Commentaries
(3) Independent validation of the whole process is sought from recognised analysts
who aim to criticise and encourage in roughly equal measure. Again, all this is on
the corporate website.
(4) A reward mechanism is established for employee appraisal based in part on corpor-
ate social responsibility performance. How this will actually be put into effect is still in
the hands of `human resources' directors.
(5) There is a willingness to listen to stakeholder complaints and to be responsive in a
definable corporate way. Again, it is too early to tell how seriously this process will be
taken by high-pressure business managers.
A critical assessment
These are the professed ideals. In practice, no major company will be able to meet such
objectives without a lot of transitional pain. Corporate cultures are simply not geared
to this, nor are reward mechanisms, nor accountable responsiveness to complaints that
do not have a clear business requirement. The major stumbling block will be a hostile
corporate outlook that will take many years to adjust.
More to the point for environmental scientists, a whole series of difficulties face the
most enthusiastic company committed to corporate social reporting.
(a) We do not really know what a 'community' is, whether it has spatial configuration,
and how its trust-building networks operate. Communities vary by place, culture, and
aspiration, so any standardised relationship is bound to founder.
(b) Culture affects attitudes to rights, ethics, and responsibilities. Shell is known to face
a dilemma on how far to promote women managers in Islamic countries. Child labour
can be a vital source of income to the impoverished family, so the task may be to make
child labour safe and better linked to education, not to avoid it.
(c) Improving the well-being of vulnerable people depends on a detailed sense of their
own social networks of power, influence, and informal economic functioning. That in
turn requires a huge effort in sensing the anthropology and sociology of social net-
works and power structures. Such information does not come easily, nor reliably. In an
honest attempt to find out who was `in charge' in community positions in Equador,
Arco got it all wrong (Mendez et al, 1998). The company could not discover who really
spoke for the indigenous peoples, and who could be trusted when investment in local
enterprises was being contemplated.
(d) Building social capital is bound to be a partnership process. Companies cannot be
expected to do this on their own. They will need to formulate investment effort with a
host of formal and informal organisations, virtually locality by locality. Such cultural
`fine tuning' is unlikely to be attractive to efficiency-minded managers.
An optimistic note
It is easy to point out obvious dangers and difficulties facing well-meaning corpora-
tions hell-bent on good corporate social reporting. The opportunist analyst will see
some scope for working with such companies rather than sniping at them.
Training for sustainability
Outlooks, valuation techniques, intuitive methods of interviewing, partnering, and
mentoring will become skills for the manager of the future sustainable corporation.
These will have to be learned or taught, so there is enormous scope for interactive
workshops involving environmental scientists anxious to operate in a truly interdisci-
plinary manner (see O'Riordan, 1999, page 10).
Community mentoring
The best way to discover how local social identities evolve and networks form is to
link up with a number of local `mentors' who know the culture of the inside but