“The once and often suggestive field of utopian fantasy has been exploited, perhaps under the comic-book definition, into a bastard literary device known as 'science fiction.' This product bears about the same resemblance to utopian speculation that the tales of Horatio Alger bore to the economic theories of Adam Smith. / [Literary] forms are the common property . . . of writers and audiences or readers, before any communicative composition can occur.” / Despite some dismissals of science fiction's significance for utopian writing, it is impossible to study the utopias and dystopias of the past fifty years or more without acknowledging the central role of science fiction. Darko Suvin and Lyman Tower Sargent (among others) have reviewed and clarified the existing definitions of utopia and - unlike science fiction - there is little disagreement today about the boundaries and characteristics of the genre. Sargent writes that utopia is 'a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space'. This definition includes the positive utopia (eutopia) as well as its negative manifestations - the dystopia and the anti-utopia. Suvin, on the other hand, restricts his definition to the positive utopia: 'the verbal construction of a particular quasi human community where sociopolitical institutions, norms, and individual relationships are organized according to a more perfect principle than in the author's community . . .'.

Europeans established two types of colonies. One was designed primarily to exploit the labour of the inhabitants and the natural resources of the country, with the Congo and India prime examples. The second, while still exploiting the natural resources of the country and sometimes the labour of the inhabitants, was primarily for settlement; most of the North and South American colonies, New Zealand and South Africa are examples. A variant of the second that became indistinguishable from it occurred in some of the Australian colonies, in which one of the purposes of the colonial power was to get rid of undesirables of various sorts. The settler colonies produced a rich harvest of utopias; the colonies designed to exploit generally did not. The settlement colonies served the purposes of the settlers as well as those of the home country. Most settlers wanted to improve their own lives and some had a specific utopian vision in mind. Those who voluntarily travelled significant distances in often horrible conditions hoped either to practise a way of life they were unable to practise in the home country or to improve their lives materially or both. Probably the overwhelming majority of voluntary colonists were what are now disparagingly called economic immigrants.

Where did it all go wrong? When did the vision of heaven on earth become an anticipation of hell? In many accounts we emerge from the hopeful, dream-like state of Victorian optimism to pass through what H. G. Wells called the age of confusion into a nightmarish twentieth century, soon powerfully symbolized by the grotesque slaughter of the First World War. Enlightenment optimism respecting the progress of reason and science was now displaced by a sense of the incapacity of humanity to restrain its newly created destructive powers. From that time ideal societies have accordingly been more commonly portrayed negatively in dystopian rather than utopian form. Like most other parts of terra utopus, however, the concept of dystopia has been much contested, many eutopias or ideal societies having dystopic elements and vice versa. Dystopias are often described as 'conservative', though they may in fact be sharply critical of the societies they reflect, as we will see. 'Dystopia' is often used interchangeably with 'anti-utopia' or 'negative utopia', by contrast to utopia or 'eutopia' (good place), to describe a fictional portrayal of a society in which evil, or negative social and political developments, have the upper hand, or as a satire of utopian aspirations which attempts to show up their fallacies, or which demonstrate, in B. F. Skinner's words, 'ways of life we must be sure to avoid' - in the unlikely event that we can agree on particulars. Yet as we will see, the most famous exemplar of the genre, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, was not intended to be anti-utopian as such.

The study of the concept of utopia can certainly not be reduced to the history of the word coined by Thomas More in 1516 to baptize the island described in his book. However, a careful consideration of the circumstances in which the word was generated can lead us to a better understanding of what More meant by the word as well as of the new meanings it has acquired since then. It must be remembered that in 1516 the word utopia was a neologism. Neologisms correspond to the need to name what is new. By revealing the changes that the shared values of a given group undergo, the study of neologisms provides us not only with a dynamic portrait of a particular society over the ages but also with a representation of that society in a given period. There are basically three kinds of neologisms: they may be new words created to name new concepts or to synthesize pre-existing ones (lexical neologisms); they may be pre-existing words used in a new cultural context (semantic neologisms); or they may be variations of other words (derivation neologisms). Utopia, as a neologism, is an interesting case: it began its life as a lexical neologism, but over the centuries, after the process of deneologization, its meaning changed many times, and it has been adopted by authors and researchers from different fields of study, with divergent interests and conflicting aims. Its history can be seen as a collection of moments when a clear semantic renewal of the word occurred.

Corporate responsibility has gone global. Business leaders, as well as leaders from government and civil society, increasingly argue that business must play a constructive role in addressing massive global challenges. Business is not responsible for causing most of the problems associated with, for example, extreme poverty and hunger, child mortality and HIV/AIDS – and, arguably, it is only indirectly responsible for most of the problems of climate change. However, it is often claimed that business has a responsibility to help ameliorate many of these problems and, indeed, it may be the only institution capable of effectively addressing some of them. As a result, corporate responsibility has secured the attention of business leaders, governments and NGOs to an unprecedented extent. Thus this book, Global Challenges in Responsible Business – which originated in an international conference on corporate responsibility organized at London Business School – addresses the implications for business of corporate responsibility in the context of globalization and the social and environmental problems faced by global business today.

The book offers a rich set of articles reflective of research on corporate responsibility, many of which are informed by empirical studies. It focuses on three key corporate responsibility issues for global business: embedding corporate responsibility within the organization, the relationship between corporate responsibility and marketing, and implementing corporate responsibility in developing countries.

Introduction

A key trend of recent years is the emergence of CSR as a managerial field. As noted by The Economist, ‘Corporate Social Responsibility is now an industry of its own right, and a flourishing profession as well.’ This field involves the creation of a set of markets devoted to the communication, measurement and evaluation of CSR and Corporate Social Performance (CSP). It is also marked by the multiplication of sectoral codes of conduct and other global standards. It has also been accompanied by the emergence of new kinds of actors and CSR experts outside (CSR consultants and auditors) and within companies (sustainability or CSR departments have been created within most public companies) and the multiplication of educational programmes dealing with CSR management.

To some extent, this situation echoes the ‘Corporate Social Responsiveness’ era of the late 1960s and 1970s. In a turbulent societal context, various companies had developed issues management departments to handle pressing social controversies, such as equal rights for minorities, consumer rights or environmental concerns. Researchers who studied those dynamics based their approach on the idea that CSR was not only a question of ethics, but that it also involved specific and difficult managerial problems. In itself, managers' will to increase the social good was not enough to implement efficient and sustainable CSR programmes. Rather, a key question was to understand how to select the most pressing issues, take relevant decisions, develop the appropriate management frameworks, tools and implementation approaches to respond to social pressures.

Using this rock-climbing metaphor, Laurie Regelbrugge, then a manager of corporate responsibility at the oil and gas operator Unocal, described how she found ‘handholds’ to establish traction and create opportunities to align and integrate citizenship throughout her company. This is an account of how she and other middle managers led change in their companies, not from the typical planned, top-down model but rather through what some term an ‘emergent-pragmatic’ or catalytic approach.

Here we first look at the problems these practitioners faced, some of the tactics employed and their rationale for adopting the catalytic versus top-down model of change. The chapter then examines several key components of this model in action and what insights emerged about leading change from the middle. The data were gathered in the Executive Forum – a multi-year business/university learning group that brought these practitioners together to swap knowledge and offer one another advice and that provided the basis for this research on integrating corporate citizenship into firms.

Introduction

Commodities like copper, gold, oil and gas can be both the source of enormous profits for the companies that extract them and a magnet for the scorn and criticism of environmental and human rights activists the world over. However, in the fourteen years since the international furore raised by Shell's attempt to sink the Brent Spar rig in the North Sea and its alleged collusion with the Nigerian government in ignoring the rights of the Ogoni people, multinational extractive firms have arguably come a long way in reforming their CSR performance. Today, in response to activist – and increasingly investor – pressure, nearly all the global oil and mining companies have a CSR programme in place and seem committed to environmental stewardship and human rights. In fact many take part in international voluntary initiatives like the UN's Global Compact. And while debate may still rage in some corporate circles about the linkage between CSR and profitability, indeed CSR has become a prerequisite for business sustainability in the extractive industry, where a reputation for corporate citizenship could arguably make the difference between winning or losing multi-million dollar concessions.

However, in spite of the ever-ratcheting levels of corporate accountability that activist pressure has spurred in the extractives sector, we observe that many companies still struggle to gain and maintain their social licenses to operate.

Introduction

Recent thinking and practice in management has challenged the widely held view that the role of the poor, as Sartre put it, is to exercise our generosity. There are alternatives to charity where the poor help themselves and business plays a part by pursuing its economic interests and tapping the economic potential of the bottom of the pyramid (BOP) – the 2.7 billion people who live on less than $2 a day. Prahalad and Hammond, in their seminal article on ‘Serving the World's Poor, Profitably’, highlighted the potential of market forces in large-scale poverty alleviation: ‘By stimulating commerce and development at the bottom of the economic pyramid, MNCs could radically improve the lives of billions of people and help bring into being a more stable, less dangerous world.’

This was a particularly welcome message in light of the challenges of meeting the Millennium Development Goals and concern about the role of poverty in fostering terrorism. A literature has since developed that builds on the core argument of Prahalad and his colleagues. However, while multiple case studies have provided further support for the idea of ‘a fortune at the bottom of the pyramid’, less attention has been given to the specific strategies and business models required. In this chapter, we focus on distribution strategies for reaching the rural poor – the majority of the BOP that poses distinct distribution challenges relative to the urban poor, who in many respects are easier to reach.

Introduction

Today's CEOs are under pressure to address pervasive environmental, social and ethical issues. Companies are held accountable for the direct and indirect consequences of their actions and face a plethora of issues such as ensuring environmental sustainability and sound labour practices, sourcing skilled employees in areas with limited educational systems, ensuring the respect of workers' rights and meeting the needs of the world's poor. A vast range of activities now comes under the corporate social responsibility umbrella: ‘from volunteering in the local community to looking after employees properly, from helping the poor to saving the planet’. According to a 2007 McKinsey global survey, managers consider that society has greater expectations for business to take on public responsibilities than it had five years ago.

The existence of a positive relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate financial performance (CFP), however, remains considered by many as a necessary condition to justify the managerial relevance of the CSR concept. As Michael Porter observed:

Introduction

While attention for corporate social responsibility (CSR) continues to grow, firms are increasingly being held responsible for practices in their supply chains. In response, firms stretch their CSR programmes, which traditionally have focused on their internal activities, to include the activities of their suppliers. The example of Nike's corporate scandal on the use of child labour in its production facilities in developing countries shows that firms may be held responsible not only for the activities that are carried out within the walls of their firm, but also for those taking place in their supply chains. If we adopt a relatively broad definition of CSR, such as the firm's ‘status and activities with respect to its perceived social obligations’, such programmes fall within the domain of CSR activities.

As many companies have international or even global supply chains, the complexity and size of CSR programmes in these supply chains may increase exponentially – especially if they originate from developing countries. These channels have a triangle-shaped structure whose base consists of large numbers of small-scale primary producers that in the end replenish Western processing industries. Unilever, for example, is developing a programme in which it plans to reach out to 300,000 tea farmers in four countries in Asia and Africa to improve the sustainability of its Lipton tea production.

With the political and media spotlight falling on climate change, sustainability, the ethics of business leaders (and those in the financial services preceding the recession) as well as the other global problems in the under-developed world of poverty, HIV, etc., the business world is beginning to see the necessity of being more socially and ecologically responsible. This is not just about being ‘green’, but about exploring the full range of socially responsible behaviours. As Theodore Zeldin suggested in his book An Intimate History of Humanity: ‘The Green Movement could not become a major political force so long as it concerned itself primarily with natural resources rather than with the full range of human desires. Its setbacks are yet another example of idealism being unable to get off the ground because it has not looked broadly enough at human aspirations in their entirety’. This book, edited by Craig Smith and his colleagues, provides the research base to this growing and increasingly important field. They focus on three key issues of corporate responsibility: embedding corporate responsibility, marketing and corporate responsibility and corporate responsibility and developing countries. Their contributors are comprised of some of the leading international scholars in the field from eight different countries: Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Italy, the Netherlands, UK and the United States. This volume is based on state of the art research, which illustrates the importance of corporate responsibility, not only in terms of the ethical and environmental challenges but also because of their business imperative.

Introduction

There is little doubt that corporate social responsibility (CSR) has gained in importance over the last decade leading firms to develop increasingly sophisticated CSR strategies for their organizations. The challenges facing managers are nothing short of daunting given the vast number of issues that fall under the rubric of CSR and the equally large number of often conflicting groups pressuring companies to be more socially responsible. The situation is even more complex for large and well-known multinational enterprises (MNEs) with operations that often span the globe and expose the organization to a wide range of economic, social, development and political conditions.

To help managers deal with this complexity, researchers in the CSR area have focused their efforts on the ‘corporate side’ of CSR with studies examining issues such as the relationship between CSR and financial performance, the different strategic and governance configurations to best deploy CSR initiatives, or the emergence of corporate philanthropy, among others. This focus on the corporation is sensible given that CSR emerged as a field of study to investigate the response of organizations to the demands of civil society.

However, a number of researchers have argued that consumers play a critical role and are a driving force behind the emergence of CSR programmes. This view posits that organizations have implemented CSR primarily as a response to consumer pressure, either actual or potential.

While the history of empirical research about the relationship between the social and the financial performance of companies has been studied for years, the literature still lacks, according to many, a convincing proof that corporate social responsibility (CSR) adds to the bottom line. J.D. Margolis and J.P. Walsh emphasized that numerous empirical studies conducted in the last thirty years on the relationship between the social and financial performance of firms present serious methodological problems (in sampling, accurate measurement of social performance, absence of intermediate variables, absence of tests for the direction of the causal link). S.A. Waddock and S.B. Graves had already pointed out that research on social and financial performance was replete with difficult obstacles:

1. (1) Social performance is hard to measure directly; proxy measures, such as social expenses, are more observable but are not necessarily desirable antecedents of social performance.

2. (2) The link between social and financial performance is mediated by many factors; this link could be embedded in a complex causal web in which the company's response to social issues comprise only part of the relevant considerations.

3. (3) The direction of the causal link cannot be easily assessed, because the most financially successful companies will always have resources to ‘waste’ on social investment, while companies in financial crisis will often be forced to curtail such investment.