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The term “corporate social responsibility”
has never really hit the spot for me, and neither has “corporate
citizenship.” The terms are muzzy, fuzzy. Sure, corporations
should be “socially responsible”—but to whom? And
for what? As for “corporate citizenship,” exactly what
is a good corporate citizen supposed to do? Put flowers in flowerboxes?
Vote? (Come to think of it, corporations do vote—with their
wallets, big-time, before the election—but that doesn’t
quite make them good citizens, does it?)
The entire notion of “corporate social responsibility”
needs more clarity, I think. I started to explore this matter in
the March/April 2004 issue of green@work, where I argued that in
this age of economic globalization, every business owes a duty to
every person on the planet. I called this the “six billion
stakeholder theory.”
That’s only the beginning, though. There’s more unpacking
to do.
Here, too, the triad, the model of self I’ve been holding forth
on for several issues now, can help clarify our thinking. For those
who are new to the subject, the triad (which is elaborated at length
in my book Out of the Labyrinth: Who We Are, How We Go Wrong, and
What We Can Do About It) proposes that we all do three things in
our lives: we solve problems, we participate in society and the
natural world, and we seek meaning. These three activities organize
into subpersonalities with distinct value systems that I call the
strategist, the citizen and the seeker, respectively—and the
“habitats” or “domains” they inhabit are the
objective domain (because the strategist pursues objectives), the
social domain (the citizen interacts socially), and the depth dimension
(the seeker must plunge into the depths of his or her own consciousness
to emerge with the gold of meaning).
This model is a “fractal:” it applies to organizational
and cultural dynamics as well as personal ones.
By focusing on a key difference between the social domain and the
depth dimension, we can derive important clues about the nature
of corporate social responsibility:
* The citizen engages the visible world. He talks with people he
can hear and touch and see. We engage the social domain with our
five senses. It is where we are born and interact
and die.
* The seeker engages the invisible world; she encounters the world
beyond our five senses. The mystic doesn’t sit down with God
over a cappuccino at the corner café; she encounters a power
that is invisible, but experienced as real.
Corporate social responsibility bifurcates along these lines, I
believe. It has a visible dimension, and an invisible one as well.
Or, to put this another way, it has a civic aspect and a meaning
aspect. A physical dimension—and a spiritual one, too.
What does this mean in terms of specifics? Let’s take a hypothetical
global corporation: Megacorp. It has its headquarters in Peoria,
IL, and factories in communities around the world. The employees
of Megacorp interact continually with the residents of these communities.
The civic aspect of corporate social responsibility requires Megacorp
to care for these communities—to treat their residents with
respect and to care for the local environment.
But Megacorp’s social responsibility doesn’t stop there.
It also owes a duty to the invisible world, to the world beyond
our five senses. The toxic pollutants Megacorp emits travel around
the world and threaten the web of life on which we all depend. Through
its marketing and advertising, Megacorp peddles a worldview that
causes people to derive their self-worth from the stuff they buy.
Corporate social responsibility extends to these unseen impacts,
too.
And so we have a new triple bottom line. The first part is the usual
one, the financial bottom line, defined in the context of the triad
as the strategic objective of delivering a strong ROI to investors.
The second bottom line is social in the sense of being civic and
local—taking care of the people and environment where a company
operates. The third bottom line is spiritual and global. It’s
about acting responsibly toward all the things that connect us on
a level that transcends touch and taste and sound and sight and
smell. It’s about the duty to care for creation because we
are part of creation. It’s about our invisible connection to
the whole.
Carl Frankel’s most recent book is Out of the Labyrinth:
Who We Are, How We Go Wrong, and What We Can Do About It (www.outofthelabyrinth.com).
Frankel can be reached at cfrankel@aol.com.
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