
Corporate Social Responsibility has become a racket - danielam
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/industry/11896546/Corporate-Social-Responsibility-has-become-a-racket-and-a-dangerous-one.html
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hitekker
_The social responsibility of a private company is actually very
straightforward. It is to make a decent product, which does what it says it
will, and isn’t dangerous in any unexpected way. It is to charge a fair price.
It is to honour its contracts. And it is to pay its staff and suppliers on
time – and, within reason, to pay its taxes promptly as well. If it can do all
of those things, and do them well, it is already making a hugely responsible
contribution to society._

While I do agree with this premise, I also believe that most, especially here
in the US, would recoil from a company that declares a limited CSR. The common
mentality would probably be: "Those fatcats should be using a sliver of their
mountains of money to help humanity!"

What's interesting is that once you've popularized, formalized and then
legislated CSR... what would would have is a set of regulations. In my view,
the pressure on corporations to bullshit CSR has everything to do with our
collective absence-of-faith in regulations/public sector: "The government will
just screw the system up even more if they take more money. But this sneaker
company is super amazing at making sneakers: surely some of that ingenuity
will translate into the betterment of our society!"

Needless to say, smartness in one area is not smartness in all, and the person
who is focused on business is not necessarily going to deploy her or his best
efforts on doing what is essentially the government's job.

Summarized by Larry Ellison (I can't believe I'm quoting him):

 _" A corporation's primary goal is to make money. Government's primary role
is to take a big chunk of that money and give it to others."_

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grecy
> _The social responsibility of a private company .. is to charge a fair
> price. ._

(And I believe implicitly it's to make a decent profit)

I believe that statement is reminiscent of a world that no longer exists.
While this may have been true in the 70s, 80s and even 90s, it's simply not
true of the world anymore.

No company charges a "fair" price anymore. The price a consumer pays for a
product is entirely divorced from the cost to manufacture said product. The
price a consumer pays has been maximized to "whatever consumers are willing
(and able) to pay".

Similarly for making a "decent" profit - companies did this for years, even
decades, and each year they were expected to make more profit than the
previous year. Now, the expectations are completely out of control. That's why
when a Bank or big company "only" make billions in profit it can be called a
failure.

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TeMPOraL
> _No company charges a "fair" price anymore. The price a consumer pays for a
> product is entirely divorced from the cost to manufacture said product. The
> price a consumer pays has been maximized to "whatever consumers are willing
> (and able) to pay"._

Yeah, that's true, but hasn't it been always? "Whatever consumers are willing
(and able) to pay" is pretty much the definition of "price" in Econ 101.

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MIKarlsen
Perhaps it's because CSR is just a facade. Too often we're seeing companies
branding themselves as customer-centric, and with the large volume of
tehchnology-illiterate in the population, people believe anything/doesn't
question their own consumption and The consequences hereof. I have friends who
volunteer 6 months in Thailand to work with children only to come home and
post instagram pictures of new Nike sneakers once every month (as far as I
know Nike doesnt exactly have the vest reputation in regards to child labour).

Most of the time, I feel like people don't give a shit about their consumer
habits because they are not motivated by The difference these habits make in
the long run ør in a global perspective. It's all about getting those likes.
"Supporting" companies with a good CSR profile is a good step towards these
likes.

Look up how many people shared and signed up for anti-Kony marches in social
media and find the articles that show how many actually showed (it was under
100 I think).

I may be extrapolating here, but I don't think my point can ever be proven
even of I'm right.

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tn13
CSR in my opinion is a scam by default. A company's job is to maximize
shareholder value by doing what it is supposed to do the best. Whatever money
the company puts into CSR is essentially taken away from the share holders.

~~~
notahacker
Except that (i) measures which improve corporate image often increase
shareholder value and (ii) shareholders freely choose to invest in companies
knowing they have chosen to spend a portion of revenues on CSR initiatives,
and very rarely revolt against corporate boards over CSR

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pmiller2
Exactly! The whole point of CSR is to make money by making the company look
good. In modern capitalism, corporations exist solely to maximize profits. By
that principle, you can figure out why a corporation does anything by simply
following the money. This is just another example of that.

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6d0debc071
You have to actually do something to impose the correct incentives if you want
entities to act in a particular manner. I'm not convinced that in the absence
of CSR these incentives would have been imposed - which seems to be the lynch
pin of the telegraph's piece - and see no evidence to support it.

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slavik81
The premise of this article seems to be that if VW didn't spend so much time
and money on CSR, that their emissions cheating would have been prevented.
That seems rather far fetched to me. It's not really clear how one would have
any impact on the other.

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bsder
The point of the article is that CSR is simply a marketing expense to a
corporation and has no relation to the actual social value of the corporation.

Recognizing that is the first step toward actually making corporations
socially responsible by setting limits on them from the outside.

~~~
slavik81
Outside limits already exist. The entire scandal is that they cheated their
way past those limits.

I mean, you're right that CSR is basically a marketing expense, but I still
don't see how getting rid of it would fix anything here.

