The future of CSR

Our collaborator on the forthcoming second edition of our CSR textbook, Laura Spence from Royal Holloway, University of London, has been musing recently on the future of CSR. So we asked her to pen another guest post for us about where she thinks things are going. Here's what her crystal ball says...

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I’ll let you into a secret. Sometimes, as I travel from conference to conference, I wonder if we are getting anywhere at all in the study of CSR.  As the field has developed, there are some topics and theories which have somewhat of a stranglehold on our thinking. With every new conference presentation that yet again tackles the well-trodden ground of large, Western multinational corporations, corporate social performance, stakeholder theory, or institutional theory, my heart sinks a little, though I also work on some of these. Don’t get me wrong, there is plenty of good work on these topics coming out, but we are in danger of throwing all our energies at an ever-decreasing circle of subjects when there is so much more out there to do. Couple that with the assessment by some that CSR has come to its natural end and it is sometimes hard to stay positive for the future of CSR.

And yet, in the last few weeks, I have had to rethink my doubts. It all started with an event on Gender and Responsible Business at Nottingham University’s International Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility. Somehow CSR – of all subjects - has more or less overlooked the gender perspective despite some pretty long standing powerful contributions.  Every presentation I saw contributed something refreshing, different and relevant, demonstrating a huge potential to shine a new light on CSR in the future. It is well worth joining the continuing conversation through the LinkedIn group: ‘Gender & Responsible Business Network’.

The inclusion of marginalized voices was to my delight also explored at the ‘Corporate Responsibility: Towards Inclusive Development’ stream at the European Group of Organization Studies (EGOS) conference in Montreal.  In a field dominated by US and European corporate perspectives and authors, this stream surfaced a young, vibrant and diverse group of scholars working on regions that constitute most of the world but a small proportion of CSR publications. We heard about CSR in Asian, South American, Middle Eastern and African countries, drawing on important cultural, political, economic, social and religious perspectives that are usually sidelined. Is the future of CSR in Europe or North America? I doubt it. The level of social need, different governmental roles, critical challenges and changing economic structures in developing and emerging economies should encourage us to look well beyond the usual contexts.

And I was not the only one pondering the future of CSR. At a special workshop at the EGOS conference, Christopher Wickert (VU University Amsterdam) and Arno Kourula (University of Amsterdam) led a focused workshop ‘Debating the Future of CSR’. Bringing together PhD students and early career researchers (and let’s face it, they should be the ones that determine what’s around the corner) with a few more established academics, we had the opportunity to really dig in to three key aspects: contextuality in CSR; theoretical criticism of CSR; and stakeholder perspectives and marginalized voices in CSR. The topics discussed were wide ranging and included the role of non-governmental organizations, CSR as a political project, activism, the role of the state, frustration with the ‘business case’, the performativity of language around CSR, listening to the polyphony of  voices and the dangers of stereotyping.  I really hope that the participants at the workshop go on to publish on some of these perspectives in more detail – it will make fascinating reading.  

Some of these waves of CSR research are captured in an earlier Crane and Matten blog and a brand new chapter in our second edition of CSR: Readings and Cases in A Global Context (Crane, Matten & Spence, Routledge, July 2013). There we add to the debate on the future of CSR in terms of new business models such as social entrepreneurship and social innovation, the influence of new social movements, forms of regulatory rather than voluntary CSR, the outcomes of CSR, and the positive prospects of CSR as a profession and an academic subject.   

So, as summer starts in earnest in the UK, I am optimistic for the future of CSR. If space is made for the rising waves of research I have been privileged to see in the last few months, you never know, we might actually make a difference. 

Laura J. Spence

Photo by eelcowest. Reproduced under Creative Commons licence

Top 10 tips for publishing CSR research in top journals

Contrary to popular belief, most university faculty don't spend the whole summer lounging on the beach or sitting in the garden. For most of us, summer is the time when we can really focus on our research without the usual distractions of teaching and university administration.

Although many academics do this research because they enjoy it, it is also a critical part of our role. Success in publishing our research is often the number one reason why we get hired or not, or whether we get that promotion or pay rise that we're after. Publish or perish is a mantra that is very real for many of us.

Publication, however, is no easy matter. There is great competition for space in the best scholarly outlets, like high ranked journals and prestigious book publishers. Those of us doing research on corporate responsibility issues, whether CSR, business ethics, business and sustainability, or whatever else sometimes struggle to meet the kinds of standards expected by these outlets. This is not because we're any less smart than other researchers, but we do have a complicated subject that doesn't always lend itself very well to the demands of the top tier journals. There is also just simply lot to learn about the publishing process, especially for PhD students, junior researchers or those relatively new to the demands of publishing their work in premier English-language journals.

As a result of this, we often find ourselves giving advice to other CSR researchers, especially at the many workshops and conferences that crop up over the summer. We tend to tailor this advice to the different audiences we speak to, but we also thought that it might be helpful to give a more general list of top tips that anyone doing work in the area could hopefully learn something from. Our thoughts are particularly relevant to publishing in high ranked management journals, but most of the lessons translate beyond this. Let us know if you find them helpful or if you have your own suggestions, just add them in the comment section below.

1. Make time for research. This is the critical starting place. Good work requires a substantial investment of time and energy and lots of researchers spend a lot of their time on teaching and service. In the CSR space, in particular, many of us are so passionate about our subject that our available research time is easily eaten up by working with our students or lobbying our colleagues to include more CSR content in their courses. Carving out the necessary space and time for research is critical. There are no shortcuts.

2. Find great co-authors … but select them carefully. OK, so maybe there is one shortcut: finding other people to do some of the research with you. But co-authorships go wrong as often as they go well. So choosing carefully is critical. Find people with complementary skills, who understand the subject in different but related ways to you. Remember, CSR issues are complicated, so just as we always advocate partnership by organizations, so too do we need to partner to understand a phenomenon. But if we go too broad, we risk losing the all-essential focus that the top journals aim for. Our no.1 piece of advice for selecting co-authors - find someone you can go for a drink or a coffee with and feel energized afterwards.
 
3. Write for a clearly defined audience, with a carefully targeted paper, that joins a specific conversation. Research doesn't happen in a vacuum. Who do you want to read your work? No, really, who exactly do you have in mind? What have they written about your subject? Answer these questions and join an ongoing conversation rather than trying to start a whole new one. It may seem like CSR issues are new and exciting, but many of the issues, problems or concepts that we find interesting have been addressed by others in other ways. Some scholars live by the maxim that if you think an idea is really new then you probably just haven't read enough. So make sure you do read enough and make sure that your work is crafted for a particular audience. If it helps, think of it like a product that has to fill a clearly defined need.

4. Be clear what the research gap is that you are aiming to fill, and what your contribution is. Probably the number one reason that editors reject corporate responsibility papers is that they don't make a clear enough contribution. Typically, this means, a contribution to academic theory. So nailing down the research gap and deciding for yourself what your unique contribution is will reap rewards. Especially if the contribution is one valued by those other researchers that you're aiming to write for.

5. Try as far as possible to be theory rather than phenomenon driven. This is one that many CSR researchers struggle with. We're doing research in this area because we find the issues themselves fascinating. This means we tend to phenomenon-driven. But the higher ranked journals all typically look for a theoretical contribution and so they expect the research they publish to be theoretically-driven. So if you don't want to take too many risks with that limited amount of research time you have, work out how to make the translation from phenomenon to theory and start as you mean to go on.

6. Different contexts have to be theoretically distinctive (revising/extending theory) not just new applications of existing theory. This is particularly relevant for those doing research on or in particular countries or industries, which is so common in the CSR field just because it has become so ubiquitous. The key thing to remember here is that just because no one has done research on your country or industry before, that doesn't mean it needs to be done now. If you're following the advice we've already laid out, you'll be thinking - what is it about this country or industry that is sufficiently different that it renders existing theories inadequate to explain it. If you can answer this, you have a shot at extending or revising that theory rather than just applying it to a new area. And that's what the reviewers will be looking for.

7. Test out your ideas with working papers, conference presentations, workshops, etc – do not submit too early. Research is a process, and the great thing about that is there are lots of opportunities to get feedback on what you're doing before its too late. Take your time to see if your ideas have the potential for top tier publication before you commit to doing the research. And then as you're doing the research get feedback from the best people you can about your emerging results. Finally, circulate your work and get feedback before you submit to that tier 1 journal that rejects 90% of the papers it receives. You want to be as sure as possible that you're going to be in the rarefied 10%.

8. Beware of avoidable ‘incompetence cues’ . This is one that the former editor of Business Ethics Quarterly, Gary Weaver, always explained very convincingly. If editors and reviewers find sub-standard English, spelling mistakes, poor referencing, formatting that doesn't meet the journal's specification and other minor errors in a paper (especially in the first few pages) you are going to activate the editor's 'incompetence schema'. That is, he or she will already be thinking that you're in some way incompetent before they even get to evaluating your ideas. Don't risk it. Get the basics 100% right, every time, without fail. This will give your work the best chance it can of being judged in the way you want it to be.

9. Remember that reviewers are there to help you improve your work. The community of researchers around CSR and business ethics are a pretty collegiate and supportive group. But it can feel like completely the opposite when you're holding three reviews which all appear to rip your work to shreds ... but are still offering you the chance to resubmit something different (well, actually, better) in the future. But believe us, they do actually want to see your work published, so you just need to work with them, not against them. The most successful researchers spend almost as much time on revising their work as they on the initial preparation. Take criticism on the chin and use it constructively as just another stage in the research process. In the end, you'll appreciate the advice because it almost always improves your research if you're working with a good journal and good reviewers.

10. Get used to criticism and rejection – and don’t forget the bigger picture of why you want to publish in the first place. We all get bucketloads of criticism and we all get our work rejected. Its a part of the job as a researcher. Some people say that if you're not getting rejected from time to time, you're not aiming high enough. So don't take it personally. And remember, the reason you're putting yourself through all this is that you think the issues are important and that you have ways of thinking about it that need to be read. The best journals are regarded a good because they have a higher impact than the others. If you really want your work to be read by other researchers - if you want to leave a mark on the field - you'll need to face the trials and tribulations of aiming for the best journals. So grow a hard skin along with that smart mind and warm heart.

Should the UN Global Compact have sharper teeth?

Do those teeth need sharpening? Georg Kell, Executive Director of the UN Global Compact. 

The emergence of multi-stakeholder initiatives and voluntary corporate accountability programs for business have become some of the most interesting aspects of the CSR debate over the past decade or so. The largest of these in terms of company participation is the UN Global Compact, which now has some 10,000 participants, including over 7,000 businesses in 145 countries. By any account, that's a huge number. It's also a huge experiment given that there's never been anything quite like it before or since.

A few years ago we were the official bloggers of the Global Compact's 10 year anniversary, "Leaders Summit" which took place in New York in 2010. At that time we made various comments on the successes, failures and future challenges of the compact. As geeky academics, we are now eagerly awaiting the publication of the special issue of the journal Business & Society (which we are on the board of), entitled "The UN Global Compact: Retrospect and Prospect", edited by our friends and colleagues Andreas Rasche, Sandra Waddock and Malcolm McIntosh. They've put together a nice collection of academic papers on the subject, including a terrific introduction from the editors, and the special issue really demonstrates how seriously the academic community is taking the Global Compact.

Some of the big questions for researchers interested in the Compact - and indeed for many in the practitioner community - are about its governance and effectiveness. Does membership have an effect of corporate social performance? What governance system would be most effective to ensure corporate accountability? And perhaps the biggest question of them all - should the compact, as its critics maintain, have more regulatory power to discipline companies that don't live up to its principles, or is it more important to have a low bar for participation so as to engage the maximum amount of companies?

Answers to these questions are slowly beginning to emerge from the research community. Over at the aptly named Global Compact Critics website, a colleague of ours at the University of Zurich, Patrick Haack, has written a guest blog based on his research that reaches a conclusion which the compact critics love to hate. Yes, you guessed it, Haack recommends that rather than kicking out any "bad apples" in the compact, the UN should keep them in. Paradoxically, this is the way to build legitimacy according to Haack: “a “soft” and consensual approach is in the best interest of the Global Compact and transnational governance more generally... "keeping bad apples” and providing them with time and resources to overcome organizational barriers may prove more fruitful than unconditional punishment."

Provocative stuff. Unsurprisingly, the critics have hit back - in the form of a post from Mariëtte van Huijstee from SOMO, the organization behind the Global Compact Critics website. "By keeping bad apples in at all times," she argues, "the initiative loses its legitimacy and appeal for other companies in the long run." This is no arcane academic argument; it goes to the heart of how to build an effective mechanism for corporate accountability and ensure that companies act in the best interests of society.  But the answers are not obvious and the need for good research is critical.Some of what has emerged so far has shown that the diffusion of the Compact has been dampened by the effect of critical NGOs who have voiced concerned over its "weak" inclusive approach - meaning that companies from countries with strong networks of international NGOs have been less likely to sign up than those from countries outside of these networks. This helps to explain why the Compact has been particularly successful at getting traction in developing countries, even whilst developed country NGO criticize its lack of teeth.

So the debate will no doubt rage on. But soon, we hope, we'll have the research to show what the real advantages and disadvantages are of the Compact - and whether its weakness is, as Haack contests, one of its main strengths.

Photo by djevents. Reproduced under Creative Commons Licence

Looking for positive outcomes from plagiarism in the Margaret Wente affair

Following on from the earlier guest post from our York colleague Dawn Bazely regarding the Globe and Mail plagiarism case, we asked Dawn to tie up the loose ends by identifying some of the positives that have emerged from the whole affair. This is what she has to say....

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There was a lot of learning to be had from following the Margaret Wente story last week. All in all, last week was important if you have ever written an assignment (e.g. essay or laboratory report), or have taught any form of writing or have read a newspapers or magazine. This covers pretty much most of the Canadian population!

Questions were raised by mainstream journalists, bloggers and hundreds of the readers of online stories, about whether Wente was guilty of plagiarism, and the behaviour of a number of Globe and Mail staff in responding to this allegation. These stories came out in publications that included Macleans, the Toronto Star, the National Post, and Toronto Life, and even the Guardian. Those asking questions included John Miller, a former dean of journalism at Ryerson, Elizabeth James with Vancouver’s North Shore News and the blogger at the Sixth Estate who wrote about How media should handle a plagiarism scandal

Why were the Globe and Mail’s ethics and standards being called into question? In a nutshell, several columns by Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente had been scrutinized by an Ottawa artist and professor, Carol Wainio in her Media Culpa blog. Over several years, Media Culpa posted comparisons of older text by other authors to the text in some of Wente’s columns. Wainio made several of these comparisons. Wente’s columns made no attributions or reference to this other work, and strings of words were identical.

What made it possible for everyone to weigh in with an opinion, was that the Media Culpa’s blogs provided similar comparisons if text to those produced by plagiarism software, such as Turnitin.com. With Turnitin output reports, side-by-side text comparisons are made. Every course director and teaching assistant must make a judgment about these Turnitin text reports, and decide what to tolerate in terms of the cutting and pasting of text. There will be a process for taking this up with students whose work is identified in this way.

The response that unfolded to Media Culpa’s posts, which Wainio had conveyed on several occasions to the Globe and Mail, was that various editors and columnists (including Wente herself) defended a position on plagiarism in which a certain amount cutting and pasting of text written by someone else is to be expected and accepted. Reasons for downplaying Wainio’s text comparisons included the pressures of meeting deadlines. A number of well known writers in “old media”, aka the mainstream press defended Wente. Some of them expressed the opinion that upholding the standards and principles of “academic” plagiarism, or the standards taught in university and high school, was just too difficult. The Wente apologists included Terence Corcoran and Dan Delmar at the National Post. Back at the Globe and Mail, the editor, John Stackhouse and the public editor, Sylvia Stead provided very muted and restrained responses, only after torrents of internet chatter ensured that the story did not die down.

Is cutting and pasting so unavoidable, so that we are we all guilty of using other peoples’ phrases and sentences?

Some members of the reading public seem to think so. Jack, commented at the crux of the matter blog: “So she quoted without naming sources. I rarely do. Does that make me a plagiarist? “Sloppy journalism”? Disagree. If that were true we would all be guilty but we aren’t are we?”

The title of Dan Delmar’s column at the National Post was: Are we all “self-righteous” sinners cast(ing) the first stone at Margaret Wente? My answer to this is a definite “no”. Biology laboratory reports provide a good case study for evaluating just how prevalent cutting and pasting actually is. Hundreds of student do the same experiments every year, and write up their results. Up to to now, thousands of these reports have been run through plagiarism software such as Turnitin. This software checks for patterns in words, and compares one person’s text against that from other sources: the internet, other student papers, journals, and whatever other text is available and accessible.

The Turnitin reports shows that it IS possible for thousands of students to write up the same experiment with relatively little overlap in sentence structure. The one exception is the methods section, in which students often quote directly from the laboratory manual, and it has been easy to put guidelines into place for quoting them.

Nevertheless, IS the academic integrity project in jeopardy?

There may be a very real case for arguing that different kinds of writers should be held to different standards, but there is no doubt in my mind that if Margaret Wente had submitted the columns in which Wainio detected unattributed text as undergraduate assignments, that she would have been called in for a chat with the teaching assistant and course director. Not surprisingly, a US Gallup poll found that journalists aren’t high on the public’s honesty list.

While the entire affair raised serious questions about the ethical behavior of powerful members of “old media”, in general, I tend to agree with the Back of the Book blog, that there has been an upside to the Wente case.

Good pedagogy includes raising awareness about the rules of academic integrity and plagiarism. Academic integrity is not primarily about punishment but about learning how not to plagiarize, and give credit appropriately. Many of the frontline workers, such as grad student blogger, gradstudentdrone, in the war on cut and paste have stepped forward during l’affaire Wente, to acknowledge the challenges, and the grey areas of confronting plagiarism.

The reader responses have shown that these principles and ethical codes relating to academic integrity are taken very seriously by many outside of academia and the media. Being able to view the text comparisons directly, was no doubt a contributing factor to the outrage at the behavior of senior editors, and the picture that their actions paint of the corporate culture. Carol Wainio wrote several responses on her blog and in the mainstream media that were calm, measured and logical. This all served to reinforce the impression that a section of the media establishment has been making judgment calls that put them out of line with teachers, readers and members of the mainstream media who are more apt to look at the evidence without blinking. Kathy English, the Toronto Star’s public editor described the Wente case as a test of accountability.

Perhaps the most positive outcome is the broad discussion that the Wente story generated. A very cool example is the discussion thread about this on the Vancouver Canucks Hockey team forum. Thank goodness the fans have something to distract them. This incident also gave many people cause for reflection and rememberance, such as David Climenhaga’s raising the tragic case of Toronto Star journalist Ken Adachi, who committed suicide after being found plagiarizing. 

Dawn Bazeley

Image by Jobadge. Reproduced under Creative Commons Licence

Plagiarism, journalistic ethics ... and climate change?

One of the big ethics stories blowing up in Canada right now concerns plagiarism and journalistic ethics. Namely, criticisms of a journalist at one of the big national papers here, The Globe and Mail, have gone viral leaving the paper, and the journalist concerned, Margaret Wente, with a serious case to answer. Many, ourselves included, have been underwhelmed by the response of the paper to what is an extremely serious threat to their legitimacy. As regular readers will know, we are pretty serious about plagiarism, as are most academics.In fact, one of our colleagues here at York, Dawn Bazely, who heads up the Institute for Research and Innovation in Sustainability, was so riled by the case that yesterday she posted a blog piece on the scandal. With her agreement, we're re-posting it here, since we think it makes an interesting contribution to the debate from an academic perspective. 

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 SCENE: Kitchen, writing student references for medical schools, while CBC’s As It Happens plays on the radio.

JEFF DOUGLAS (As It Happens radio broadcoaster):

“”Media Culpa.” That’s the name of a blog maintained by Ottawa artist Carol Wainio. As the name suggests, the blog exposes what Ms. Wainio believes to be substandard journalism. Lately, her spotlight has been focusing on one Canadian journalist in particular: Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente.

On Friday, the Globe’s Public Editor, Sylvia Stead, responded to some of the issues raised by Ms Wainio. Ms. Stead included an explanation from Ms. Wente. But Carol Wainio isn’t satisfied, and neither is John Miller.

He’s the founding Chair of Ryerson University’s Journalism Department and professor emeritus. We reached Mr. Miller in Port Hope, Ontario.” (from The Monday Edition of As It Happens, duration 7 mins 49 secs)

DAWN BAZELY: “What the heck?” To my family hanging around doing homework and reading the Globe and Mail: ”Did you hear that?”

Yes, we heard it and after the interview with Prof. Miller (starting at minute 13:25 of the podcast), I read many of the blogs and the Globe and Mail articles about the plagiarism. The Globe and Mail admitted to some of what Carol Wainio has been documenting, though did not call it plagiarism. It culminated, this morning, in my sending a Letter to the Editor of the Globe and Mail explaining that until a transparent and public investigation takes place to restore my faith in their journalistic standards and practices, that I would be cancelling my online and print subscriptions. Too bad, because I am a huge fan of Lucy Waverman’s recipes, and my lobbying to get her back to the Saturday Life section from the mid-week section appeared to have borne fruit.

What does this debacle at the Globe and Mail have to do with Climate Change? A lot, actually (more on that in a moment).

It also has to do with how universities deal with ethics and academic integrity, including plagiarism. York University students are required to read the Academic Integrity webpages and do the tutorial about it. At York, I was one of the first professors to use Turnitin plagiarism software, because I brought in a lot of written work into BIOL 2050 (Ecology). Course instructors and teaching assistants spend a huge amount of their time educating about and policing academic honesty and making sure that plagiarism is not happening and if something is flagged as being potential plagiarism, filing complaints, holding meetings with associate deans and students involved, and then doing any follow up remedial work. There are large chunks of my life spent with tearful, upset students, that I will never ever get back.

So to read that a very public and polarizing columnist who has been given many board-feet of column space in what Chris Selley of the National Post describes in an online post as Canada’s “self-styled paper of record” is not only being questioned about possible plagiarism and that several instances of this have been raised in the past by Carol Wainio (you can read the comparisons of the text – they are all over the internet), but then to see the muted responses from the Globe’s Public Editor, and the Editor, made me feel utterly dismayed. THIS IS SERIOUS! In our courses, this would get students called into meetings, and if it continued (as appears to be have been happening), there would be a ramped up response and penalties imposed – severe penalties. Chris Selley quite rightly went on to observe that the Globe’s response “is completely out of keeping with the global journalism mainstream“.

I have written about the challenges of consistent blogging about sustainability, because of the time that I feel ethically obliged to spend checking sources, referencing and inserting links into posts, so as to maintain the standards that I am supposed to uphold as an academic. I get freaked out about accuracy and attribution. Apparently the Globe and Mail doesn’t see this as such a big issue.

And finally, climate change… It’s simply that Margaret Wente’s many columns on climate change, sustainability, energy, etc. indicate that she is happy to give a big shout out to skeptics and denialists and generally is not interested in considering the boring old scientific community in a respectful, (even semi-) balanced and informed dialogue. Furthermore, a number of her columns about about the environment have contained errors through omission – exactly one of the reasons for academic dishonesty charges being levelled against Bjorn Lomborg, himself a controversial climate skeptic – then believer – nowunfunded. I gave up reading Wente a long time ago after realizing that any time spent analyzing and responding was a total waste. The people now defending Wente in the comments section of the Globe and Mail appear to be supporting her because she speaks to their cultural beliefs and for them, uncomfortable facts are really not going to be that important (aka cognitive dissonance). A couple of years ago, the Globe and Mail actually did publish a response by Gerald Butts of WWF Canada to one of Wente’s anti-climate change screeds.

So, here I go – a bit of analysis and observation of a couple of Wente columns:

From a December 1st 2011 column, “Suppression of climate debate is a disaster for science”

“Instead of distancing themselves from the shenanigans, the broader climate-science community has treated the central figures in Climategate like persecuted heroes. That is a terrible mistake, because it erodes the credibility of the entire field. The suppression of legitimate debate is a catastrophe for climate science. It’s also a catastrophe for science, period.” (M. Wente)

Sorry – but the climate scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit were cleared ofmalpractice allegations, as reported by the Guardian on April 14 2010 in an inquiry headed by Lord Oxburgh. More of the same hacked emails were put out there after the inquiry had finished, by the denialists – but Wente doesn’t mention the Oxburgh inquiry results anywhere, as far as I can tell – though she does consistently say that the science of climate change is not settled. NOT TRUE! Surely the Globe could have afforded to send her to any one of the International Polar Year conferences held in Quebec.

And  in the same column, Wente cites an economics professor on the topic of climate science: “Ross McKitrick… at the University of Guelph who is a leading climate-science critic” A quick check of McKitrick’s publications on Google Scholar, indicates that he publishes papers about the lack of evidence for climate change with a co-author Patrick J. Michaels of the libertarian think tank, the Cato Institute, Washington, D. C. Hmm – wonder who funds them? – oh, that billionaire, Koch.

Previously, Wente had covered Climategate in a column, ”Climate science’s PR disaster“ in which someone called Steve McIntyre a skeptic and “anarchist” was heavily referenced. He has recently published a journal paper confirming  climate change in Antarctica, but this is his only peer-reviewed paper – his other writing is on his blog page.

The problem with these two columns is that Wente is conflating peer-reviewed and non-peer reviewed writing. There is a whole field that considers academic and funder bias (but it’s not really ever mentioned by Wente).

I could go on picking Wente’s biased writing apart, but it’s pointless. She has sold many papers with this approach, and gets a lot of clicks on the internet. Except, that I cannot resist pointing out the irony of a June 14 column supporting fracking in which she’s actually calling for science: “I’m no expert on fracking technology, and I’m in no position to evaluate the risks. I have to rely on experts for that.” She fails to point out that there is research ongoing into this issue and a lot of concern about fracking. Yes, the research investigating the downsides of fracking is in its infancy, and there’s not much published on it, but Wente has never shied away from featuring the opinions of poorly-published people.

It really is time for the “legacy media“, as I have learned it is called, to step up to the plate and deal substantively with the allegations against Margaret Wente. This would at the very least, include running all of her writing through Turnitin or some other plagiarism software.

Dawn Bazely

Photo by smallestbones. Reproduced under Creative Commons licence

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

Another free download on corporate social responsibility

Last year we released a free download of our introduction to corporate social responsibility, originally published in our textbook "Corporate social responsibility: readings and cases in a global context". It proved to be pretty popular, with hundreds of downloads in the months since it was released. Today, we are making available another free CSR download, this time from our three volume edited collection on CSR, originally published by Sage in 2007. You can download the chapter by going HERE and selecting the "One Click Download" tab.

The new download is more of an academic-oriented treatment than our last one. It sets out to describe the academic literature on CSR rather than how CSR is thought about by practitioners. So for anyone doing research in the field, or just looking for a general introduction to the academic field of CSR, it will provide a handy starting point. We intended it to be accessible rather than too complex or jargony, so it should make sense to non-academics too.

The book itself is mainly intended for university libraries to purchase. At over 1000 pages and with a price tag of £450, that will probably come as no surprise! But we wanted to give the specially written introduction a wider readership and the publishers Sage have kindly agreed to now make it available free to anyone that wants to read it - and with all the final formatting and page setting in place too.

You may be interested in knowing which articles we ended up collating to capture the field of scholarship of CSR at the time. Things have moved on in the literature since 2007 but we think this still gives a pretty thorough overview of the field. The full table contents are below. If anyone wants full references for any of these pieces, just drop us a line. And keep watching for news of our next addition to the Sage Library in Business and Management - a mammoth 4 volume set on New Directions in Business Ethics, due out next year.

FULL CONTENTS: CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY. 3 VOLS, EDITED BY ANDREW CRANE AND DIRK MATTEN

Volume I: Theories and Concepts of Corporate Social Responsibility

1. Editors’ introduction

2. Introduction to Corporate Social Responsibility
2.1 What's a business for?, Charles Handy
2.2 The case for corporate social responsibility, Henry Mintzberg

3. Corporate Social Responsibility in Theory
3.1 The pyramid of corporate social responsibility: toward the moral management of organizational stakeholders, Archie B. Carroll
3.2 Corporate Social Responsibility Theories: Mapping the Territory, Elisabet Garriga & Domènec Melé

4. Critiques of Corporate Social Responsibility
4.1 The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits, Milton Friedman
4.2 The nature of business, Elaine Sternberg

5. Stakeholder Theory
5.1 The stakeholder theory of the corporation: concepts, evidence, and implications, Thomas Donaldson & Lee E. Preston
5.2 What stakeholder theory is not, Robert Phillips, R. Edward Freeman & Andrew C. Wicks

6. Corporate Citizenship
6.1 Corporate citizenship - towards an extended theoretical conceptualisation, Dirk Matten & Andrew Crane
6.2 Business citizenship: from domestic to global level of analysis, Jeanne M. Logsdon & Donna J. Wood

7. Corporate Sustainability and Business Ethics
7.1 Focusing on value: reconciling corporate social responsibility, sustainability and a stakeholder approach in a network world, David Wheeler, Barry Colbert & R. Edward Freeman
7.2 The corporate social policy process: beyond business ethics, corporate social responsibility, and corporate social responsiveness, Edwin M. Epstein

8. Corporate Social Performance
8.1 Corporate social performance revisited, Donna J. Wood
8.2 Corporate social and financial performance: A meta-analysis, Marc Orlitzky, Frank L. Schmidt & Sara L. Rynes

9. History of Corporate Social Responsibility
9.1 Corporate responsibility, Tom Cannon
9.2 Corporate social responsibility - evolution of a definitional construct, Archie B. Carroll


Volume II: Managing and Implementing Corporate Social Responsibility

1. Corporate Social Responsibility, Leadership And Strategy
1.1 Components of CEO Transformational Leadership and Corporate Social Responsibility, David A. Waldman, Donald S. Siegel & Mansour Javidan
1.2 How corporate social responsibility pays off, Lee Burke & Jeanne M. Logsdon

2. Organizing Corporate Social Responsibility: Organizational Structure, Culture And Learning
2.1 The Institutional Determinants of Social Responsibility, Marc T. Jones
2.2 The Path to Corporate Responsibility, Simon Zadek

3. Corporate Social Responsibility and Human Resource Management
3.1 The development of human rights responsibilities for multinational enterprises, Peter Muchlinski
3.2 Corporate social performance as a competitive advantage in attracting a quality workforce, Daniel W. Greening & Daniel B. Turban

4. Corporate Social Responsibility and Marketing
4.1 The Role of Marketing Actions with a Social Dimension: Appeals to the Institutional Environment, Jay M. Handelman & Stephen J. Arnold
4.2 Doing Better at Doing Good: when, why and how consumers respond to corporate social initiatives, C.B. Bhattacharya & Sankar Sen

5. Corporate Social Responsibility And Accounting
5.1 Thirty years of social accounting, reporting and auditing: what (if anything) have we learnt?, Rob Gray
5.2 Getting to the Bottom of "Triple Bottom Line", Wayne Norman & Chris MacDonald

6. Corporate Social Responsibility In Purchasing And Supply Chain Management
6.1 Supply chain specific? Understanding the patchy success of ethical sourcing initiatives, Sarah Roberts
6.2 Socially responsible organizational buying, Minette E. Drumwright

7. Corporate Social Responsibility And Public Affairs Management
7.1 Differences between public relations and corporate social responsibility: An analysis, Cynthia E. Clark
7.2 How Multinational Corporations Deal with their Socio-political Stakeholders: An Empirical Study in Asia, Europe, and the US, Dirk Holtbrügge & Nicola Berg

8. Stakeholder Management And Partnerships
8.1 Stakeholder management: framework and philosophy, R. Edward Freeman
8.2 Common interest, common good: Creating value through business and social sector partnerships, Shirley Sagawa & Eli Segal

9. Codes Of Conduct
9.1 Standards for corporate conduct in the international arena: challenges and opportunities for multinational corporations, S. Prakash Sethi
9.2 International codes of conduct and corporate social responsibility: Can transnational corporations regulate themselves?, Ans Kolk, Rob van Tulder & Carlijn Welters


Volume III: Corporate Social Responsibility in Global Context

1. Global Governance And The Firm
1.1 Global rules and private actors - towards a new role of the TNC in global governance, Andreas Georg Scherer, Guido Palazzo & Dorothée Baumann
1.2 Governing globalization? The state, law and structural change in corporate governance, John W. Cioffi

2. Institutions Of Global Corporate Social Responsibility
2.1 Reconstituting the public domain - issues, actors, and practices, John Gerard Ruggie
2.2 Strategic Responses to Global Climate Change: Conflicting Pressures on Multinationals in the Oil Industry, David L. Levy & Ans Kolk

3. Global Civil Society And The Corporation
3.1 The idea of global civil society, Mary Kaldor
3.2 Nongovernmental organizations as institutional actors in international business: theory and implications, Jonathan P. Doh & Hildy Teegen

4. Corporate Social Responsibility in Europe and North America
4.1 Corporate Social Responsibility in Europe and the U.S.: Insights from Businesses Self-presentations, Isabelle Maignan & David A. Ralston
4.2 A conceptual framework for understanding CSR in Europe, Dirk Matten & Jeremy Moon

5. Corporate Social Responsibility in Asia
5.1 Corporate Social Responsibility in Asia: A Seven Country Study of CSR Website Reporting, Wendy Chapple & Jeremy Moon
5.2 Transcending Transformation: Enlightening Endeavours at Tata Steel, S. Elankumaran, Rekha Seal & Anwar Hashmi

6. Corporate Social Responsibility in Africa
6.1 Revisiting Carroll's CSR pyramid: An African perspective, Wayne Visser
6.2 Do firms with unique competencies for rescuing victims of human catastrophes have special obligations? Corporate responsibility and the AIDS catastrophe in Sub-Saharan Africa, Thomas W. Dunfee

7. Corporate Social Responsibility in Latin America
7.1 The Corporate Social Responsibility System in Latin America and the Caribbean, Paul Alexander Haslam
7.2 Social and Environmental Responsibility in Small and Medium Enterprises in Latin America, Antonio Vives

8. Corporate Social Responsibility and International Development
8.1 Serving the world's poor, profitably, C.K. Prahalad & Allen Hammond
8.2 The false developmental promise of Corporate Social Responsibility: evidence from multinational oil companies, Jedrzej George Frynas

9. Fair Trade and Corporate Social Responsibility
9.1 The Fair Trade movement: parameters, issues, and future research, Geoff Moore
9.2 Fair Trade Futures, Alex Nicholls & Charlotte Opal

Photo by johntrainor. Reproduced under Creative Commons Licence