Cleaning up the "ethical oil" mess

With Stephen Harper's government getting plenty of heat at the Durban climate conference over its decision to relegate Kyoto to the history books,  there is a lot of discussion back home about the merits or otherwise of presenting the Canadian oil sands as "ethical oil". It's something we discussed in the blog earlier in the year, but the XL pipeline decision process has kept the issue very much on the front burner. Factor in a controversial TV spot by Ethicaloil.org comparing so-called "ethical" Canadian oil to "conflict" oil sourced from Saudi Arabia that funds oppression of women, and its no surprise to wind up in a heated debate

Yesterday, CBC, Canada's national broadcaster, featured a segment on ethical oil in its popular morning radio show The Current, and we were happy to be invited to participate, along with Kathryn Marshall, the spokesperson for Ethicaloil.org and Jody Williams, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, who has publicly come out against the tar sands.  You can hear the lively discussion, led by the impressive host Anna Maria Tremonti on the CBC website.

A colleague of ours in the law school here at York University, Stepan Wood, has blogged about the show and takes the time to expand upon some critical points that there was hardly even enough time to raise in the conversation itself. As he says:

"For one thing,[ethical oil's] narrow focus on human rights and the rule of law distracts attention from the massive environmental damage and energy consumption involved in extraction and processing of tar sands oil. For another, the claim that tar sands operations fully respect human rights is debatable, with numerous First Nations claiming that these operations impair their rights to clean water and a healthful environment. It is also hard to miss the xenophobic undertones of the Ethical Oil message–it is no coincidence that most of the countries targeted by the campaign are ethnically, culturally or religiously distinct from the white Canadian majority"

The bottom line, in which we and Stepan agree, is that Canada is very much not a leader when it comes to handling its responsibilities around oil extraction:

"To be a real leader Canada would have to show that it is genuinely committed to progress toward a post-carbon economy and improvement of the human rights records of Canadian companies overseas. This would include holding Canadian oil companies to the same high standards wherever they do business in the world. It is disingenuous to say that oil companies in Canada are ethical leaders if those very same companies are busily pumping oil and propping up those same repressive foreign regimes that the Ethical Oil campaign vilifies."

We don't expect that to happen any time soon, and in fact Canada has been content to be relegated very much to the margins of the Durban conference. When even China is criticizing you for setting a bad example, any claims that the country is a leader in providing "ethical oil" are only likely to fall on deaf ears.

Graphic by jfeathersmith. Reproduced under Creative Commons Licence

The tents are gone. But what about the ideas?

The tents are gone in New York’s Zuccotti Park and many other cities - including Toronto's St James Park. Daily we can follow how other Occupy sites in the US are closed down by more or less forceful police actions. By and large, one has to say that the movement as such is fading out, at least in its initial shape.

A good time then to assess two important questions. What, if anything, has the movement achieved? And, equally important: Where is it going from here?

As to the first question, even skeptics like Jeffrey Simpson from the Globe and Mail admit that the movement has put the finger on an important issue, namely the one of income inequality in most developed democracies. He has quite impressive numbers to make his case - that while Canada, thanks to a tighter regulated banking sector, has not felt the brunt of the current crisis quite as badly, the issue of inequality is no less a matter close to home. As Politico’s Ben Smith has shown, the mentioning of ‘income inequality’ in print and web media has quintupled over the course of the Occupy protests (from 91/week to over 500).

So there can be little doubt that the movement has raised long acknowledged issues and has given them a legitimate place in the public. That is a success - no doubt. Other than that though, I am quite pessimistic about the impact of the protests. Despite sympathizing with many of the concerns and this new way of political protest I am rather disillusioned because – by and large – most media outlets, print and TV alike, have not really taken the issue seriously. This certainly applies to the Canadian papers, and apart from TVO, I have a hard time to see some more engaging coverage on TV. Similar observations hold true to the US media – which nearly unanimously ignored Occupy Wall Street for the first couple of days. Even with lone voices such as Keith Olbermann’s on Current TV it is hard to mobilize a broader public when your message is somewhat obscured, watered down or ridiculed.

This leads to my second question of where the movement is going. A good measure of the validity of an argument is still the determination of its opposition. Pepper spraying peaceful students (UC Davis) and 84 years old ladies (Seattle), or fracturing the sculls of Iraq veterans (Oakland) are just the tip of that iceberg which is the violent response from public authorities in the United States.

The destruction of public spaces or safety concerns were popular arguments in Canada. My home is right next to St. James Park where Occupy Toronto took place. The park, a hangout for homeless people and drug consumers on normal days, has never been safer than during Occupy. And it were police vehicles that ploughed the turf into a brown mess two weeks ago.

Be that as it may, the reaction to the movement was decisive and uncompromising. Perhaps no one other than Frank Luntz, long time strategist for the Republican Party has put the underlying sentiments in better terms:

I'm so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I'm frightened to death... They're having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.

He said these words instructing Republican campaigners on how to clean up their language to immunize it against Occupy’s agenda. In my book, that endorsement just takes the cake.

The tension in a society that embraces both capitalism, free markets and private property on the one hand and democracy on the other has always been there. In the early decades of the 20^th century we saw it spiraling out of control, leading to fascism or communism in Europe. In the US it led to the great depression, upon which Franklin Roosevelt took leadership in assigning a new role to government in bridging this inherent contradiction.

Capitalism is hampered by two things. First, its inequality of wealth distribution and second, its cyclical ups and downs. Both of which have always put those in a precarious spot who just had their labor to bring to the party of capitalism. The reason capitalism and democracy have now been able to coexist for some 60 years in many developed countries has to do with the fact that mechanisms of economic empowerment and redistribution had been implemented to mitigate against those two problems.

Keynes’ solution was that government addresses the problem, by guaranteeing basic welfare state provision and actively spending in times of economic downturn. The ‘neoliberal’ solution, linked to Reagan and Thatcher’s approach in the 1980s has been to turn labor into ‘mini-capitalists’: boosting home ownership and moving from tax-based to investment-based entitlement plans (e.g. retirement, life insurance) has given millions an active stake in the capitalist systems.

The financial crisis has pointed out the limits of both approaches. The reality of the Occupy movement is that it has been strongly driven by those ‘middle class’ Americans who fell into poverty in the last years. The movement only started now just because the effects of a rigged system are only now painfully palpable for a critical mass of people, as described in the current issue of the New Yorker.

The issue of inequality therefore is here to stay, never mind the preliminary seizure of Occupy protests this past autumn. Looking at the Republican presidential contest in the US offers a somber glimpse at the alternatives. Candidates with no interest in governing and no interest in the institutions that have provided some peace and prosperity for quite some time, dominate the debate. Even George W. Bush’s former speechwriter agonizes about that.  If democracies cannot secure a stake for those who just bring their labor to the market of the capitalist system, it has to come up with some other ‘mortar’ for keeping the social fabric together: religion, xenophobia or crude nationalism are just some of the offers we currently see.

This is not just a North American problem. The rise of the far Right in Europe – from The Netherlands to Hungary – or the militant protests in Greece point into the same direction. A system of majority based rule only works if the majority has some ‘stake’, some form of participation and real grounds of aspiration with regard to the 'system'. This is exactly what is eroding under our eyes. Occupy deserves credit for making these shifts manifest.

One of the sources of antagonism towards the movement was its strong anti-corporate bias. In some ways this preoccupation points towards one avenue of solutions. Heavily indebted governments or individuals disenfranchised by the financial system are not generating the solutions any more which we dearly relied on so far. If we ask for securing the buy-in of the working middle class in the capitalist system, a more active role falls to the corporate sector. In some ways one might argue that this demand has been well heard – the vociferous efforts to shut the movement down certainly allow this interpretation. The social responsibilities of business – beyond avoiding all these obvious scandals surfaced in the financial crisis – certainly extend now beyond pure philanthropy. Paying decent middle class wages, providing employment and affordable access to basic products and services is an imperative - provided we want to see an ongoing coexistence of basic forms of both democracy and free markets. It is in the ‘enlightened self interest’ of business to live up to these demands.

So yes, the tents are gone. But the core issue is here to stay. As is the struggle to address these them.

How many CSR experts are just cheats and plagiarists?

CSR experts, people that write about, research, and practice CSR day-in, day-out are a pretty responsible bunch, right? After all, who would listen to anyone talking about responsible business who they didn't think was, well ... responsible?

Uh, wrong. Unfortunately, if our recent experience is anything to go by, there are some decidedly irresponsible CSR experts out there.  Actually, worse than that; not just irresponsible, but flat-out cheats and plagiarists. And we're not just talking about the usual CSR snake-oil salesmen who are simply out to make a quick buck from some dishonest greenwashing. No, we're talking the supposed purveyors of something resembling objective truth - academics and journalists.

How do we know? Simple. In the last couple of months we've run into several glaring examples of so-called experts simply stealing our work and passing it off as their own. Consider this one that has only just come to light. Jaquelina Jimena, a journalist and CSR adviser, wrote a nice article in the Canadian Mining Journal back in 2009 titled "Is Corporate Engagement Possible Through CSR Blogs?" Well, we would say it's nice, because it is almost word-for-word copied from one of our own blog entries "Corporate Engagement through CSR Blogs", published the year before. She changes our use of "we" to "I" of course, but that is about it. The rest is almost entirely plagiarized from our post. Well, except the last paragraph, which we she didn't copy from us. But that's not her work either. It's directly stolen from a post from our fellow blogger Fabian Pattberg.

Jimena has published other pieces in the Canadian Mining Journal about CSR, all of which, as far we can tell, contain substantial portions of text just cut and pasted from other people's articles and websites. Our friends at Ethical Corporation are a particularly popular source, it seems. Of course, she claims on her LinkedIn page, to be a "professional journalist" as well as a CSR adviser and lecturer, with experience among others advising at the Global Reporting Initiative and Anglo-American.

Now, we're not saying that Jimena isn't an expert in CSR,or in her specialist field of stakeholder engagement and communication. But as a potential editor, employer, client, or reader of hers, would you really put your trust in someone who, from time to time, made a living by stealing other people's work?

It's not just journalists though. While plagiarism in academia is usually discussed in relation to students (and we have to say, this continues to be a big problem in the sector), there are no shortage of cheats standing at the front of the classroom too. Again, our own experience is instructive here.

A few months back, it came to our attention that an article published in the journal Management Decision under the title "Sustainability managers or rogue mid-managers? A typology of corporate sustainability managers" and suppposedly written by professors Tang, Robinson and Harvey, was in fact almost entirely plagiarized from a working paper written by Andy and one of our long time friends and collaborators, Wayne Visser. After someone had kindly pointed this out to us, we informed the journal who did some checking and then retracted the offending piece, acknowledging that "a large proportion" of the article had been copied from ours.

We also did a little further digging and discovered that one of the ostensible authors, Kevin Tang, had even plagiarized almost his entire PhD thesis. It took about 5 minutes to find this out given that he'd copied almost word for word Jennifer Lynes' dissertation about environmental commitment in the airline industry which was easily available on-line. So we informed Lynes (who was suitably shocked) and Bond University in Australia, who had awarded Tang's PhD. They've now taken the online version of Tang's PhD down and informed us that a thorough investigation into the allegations is underway. So you can't check now this one yourself, but believe us, it is a cut-and-dried case of plagiarism, even down to the personal acknowledgments page!

We'd love to believe that these are just isolated incidents, but realistically we think it is just the tip of the iceberg. Both of these cases came to light by accident just in the last few weeks and we only noticed them because they were rip-offs of our own work. Who else is blissfully unaware of getting their CSR research stolen by a so-called expert? And how many other CSR experts are out there passing off someone else's work as their own that we haven't discovered yet?

Academia certainly has been getting into all sorts of cheating scandals recently. Earlier in the year we witnessed the forced resignation of the German Secretary of Defence after revelations of his plagiarized PhD thesis. A few weeks ago, an investigation confirmed that  the noted psychologist Diederik Stapel, the former Dean of the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, had falsified data and made up entire experiments over the course of the past decade. Unethical journalism has also been in the news of late, especially around the News International phone hacking scandal. Both professions are clearly in need of clean-up.

At the moment, none of these more high profile scandals have been concerned with CSR experts. Not yet, anyway. But if our experience is anything to go by, it's probably just a matter of time.


Photo by loop_oh (Robert Ganzer). Reproduced under Creative Commons licence

Happy 2 months birthday, OWS!

Its two months today that Occupy Wall Street had occupied Zuccotti Park in New York. And after strong reluctance from the big media (it took most of big US networks more than a week to cover the story) the movement has successfully occupied the news channels for the last weeks.

New York’s mayor duly used the two month anniversary of the movement to finally evict them from their initial site. Ironically though, that decision seems to just have added that other bit of publicity the movement could handily use. By the time of writing, between 15,000 and 35,000 people, depending whose estimate you want to believe, are currently marching in the streets of New York. Mike Bloomberg still does not disappoint as the most effective PR agent of the Occupy movement.

I had a strange déjà vu today when stumbling over one bit of news. Obviously, the evicted protesters in New York are flocking to church buildings to get food and shelter, and to be secure from police harassment. The last time when churches were the only safe haven for civil unrest was when people in East Germany took to the streets in the summer of 1989. Those famous ‘Monday demonstrations’ and their organization started in churches (note: this was before facebook and twitter). By November 9^th that year, the wall had finally fallen. And with it the regime that held the country in its grip for some 40 years.

Certainly in Toronto, where the Occupy movement has camped in St. James Park, co-owned by the Anglican Church, a similar pattern is visible. Even though support currently seem to falter, initially the church was one of the crucial supporters of the protest, supplying them with vital access to amenities.

This historical parallel is more than just a co-incidence. Like the demonstrations in 1989, the Occupy movement is only loosely organized, has some rather sweeping demands and has little sense of translating their agenda into the institutional setting of how our society is governed. All they have is a legitimate issue. They are concerned with the fact that governments no longer represent the people, the ‘99%’, and that wealth is blatantly unfairly distributed. It all sounds so familiar to me, up the chants to remain non violent by OWS protesters, very much like the famous ‘Keine Gewalt’ (‘no violence’) choruses which became the signature slogan of East German protestors 22 years ago.

Like communism, the current form of capitalism has created a governance system, where some very few are perceived to control societies and where large parts of the population feel disenfranchised and curtailed in many ways.

The crucial difference to today’s US seems to be that in most US cities the reaction of the police is rather uncompromising and violent. Events in Oakland or the pepper spraying of an 84 year old lady in Seattle are just a tip of the iceberg. In some ways the starkest prove that these protestors have a point is the remarkable police presence. When I visited Zuccotti Park in late October my guess would be that the ratio of police to protesters was at least 2:1.

If it is true that OWS is ‘not productive’ (Michael Bloomberg), why do we need so many police there? The fear of the establishment is palpable. New York just serves as the test tube for this: the Mayor Bloomberg, himself firmly in the ‘1%’, symbolizes the seizure of corporate interests of the political process. To become the ‘democratically’ elected mayor he spent $250m out of his private wealth.

Drawing the parallel to the fall of communism 22 years ago, one big difference seems to be that there is no ‘Gorbachev’ figure. There is no strong, prominent, visible leader on the other side, who understands the legitimacy of the issues and, as Michael Gorbachev at the time, refuses to use the power at his disposal to crush this movement.

This said though, some of the ‘1%’ understand the movement and take it seriously. As business school professors, we occasionally have to go to events where we rub shoulders with these guys. Just yesterday, I was totally flabbergasted listening to one of Canada’s real estate tycoons arguing that this movement is serious and here to stay and that it is something business leaders better take seriously.

It is difficult to predict where this movement is going. At the moment, the fact that it has stayed non-violent has certainly helped to make people sympathize with it that do not ordinarily go out on the streets demonstrating. The other element is the core issue of the movement. It seems that the blatant inequality of wealth and the co-optation of governments by business interests are the common denominator of the protests.

In some ways we have nothing to add to our earlier comments. There are strong parallels between the green movement starting off in the 1970s with pretty similar features. David McTaggart and the other founders of Greenpeace where hardly taken seriously by the establishment back then. But we all know which impact that movement had on politics, business and civil society.

So again, Happy Birthday Occupy Wall Street! And many happy returns!

DM

Photo by David Shankbone, reproduced under the Creative Commons Licence.

Why is communication such a big deal for CSR?

Corporate social responsibility often provokes a lot of debate. But one thing that most people seem to be agreed on is the necessity of good communications. Of course, what makes for "good" communications is not so clear cut. Should companies engage in dialogue and debate with their stakeholders? How do you communicate "authentically" with consumers around social issues? And what do employees expects or want in terms of internal communication around CSR? These are some of the questions occupying minds rights now, so it has been interesting to spend the last couple of weeks exploring some of the challenges around the intersection of CSR and communication, both from a research and practice perspective. Not that this has necessarily brought me any closer to the right answers, but I think it has helped a lot in clarifying what the right questions might be.

Last week I keynoted the 1st International CSR Communication conference in Amsterdam, NL, a primarily research conference that also featured a lot of practitioner participants. This was preceded by a doctoral workshop on CSR and communication research where budding PhD students sought to test out their ideas, theories, and methods with experienced researchers like myself and Mette Morsing from Copenhagen Business School. Then, this week I keynoted another pretty unique conference - a mixed practitioner/research conference in Copenhagen on CSR and social media titled "Social media for social purposes".

Suddenly it seems that the communications challenges in CSR are getting a lot of attention. Certainly they are beginning to attract a lot of research activity, whether from management researchers, communications scientists, or media analysts. There is some really interesting stuff happening out there, much of it making use of the new online data that is all around us. I've been impressed by some of the datasets that are being put together using Tweets, blogs, YouTube videos, media articles, and a variety of online texts and reports. The possibilities of analyzing "big data" around online CSR communication are growing all the time. But also, it is clear that we need more than just huge amounts of data - we also need to be asking the right questions.

Consider this. McDonald's, which has been a pioneer in blogging about its CSR practices through its Values in Practice blog, has recorded the following stats from January - November 2011:

Number of posts: 16.
Average number of comments per post: 0.5
Average number of tweets per post: 1.2
Average number of Facebook likes per post: 3.1
Average number of shares per post: 3.8

Now consider this. McDonald's has more than 11m people who have "liked" the company's main Facebook page. That's a lot of people who don't seem to be much interested in what is happening over at their CSR blog. Clearly something is up. CSR experts are saying that companies need to engage in dialogue with their stakeholders. So are McDonald's stakeholders actually not interested in dialogue? Is the way the company is communicating not relevant for them? Is the company blocking interacting on some way or is one way communication actually effective here?

As I say, we don't really have the answers to these sorts of questions yet, but the field is moving fast and through network, discourse, and sentiment analysis, for example, researchers are getting a better understanding of how and why people respond to CSR communications in particular ways.... and what this all means for the society we live in today. There is a long way to go, but it looks like its going to be an exciting and informative journey.

AC

Photo by joshfassbind. Reproduced under Creative Commons licence