A lot of the encouragement of csr in the region has come from the us and Europe in terms of norms and vocabulary, but more importantly in terms of big companies improving their supply chains in the region or their regionally based projects. Despite the recent major business scandals in the United States, the functional governments and legal frameworks of the North assure that businesses generally act in the interests of society. In the South, governments are less effective at playing this role. The increase of democracy in the region has created opportunities for people to speak out, and, as governments fall behind in meeting social needs, pressure increases on the private sector. Latin American companies feel cornered and without recourse because of inefficient government. Brazil has in fact become the regional powerhouse of csr, with about 500 companies there issuing citizenship reports following the guidelines of Brazil's Ethos Institute.
This technical paper determines the extent to which small and medium enterprises (SMEs) behave responsibly, and propose measures to enhance and promote corporate social responsibility in SMEs. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has taken on a broader view and refers to the actions that firms take to carry out their activities in a responsible manner, respecting the environment, the community and the workforce, and also creating opportunities to enhance them. The study covers eight countries in Latin America and over 1,300 firms surveyed. As SMEs represent over 95 percent of all firms in Latin America, provide between 40 and 60 percent of all jobs, and account for 30 to 50 percent of GDP, their behavior can have a significant impact on society and the environment.
This chapter focuses on the multinational Chiquita and its sourcing of bananas from Latin America. Large multinationals involved in trading bananas are under increasing pressure to improve labour conditions in their own plantations and those of ‘independent producers'. The material is based mainly on the following primary sources: two focus group discussions conducted in July 2001 with women banana workers in the local trade union, Associacion de Trabajadores del Campo, in Chinandega, Nicaragua; interviews with representatives of the local trade union; and an in-depth interview conducted with George Jaksch, Chiquita's senior director of corporate responsibility and public affairs. Chiquita's Corporate Social Responsibility programme includes internal and external assessment, an agreement with the unions through the Chiquita/colsiba/iuf Framework agreement and the membership of the multi-stakeholder uk-based Ethical Trade Initiative. Chiquita's code states that their employees should be aware of the code.
The concept of corporate social responsibility or corporate citizenship has achieved significant victories in the ongoing battle of ideas. The concept is now well established and, as such, requires closer examination. In the United States and Europe, corporate social responsibility emerged as a topic of study in the 1950s and 1960s, as incorporated in the work of authors such as Bowen, Chamberlain and Galbraith, centring on the subject's acceptance or rejection. The ‘media’, in the broadest and least precise sense of the word, is already the subject of analysis by students of the issue. The study analysed 750 stories using the following keywords: corporate balance sheet, corporate citizenship, business citizenship, citizen company, volunteer company, corporate ethics, socially responsible management, Global Compact, Instituto Ethos, social responsibility, socially responsible, sustainability, corporate volunteer. Issues addressed unilaterally, independently from any others, can benefit from having their agendas introduced in the public sphere without significant resistance.
This chapter discusses the sustainability issues were managed in Perez-Companc, a former Argentine conglomerate working mainly in the energy sector and agro-industries, and now part of the Brazilian Petrobras. The company had to modernise its infrastructure to deal with the increasing competition in the oil sector after deregulation and the privatisation of the state company ypf, including social and environmental management. Perez-Companc grew quickly in the oil sector with the acquisition of parts of ypf at relatively low prices. The internationalisation of the company led to different pressures to improve social and environmental management. The text examines the external and internal factors that led to changes in management, as well as how environmental and social affairs in the company evolved from being an appendix to the rest of the company to become part of the business strategy. Corporate citizenship has become increasingly important in business decision-making, especially in sectors with potential social and environmental impacts such as the energy sector.
This chapter explores the approaches to corporate citizenship and corporate social responsibility (csr) of large firms headquartered in Mexico. Corporate citizenship is rapidly becoming a popular expectation around the globe—including in Central and South America, as documented in this focused issue. Case studies of Mexican firms that are recognised as having exemplary csr practices provide a more accurate view of how csr is understood within Mexican firms and the distinctive forms that csr takes in Mexico. Mexico's cultural and institutional history is rooted in its colonial past, reflecting a mistrust of power and institutions while also placing particular emphasis on the public interest-serving roles of private-sector businesses. Since the 1980s, Mexico has aggressively entered the global economy, both by opening its borders to foreign trade and investment and by stimulating the growth of the Mexican private sector, especially through privatisation of state-owned enterprises.
Mexico's main reporting precedent is a toxic pollution disclosure law, an adaptation of a US community ‘right-to-know’ model that requires polluting companies to measure and report emissions of substances listed on a governmental register of 104 chemicals going into the air, water and land. Corporations have come under pressure to convincingly communicate their environmental and social actions to an expanding web of stakeholders. Aware that secrecy almost always backfires, many corporations are making environmental and social disclosures in ways and to audiences that would have been unthinkable in the past. While transparency is no guarantee of a quiet corporate life, in this high-exposure era, secrecy almost always backfires, especially in environmental and social arenas. The nature of non-financial reporting has changed over the past decade complementing a previous focus on environmental issues with a broader ‘sustainability’ approach that includes environmental, social and economic information.
In the last decade there has been a movement towards facilitating Open Access to academic outputs via the World Wide Web. This movement has been characterised as one that embodies corporate citizenship because such sharing has the potential to benefit all stakeholders: academics, policy makers, charitable sectors and the wider public. In the UK, the Economic and Social Research Council are implementing Open Access compliance guidelines for research that they fund, which is interpreted by individual institutions in their school regulations. In the case of doctoral theses, there is now a requirement for students to provide an electronic format of their final work to be included in their school's online digital repository. In a number of UK institutions, University Awards and Progress Committees will only consider awarding the doctoral degree once these requirements have been satisfied. Although this move to Open Access can be considered as an egalitarian endeavour, this paper argues that an important stakeholder may have been overlooked in the march towards progressive dissemination. The temporal space between gaining informed consent from research participants and the changing nature ofthe accessibility of outputs can both engender a breach of ethics in terms of the initial agreements negotiated with participants and raise issues around representation in the ongoing dissemination and reformulation of the original work, particularly where visual images are central to research outputs. The paper utilises autoethnography and poetry to reflect on my own encounter with the requirement for Open Access and the ways in which this brings up concerns around ethics, obligations and integrity.
Racism is an anathema to a just society. Overt expressions of personal racism are frowned upon in 'nice' homes, at progressive boardroom tables, in liberal churches, in the critical classrooms of universities, and in the many places privileged people meet. Institutional(ised) racism, however, has yet to attract such widespread recognition and a similar public discouragement. We are aware of, and engaged with, many expressions of such racism in Aotearoa, a country renamed as New Zealand by the colonisers. In this paper we focus on how institutional racism manifests within public health policies and funding practices in this country distilled into a handy napkin- sized conversation starter. We see the moral integrity of managers as a necessary conduit to institutional and therefore social transformation. We urge their responsi- ble actions in their corporate citizenship in seeking innovations that wipe out institutional(ised) racism and embed practices that are just for all.
This paper explores the power of stories and how they can give voice to the unheard. The first part of the paper consists of a story. The fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood has been rewritten from the wolf's perspective. The wolf has been a silent voice in the fairy tale for a longtime. Writing the story from his perspective makes it easier to understand his actions and identify with him. The second part of the paper is an explanatory section, which describes how the story of Little Red Riding Hood can be seen as a metaphor for discourse and hidden power relations. Often in organisations, in communities, and in societies there are voices present that are not being heard. lt is hard to pay attention to these voices because they are so difficult to hear, even when they speak. Other voices are louder, more familiar or just the majority. lt is argued that 'sacred stories' are an important cause of exclusion and, especially in an organisation that wants to be a learning organisation, we should pay attention to silent voices instead of overruling them. Silent voices have a different perspective, which might help discover organisational blind spots. But in order to look beyond our sacred stories, we need to look for other means than the obvious. Fiction could be one of those means, being a silent voice within the dominant discourses of social science itself.
Volunteering through the workplace is growing, with companies investing millions of dollars into it but possessing little knowledge of its value. This paper explores the value that a corporate volunteering programme (EDP Group) generated. The analysis was based on a new model, the “whole value model”, which resulted from the adaptation of a model that Andrew Haldane advocated in 2014. It showed that a corporate volunteering programme could generate an estimated average of at least € 3.55 for every € 1 invested and the potential return on a volunteer hour was guaranteed to be 5.75 times higher than its costs. This case study showed that the economic value was a small part of the whole value generated (estimated to be at least 22 times larger than just the economic value). The study facilitated the setting and testing of a new model for the value analysis of corporate volunteering.
