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title
Editorial: Is Corporate Citizenship Spreading and Shrinking?
author(s)
David Cooperrider and Ronald Fry
available in The Journal of Corporate Citizenship
issue 35
date Autumn 2009
pages 3-6
issn 1470-5001
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Editorial
Is Corporate Citizenship Spreading and Shrinking?
Issue 35
Autumn 2009
David Cooperrider and Ronald Fry
The Fowler Center for Sustainable Value,
Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University, USA
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was
the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity . . .
It was the spring of hope (Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities).
the business headlines this summer
said, ‘GM in Bankruptcy’.1 Meanwhile, the
leadership at Toyota continued to work
toward their ‘dream car’, a car of the future
that purifies the air we breathe and ‘can
drive around the world on a single tank of
gas’.2
Like the tale of two cities, today’s business news signals significant opposable
realities of our age.
Another recent newsworthy event was
the abrupt bankruptcy of Redlands Ltd—
a Canadian mining business ‘deceitful
about its plans’ and ‘leaving a mess at taxpayers’ expense’—related to acid mine
drainage lethal to aquatic organisms and
potentially harmful to other wildlife and
humans.3 At almost exactly the same time,
an Ohio-based mining company, Fairmount Minerals, was thriving, having
been lauded as the number-one corporate
citizen by the US Chamber of Commerce.
It has been growing at an earnings rate of
over 40% a year, and has created a turnedon, inspired workplace by periodically
bringing groups of 300–400 internal and
external stakeholders together in multistakeholder collaborative configurations
to apply state-of-the-art business innovation methods at its unique kind of sus-
1 Chris Isidore, ‘GM Bankruptcy: End of an Era’, CNNMoney.com, 2 June 2009; money.cnn.com/
2009/06/01/news/companies/gm_bankruptcy; Linda Sandler, Chris Scinta, Bob Van Voris and Jeff
Green, ‘GM Files bankruptcy to spin off more competitive firm’, 1 June 2009; www.bloomberg.com/
apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aA_QjYuWXWzI.
2 Katsuaki Watanabe, Thomas A. Stewart and Anand P. Raman, ‘Lessons from Toyota’s Long Drive: A
Conversation with Katsuaki Watanabe’, Harvard Business Review, 1 July 2007.
3 David Cooperrider, Address at the Second Global Forum for Business as an Agent of World Benefit,
Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, 3 June 2007.
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tainability summit. The company’s practices are earning it big business: after a
Wisconsin community selected the company to operate in its region over an unsustainable competitor, the local newspaper wrote a telling story and called it ‘The
Tale of Two Sand Companies’.4
Yes, we find ourselves in between things.
It is the eve of a new era. What’s most
intriguing about the Toyota story in contrast to that of GM, and about the awardwinning Fairmount Minerals in contrast
to Redlands Ltd, is that the two companies
that made the least investment in corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability during this economic recession
are bankrupt. The two comparison companies did just the opposite: they amplified their CSR and sustainability commitments, and they did so during this, the
most alarming recession since the Depression.
What if the lens of sustainability turned
out to be the biggest business opportunity
of the 21st century—but very few business
leaders could see it or make it a pre-eminent part of corporate strategy? What if the
moral sense of responsibility, and the apparent sheer ethical weight of it all, turned
out to be the easiest natural trigger for
inspiring innovation and growth, for creating admiring customers and proud
communities? What if Garrett Hardin’s
seemingly inevitable ‘tragedy of the commons’ was largely a myth? How would it
feel to be part of a corporation—especially
during this time of economic hardship—
that asked entirely new questions powered by the sense that the eradication of
extreme poverty or the design of a smart
planet is already possible, not in a hundred years, but today—within the grasp of
our generation?
In the lead article in this fascinating
issue of the Journal of Corporate Citizenship, Jean-François Laugel and Chris Laszlo
take this paradoxical recessionary logic to
the hilt. They go right to the heart of the
matter in the most anguished industry of
all—the banking industry—and they offer
a clear prescription few would dare to
apply to an economically stressed population of institutions. What’s the prescription? In a word, leadership: leadership in
the citizenship and sustainability domain—
exactly the kind of leadership being played
out by industry-leading stars such as Toyota and Fairmount Minerals.
To understand this prescription one
needs to understand Laugel and Laszlo’s
concept of ‘sustainable value’. As the authors propose, creating sustainable value
is a way for companies to advance their
business priorities, drive innovation and
achieve cooperative advantage. All of this,
of course, requires a major mind-shift,
and an expanded definition of value that
includes value for shareholders and value
for stakeholders; an increasingly broad
array of stakeholders who contribute to a
company’s wealth-creating capabilities.
Interestingly, the authors note that, in the
financial industry, there is not one single
bold, pioneering leader in stakeholder
engagement and sustainable innovation,
such as a Unilever, for example, or a GE
with its ‘ecomagination’. But all this may
change, predict the authors, especially in
times of economic crises. Why? Because
sustainability is synonymous with an
expansive stakeholder view of the firm
where stakeholders have moved from first
having illegitimate claims of business
value, then to having a limited voice primarily focused on ensuring compliance,
and now to serving as value-creating partners. Capturing sustainable value, assert
the authors, is not at all automatic and
requires specific financial, strategic and
measurement competences to integrate
stakeholder impacts into the value-delivery capability of a company.
Almost every other article in this issue
builds on this theme: that corporate citizenship will become more important, not
less, during this time of economic upheaval.
But there is one essential caveat. It all
depends on or is conditioned by the corporation’s ability not only to expand its
definition of stakeholders (NGOs, com-
4 The Dunn County News, www.dunnconnect.com.
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munities, regulators, the Earth itself) but
also to turn these key stakeholder relationships into sources of imagination,
innovation and inspiration.
Kristian Darigan and Jim Post’s research
on the growing CSR movement in China
affirms this point (even as the recession
takes hold): ‘the confluence of political
changes, business pressure and natural
disasters created a new watershed of dialogue, ideas and progressive thinking about
corporate social responsibility in China’.
In the article ‘Uptake of Voluntary Environmental Management System Initiatives by South African Automotive Industries’, Anderson Kehbila, Jürgen Ertel and
Alan Colin Brent explore how different
variables affect implementation of voluntary environmental management initiatives, and find that holistic approaches
have been most cost-effective. In a similar
vein, Lawrence Lad and Craig Caldwell, in
‘Collaborative Standards, Voluntary Codes
and Industry Self-regulation: The Role of
Third-Party Organisations’, pick up the
point that stakeholder relationships will
be the defining feature of the newer mixed
modes of regulatory processes, especially
where there are predictable market failures requiring larger systemic collaboration. Geoff Walters expands on this theme—
that is, the power of collaboration—by
documenting the rise in CSR effectiveness
when companies partner with community
trust organisations. Drawing on several
cases of business and community partnerships in the English football industry,
the author shows precisely how mutual
benefit happens, for both the company
JCC 35 Autumn 2009
and the community, through the power of
sport as a mass media distributor which
advances sustainability awareness and
positive human health practices. But are
partnerships easy? Not so quick, says Martina Battisti in her article ‘Below the Surface: The Challenges of Cross-sector Partnerships’. Using a psychodynamic approach,
Battisti reveals what often remains unspoken: fear of losing control in partnerships,
insecurity, and external partners who
carry negative images of business into the
relationship.
And, finally, ‘Corporate Social Responsibility and Garrett Hardin’s Tragedy of the
Commons as Myth and Reality’ takes a fascinating look at the question of our world’s
commons. While this article sounds a new
note of hope, tracing the ways in which
Garrett Hardin’s powerful rhetoric actually exaggerated the idea of self-serving
human nature—a myth of huge proportions—it also raises new challenges for
the domain of corporate citizenship. It is
not human nature that is the problem,
argues author Wade Rowland, but the
design of our institutions. Indeed, Rowland reminds us that we rarely step back
and look comprehensively at the concept
of the corporation itself. Like the important Corporation 20/20 project, the author leaves us with important questions
for future editions of JCC: What is the purpose of the firm? What kinds of structure
and system give life to that purpose? How
might corporations be designed in order
to blend social, environmental, governance and financial mission at their very
core?
David Cooperrider and Ronald Fry,
June 2009
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David Cooperrider’s interests include
the theory and practice of Appreciative
Inquiry (AI) as applied to corporate
strategy, change leadership and positive
organisational scholarship. In addition,
David is pioneering new horizons in
the AI Summit method—a large-group and networkbased approach—for advancing business innovation
and creative design. David’s most recent passion is an
inquiry into ‘Business as an Agent of World Benefit’,
where he believes that sustainable design has become
the biggest business opportunity of the 21st century.
David has published 14 books, authored over 50
articles, and has received numerous awards.
!
David.Cooperrider@case.edu
Ronald Fry’s research interests focus on
the factors and dynamics that foster
system-wide, positive change. As a cocreator of the Appreciative Inquiry
theory and method, he works with
groups, organisations and institutions
around the world to increase their cooperative capacity
in order to engage the whole system in strategic
thinking, planning and change. Through his research,
he continues to develop insights on large-group
dynamics, appreciative leadership, multi-stakeholder
strategic planning, and business as an agent for world
benefit.
!
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Ronald.Fry@case.edu
JCC 35 Autumn 2009