EFFECTIVE EXECUTIVE SEPT.2009

SOCIAL CAUSE MARKETING

Motivations for Corporate Citizenship

This article makes a politico-sociological attempt to analyze the real factors that drive the apparently philanthropic notion of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) or Corporate Citizenship towards policy-level implementation and praxes. Various reasons such as image-building exercises, confidence-building measures, power politics, bargaining strategies, negotiations and compromises, altruism, accountability towards the concept of Sustainable Development (if not inclusive growth!) and Good (Corporate) Governance are examined in the process. The article tentatively concludes that CSR is rather situation-specific.

CSR or Corporate Citizenship (also variously known as Sus- tainable Responsible Business or even Corporate Social Performance) has steadily emerged as one of the defining parameters of the entire arrangement of business strategy since WWII. The concept of social welfare has been integrated with business management for purposes that will be subsequently discussed in this article.

But what is interesting at this juncture is to appreciate how in fact these divergent trends have been cohered to generate new ideas and images in the marketplace of corporate politics that has increasingly found it difficult to ignore the polyphony of voices and choices underpinned by the need for change management initiatives towards societal benefit (Toenjes 2002). The multiplicity of business choices has to now necessarily conform to the obtainable arrangement of community level developmental choices in order to institutionalize the best practices of social entrepreneurship and corporate citizenship.

This development towards new possibilities has largely been made possible by the emergence of the Civil Society (following Antonio Gramsci) as the Third Actor that has moved away from the confines of both the State and the Market to create a dialogic space for itself that also caters to stakeholders (and not merely stockholders) interacting within and outside the Public Sphere (following Jürgen Habermas) on the issues of preferences, priorities and polemics that tend to affect their politics of everyday life (Lehman 2001).

What is rather important to understand here is the fact that the Civil Society has distanced itself away from the Market while citizens limited to political boundaries (or netizens without any such foreseeable or apparent boundaries) have also been socialized enough to agree to disagree (not really in consonance with Noam Chomsky's thesis of manufactured dissent).

Dr. Prasenjit Maiti presently teaches at the Indian Institute of Social Welfare and Business Management (Public Systems Management and Human Resource Management Departments). He was working till recently as a Guest Professor at the University of Southern Denmark. He has written three books till date on the problems of Governance, Development and Ethics. He has also edited Volumes on Social Capital, Rural and Urban Development as well as Environment. His latest Edited Volumes were on the Puzzles and Polemics of Development as well as Corporate Citizenship / Social Responsibility.

More intellectual debates and critical discourses at the social level of politics have largely been a derivative of development studies. The classical studies on perverted development had led to the formulation of the metropolitan center versus satellite analyses that indicate that drainage of indigenous wealth and natural resources from the South to the North has resulted in a top-heavy model of so-called economic development (Frank 1967 and Preston 1996).

Subsequent decolonization and establishment of post-colonial democracies in the South had only confirmed Frank's observations. Such a pattern of exploitation based on mercantile/industrial/finance capitalism and culminating in cultural imperialism logically led to the process which has now come to be fashionably known as globalization (following Immanuel Wallerstein and Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm).

But globalization has also been challenged by glocalization with a mantra championed by the World Bank that urges us to `Think Globally but Act Locally'. Added to this imperative are the Millennium Development Goals put forward by the United Nations Development Program.

So the question remains: is CSR a proactive or a reactive development that impinges upon the realities of social markets? Citizens and consumers have equally learnt to say no and look elsewhere for viable alternatives while the rapid expansion of the Development Sector has also ensured that Community-Based Organizations, Civil Society Organizations, Voluntary Organizations and Non-Government Organizations have gradually become sensitized to the intricacies and specifics of various multi-stakeholder dialogues that happen to inform the very fabric of consumerist societies and commodity fetishism (following Karl Marx).

So the war is now principally focused on the mind and market rather than territory and matter because cultural imperialism as the new form of colonization has invaded the sanctity of the Self by creating the deprived Other. The sale of a product as innocuous as Coca-Cola globally has provoked critics to come up with the concept of Coca-Colonization that simply implies taking the world by storm while equipped with the American cultural baggage that in itself is both a social as well as a power statement (Amba-Rao 1993).

Hypothesis / Methodology

We propose in this article that CSR as a corporate strategy is fundamentally a dynamic policy mechanism that facilitates better business profits by projecting the broad-base social profits accruing to the vulnerable communities who get disproportionately affected by the processes of mass-scale industrial production.

Adverse impacts of degraded environments, toxicity in the air / water / soil due to pollution, alienation of the self of the worker from the otherness of his/her produced outputs, dissociation of the creative psyche from the produced entities, disjunction between labor and wages etc., are sought to be rationalized in an arbitrary and ex post facto manner.

The methodology deployed in this article conjoins content analyzes, theoretical constructs, historical/archival data mining and analyses of the given primary facts in the intellectual framework of meta-narrative and post-modern historiography. Case studies have been investigated and contemporary theoretical baggages/underpinnings critically gazed at in order to understand the neoinstitu-tional and hegemonistic trappings of corporate power that happen to inform CSR while not at all reorienting the critical and traumatic relationships between individuals/beneficiaries (?) and their institutions/benefactors (!).

CSR Politics

The politics that more often than not happens to inform the politics of CSR is multidimensional in character and multilayered in its impact. It is somewhat similar to the politics of aid when donor countries or funding organizations from the North extend financial support to the South in exchange of disguised Structural Adjustment Programs (Bennett 2002).

The ostensible reason for extending grants or aid (not loans) is humanitarian in its scope and approach but the real reason is somewhat different. So a soft drink company from the North may well sponsor a safe drinking water project in a village from the South and then start marketing its product after having established a pro-people / pro-poor image. This is nothing else but vicarious marketing that is cloaked as ethical and responsible business practices (Jackson 1993 and Moriarty 2005).

The debate whether multinational corporates should at all involve themselves in social expenditures is rather old. A certain school (following Milton Friedman) has steadfastly maintained that business should only be concerned with making profits. But modern business is smart enough to understand that economic profits increase with an expansion in social and cultural investments because popular trust and favorable perceptions are then associated with the company's products and promote sales in this process (Elkington 1994 and McClintock 1999). But this entire process has to be sustainable and decided on the basis of viable business options.

So the issue is nearly all about fusing the identity of products (brand equity) with the public image of the company. The concerned company would ensure a steady level of profits and more once this is achieved. The question is really very simple: how can a company integrate its business objectives with its altruistic image for the purpose of increasing profits? CSR lends itself to a multiplicity of explanations in this regard as would be evident in the course of this article.

This apparently difficult task is simplified once a business enterprise makes inroads into a market by institutionalizing its business ethos vis-à-vis the society and the multiple communities. The Tata Group of Companies in India is a potential example that readily comes to mind in this connection: the Tatas have always projected a sense of responsible and socially committed business in a country like India by investing considerably in the area of social infrastructure development.

A modern city like Tatanagar has emerged around the Tata Steel and Tata Motors factories while the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Tata Energy Research Institute (now known as The Energy and Resources Institute) and Tata Memorial Hospital are a few important institutions in India in the public domain that owe their inception and inspiration to the Tatas.

The general perception in the popular psyche is that any commodity and / or service that has the Tata brand associated with it in any way would be of endurable value. Tata Consultancy Services and Tata Indicom are next generation companies of this group that has steadily evolved with the times by not wavering from its core business values. Now Ratan Tata has come up with his people's car (Tata Nano) that is affordable while at the same time is also profit making for Tata Motors. So the idea is to portray a philanthropic image by targeting niche markets that would still ensure corporate profits while expanding the bases of the company's social acceptance (Booth et al 2000).

Monitoring and Evaluation

Monitoring is the systematic collection of primary data to provide the corporate management and primary stakeholders with an indication of project progress. Evaluation is the methodical and objective assessment of an ongoing or completed corporate project, including its design, implementation and results.

Evaluation leads to more informed decisions, allowing those stakeholders/stockholders involved in the profit-making project to learn from experience and to be accountable to corporates and stakeholders alike on the basis of identified best practices. Both monitoring and evaluation should be used to demonstrate accountability and to understand the dynamics of the project.

Willingness to pay underscores the anticipated revenue earnings of the corporate management in terms of user charges and fees so far as operation and maintenance of civic/ infrastructural assets are concerned. Better supervision of existing infrastructure indicates optimum utilization of manpower presently available i.e., streamlining human resources and avoiding incurrence of non-merit expenditures (free rider subsidies) in this process. Such benchmarks examine the value for money concern of good corporate governance as a central issue of sustainable development strategies drawn by stakeholders' consultation/participation and mobilization/information. Benefit mapping of CSR projects in terms of new infrastructure created is also an exercise related to physical progress measurement of engineering interventions and designs at the ultimate level of implementation.

Monitoring and evaluation indicators may be both quantitative and qualitative in order to include process indicators, progress indicators and qualitative indicators. These indicators provide data inputs to monitor the project, evaluate progress of engineering works and guide the corporate managers to ensure and safeguard efficient use of valuable and limited resources.

Monitoring and evaluation indicators may also determine the magnitude of project impacts on the quality of life of beneficiaries before and after implementation of civil works. Such indicators can also examine the increased level of civil society participation and awareness generation in terms of CSR-related project interventions.

Why CSR?

The basic discourse of CSR makes an attempt to conjoin the market with civil society by making business more responsible and the community more responsive towards the realities of profit-making ventures that have to compete with one another in the critical area of social dynamics as well. It is the question of allowing the disadvantaged and underprivileged adversely affected communities `speak out', so to say, in the great carnival of Multinational Corporations and their profiteering discourses (Spivak 1988).

The concerns before CSR are in terms of challenges posed by poverty, malnutrition, unemployment, illiteracy, corruption, lack of accountability/transparency, imperfect implementation of projects and skewed delivery of benefits, socioeconomic-cultural infrastructure and preconceived notions/mindsets (Edmunds 2003). The challenge is to decide upon a harmonious and presentable order of socially committed business.

Management strategies are put to test while transforming these threats into opportunities and weaknesses into strengths. It is also a question of putting the right foot forward by identifying the areas that require the first attention of the company in order to carry the community together along the direction of participatory decision-making and profit-making efforts.

The company has to be seen to deliver social goods and services. This visibility factor assumes supreme importance in the face of dogged resistance posed by activist and pressure groups that militate on grounds of sustainable environmentalism and inclusive growth. It is true that natural resources would be depleted and environmental pollution would take place whenever industrial production on a large scale commences in any given area. But the basic idea is to initiate a process of consultation with the communities concerned from the angle of benefit mapping exercises (Gray et al 2006). The idea is to convert pedagogics to deschooled and decentralized decision-making.

Benchmarking CSR

CSR can be ideally benchmarked by putting into place several benefit monitoring and evaluation strategies at different life cycles of the company's social interventionist exercises. The different stages and angles of CSR benchmarking can be understood by the model given in Exhibit I.

Ideational CSR

The idea of CSR can be explored in its tradition of responsibility and ethos of social commitment. It is as if CSR tries to achieve an egalitarian social order as best as it can and thus comes into conflict with the basic goals of corporate entities. But the idea can also be found in the larger issue of moral ecosophy where deep ecology and philosophy come together to question the political and even human rightness of the morality of large-scale production systems.

So even CSR as a concept can be categorized as Marxist, Green, Feminist, Pink, Black etc., depending on the people practising it and the people for whom it is being practised. Marxist/ecosocialist CSR would stress more upon an equitable Mode of Production that would entail a just (re)distribution of the surplus value being created by labor that is irretrievably alienated from the process, creative joy, forces, techniques and tools of production.

Green CSR would necessarily highlight the need for eco-friendly business practices that also take into account the overall depletion of the physical environment and try to make amends for the same by way of community forestry, joint forest management, eco-clubs, nature trails and similar ventures at the collective level by co-opting both the natural and the built environments as stakeholders of corporate growth and organizational development in any given context of production. Ecologically sensitized CSR practices would have to necessarily focus on the cutting edge of research in sustainable environmentalism in order to transmit the correct messages to the correct markets.

Feminist CSR essentially views the primary stakeholders as the `alienated other' that has been penetrated by the corporate stockholders/shareholders and fights for an engulfment of the same by establishing a regime of equal rights and responsibilities. The worldview in this case is based on the notion of exploitation and a tradition of lopsided power-sharing dynamics (Gilbert 1986).

Pink CSR assumes a somewhat diluted socialist approach while Black CSR again takes up cudgels on the grounds of ethnicity and claims that corporates owe much more responsibility towards racial minorities who have been exploited disproportionately since time immemorial when colonial capitalism and slave trade had their heydays.

Pragmatic CSR

But CSR is really much more practical than it appears. It has to factor in strategies and negotiations of rapport-building with the community, civil society, multi-layered governments, activists and media. At all levels the message has to go through rather clearly and distinctively that the company has spent a lot of resources in designing and implementing its CSR mechanisms.

CSR has to be not only dialogic but also pedagogic in that others should perceive the company as having invested considerable intellectual and technical inputs into the operationali-zation of its community facilitation and liaison enterprises. The "good work" done has to be suitably packaged and presented before everybody and posted on the company's interactive website so that the right signals are transmitted to the right people at the right moment.

CSR requires hard-headed policy decisions that are ruled by reason and not passion. Compassion may influence the entire process but only in a strict rational sense. For social work also requires professionalism and experts to deliver the goods and services to the people if the company is at all interested in doing so and expresses sufficient goodwill in this direction.

It is basically an egalitarian social exercise by delegating specialized assignments to the technical experts who can take care of contingent situations and deliver the professional services that help to identify the Unique Selling Points of CSR (Harmon 2004). For CSR (following David Easton) has now become essentially an authoritative allocation of social values in order to reorient the balances of power and benefits in any given society/community. The myopic vision of business applications has to now outgrow itself and assume a new language in the context of different signifiers and radical signifieds that lend themselves to technically new interpretations.

CSR and Images

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Sir Dorabji Tata Trust, Ratan Tata Trust, Azim Premji Foundation, Rockfeller Foundation etc., are a few examples of CSR praxes in India and abroad. As Nagavara Ramarao Narayana Murthy of Infosys Technologies had once expressed the opinion that beyond a point wealth has to be used meaningfully for social purposes, CSR primarily seeks to reinvest business profits into the mainstream of institutions and individuals called society to promote images and entrench images of responsible and committed business (Hill 2005 and Hill et al 2007).

But even image building exercises comply with the regime of priorities and preferences and notions of power superiorities. How to spend CSR funds thus becomes a question of political equations and multifaceted games played out in the uneven arena of globalized markets in the name of fostering multi-stakeholder dialogues (Hsieh 2004). The image building enterprises of CSR projects can be better understood in terms of the model formulated in the exhibit II.

Corporate Ethics

The issue of corporate values conjoined to the various narratives of corporate citizenship is more often than not predicated by the choices and priorities of infrastructure augmentation and enhancement of physical assets for public/welfarist purposes. The priorities of ethical choices applied to the sanctity of sustainable human development and inclusive growth emerges as a critical policy imperative in the larger discursive context of moral emancipation. This leads us to the larger and more problematic question of human rights when considered from the angle of societal civil liberties supported by CSR initiatives. How ethical can community development ultimately become when analyzed in the light of assumptions informed by corporate hegemony and the power/knowledge discourse that is inspired by the productive forces of the capitalist mode of production?

So sustainable development championed by CSR efforts often appears to be a panopticon construct (following Michel Foucault) that is cohered by a gaze that is transnational and transcommunal in its very scope, rationale and purpose.

Human development underpinned by corporate citizenship can never emerge as a value-free project that is not conditioned by the microeco-nomics of capitalist power or even the archaeology of meta-knowledge. The semantic analysis of corporate learning is an ontologic exercise that cannot be unduly coerced by the versatility of multicultural complexities or pluralist developmentalist politics.

We have to appreciate the fact that the overall dynamic of ethical business applications cannot really be undermined irrespective of whatever value connotations development may subsume at different stages of infrastructure augmentation projects that happen to impact different categories of stakeholders in variant magnitudes and qualities.

Ethical Business Applications

Redefining stakeholder entitlements is a process that intrinsically challenges predominant corporate assumptions in the context of growing pressure of population and fragmentation of urban resources. New material conditions of life are reoriented and differently molded in this process. Lesser payoffs in terms of minimum tangible benefits to primary stakeholders may take place as a direct spin-off of the multiplying poverty reduction programs. This is somewhat similar to the diminishing marginal utility of consumption and over-utilization of resources that finally lead to consumer satiety.

Poverty alleviation initiatives and income generation measures may lead to gender empowerment for a certain section of the community. This may or may not lead to the formation or facilitation or even enhancement of the available stock of social capital so far as the target groups among the community are concerned. New culture root paradigms may get entrenched in this critical process as functions of new societal arrangements and perceived specifics of realigned identities and different matrices of power. Such may be the case when new local markets are sought to be explored in the face of established global markets.

Such a state of affairs would require new institutional networks that may work in a milieu of change management predicated by sustainable development alternatives. This necessitates a new regime of discourse of dynamic CSR where the terms beget different signifiers and alternating signifieds. Voices and choices of the people would become confused otherwise in a cacophony generated by the multitude or the Tower of Babel of corporate policy alternatives. Such an overwhelming otherness would subsequently provoke dystopic and dysfunctional social pathologies that would be without any incipient tenets of hospitality whatsoever (following Jacques Derrida).

Systemic compulsions of the new international economic order ushered in by the World Trade Organization and the General Agreement on Trade and Tariff may be viewed as in-built disruptions that only add background noise to disturb channels of communication between the social market and the political consumer who is prepared to utilize significant and limited resources in order to access utilities. Depleted capacities of primary stakeholders occur as a result of the systemic imperatives of globalization and CSR.

Responsible Business

Populism is another disabling factor that plagues the ideology of CSR. We come across business policy decisions that are not commercially tenable in the market but are implemented nevertheless due to the compulsions of so-called pro-people and pro-poor politics that is not akin to dynamic CSR strategies. Local actors may be able to reorient a new brand of corporate politics in their favor by manipulating primary resources available at the grassroots. But we have to deal with local as well as macro-level corporate politics simultaneously in order to coordinate between the compulsions of subalternist and elitist power approaches.

The CSR approach to social realities may ultimately serve to restore the community at the center of its developmental focus but at a significant cost. This cost is the one incurred during informed exercises pertaining to social choice. So it appears that the incidence of poverty and the eradication of poverty are often to be studied in a context of change management.

Contemporary social realities would suggest that poverty becomes institutionalized as a phenomenon in the interest of powerful corporate actors who are able to obtain the maximum mileage out of the sense of relative deprivation that afflicts civil society. Poverty is also a function of social asymmetry.

This is due to the fact that social clusters are located along the economic hierarchy in different degrees of embeddedness. Public action and civic engagement in an enabling corporate environment may or may not entrench channels of cooperation among primary stakeholders. Such vertical divisions among society are caused by differing axes of participation and priorities conditioned by dynamic variables such as knowledge, attitude and perceptions.

We may increasingly appreciate that globalization is not only about processes but also about mechanisms that impact our daily lives and the manner in which we would prefer our lives to be impacted upon. This contention may appear to be somewhat irreverent and irrelevant but is merited with a certain quality of objectivity as well. So the nuances and criticalities of existence become all the more difficult to negotiate while rooted in one single destiny conditioned by one given and preordained order of corporate values. We require more values and non-values in order to co-habit with more meanings and more non-meanings. So it is merely all about conjoining abstract signifiers with concrete signifieds as the fashionable glocal way of life.

The contemporary processes of globalization do not only happen to constitute polemic engagements with laissez-faire utopianism because of the political specifics available in the First as well as in the Third Worlds but that most of the benefits of globalization also accrue to the First World because of its dominant policy to resist laissez-faire market arrangements in the movement of goods and services and labor forces around the world – especially into its domain – and its sustained opposition to the norms laid down by the Washington Consensus. Rich countries religiously maintain their immigration barriers and discourage agricultural imports while most poor countries have not been quite successful to attract much Foreign Direct Investment due to misgovernance on the part of their national governments. Rich countries, however, may as well concede that CSR politics is a fundamental informant/evidence of economic inequality since they are not likely to lower their agricultural and immigration barriers in the near future in order to facilitate protectionism at home. Rich countries may also review the performance of the Washington Consensus, which assumes that free markets necessarily promote economic convergence and underscores important issues such as the rule of law, property rights and transparent banking systems to sustain dialogues between the North and South.

The dynamics of CSR are more often than not perverted by the First World's studied reluctance to apply identical standards of laissez-faire to its borders and imports that it tries – with varying degrees of success – to impose on the Third World's legal structures and political arrangements. New global bodies such as the World Social Forum have also emerged in the recent years to meaningfully negotiate with the World Economic Forum and its politics of hegemony that extends to identities, cultures, languages, material conditions of life, ethnicity, social baggages, epistemology (knowledge) and ontology (existence).

Corporate is Social

May we now shift our polemic stance somewhat to reflect that CSR-induced development may not always lead to freedom? Basic human rights (if guaranteed by CSR strategies) may lead to capacities on the part of citizens/netizens. But what about capacities that do not sell at the globalized marketplace? If globalization, on the one hand, facilitates decentralization then, on the other, it also helps develop pockets of dynamic Free Trade Areas in large developing countries like China and India by reorganizing their economic geography, Foreign Direct Investments and global commodity supply chains.

This process, however, creates large hinterlands of economic backwardness and entrenches economic inequality within the developing South. CSR-induced development, therefore, intensifies regional disparities within the Third World. The so-called Internet Revolution is indicative of the hegemonistic battles waged on a daily basis around the world with reference to critical discourses of production, consumption, distribution and exchange. The World Wide Web was originally designed as a virtual space to permit efficacious and intuitive transfer of data across an array of proprietary networks but it is now generally deployed to intensify uneven power relationships.

Multi-Sectoral Dialogues

CSR dialogues are expected to facilitate cross-sectoral stakeholder commitment and involvement in infrastructure development projects. Such dynamic interactions may also contribute effectively to streamline timely implementation of the physical works of development projects. Stakeholders' involvement in terms of public information and consultation exercises may extend to the generation of awareness about the proposed physical works under different CSR-driven projects, active participation at the design stage and propagation of knowledge with regard to the timely implementation and cost-effective management of project activities.

Social Capital

The popular understanding of Social Capital as an embedded civil societal resource supported by networks of trust and cooperation should be analytically conceptualized here in order to locate the altogether intriguing notion of corporate ethics in its proper intellectual discourse. Social Capital is more often than not underpinned by manufactured (or else fractured) consent that in itself is conditioned by parallel movements of power and culture identities.

What is trust and how can the intangible value of trust be defined by cooperation and multiple axes of social synergy that is cohered by an equally unquantifiable category called enlightened corporate self-interest that is variously known as faith?

The comparative value of trust when measured against infidelity may be quantified in order to understand why people sustain a working stock of Social Capital at the marketplace of CSR, in politics, public offices and the government or elsewhere where interactions and institutions come together to define various interfaces of the public domain.

To disown my neighbor in his/ her hour of need or crisis may not be quite a wise policy when located in a broader temporal perspective. But the problem with rational consumers interacting at the level of the marketplace of CSR politics is that they are not always endowed with the gift of foresight that in itself is an asset conditioned occasionally by experience i.e., acquired social knowledge.

Why is the notion of Social Capital relevant at all in our community life informed by CSR initiatives? Is this because it is a useful and practical idea that is mutually beneficial in utilitarian terms? You would benefit if I am truthful while I would gain if you are honest. We can translate and extend this notion into areas of Corporate Good Governance such as accountability and transparency. The social structure as a whole has a developmental stake rooted in the intangible yet immensely valuable resource of Social Capital. This argument is substantiated in the case of corporate ethics.

Conclusion

CSR-induced development, it may be appreciated at this point, is not anything extrinsic like politics imposed from the above without any regard whatsoever to the end-users of limited socioeconomic and political resources. Actors who are supposed to interface with their very own institutions are nearly always better comfortable if left alone with the material conditions of daily life that breed organic ethos of community existence. This is where the colonial masters went wrong in Asia, Africa and South America when they bled the colonies white and left behind a legacy of comprador bourgeois and crony capitalism that, in turn, fostered a repressive state apparatus and a perverted anti-people bureaucratic managerial state system that was not only anti-people but was also occasionally anti-progress. So CSR politics is largely similar to the distressed Sphinx that appears enigmatic without any mystery and that is also rhetorical without any enabling strategic figures of political speech.