Should We Boycott the FIFA World Cup in Qatar?

By Andreas Rasche

On 20 November, the FIFA World Cup in Qatar is opening its doors. Billions of football fans around the world will tune in and watch this mega sport event. As we are getting closer to the opening match, I am often being asked whether I believe it is responsible to watch the World Cup or whether it is better to boycott the tournament. Here is my personal assessment.  

Human Rights Problems – More Than Labor Rights Violations

While the labor conditions of migrant workers in Qatar have attracted most media attention, the human rights problems go much further. Journalists are thrown into jail while covering stories around working conditions, the LGBTQ+ community is subject to ill-treatment, and women’s rights are still significantly curtailed.

Those arguing that the country made progress in terms of human and labor rights have a point. The kafala system – a system leading to the exploitation of migrant workers that can potentially give rise to forced labor – has undergone some reform in 2020, however, this is ten years after the country was awarded the World Cup and it only happened after significant pressure. It is also true (and noticeable) that Qatar is the first country in the Arab Gulf region to have made such changes.

But should we celebrate this as an achievement of the World Cup taking place in the country? Following this logic, we should award countries that limit human rights mega sport events in the future hoping that these countries may agree to reforms that are long overdue. Also, who tells us that Qatar will keep making progress in terms of human rights after the World Cup has ended and media attention has vanished?  

Just a few days ago, one of the official World Cup ambassadors, Khalid Salman, talked about gay people in an interview with German television. He mentioned that “We will accept that they come here. But they will have to accept our rules.” He then moved on claiming that gay people are “damaged in their mind.” At this stage, a spokesperson of the World Cup organizing committee (who was shadowing the reporter while being in Qatar) stopped the interview.  

Some supporters of the Qatar World Cup argue that we did not “make such a fuzz” when the tournament took place in Russia in 2018, just four years after the illegal annexing of Crimea. In 2018, Russia faced significant human rights challenges, some of them very similar to the ones of Qatar (e.g., lack of freedom of speech and ill-treatment of LGBTQ+ community). While it is difficult to directly compare both cases (e.g., labor conditions were not that debated back then), it would be misleading to justify one problematic mega sport event through lack of attention to another one.

A Corrupt Bid

One of the strongest controversies around the World Cup has been around whether the bidding process was influenced by corrupt behavior, a claim that Qatar has long denied. However, a longstanding investigation of the U.S. Department of Justice claimed that representatives working for Qatar and Russia bribed FIFA officials ahead of the 2010 bid.

In 2020, the New York Times reported that three South American officials received payments to vote in favor of Qatar and Russia according to the indictment. In the end, Qatar defeated the U.S. in the bidding process. At the time of the vote, the FIFA committee was already diminished by two members who were secretly filmed while agreeing to sell their votes.

Of course, Qatar is not the only country to have won a World Cup through a corrupt bidding process. Investigations revealed that Russia’s bid for the 2018 World Cup was also linked to bribes, and the German World Cup in 2006 was also allegedly linked to dubious payments. Yet, we cannot legitimize or downplay corruption in the case of Qatar by reference to prior corrupt practices during World Cup bids. Grand corruption was and is a deeply problematic practice, regardless of where and when it occurs. No-one is suggesting to bar countries that are known for higher levels of corruption from future World Cup bids. What is needed are stricter compliance rules and better oversight.

The Net-Zero Winter World Cup?

The decision to move the World Cup to November/December was made so that players do not have to play in the middle of the unbearable summer heat. FIFA estimates say that the World Cup will produce 3.6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide during the tournament, which is about the carbon footprint of a smaller country. By comparison, the World Cup in Russia produced 2.1 million tonnes. It is uncertain whether we can actually trust these figures. A report by Carbon Market Watch suggested that the emission figures associated with the construction of the new stadiums are vastly underestimated due to the methodology used by Qatar.

Where do the emissions come from? Contrary to popular belief, stadium air conditioning does not contribute the lion’s share of the overall emissions. Emissions mostly come from the need to build totally new infrastructure (incl. housing and ground transport) and to get fans to Qatar (which is for many fans only possible via plane). Given that the U.S. (the main competitor in the bid) already had most of this infrastructure, makes the decision to place the World Cup in Qatar seem even more strange from an environmental perspective.

Qatar has promised the “first carbon-neutral World Cup in history”. However, so far only 1.8 million tonnes of carbon have been offset, and experts have argued that the quality of the carbon credits is low, for instance due to problems associated with additionality.

The problem with net-zero mega sport events is not only the credibility of the claim. It gives the false impression that we can build huge stadiums and fly in people from all over the world, and that all of this is somehow compatible with reaching Paris-aligned climate goals.

To summarize, we have placed the World Cup into a tiny desert state that significantly and systematically harms basic human rights, that has moved the World Cup final near Christmas to avoid the extreme summer heat, and that has allegedly won the bidding process through corrupt behavior.

Importantly, only pointing the finger at Qatar may be too easy, some of the problems reflected through the World Cup are part of much bigger problems surrounding football as such, most of all its extreme dependency on money.  

I am a football fan, and I will miss the matches, but I am also a fan of human rights, environmental protection, and anti-corruption. Football is for everyone and not just for those a repressive regime deems worthy. So, I rather stay away from the matches and instead spend time playing football with my son. In the end, the World Cup in Qatar will not have a true winner, because sustainability already lost…  


About the Author

Andreas Rasche is Professor of Business in Society and Associate Dean for the Full-Time MBA Program at Copenhagen Business School. More at: www.arasche.com

Environmentally sound and financially rewarding? Key findings from an exploratory study on the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi)

By Milena Bar, Ottilia Henningsson, & Dr. Kristjan Jespersen

◦ 5 min read 

The Science-Based Targets initiative aligns firms’ emission reduction targets with a net-zero emissions pathway. Firm commitment yields significant abnormal returns which are larger for firms committed to larger emission reductions and for high-emitting firms. 

The IPCC’s sixth assessment established a code red for humanity and provided mounting evidence of widespread, rapid, and intensifying climate change. The Paris Agreement, ratified by over 190 states and non-state actors in 2015, formally stipulated the goals of limiting global warming to ideally 1.5°C and at a minimum well below 2°C with the aim of reducing the most catastrophic damages related to climate change onto the natural environment, human health and global financial market. The need for climate action is urgent and requires engagement from governments, individuals as well as corporate and investor participation.

Combatting climate change requires voluntary private sector engagement

Incentivizing corporations and investors to act voluntarily on climate change is critical to redirect private capital towards environmentally responsible business practices. The Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) is becoming the global standard for firms seeking to set emission reduction targets aligned with the required global decarbonization targets established in the Paris Agreement. By encouraging voluntary corporate carbon emission reductions, the SBTi is a critical tool to reduce the private sector’s reliance on fossil fuels. 

2021 record year for new approved targets and committing firms for SBTi

Since its founding, just seven years ago, SBTi has experienced exponential growth in the number of committing firms and has mobilized firms representing more than a third of global market capitalization to reduce their carbon emissions. In 2021 the initiative took steps to increase the ambition level of firms’ emission reduction targets. When first established, firms could commit to reduce their emissions either aligned with the reduction targets of 1.5°C or 2°C. However, from summer 2022, the initiative will only be accepting the more ambitious emission reduction target, as set out in their campaign Business Ambition for 1.5°C.

Since company engagement ultimately comes down to whether committing to SBTi will drive wealth for shareholders, understanding the stock market response to firm commitment to the SBTi is essential not only for businesses looking to commit, but also for investors. To justify the integration of a climate credential such as the SBTi in investment management, it needs to be able to provide excess returns. To understand the stock market reaction to firms’ announcement of SBTi commitment, we conducted a short-horizon event study on a portfolio of 1.535 firms.

Firm commitment to the Science Based Targets initiative aligns environmentally sound practices with financial viability 

Firm commitment to the SBTi indeed yields a positive announcement abnormal return and thus speaks to the credibility of SBTi in constituting a credible signal of firm commitment to sustainable business practices. Even more encouraging is the finding that firms committed to the 1.5°C target experienced substantially higher returns, indicating a stronger positive market reaction when exhibiting a higher cost of commitment and higher target ambition level. The market evidently differentiates between ambition levels by rewarding businesses that are pledging themselves to more demanding emission reductions and a more climate-friendly business strategy. These findings are particularly relevant in light of the SBTi making the more stringent emission reduction target the new standard for all firms via their campaign Business Ambition for 1.5°C and may encourage more firms to increase their efforts in reducing their greenhouse gas emissions.

Stock price reaction in response to commitment to the Science Based Target initiative

In turn, high carbon emitting firms, proxied here by firms identified by the CA100+ list, reaped the largest reward in their stock price following commitment. This finding further confirms the market’s more sensitive reaction to costlier commitments, but also creates concern about whether the SBTi may have to rethink a recent strategic decision. The SBTi announced that they will not be accepting targets set by firms operating in the Oil and Gas industry, thus abandoning the industry specific methodology for fossil fuel firms which had been in development for several years. Fossil fuel firms have a key role to play in successfully achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement, thus begging the question of whether the SBTi is not missing out on covering an industry critical to combatting climate change and a sector of firms who are highly rewarded by the market for committing to reduce their emissions. 

As climate disasters become more prevalent and more severe, firms who fail to transition to a low, or zero, carbon business model can be expected to become more vulnerable in the long run. To expand the analysis, we further tested the performance of a portfolio strategy screened for firms committed to the SBTi. Despite the underperformance of an SBTi screened portfolio against a portfolio consisting of only non-committed firms in the medium-term, there is reason to believe that a portfolio with SBTi committed firms may provide higher returns in the future. Given that SBTi commitment represents a commitment to aligning the firm’s operations with the net-zero emissions pathway, it can be perceived as a safer bet in the long run. Moreover, portfolios consisting of SBTi firms were shown to be characterized by lower volatility. The objective of investors is shifting to increasingly sustainable and impact focused investment profiles, hence portfolio and asset managers may use SBTi commitment as a filter in security selection to achieve their client’s demand.

Looking Ahead

Financial institutions have a key role to play in driving systematic economic transformation towards a global net-zero carbon emissions economy in their power to lend and invest. As evidenced, firm commitment, ambition level and cost of commitment are reflected in the stock’s pricing mechanism, making the business case for the firm to set ambitious targets for decarbonization, and providing rationale for investors to in the short run utilize the market’s reaction to firm commitment in investment processes and strategies. 


About the Authors

Milena Bär is a recent graduate in MSc Applied Economics and Finance and is working as a student researcher in ESG and Sustainable Investments at Copenhagen Business School. Her research projects are mainly within the field of ESG metrics and regulation, with a focus on the investor’s side.

Ottilia Henningsson recently graduated with a MSc in Applied Economics and Finance from Copenhagen Business School with a keen interest in the transition towards a more sustainable financial industry. 

Kristjan Jespersen is an Associate Professor at the Copenhagen Business School. He studies on the growing development and management of Ecosystem Services in developing countries. Within the field, Kristjan focuses his attention on the institutional legitimacy of such initiatives and the overall compensation tools used to ensure compliance.


Photo by Matthias Heyde on Unsplash

Constructing Social Portfolios: A Quantitative versus Screening Approach

By Alina Hofer, Lea Katharina Kasper & Dr. Kristjan Jespersen 

◦ 5 min read 

When we talk about ESG, one could argue that there is a strong bias focused on climate investing, reaching net zero targets as well as good corporate governance and diversity themes. But there is much more to ESG. The “Social” dimension of ESG is hugely under explored and developed and covers under studied issues such as how companies treat their employees and care for the responsibility of their products. Still further, assessments linked to human rights codes and social impacts is only now receiving the attention it truly deserves. Although the importance of these topics is undisputed, we see that attention to particularly address the social dimension has been lacking, whereas awareness of other ESG risks has been rising immensely during the past years. 

Not only is the general knowledge and focus on the social dimension of ESG limited, its overall  implementation in portfolio management has not been sufficiently experimented with and addressed.

The delay to properly implement the “S” in ESG is often explained because of the challenges to quantify, assess, and integrate social factors generally.

However, this argument should not be a sufficient justification for neglecting the “S” in ESG and for investigating a possible relationship between a good social rating and superior financial performance. To tackle this lack of awareness, we constructed two portfolios which integrate Refinitiv’s Social ratings based on different integration strategies and test their performance towards the market between 2012-2021.

When integrating social – or other ESG – ratings into the investment process, we find there is often disagreement on how to best consider these factors in portfolio construction. Currently, it is most common to apply screening or best-in-class strategies. These approaches aim to remove assets that do not fulfill certain criteria from a defined investment universe. Negative screening would mean to remove those companies that perform worst from the pool of assets. Inversely, an investor could also only continue with those firms who at least have a certain minimum rating. For both approaches, the portfolio weights are then allocated to the assets that remain. This is done using conventional indicators such as value, size or expected risk-adjusted returns. In our study, we, however observe a clear shortcoming of this approach: After screening out the worst 10% “social performers” and allocating weights based on a risk-return trade-off, the portfolio does not necessarily promise a higher overall ESG score than a portfolio would reach which does not consider the ratings at all. Although the portfolio yields a solid financial performance, this raises the question whether any ESG-related impact has been made with this integration approach.

To make sure an investor can improve his exposure to assets that score well in the social dimension, we integrate the rating scores directly into the optimization problem of our second portfolio. This leads to a very different outcome on the social rating:

Looking closer at the mechanics of this approach, we extend the traditional Sharpe Ratio with the ESG factor, meaning to add by how much it a company “outscores” the market average. This results in the following “Social Sharpe Ratio”:

We add a fifty percent weight split, which can be flexibly adjusted towards investor preferences. And we now balance a risk-return-social trade-off. This explains why the second approach over 9 years constantly beats the market average in respect to the integrated Social factor without sacrificing any performance on the financial side. In fact, we find that in 5 out of 9 years, the second strategy would have also led to higher risk-adjusted returns measured by the Sharpe ratio. Moreover, returns were consistently higher compared to the market benchmark. This result is quite remarkable, given that it is often questioned whether investors need to sacrifice returns in order to make their investments more socially responsible. 

Lastly, our study resulted in one more unforeseen twist when it comes to integrating ESG ratings. That is, the question whether we can actually trust the rating scores. To answer this, we must first understand how scores are created. Rating providers look at an immense amount of publicly disclosed information, reports and policies. And based on what company’s report, rating scores are aggregated. However, it is clear that a firm would only report on things they do well. In fact, we observe that with increased reporting, ESG scores also improve. But what about the real-life actions and impacts? Some rating providers offer a combined score, which also considers media reports on the involvement in controversial actions. As these scores are only available at an aggregate level, we calculate them on a single-pillar level using Refinitiv’s methodology, which adjusts for firm size and industry. Looking at specific examples in our portfolios, we found that the impact of such controversy involvement on the overall score could still be larger. Nevertheless, we stress that in order to have a complete picture of a firm’s ESG behavior, the impact of these controversies needs to be reflected in investment decisions. 

To sum up, given the results of our research, there are three things we aim to highlight:

  • It is crucial to increase investors’ awareness of “Social” matters and provide a better landscape for impact investments in this specific dimension.
  • Integrating ESG ratings does not always promise a better ESG performance for the whole portfolio. Therefore, it is necessary to focus on strategies that lead to actual impact.
  • Third, looking beyond the information that is disclosed by companies themselves, more attention should also be addressed to “real life actions” when making investment decisions. 

About the Authors

Lea Kasper has recently graduated with a MSc. in Finance and Investments (cand.merc.) from Copenhagen Business School. Her interest and enthusiasms about sustainability and how to more efficiently integrate non-financial factors in investment decision-making contributed to her choice to further investigate this topic throughout the master thesis. 

Alina Hofer has recently graduated with a MSc. in Finance and Investments (cand.merc.) from Copenhagen Business School. Being passionate about creating impact through ESG-aligned investments, she was excited to further focus on her interest in this field throughout the master thesis.

Kristjan Jespersen is an Associate Professor at the Copenhagen Business School. He studies on the growing development and management of Ecosystem Services in developing countries. Within the field, Kristjan focuses his attention on the institutional legitimacy of such initiatives and the overall compensation tools used to ensure compliance.


Image source: SustainIt

Corporate social responsibility and societal governance

By Jeremy Moon

 3 min read ◦

Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine reminds us that corporate social responsibility (CSR) is both a reflection of the times we live in and also dynamic! Numerous corporations, acting in response to social and political pressure, are withdrawing from Russia on the grounds that human rights, and a nation’s rights, are being trampled on. This is not to say that these decisions necessarily come easily: there may be ethical, strategic, stakeholder and political tensions. But the point is that perhaps the most basic societal issue of war and peace – and its governance – enters CSR agendas. Ethical investors are even considering the defense industries as suitable for their assets.

In recent decades several challenges have emerged which appear to move CSR from a relative comfort zone of discretionary activities to more core societal governance challenges, some of these manifestly involve some corporate culpability (e.g. the 2008 financial crisis, international supply chain labor abuses, climate change, ecological degradation), others like international pandemics, war and international health and welfare challenges reflected in the UN Sustainable Development Goals, may reflect wider causes. Nonetheless, corporations claim some responsibility for these issues. Even corporate ‘talk’, as well as ‘walk’, contribute to the redefinition of CSR to take in core societal governance challenges.

This is understood as right and proper from some perspectives. Medieval corporations were established precisely to achieve public ends – often of basic infrastructure. Industrial corporations were pioneers of C19th health, welfare and education systems.  In many developing countries corporations take responsibility for physical security of their employees and communities. 

But in the late C20th a view took hold that this was somehow inappropriate.  Milton Friedman’s famous 1970 critique of CSR was precisely on the grounds that corporations are not accountable for addressing such issues: governments are. Many CSR advocates, whether fearing a corporate takeover of government or vice versa, and have advocated a dichotomy between the responsibilities (social and economic) of corporations and those of governments.

Yet the last twenty years have witnessed two related phenomena which challenge the dichotomous view. First, corporations have chosen to engage in social and environmental agendas which are core for national and international governments (e.g. human rights, corruption, access to resources), whether in response to pressure or by virtue of their own ethical or strategic judgement. Secondly, governments have encouraged corporations to enjoin public efforts, through their policies of endorsement and cajoling, financial incentives, partnerships and even mandates (e.g. for energy markets, non-financial reporting, supply chain due diligence).  

Governments have recognized the distinctive resources that corporations can bring to governance questions (e.g. to innovate, to experiment, to reach beyond national boundaries, to collaborate). Interestingly in cases of mandate, governments often cede to corporations discretion as to how, rather than whether, to comply. Thus, for example, corporations can choose whether to cynically comply with international weapons sanctions on a country to sell arms by the legal use of third parties to effectively maintain the sales OR to embrace the spirit and intention of the sanctions and uniformly cease the sales to the regime in question.

But Friedman’s critique nags and critics of corporations point to unaccountable corporate power through lobbying and informal influence.  Corporations lack a traditional democratic mandate. We elect MPs and governments, but not CEOs. So is engagement with public policy (rather than legal compliance) really the business of corporations?  

My short answer is ‘yes’ on the grounds that businesses are members of society and that corporations are afforded particular privileges by the state, and thus have clear public duties. But the situation is not satisfactory.  In most democratic jurisdictions corporations’ roles ‘to make’ and ‘to take’ regulation are not clearly specified and thus their accountability is unclear.  Moreover, new international multi-stakeholder initiatives which tie corporations in with each other and with civil society often fail to effectively regulate errant organizations.  

So we have a challenge which is about CSR and politics: how to better build corporations into political institutions? I suggest that the challenge is shared – for corporations to review their political participation to ensure that it is citizenly; for civil society to engage in defining how corporations can be more accountable and to engage more directly in corporate accountability (perhaps with support from government?); and for governments to review how accountably corporations influence and respond to regulation.  


About the Author

Jeremy Moon is Professor at Copenhagen Business School, and Chair of Sustainability Governance Group. Jeremy has written widely about the rise, context, dynamics and impact of CSR.  He is particularly interested in corporations’ political roles and in the regulation of CSR and corporate sustainability.

Photo credit: TarikVision on iStock

Do nudges work in organisations?

By Leonie Decrinis

 3 min read ◦

Introduced by Thaler and Sunstein in 2008, nudges have become popular policy tools to change the behaviour of consumers and citizens in desirable ways without compromising their freedom of choice. Their success in public policy domains has sparked the interest of management teams to apply nudges in organisations as means to guide the decisions of employees. However, in comparison to the ever-growing literature on the use of nudges in the public sphere, relatively little is known about their applicability at the workplace. 

More and more organisations are pursuing corporate social responsibility and sustainability strategies, for which changes in workplace behaviour are key. Nudges can help organisations promote the needed behavioural change in relevant domains, such as employee health, energy conservation, green transportation, waste management, ethics and diversity, to name just a few. A number of studies report, for example, success in promoting healthier food choices of employees through alterations in the choice architecture of workplace canteens. Other nudging interventions have led to reductions in electricity use by providing feedback to employees on the desirable behaviour of peers. Regarding workplace diversity, evaluating job candidates jointly rather than separately has proved to promote gender-mixed teams. Further, in the ethical domain, honest employee behaviour appeared to rise by reminding people about their shared moral values at critical decision points. 

The mentioned examples provide an idea of the potential of nudges as cost- and time-efficient alternatives to traditional organisational intervention tools that mostly involve trainings and sanctions with limited success. A key advantage of nudges is their behaviourally informed approach, acknowledging the role of unconscious decision processes that often contradict people’s good intentions.

By altering the choice environment rather than trying to rewire the human brain, nudges can steer employees to desirable behaviours while preserving their freedom of choice.

Just recently, the United Nations Behavioural Science Week has convened experts from international agencies, governments, academia and the private sector to discuss about these possibilities. However, what has also been recognised, as much as workplace nudging involves opportunities, it comes with challenges that need to be addressed. 

The first question that one might ask is how nudging individuals inside organisations for specific concerns leads to impactful organisational change in line with strategic corporate goals. Theory tells us that this is possible indeed by nudging a significant amount of employees. Organisations are made up of people. When enough people are nudged to alter their behaviour in a specific way, the new behaviour has the potential to become a norm, i.e. a rule for expected and accepted behaviour. Once embedded in the culture of an organisation, people are likely to conform to the new norm, so that organisational behaviour changes as a whole. 

This idea comes with a caveat though. Organisations are complex social constructs with formal and informal components of organisational culture conveying a variety of messages to employees. A gentle nudge might thereby not be strong enough to induce the desired behavioural change. Signals elsewhere in the organisation could simply counterbalance the effect of a choice-preserving nudge. Typically, nudges are designed and tested for very specific instances of human behaviour. What works in one context might not work in another one, sometimes even resulting in unintended consequences. Clarifying the effectiveness of nudges is difficult in complex organisational settings, particularly regarding their impact in the longer term. This requires consequent piloting and testing over considerable periods of time, allowing for a flexible and adaptive approach to a particular setting.

Contrary to the idea of nudges being top-down policy tools, successful intervention implementation in complex organisational choice environments requires the active contribution of employees. The latter should be consulted about their needs, involved in the design of nudges and informed about the intervention implementation. A high degree of transparency is also necessary to ensure the acceptance of nudges by employees.

Another aspect to keep in mind is that widespread organisational change, such as switching from a solely profit-oriented corporate performance to a more encompassing economic, social and environmental one, cannot be addressed by nudges alone.

Complex organisational problems need to be broken down into micro pieces, suited to be managed by a variety of measures and instruments. Not all of the resulting aspects will have human behaviour at their core. Some might be fundamentally technological in nature, requiring innovative technical solutions. For those problems that remain to be behavioural, the ones that involve serious risks will always call for stringent enforcement tools. Others, however, might be better addressed through a voluntary, trust-based approach. This is where choice-preserving nudges come into play. Clearly, a single nudging intervention can only address a very specific concern. The wider organisational success depends on the aggregate of multiple nudges as well as their interplay with other policies. Measures ultimately need to send consistent messages about desirable behaviours, aligned with an organisation’s broader strategic goals. By influencing organisational culture in an encompassing way, widespread organisational change will gradually take place. 


Further readings

Beshears, J., & Gino, F. (2015). Leaders as decision architects: Structure your organization’s work to encourage wise choicesHarvard Business Review.

Foster, L. (2017). Applying behavioural insights to organisations: Theoretical underpinnings (EC OECD seminar series on designing better economic development policies for regions and cities). Paris: OECD and European Commission. 

Ilieva, V., & Drakulevski, L. (2018). Applying behavioral economics insights at the workplace. Journal of Human Resource Management

Venema, T., & van Gestel, L. (2021). Nudging in the Workplace. In R. Appel-Meulenbroek, & V. Danivska (Eds). A Handbook of Theories on Designing Alignment between People and the Office Environment.


About the Author

Leonie Decrinis is PhD fellow at Copenhagen Business School with research interests in corporate social responsibility, sustainability governance and behavioral sciences. Her PhD project focuses on applying behavioral insights to corporate sustainability in order to align governance objectives with organizational behavior.


Photo credit: Rudzhan Nagiev on iStock

ESG investing in a changing regulatory environment: investing in active or passive ESG financial products?

By Marco Morazzoni and Dr. Kristjan Jespersen

◦ 8 min read 

The impending climate crisis emphasizes the need to mobilize large-scale investments to finance the transition towards a more sustainable and inclusive economy. The financial sector plays a pivotal role in this context, as it allocates capital from investors who wish to pursue financial and non-financial objectives to corporations and stakeholders who need these resources to empower the sustainability transition.

Over the past decades, individual investors have become aware of the risks inherent in unsustainable business practices, being increasingly interested in financial products that combine a competitive risk-adjusted return with Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) criteria. Despite the increase in funds, indices and benchmarks that include ESG dimensions, the universe of ESG financial products remains difficult to navigate for individual investors due to the range of investment strategies that can be used to pursue ESG goals, such as negative and positive screening, best-in-class, ESG integration, impact investing and ESG engagement. In addition to ESG strategic considerations, investors ought to consider the level of active management inherent in their ESG products, since it has considerable implications for financial returns and the ESG objectives pursued.

In fact, while some financial products have an active investment approach, trying to beat a reference benchmark, others merely aim to replicate the ESG impact and financial performance of an index.

‘Active versus passive’ debate

The literature on conventional active and passive investing is almost unanimously in favour of long-term passive investing, due to active managers’ inability to consistently beat the market and to the lower fees charged by passive funds. However, the ‘active versus passive’ debate in the context of ESG investing is more nuanced.  This is because ESG investing entails the pursuit of intangible and hardly quantifiable goals that go beyond the achievement of mere financial returns. Furthermore, due to the different definitions and methodologies used in the assessment of ESG performance and the resulting unrealiablity of ESG data, the trade-off between impact and financial returns can be difficult to reconcile. 

A study conducted on 78 ESG active mutual funds and 15 ESG exchange-traded funds (ETFs) seeks to contribute to the debate by illuminating the financial and non-financial features that characterize these sustainable financial products. The funds were selected from Morningstar Direct according to specific criteria, such as: availability of an ESG rating, European domicile, invested in equity, active investment approach (for mutual funds) and passive investment approach (for ETFs).

By constructing an equally-weighted portfolio for the selected ESG active mutual funds and ESG ETFs, the study used the CAPM, three-factor, four-factor and five-factor model to compare the portfolios’ risk-adjusted perfromance before and after fees. To increase the robustness of the study, the regression analysis was conducted on various market benchmarks, such as MSCI World, STOXX Europe 600, MSCI World ESG Leaders and MSCI Europe ESG Leaders.  

The regression results indicated that the ESG active portfolio outperformed the ESG passive portfolio both before and after accounting for management fees. Controlling for the criteria used in the selection of the funds, the active outperformance could be attributed to the funds’ instrinsic characteristics, such as investment orientation, ESG investment approach and ESG scores. Accordingly, 77% of the ESG active portoflio had a global investment orientation compared to 27% of the ESG ETF portfolio. This entails that the active portolio covered more geographies, exhibiting higher diversification and improved risk-mitigation.

Further, 83% of the active portfolio practiced ESG engagment, a strategy that previous literature associates to superior financial returns and improved ESG impact.

By engaging with companies on ESG issues, ESG active funds may have been able to help ‘lagging’ firms improve their ESG performance, while enabling ‘leading’ firms to address their ESG issues. With respect to ESG scores (Morningstar and MSCI), the active portfolio displayed a lower overall ESG score compared to the ESG ETF portfolio. This finding could suggest that the active portfolio invested in lower rated companies on average, with the objective of helping them transform their ESG strategy and thus pursue higher risk-adjusted returns.

Insights to individual investors in ESG financial products

Recognizing the limitation derived from the small sample size and the fact that the active outperformance might be due to the specific funds selected, the findings were used to provide a set of insights to individual investors who wish to invest in ESG financial products.

Firstly, individual investors were categorised into ESG-unaware, ESG-aware and ESG-motivated, according to the investor labels used by Pedersen et al. (2021) “Responsible investing: The ESG-efficient frontier”. This categorization simplified reality to the extent that it became easier to derive actionable insights. Furthermore, it provided more granularity with respect to investors’ prerogatives regarding the trade-off between the pursuit of an ESG impact versus a risk-adjusted return.

Based on this categorization, investors who disregard ESG information (ESG-unaware) should invest passively in broad conventional ETFs or in a diversified portfolio of more specific conventional ETFs.

Investors who consider ESG information for risk-mitigation purposes (ESG-aware) ought to focus on the level of selectivity displayed by active managers in their stock-picking activity, measured in terms of high/low R-squared. If active managers are highly selective (low R-squared), ESG-aware investors may consider foregoing part of their return, due to the higher active management fees, and thus benefit from managers’ ability to pursue a greater ESG impact and potentially higher risk-adjusted returns.

Conversely, if active managers exhibit low selectivity with respect to a reference benchmark (high R-squared), investors would be better off investing passively in broad ESG ETFs or in a diversified portfolio of more specific ESG ETFs. Lastly, ESG-motivated investors may be better off investing in ESG active funds who practice ESG engagement, as the higher fees charged by these funds would worthwhile, given the superior ESG impact inherent in ESG engagment strategies.

Regulatory considerations

In addition to the empirical findings, the study also included regulatory considerations in the assessment of the suitability of active versus passive ESG financial products for individual investors. This was critical, since the new MiFID for sustainability preferences will come into force on the 2nd of August 2022.

According to this regulation (2021/1253), investment firms will be obliged to ask their clients about their sustainability preferences and find out whether they are interested in sustainable financial products. If the answer is affirmative, financial advisors will only be allowed to offer MiFID-aligned products to their clients. A MiFID-aligned product will have to include a minimum portion of ‘environmentally sustainable Investments’ (SFDR article 9), EU Taxonomy-aligned investments, or enhanced article 8 investments, consisting of article 8 investments (SFDR article 8) which also include Principal Adverse Impact (PAI) indicators.

Linking the new regulatory requirements to the findings of this empirical research, it is reasonable to expect that ESG-unaware investors will no longer exist, as investment firms will be legally required to inform these clients about the ESG implications inherent in their investments. This will give rise to an increase in supply of sustainable financial products (MiFID-aligned), as investment firms strive to keep up with the increased demand for these products. The rise in supply will most likely be larger than the increase in demand, since a portion of the new ESG-aware investors might continue disregarding ESG information, if ESG financial products are priced unreasonably (excessively high management fees). This will ultimately lead to higher competition among investment firms, with a consequent downward pressure on fees in the long-run. Lower investment costs could subvert individual investors’ incentives, as they decide on whether to invest in ESG active or passive funds. Accordingly, it might become desirable for ESG-aware investors to invest in ESG active funds who practice ESG engagement, as opposed to it being a strategy exclusively suitable for ESG-motivated investors.


The information contained in this blog post is not to be taken as constituting the giving of investment advice or recommendation. The reader is acting for its own account, and they will make their own independent decisions as to whether any investment is appropriate based upon their own judgment.


About the Author

Marco Morazzoni is a recent graduate in MSc Applied Economics and Finance from Copenhagen Business School. Having an interest in finance and ESG, he wrote his master’s thesis on “ESG exchange-traded funds versus ESG active funds: how can individual investors pursue ESG objectives while achieving competitive risk-adjusted returns?”

Kristjan Jespersen is an Associate Professor at the Copenhagen Business School. He studies on the growing development and management of Ecosystem Services in developing countries. Within the field, Kristjan focuses his attention on the institutional legitimacy of such initiatives and the overall compensation tools used to ensure compliance.


Photo: Khanchit Khirisutchalual on iStock

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in Asia: Then and now

By Wendy Chapple & Jeremy Moon

◦ 3 min read 

This blog post is a repost and has first been published by Business and Society (BAS) blog on 27th of April 2022.

It is both a bit weird and a great honour to be invited to reflect on our paper, “Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in Asia: A Seven Country Study of CSR Web Site Reporting”. The process has given us a chance to reflect on what we knew then, what we know now, and how much things have evolved. Our reflections cover memories of the context and origins of the paper; the data available – and unavailable – to us at the time; the approach we took – and what we see as its virtues – and the results; and the relevance of the paper to CSR in Asia today – nearly twenty years on.

As is often the case, the origins of a well-known paper are curious. Our paper grew from the internationalization strategy of the University of Nottingham (UoN) where we then worked in the International Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility (ICCSR). UoN had opened a campus in Malaysia and was opening another in China. So, the Vice-Chancellor encouraged us to engage with our colleagues there …which made us think that we should probably know a bit about Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in Asia … hence the paper. Little did we know what this would lead to!

Thanks to the ICCSR, we had the funds to employ researchers with whom we analyzed web site reporting of 50 companies’ CSR in seven Asian countries: India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea, Singapore, and Thailand (bringing a range of business systems in terms of size, religion and culture, political system, and economic development). Hang on, you say, what about China? Our answer is simply that at that time there were barely any Chinese MNCs with English language website reporting… which is certainly not the case now! Although our choice of sample skewed the population to the larger companies with a strong international business profile, this did not concern us as it strengthened the testing of the CSR-shaping role of national business systems.

We focused on broad CSR waves, i.e. community involvement, socially responsible production processes, and socially responsible employee relations. Whilst it enabled broad generalizability of the character of CSR nearly twenty years ago, it does raise some questions of compatibility with current CSR agendas in Asia. However, the more inductive identification of component CSR issues (e.g. community development; education & training; health and disability; environment) makes the findings amenable to temporal comparison, providing a more fine-grained analysis of activity within the waves. We also focused inductively on the dominant CSR modes (i.e. how the issues were addressed). This is when things got interesting. We started to see distinctive country patterns emerge in terms of issues within the waves (e.g. community issues were particularly prominent in India, Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines, but less so in the other three countries), but this was not the case in the modes. The modes deployed within each of the waves were strikingly similar: philanthropy dominated community investment, and codes  and standards dominated production processes. In other words, the “what” rather than the “how” was nationally distinctive.

Some conclusions now seem uncontentious, most obviously that ‘community involvement’ is the CSR priority in Asia. Similarly, there is no “Asian CSR” model, but a set of nationally distinctive patterns of CSR behaviour, resulting from the national business systems, rather than development. Reflective of the impact of globalization on CSR, we found that companies operating internationally were more likely to adopt CSR than those operating only in their home country. One might expect that international exposure might lead to an increase in similarity of approaches across countries; however, we instead found that the CSR of the multinational companies operating in Asian countries tended to reflect their host rather than their home countries, reinforcing the national distinctiveness. However, this finding may be a little simplistic in the light of emerging tensions between international CSR approaches and host country experiences.

It is great to see that CSR in Asia has attracted a volume of research and we are delighted that our paper has been a reference point for some of this research.


Blog Editor’s note: The authors’ paper, “Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in Asia: A Seven Country Study of CSR Web Site Reporting” , is open access until December 31st 2022 as part of the journal’s 60th anniversary celebrations


About the Authors

Jeremy Moon is Professor at Copenhagen Business School, and Chair of Sustainability Governance Group. Jeremy has written widely about the rise, context, dynamics and impact of CSR.  He is particularly interested in corporations’ political roles and in the regulation of CSR and corporate sustainability. He is the Project Lead of the RISC research project.

Wendy Chapple is a full Professor of International Business and CSR at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Vienna). She has played central roles in programme design and development, designing CSR related programmes and has been programme director for MSc and MBA programmes in CSR in the UK.  Wendy gained recognition for the development of faculty, programmes and research, by winning the Aspen Institute faculty pioneer award in 2008.  At WU, she will contribute CSR and Sustainability modules to the CEMs and undergraduate programmes.


Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Institutions matter: The importance of institutional quality when embedding sustainability within the capitalistic realm

By Lisa Bernt Elboth, Adrian Rudolf Doppler, & Dr. Kristjan Jespersen

◦ 5 min read 

Institutions not only structure any sort of social interaction [1], but are also essential in solving societal problems [2], such as climate change and the associated threat towards a fair and just future. It is not without reason that the United Nations particularly emphasized institutional progress within SDG 16 [3] to advance to a more effective, inclusive, and accountable society. In a recent study, it was found that institutions matter to a great extent when scrutinizing the relationship between corporate financial performance (CFP) and ESG performance. More specifically, the institutional environment a company finds itself in determines whether sustainable business practices get transformed into financial returns.

The claim that more sustainable companies are outperforming their not so sustainable peers is not new [4] and the consequent shift of investors’ preferences towards more sustainable companies has been taking place with increasing speed over the last decade [5]. Associated wake-up calls and the urge to take ESG into consideration are not surprising either. Besides the alleged desire of investors for a just and sustainable future, this shift is more likely based on the theory that sustainable finance delivers abnormal returns [6]. But is the relationship between sustainable behavior and financial performance as straightforward as it is disseminated? Are more sustainable corporations indeed more likely to achieve better financial results regardless of where they are and what they do?

In fact, when utilizing ESG scores, rankings, and performance as a proxy for sustainable behavior, two meta-analyses [7] [8] concluded that in most empirical studies the resulting relationship was not as simplistic, universal or linear as it is often propagated. In a corresponding literature review, the researchers also identified a large number of discrepancies among scholars in how to statistically model the relationship, what control variables to use and how to even quantify the dependent and independent variables of focus. Following these insights, the researchers uncovered a determining factor in establishing and shaping the emphasized relationship – institutional quality.

Key Findings

The final sample consisted of datapoints from 6,976 corporations, situated in 75 different countries over a period of eleven years or, specifically, from 2009 to 2020. Subsequently, these were analyzed applying fixed effects panel regression models. Both an accounting- and a market-based measure were used to quantify corporate financial performance, respectively, Return on Assets (ROA) and Tobin’s Q. Meanwhile, ESG performance was proxied by ESG scores from Refinitiv (former Thomson Reuters). The variables associated with institutional environment were split into 

  1. Institutional Quality, calculated through a factor analysis and based on the World Governance Indicators from the World Bank and 
  2. Industry Sensitivity, a dummy variable equal to 1 if the GICS industry of a firm was deemed sensitive towards ESG.
Institutions are among the determinantal factors for the link 

Interestingly, the general statistical analysis of ESG and CFP did not yield any significant results, however, when moderating effects stemming from the institutional environment were introduced, this changed. Under high institutional quality, the researchers found a positive relationship between ESG scores and financial performance. Contrarily, the relationship was negative under low institutional quality. Exemplified below by the case of Finland 2012, Argentina 2018 and Zimbabwe 2012, institutions can be seen as the determining factor for direction of the focal link. Furthermore, the industrial environment a corporation finds itself in was found to affect the relationship ambiguously. Generally, sensitive firms seem to receive relatively less financial gain for improved ESG performance, and it may even be negative.

Possible explanations for such dynamics
  • Legal institutions, such as environmental regulations, labor laws or health and safety requirements, can serve as the means of reflecting sustainable behavior inside a company’s balance sheet. Finland was for instance the first country to introduce a carbon tax capturing corporate pollution by giving it a price and hence affecting accounting profits.
  • In highly corruptive settings, where the trust of the general public is lacking, the likelihood of sustainable activities being perceived as greenwashing and thus not rewarded by investors, could be another reason for an inverse relationship in low institutionally developed regions. 
  • In line with the previous, when accountability is low, and corporate entities can disclose information without third party verification, it could be relatively easy to stay focused on short-term profits through unsustainable practices but still receive a better ESG rating.  
  • In environments with low institutional quality, banks tend to only give out short-term loans in order to reduce their own risks. This can lead to a vicious cycle of corporate lenders also only focusing on short-term profit maximization which then again decreases their access to capital, constraining their ability to engage in long-term sustainable practices.
Putting the SO WHAT into practice

When setting out for systemic change, it is important to ensure the necessary institutional environment in order to encourage individuals, as well as corporate entities to act in the best interest of the entire society and the planet. Thereby, a bottom-up approach focusing on incentivizing every individual and a top-down approach, fostering legal macro-level change can be synthesized, leading to the best possible outcome. These institutions should seek to maximize accountability, transparency, and mechanisms to internalize negative externalities. Corporations within such environments should fully leverage opportunities associated with sustainable practices, such as cheaper access to capital, in order to incrementally advance the progress towards a just space for humankind. Corporations, which are especially sensitive towards ESG related elements irrespective of their ESG scores, should aspire to enhance their own credibility, as this might award them with a competitive advantage. Lastly, societies with high institutional quality should strive for teaching about their institutions and the associated benefits to everyone else, as a global problem can only be solved on a global level. 


References

Doppler, A.R., & Elboth, L.B. (2022). Institutional Quality, Industry Sensitivity and ESG: An Empirical Study of the Moderating Effects onto the Relationship between ESG Performance and Corporate Financial Performance (Unpublished master’s thesis). 22098. Copenhagen Business School, Denmark.


About the Authors

Lisa Bernt Elboth recently graduated with an M.Sc. in Applied Economics and Finance as well as a CEMS Master’s in International Management from Copenhagen Business School and Bocconi University. Her interest in global matters and sustainability has flourished during her studies impacting the choice of master thesis topic and this subsequent blog contribution.

Adrian Rudolf Doppler works as a research assistant for the Department of International Economics, Government and Business at Copenhagen Business School and had just graduated with a Master’s in Applied Economics & Finance and the CEMS Master’s in International Management after a two-year journey. He had always been passionate about ESG, Sustainability and the existing links with the capital markets, as well as the complex system dynamics arising form it.

Kristjan Jespersen is an Associate Professor at the Copenhagen Business School. He studies on the growing development and management of Ecosystem Services in developing countries. Within the field, Kristjan focuses his attention on the institutional legitimacy of such initiatives and the overall compensation tools used to ensure compliance.


Photo credit: Galeanu Mihai on iStock

Corporate sanctions in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine

Summary of the discussion with Sophia Opatska at CBS

◦ 8 min read 

This blog post is a repost and has first been published by UCU Business School on 5th of April 2022.

In normal life, I am a vice-rector for the strategic development of the best Ukrainian private nonprofit University and founding dean of UCU Business School. Right now, I am one of 4 million Ukrainians who left Ukraine because of bomb shelling and war, which Russia started on February 24th.

Sophia Opatska, 2022

What happens in Ukraine right now is devastating. Every day more and more people die, more and more cities are ruined. Over the weekend, the Kyiv region was liberated after a month of occupation. Pictures of Bucha (a beautiful small town near Kyiv) can make any normal person sick: mass executions, civilians being killed on the streets, lying there for days and weeks, half-burned bodies of raped and naked women, robbed houses.  Those pictures are telling the terrible truth about Russia, russians, and their war in Ukraine. There is no excuse for terrorism and what we live through and observed by the whole civilized World – is terrorism and genocide. 

Since this meeting and discussion is about business and economics, there should be numbers. So I will try to get into them, but no numbers can validate what Ukrainians saw in their cities after russian invaders left them. 

According to various estimates, our economy is ruined by between 500 billion and trillions of dollars. In 5 weeks. And it will take years and years to rebuild Ukraine. 

I think this is the first time in history when war is so connected to economics.

Unfortunately, Russia’s domestic political stability at the moment looks high. Protest sentiments in Russia are low, there has been no significant split between elites, and the loyalty of the security forces to Putin is not yet in question. 

There is little dissatisfaction with the consequences of the war among a small number of elites, mostly «technocrats» and «old officials». Young people under the age of 30 and the urban middle class are the most affected by the current situation and sanctions out of the population capable of protest. 

There are two types of sanctions – official sanctions of countries and private companies.

The G7 and the EU have decided to disconnect several Russian banks from the SWIFT system. The disconnection of banks from SWIFT does not limit their ability to make payments in foreign currency, but slows down payments and makes them more expensive.

It is important to note that the problems of banking transactions are rather temporary. At the moment, this leads to supply disruptions and rising costs, but over time, both importers and banks are adapting. Alternative and fast methods of payment through third countries or analogs of the SWIFT system will be created (for example, Russian SPFP and Chinese CIPS).

And if we are talking about the economics, let me give you 10 consequences of sanctions in the near future (1-6 months, key – 2nd quarter of 2022) for Russia in order to understand if and how they help Ukraine, mostly leading to changes within russia itself. As a basis, I took a report from the Ukrainian Institute of the Future that analyses the impact of the sanctions.

1. Devaluation. During the month of the war, the Russian ruble fell by 19% against the US dollar. In March, the European Union and the United States imposed a ban on the import of banknotes into Russia. Though the official exchange rate almost did not change on the «black» market, one dollar is estimated at 250-300 rubles.

It is believed that the devaluation of the ruble by 10% leads to inflation by 1%. Accordingly, the fall of the ruble will lead to a «weight of wallet», a reduction in real household income, and a reduction in effective demand.

2. Reduction in the supply of imported products, a sharp narrowing of supply, shortages of certain goods.

According to FourKites, since the beginning of the war, imports to Russia have fallen by 59%, including imports of household goods and industrial goods.

3. Inflation. A reduction in supply is always an increase in prices. 

First, the rise in prices will affect the «middle-class urban family», which has a high share of imported products in the consumer basket. Due to sanctions and inflation, the consumer line is expected to change in the long run, namely simplification, fewer high-tech products, and an increase in the share of Chinese and Indian goods (medicines, gadgets, cars, etc.). 

In villages with conventionally grown potatoes, locally produced pasta, oil, and sugar, it may be a little easier at first. However, with a certain time lag, prices will rise for everything, including domestic products. And for low-income people, whose consumer basket consists mainly of food and medicine, the consequences will be the most traumatic. 

Inflation is hitting the poorest. But the poor are not a protest power. The likelihood that they will join the protest audience remains low. It is most likely that 70-80% of the population will suffer, trying to «squeeze» something out of the state and thus become even more dependent on the state.

4. Fall of the industry: decline in production, fall in employment, unemployment. The largest hit by the sanctions is the aviation sector, the automotive industry, mechanical engineering, the electronics sector, the oil, and gas sector (its modernization), and metallurgy. The more technological the production, the higher the share of imported components, and, accordingly, the more it will suffer from sanctions.

If the shutdowns take place, it will have a multiplier effect on the economy. And this can be disruptive. e.g., The Russian car industry employs about 300 thousand people, and another 700-900 thousand are employed in Russian companies that are suppliers to the car industry.

5. Falling incomes and employment in services. The first thing that consumers save on when real incomes are reduced are services: beauty salons, fitness centers, catering, restaurants, recreation, and more. The tourism sector is likely to fall. A decline is expected in trade. This is an important part of the Russian economy: the share of wholesale and retail trade is almost 12% of GDP and 15% of all employees. 

6. A blow to the construction and real estate market. About 40% of Russian companies have already frozen their construction projects across the country. This is due to the imposition of sanctions against Russia, which leads to disruptions in the supply of construction materials, their shortage, and a rise in price. According to experts, since the beginning of the war, the cost of building materials has increased in some segments by 80-100%. Some companies decide to freeze some projects indefinitely and redirect resources to complete near-completed projects.

7. In Russia, it is planned to transfer to the state assets owned by foreign companies that have left the market. The Public Consumer Initiative has created a list of 59 companies that can be nationalized, including McDonald’s, Volkswagen, Apple, IKEA, Microsoft, IBM, Shell, Porsche, Toyota, H&M, and others.

8. Exit from partnerships of oil and gas foreign partners. I am not going to name all, just a couple: 

  • BP sells a stake in Rosneft (19.75%).
  • Shell is leaving the joint venture with Gazprom and is terminating its participation in the Nord Stream-2 project.
  • Exxon Mobil stops oil and gas production in Russia (on the island of Sakhalin) and stops new investments. The company leaves the Sakhalin-1 consortium and recalls American specialists from Russia.

What is critical here is that companies are leaving with their own technologies, including offshore drilling technologies for gas production, which Russia needs to develop new fields.

9. Sharp increase in interest rates on loans and lack of working capital in the business.

10. Reduction of microcredit (lending for those who cannot reach the next salary). People who live from salary to salary cannot get a loan today. This is again a factor in the growth of poverty, the barbarism of the population, and the growth of crime.

Russia’s economy is going down. Experts talk about the beginning of the economic winter in Russia, use the term “Iranisation” of the Russian economy, and draw parallels between Russia and North Korea.

Current sanctions have critical consequences in terms of living standards and quality of life in Russia over the next 10 years. Lack of prospects, opportunities to realize their life potential, the need to survive instead of making plans for the future and development – all this calls into question the feasibility of life in Russia on the horizon of 5-10-20 years and makes the issue of emigration more relevant than ever. Summing up in one sentence, we can say that «Vladimir Putin stole the future from the Russians

At the same time, the basis of internal stability in Russia is Putin’s personal image and absolute trust in him PERSONALLY by the population, not the government, parliament, or government as a whole. It holds an elite consensus, as well as a social contract in Russia, which he himself guarantees and embodies.

I would like to finish again with images of BUCHA – a beautiful town near Kyiv that made me sick on Saturday evening and the entire day yesterday. People’s lives cannot wait for another 10 years so that the current status of sanctions works slowly and mildly on society which Putin created in russia and people accepted by voting for him for 22 years and western society inviting him every time to the table. There is a huge moral dilemma in what we currently experience, there is a huge challenge to democratic order with respect to Human dignity, freedom of speech, and free society which Europe was building for many years. 

There are many concerns: what if the situation engages more countries, what if we give more military weapons to Ukraine, what if… many more what if? But I would like you to ask yourself – What if Ukraine loses? Everybody in the free world will lose, as when they come here they will do the same as they did in BUCHA. 

Foodback Loop: Developing Sustainable Food Systems for a Circular Society

By Bruna Carvalho and Lucia Reisch

◦ 4 min read 

The Sixth IPCC Assessment Report warns that crops are more frequently lost due to extreme weather conditions than ever before. At the same time, communities across the globe are facing increased – and in many cases acute – food insecurity.

Feedback loops in food production may increase future food insecurities

While suffering the consequences of climate change, our food systems also act as major contributors to it by accounting for one-third of the global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions caused by human activity. This potentially creates a feedback loop where food production increases GHG emission, which in turn accelerates climate change leading to more extreme weather events that threaten and damage crops, reducing food availably and increasing food insecurity, which increases demand for food production and takes us back to increased food GHG emission stemming from food systems. Something like the diagram below:

Figure 1: Example of a feedback loop within a food system
Figure 1: Example of a feedback loop within a food system

This is, of course, a snippet of much more complex food systems of provision out there. A full assessment of these systems would consider other elements such as biodiversity, water use, mass production and small scale agriculture, health and nutrition, culture, local, regional, and global scale systems, to mention a few.

The chain of actions and reactions shown in the diagram are what we call a feedback loop, where elements of a system interact, amplifying or dampening each other’s effects. This may sound complicated but becomes easier to grasp through examples. Referring once more to the diagram above, it is easy to see how producing more (+) food could lead to increased (+) GHG emissions, while enduring more (+) extreme weather events could damage crops and reduce (-) the availability of food. This is useful when analysing complex systems and especially handy when it comes to developing solutions that can disrupt a link in the system hence leveraging change towards a desired state.

Mainstream food systems are designed to operate in positive feedback loops – and that’s not positive

As illustrated in our diagram, the current mainstream food system is designed to operate in a positive feedback loop, where the word positive (unfortunately) does not mean something nice or beneficial, but instead that the relationships within the loop (and possibly the whole system) create a snowball effect. This is certainly not what we want. To go in the direction of operating within the planetary boundaries, we must work on the links that offer the most leverage for change (preferably with the least use of resources), and ideally operate only with bounded trade-offs.

A previous BoS article on the importance of food systems for building resilient societies highlighted two major behavioural changes that substantially mitigate greenhouse gas emissions from food systems: avoiding food waste and dietary shifts to plant-based nutrition, which can be leveraged by individual choice.

“Because individual choices are the basis of any healthy and sustainable food system, understanding and influencing consumer behaviour is a promising route to achieving sustainability, resilience, and healthfulness of our food systems and society generally”.

In this sense, we envision that nudging people into making more environmentally friendly food choices will lower “GHG emission” stemming from food systems and will have a beneficial impact on the other elements with which it interacts due to the nature of feedback loops and systems.

The BEACON project explores pathways to shift to a sustainable food system

But how can we move consumer-citizens towards more sustainable diets and reduced food waste? Moreover, how can we design a more resilient food system and food environment? These are the questions we seek to answer in partnership with the City of Copenhagen through the BEACON Project (funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation). Here, we work in connection with actors who directly and indirectly shape the city’s food environments to employ interventions in real-life settings, which we expect will enhance the experiments’ validity, yield useful results, and increase engagement and “buy-in”. By finding the answers to these questions, we expect to contribute to developing pathways for change and to harnessing and advancing behavioural insights (nudges) that can inform people-centric food and health public policies as well as mitigation efforts by the private sector. We also expect our findings to apply to other systems of provision beyond food.

Developing a circular society

Ultimately, we aim at further developing the concept of a circular society, which builds on the concept of circular economy but is more far-reaching. Circular societies consider less material forms of value creation, are sustainable, just, resilient, deliver social wellbeing within the planetary boundaries and operate in a balanced state among the biosphere, the sociosphere, and the technosphere (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Circular Society. Source: BEACON Project

Given that societies are collectively built, our ambitious goals can only be achieved through open dialogue and collaborative work with practitioners, policymakers, researchers and civil society. If you would like to contribute to this discussion, you are most welcome to write to us here.


Further readings

Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Working Group II Contribution to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report

Reisch, L.A. (2020) How to make food systems more resilient: Behavioural Food Policies. BOS Blog

Reisch, L. A. (2021). Shaping healthy and sustainable food systems with behavioural food policy. European Review of Agricultural Economics.

Bauer, J. M., Aarestrup, S. C., Hansen, P. G., & Reisch, L. A. (2022). Nudging more sustainable grocery purchases: Behavioural innovations in a supermarket setting. Technological Forecasting and Social Change.


About the authors

Bruna Carvalho is Research Assistant at Copenhagen Business School. She brings research experience in the areas of transformational sustainability entrepreneurship, policy reviews and road mapping for sustainable public procurement, and transdisciplinary research in the field ecosystem conservation in partnership with the Waorani indigenous people (Ecuadorian Amazon). As a practitioner, she founded the Sustainability Commission of the Brazilian Federal Justice (State of Paraná), where she acted as Commission Secretary for three years.

Lucia Reisch is the El-Erian Professor for Behavioural Economics and Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, the founder of the Consumer and Behavioural Insights Group (CBIG) at Copenhagen Business School, Department of Management, Society and Communication, and the principal investigator of the BEACON project. She is a behavioural economist and social scientist and one of Europe’s leading academic experts in behavioural insights-based policies for sustainability. Lucia is an Editor of the Journal of Consumer Policy (SpringerNature) and a founding Editorial Board Member of the Journal Behavioural Public Policy (Cambridge University Press) as well as a member of the Editorial Board of Food Policy (Elsevier), among other editorships.


Photo credit: Scott Goodwill

Innovation as a Survival Mechanism during the COVID-19 pandemic: Successful examples from the foodservice industry

By Anna Sophie Hauge, Marie Haadem and Meike Janssen

◦ 4 min read 

Innovation fosters creativity and generates growth – especially in times of crisis. The foodservice industry has been hit extremely hard by COVID-19 and the corresponding restrictions and lock-down measures. While many businesses in the foodservice industry struggled to survive, some took the opportunity to innovate. The question is then, what drove businesses to innovate in the middle of the crisis?

Drivers of firm innovation and the outcomes differ from case to case, however all can be connected to overarching themes. The external shock of the COVID-19 crisis is undoubtedly one such theme which has created new environments for supply and demand within the foodservice industry.

…times of crisis may provide an opportunity to develop dynamic capabilities more quickly than good financial times. A possible explanation is that ‘dynamic environments’ are needed to deploy dynamic capabilities

Alonso-Almeida et al., 2014

In the spring of 2021, we interviewed five courageous food-entrepreneurs, all using innovation as a survival mechanism throughout the crisis. We used John Bessant and Joe Tidd’s 13 drivers of innovation as the starting point to have a closer look into five small- to medium-sized innovative companies from Copenhagen and Oslo: a gourmet pizza takeaway, an online grocery delivery, an online fruit and vegetable delivery, a vegetarian takeaway, and a café takeaway. 

Besides the crisis itself being the most powerful driver of innovation, the need for change in the way people consume and offer food services proved to inspire numerous innovative measures (See Table 1). The trends and environments created by COVID-19 inspired new processes within our pre-existing case firms. For the three firms established pre-COVID-19, a large focus was put into the implementation of contactless home deliveries.

Additionally, we found that the crisis even triggered the innovation of completely new businesses. The two we interviewed exploited the rapidly changing environment to meet new needs, employing pandemic-friendly formats to deliver their services. An example is the highly integrated use of Instagram as a food ordering and communication platform. Innovation of business processes and products became survival means for our firms within the foodservice industry, as it helped them keep up with new consumer needs in the context of the pandemic. At the same time, these changes elevated the firms’ value propositions due to the new operating circumstances imposed by COVID-19. Products and processes were adapted to the COVID-19 trend of ‘support your locals’ throughout lockdown, through the integration of local suppliers and products. Innovations in relation to such trends helped target important social values during the pandemic.

Many of the innovations within the case companies originated from the necessity of minimizing the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Changes to the physical spaces of the foodservice firms and higher focus on contact through digital channels are examples of measures taken.

Characteristics of Success

Four out of the five firms were small in size. Each firm utilized collaborative relationships in the development of their products and services during the pandemic. Congruently, these firms explored new market opportunities; both in the expansion and adaptation of product lines and services, but also starting completely new businesses. Another characteristic was the integration of technology, such as online ordering and social media communication. We also found that the firms innovating during crises did not compromise on costs in their innovations. Ultimately, these characteristics developed and supported the firms’ crisis-driven innovation. It was also recognized that the pre-existing firms were innovative also before the crisis, which helped facilitate their innovation in times of distress. These characteristics are identical to those found in companies that innovated during the financial crisis in 2008.

Two additional characteristics were identified in the firms; firm flexibility and targeting niche segments. High flexibility was identified within the case firms, introducing options for pre-ordering, and thereby allowing for efficient and sustainable use of resources. Firm flexibility was also created through the use of digital modes of operations like online communication platforms and ordering systems. Lastly, four of the case firms have niche and urban customer segments. They target a trendsetting, educated urban-elite, all living in central Copenhagen or the West End of Oslo. Both the firms’ business models and unique selling propositions are non-typical for the given industry. Having such target groups and trend-setting concepts is seen to have enabled successful innovations. These two firm characteristics arguably provide the necessary infrastructure for the innovations’ success and are recognized to be essential for firm survival in times of crisis.

In the end

It is inspiring to see that times of crises can inspire people, and that courageous steps are being rewarded in a dynamic environment with open-minded customers. However, not all cafés and restaurants were as lucky as the ones in our study. Now that restrictions are no longer in place, the foodservice industry deserves our support, and you deserve to regularly treat yourself to a nice dinner or lunch.


About the Authors

Anna Sophie Hauge is studying her master’s in Finance and Strategic Management at Copenhagen Business School. Outside of her studies, she is currently working as a commercial student analytic at Løgismose, a Danish food brand, focused on quality and ecology.

Marie Haadem is currently finishing her Master’s in Management at IE Business School in Madrid, specialising within Finance and Investment. She will be joining Citigroup this July as a Banking Analyst for the EMEA Banking Analytics Group in Spain.

Meike Janssen is Associate Professor for Sustainable Consumption and Behavioural Studies, CBS Sustainability, CBS. Her research focuses on consumer behaviour in the field of sustainable consumption, in particular on consumers’ decision-making processes related to sustainable products and the drivers of and barriers to sustainable product choices.


PhPhoto by Kai Pilger on Unsplash

Sustainability enabler or complexity blinder?

By Milena Karen Bär & Dr. Kristjan Jespersen

◦ 5 min read 

The first step of the EU Action Plan of Sustainable Finance

New regulations in the ESG sphere are on the upswing especially in the EU. To reach the commitments of the Paris agreement, the European commission has introduced new regulations as the first step of the EU action plan: the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR). The first level was already implemented on March 10th 2021. The implementation of the regulation is an extension of the EU Taxonomy, amending the issue of greenwashing among financial market participants (FMPs). The new reporting requirements are profound and will be fundamental to almost any participant on the European markets, whether you are in the financial, or for that matter, the manufacturing, retail, service, non-governmental and governmental sectors.

The European Union’s experiment in defining what is sustainable and in directing markets to more sustainable investments, is putting pressure on market players to keep up with the quickly paced regulative developments.

Two main issues are subject to the debate of appropriate implementation of the SFDR, which entail firstly, the uncertainty of product classification and secondly, the complexity of data collection and usage. Not only all those affected must revise their whole reporting regime, but the EU must ultimately also ask itself the question whether the regulations have nurtured the intended behavior of the market. 

SFDR and PAI in general

The SFDR is implemented to benefit clarity for investors and asset managers, by improving their ability to compare investment options from a sustainability point of view. Therefore, the SFDR provides a collective framework, which requires FMPs to disclose the way they are taking sustainability risks into consideration in its business practices (entity level) and in its financial products (product level) in a consistent and curated fashion.

Additionally, the FMP must report on the principal adverse impacts (PAIs). These contain a list of mandatory and voluntary adverse impact indicators, covering environmental issues and the field of social and employee matters, respect for human rights, anti-corruption, and anti-bribery matters. Based on the SFDR disclosures, the product offerings can then be classified within the three categories referred to as article 6, 8, or 9 products, which indicate the level of greenness ranging from article 6 which does not consider sustainability at all, and article 9 which must follow a sustainable objective.

Issues arising 

The objective of the EU Action Plan and the SFDR is to reorient financial capital towards sustainable products and solutions. However, certain challenges raise the question whether the regulation can indeed serve this very purpose. To begin with, the mechanics of defining light and dark green products is lacking a foundation and boundaries, allowing for self-interpretation. The differentiation between light and dark green is ambiguous, and thus instead of serving as a guideline, is increasing uncertainty about what the articles constitute. 

Issue 1: The color palette of light and dark green assets

One might say, just as colors are perceived differently by each human, light and dark green assets can be various shades of green and thus, on completely different sustainability levels. The regulatory product declaration is not yet methodologically sound, the lack of distinction of the two leaves room for interpretation of the classifying entity. So far, no specific classification mechanism or framework exists that FMPs can apply and are thus able to approach the classification in more prudent or more generous ways. One may put a product under article 8, while at the same time another FMP might classify the same product under article 9. 

It seems the darkness of green is up for preference of the asset manager. Although there may be consensus that exclusion strategies are minimum requirements for both classifications, the scope of exclusion criteria varies greatly. This allows for instance some article 9 products to still be involved in controversial actions, such as fossil fuels, tobacco, and controversial weapons. 

Secondly, collecting relevant data poses a challenge, and even if data is available, its variety used to report on the SFDR and the PAI, makes the curation inconsistent and biased. An investor might have a full PAI statement to assess its investment, but can one trust the accuracy and relevancy of the data? 

Issue 2: Quality of data fades into the background

The PAI statements can be considered as a curation tool for asset managers (AM) to filter for the most sustainable products and steer capital towards green transition products. Even though the framework of the PAI indicators might be well structured, what is important is the quality of inputs. But the complexity of PAI indicators poses challenges for almost any market participant. PAI data is often not readily available, and this is aggravated by the fact that this data needs to be tracked on a continuous basis. Data collection and maintenance can thus become costly for the underlying portfolio companies. Large cap companies can overcome this issue, but small cap players are confronted with an expensive data collection for a wide range of PAIs or with the need to opt out due to lack of data availability.

Hence, large cap companies may gain competitive advantage without indicating greater performance. AMs incorporate the PAI data in a screening process to extract the most responsible products of the investment universe. However, some asset managers are simply selecting those assets with the highest coverage of PAI indicators. Again, leaving large cap companies in favor, although the high coverage of indicators not necessarily correlates with sustainable performance. The quality of the data fades into the background and investments with higher sustainable and financial potential can be missed out on. Ultimately, businesses leading the market today, may stay right where they are, without enabling opportunities for more innovative and greener solutions.

While the intention of the SFDR is to further restrict greenwashing, current practice may raise the question whether there are still loopholes for FMPs to label their products as greener as they actually are. Although we have seen regulations to be great drivers of sustainable corporate and market action, guidelines must be established to provide more specific and narrow pathways. The weak structure of product classification and the complexity of data may prevent the SFDR to provide a framework for more coherent and uniform information of sustainability risks. The European commission must clarify actual implementation practices, to enable the entire effect of capital reorientation. No market participant is exempted from the need to be aligned with the SFDR today, as new waves of regulations will follow, and it is to start paddling.


About the Author

Milena Karen Bär is a student researcher in ESG and Sustainable Investments, absolving a Master’s degree in applied Economics and Finance at Copenhagen Business School. Her research projects are mainly within the field of ESG metrics and regulation, with a focus on the investor’s side.

Kristjan Jespersen is an Associate Professor at the Copenhagen Business School. He studies on the growing development and management of Ecosystem Services in developing countries. Within the field, Kristjan focuses his attention on the institutional legitimacy of such initiatives and the overall compensation tools used to ensure compliance.


Photo by Freddie Collins on Unsplash

How do we think about sustainable investing? Suggestions from an exploratory study

By Margherita Massazza & Dr. Kristjan Jespersen

◦ 4 min read 

From the outset, this blog post takes the perspective that behavioral finance is required to assess the perceived tension in sustainable investing (SI). Our work investigates the extent to which sustainability considerations are included in investment decisions, and the drivers behind SI approaches.

Sustainability is increasingly integrated in financial markets, with the acronym “ESG” (Environment, Social, Governance) becoming an all-encompassing term widely used in all phases of the investment process. According to a recent global review, sustainable assets [1] reached USD 35.3 trillion at the end of 2019, representing 35% of total professionally managed assets, and they are set to grow further in the coming years. Yet, despite its growth and the positive sentiment associated with it, there is an inherent tension in sustainable investing.

This tension stems from the apparent disconnect between the theoretical assumptions of classical financial models, focused on risk and financial returns as the predominant determinants of investment decisions (e.g., Capital Asset Pricing Model, Modern Portfolio Theory, etc.), and the empirical evidence of SI, where portfolio allocations are affected by non-financial aspects like personal values and social pressures. How can we make sense of this tension? 

Usually, the contradiction is formulated in terms of a tradeoff between financial returns and ESG impact: in order to achieve one, investors must forego the other. However, this view is still rooted in a traditional finance perspective, according to which including ESG considerations or seeking a non-monetary impact comes at the expenses of returns.

There needs to be more nuance in how sustainable investing decisions are investigated and assessed. Given the pervasive and engaging nature of ESG issues, sustainable investing is likely shaped by internal and external forces that go beyond the financial-vs-impact debate. By acknowledging the role that cognitive limitations, biases, and the external context play for investments, behavioral finance allows to capture the financial impact of factors that tend to be overlooked in mainstream financial theories. 

Under this perspective, the authors carried out a study based on primary data from European retail and professional investors. It focused on two main questions:

To what extent are sustainability considerations included in investment decisions?

Firstly our analysis broke down the relative importance of four attributes for the investment choice, i.e. the relative weight (expressed in percentage) that each characteristic exert on the investment decision. Sustainability attributes carry a relative importance of about 38%, with ESG score displaying a 26% relevance, and the investment’s end objective a 12% relevance. Taken together, these parameters display a larger role than standard financial attributes of risk level (relative importance of 33%) and expected returns (relative importance of 29%) (Figure 1). The results confirm the significance of ESG aspects for a well-rounded assessment of an investment, arguing against the traditional perspective of risk and returns as the sole determinants of investment choices.

Figure 1 – Relative importance of investment attributes for investment choice, by investor type
What drives investors to invest sustainably?

Secondly, we identified the main tendencies leading investors to engage in SI. Starting from a set of 16 heterogeneous motives, 4 main drivers emerged: a desire for self-expression, a financial-strategic rationale, the influence of the external context, and an opportunistic motive (Table 1). These drivers depict SI as a multifaceted phenomenon that unfolds along various dimensions, and not only on the financial and impact layers. They propose a novel perspective to think about SI, which takes into consideration how endogenous (e.g., alignment with values) and exogenous (e.g., role of regulation) forces may affect investments. 

Table 1 – Drivers of Sustainable Investing
How can the findings help us better assess sustainable investing?

This analysis shows the extent to which ESG aspects are integrated in investments, confirming their importance for investment choices. It also shows the multidimensionality of SI drivers, which eschews the rigid perspective of traditional finance and accounts for the impact of relevant internal and external factors. 

With this understanding, it is possible to formulate practical insights for industry participants to address the current challenges of SI. In fact, there are concerns related to the over-inclusion of sustainability in investment decisions at the expenses of fundamental financial analysis, which may lead to mispricing, inflated asset evaluation, and potentially an “ESG bubble”.

  • Standardize definitions and improve sustainability communication. Social context emerged as one of the drivers of SI, and regulators have a strong role to play in harmonizing the meaning of sustainability in finance. Legislative and non-governmental bodies are working to overcome the lack of standard definition and frameworks in SI – e.g., via the European Union’s Sustainable Finance strategy. Their effort to create a common vocabulary and shared understanding of what SI entails will help to align incentives, concepts, and strategies. In parallel, the financial-asset supply side (e.g., fund providers, financial advisors, etc.) should communicate clearly and extensively on the sustainability aspects of financial products. Given the importance of ESG characteristics for investment choices, this will ensure investors have reliable and trustworthy information to guide their investments. Together, the agreement in terminology and the availability of sustainability information will reduce the possibility for misinformation and opportunistic tendencies to sway investment decisions.
  • Recognize the existence of complex drivers behind sustainable investment decisions. Investors, both professional and retail, should evaluate how different motives affect their investment choices. Knowing that multiple drivers exist will ensure that investment are aligned with goals, limiting the influence of irrationality and misinformation. This will not only benefit investment strategies, but also curb counter-productive results such as the emergence of an ESG price bubble. To explore what drives investor’s decisions, an ad-hoc survey could be submitted ahead of opening investment accounts, mirroring the logic of the MiFID directive. This may have positive effects, such as involving more retail investors in sustainable investing [2].
  • Finally, consider adopting a behavioral approach when studying sustainable investing. The flexibility of behavioral finance may allow to grasp further insights and help to think about this timely topic in a novel way.

References

[1] The Global Sustainable Investing Alliance (GSIA) considers defines “Sustainable” all assets that integrate ESG factors in the analysis and selection of securities. More detail in their latest global report.

[2] Retail investors still face barriers to fully engage in SI: the topic is investigated in the paper “Investment Barriers and Labeling Schemes for Socially Responsible Investments” by Gutsche and Zwergel (2020).


About the Authors

Margherita Massazza is a CBS and Bocconi graduate in Economics of Innovation, with a focus on Sustainability. Her research investigates the links between traditional investments and behavioral finance to understand how sustainability decisions unfold. She is currently working in the Foresight team of AXA, an insurance company, where she studies the role that corporations will play in the future and how the concept of sustainability will evolve. 

Kristjan Jespersen is an Associate Professor at the Copenhagen Business School. He studies on the growing development and management of Ecosystem Services in developing countries. Within the field, Kristjan focuses his attention on the institutional legitimacy of such initiatives and the overall compensation tools used to ensure compliance.


Photo by PiggyBank on Unsplash

No Trees, No Future: How can we unlock the full potential of conservation finance?

By Dr. Kristjan Jespersen, Dr. Izabela Delabre, Dr. Caleb Gallemore, and Dr. Katryn Pasaribu

◦ 3 min read 

Tropical deforestation continues at alarming rates, with 12 million hectares of tropical tree cover loss recorded in 2018. Much of this deforestation is linked to large-scale agricultural development. Palm oil companies are seen as key deforestation culprits due to high-profile media campaigns being led by NGOs and, in response, recent years have seen the proliferation of private sector pledges and initiatives to address deforestation in the palm oil value chain. There has also been growing international focus on forest conservation in the context of climate mitigation, with countries at 2021’s United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) pledging to halt deforestation by 2030. Multi-billion dollar initiatives, such as the Bezos Earth Fund are investing in nature-based solutions to address climate change, including through the protection and reforestation of forests and other ecosystems. 

Given these ambitions, an important question for corporate sustainability and conservation research and practice is how to link financing mechanisms for conservation and value chains, two policy streams that are generally disconnected. Actual methodologies for understanding appropriate, long-term financing for forest conservation remain elusive, and this knowledge gap hinders the clear assignment of responsibility, accountability and sustainability of conservation efforts.

Articulating “conservation finance” (the “mechanisms and strategies that generate, manage, and deploy financial resources and align incentives to achieve nature conservation outcomes”) with value chains could help align incentives between actors and facilitate increased financial flows from the private sector to conservation. 

Introducing No Trees, No Future – new research project

An ambitious new research project “No Trees, No Future – Unlocking the full potential of conservation finance”, funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, seeks to design and test a rigorous methodology for understanding the responsibility for conservation finance of influential firms in the palm oil value chain. It addresses important knowledge gaps that currently impede effective conservation finance, examining questions such as: Which firms are responsible for financing conservation? What are the motivations of firms to engage in different types of conservation finance initiatives? To what extent are companies willing to internalize conservation costs? What might cost-sharing models look like? 

This novel, interdisciplinary research project uses a mixed-methods design that combines in-depth case studies, surveys and remote sensing to explore how the costs of conservation may be shared effectively and equitably between palm oil value chain actors, and provides a resource for external stakeholders seeking to identify firms’ contributions to land cover change, in Indonesia to start with.

The research will involve the development of data-intensive methods to assess the spatial footprint of the supply chains of a set of lead firms in the oil palm value chain, as well as in-depth interviewing of stakeholders across the palm oil value chain to identify the feasibility and possible impacts of adopting new methods for conservation finance. 

Our goals are: (1) to develop a methodology that can be readily applied to estimate lead firms’ responsibility for contributing to conservation finance in the palm oil sector, and (2) that business models and strategies integrate conservation finance effectively, supporting more equitable cost sharing. 

The research will identify several possible models for assessing spatial footprints of firms’ supply chains in the oil palm sector, testing their feasibility with a selected group of investors and conservation project proponents. Following this initial project, which focuses on the palm oil value chain, we intend to explore possibilities in other commodity sectors, and how to scale up efforts to support effective and equitable conservation finance.

To what extent will companies be willing to absorb the costs of conservation finance into their supply chain transactions? How might potential barriers be overcome? It is our intention that the project contributes to companies taking on greater responsibility for conservation finance, embedding long-term conservation costs into the palm oil value chain (that are currently externalized), disrupting ‘business as usual’ to support forest conservation, given their critical role in climate mitigation and biodiversity conservation. 

We will share our interim findings on this blog as the project progresses. We would be delighted to hear from researchers from different disciplines and practitioners working in this field. If you have any questions or comments, please get in touch! 


About the Authors

The two-year project is led by Dr. Kristjan Jespersen, Associate Professor at the Copenhagen Business School (CBS). The research team includes Dr. Izabela Delabre, Lecturer in Environmental Geography at Birkbeck, University of London; Dr. Caleb Gallemore, Assistant Professor in the International Affairs Program at LaFayette College, Pennsylvania; and Dr. Katryn Pasaribu, seconded from Universitas Prasetiya Mulya to CBS.


Photo by Franz Schäfer on Unsplash

EU proposal on Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence for human rights and the environment

Advancing responsible business conduct, but failing to consider key functional challenges for remedy

By Karin Buhmann

◦ 9 min read 

Why is the proposal important?

The EU Commission’s draft Directive on mandatory ‘corporate sustainability due diligence’  published in the end of February is already recognized to have the potential to become a game changer for responsible business conduct (RBC) in Europe and beyond. If adopted, the proposed Directive will turn international soft law recommendations for companies to exercise risk-based due diligence in order to identify and manage their harmful impacts on human rights and the environment into hard EU law and therefore binding obligations for companies. Companies will be required to exercise due diligence with regard to actual and potential human rights adverse impacts and environmental adverse impacts, with respect to their own operations, the operations of their subsidiaries, and the value chain operations carried out by entities with whom the company has an established business relationship. 

The proposal also aims to establish accountability through corporate liability for violations related to insufficient due diligence.

What the draft directive refers to as ‘corporate sustainability due diligence’ draws on what the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises refer to as ‘risk-based due diligence’, and what is referred to as ‘human rights due diligence’ by the United Nations (UN) Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). Indeed, the proposal refers directly to those two international soft-law instruments, which are generally considered state of the art for responsible business conduct (RBC).

This form of due diligence is a process to identify, prevent, mitigate, remedy and account for risks or actual harm caused by the company (or its partners) to society. Unlike financial or legal liability due diligence, the focus is not on risks to the company, although of course societal (including environmental) harm may also affect the company negatively (see also Buhmann 2018). 

For companies covered by the directive, this will fundamentally change RBC from being voluntary to becoming legally binding

The Draft has generally been welcomed by business associations, although some remain hesitant towards a (much watered-down) proposal to strengthen top-level sustainability corporate governance. Civil society also generally approve although the range of companies covered has been criticized for being too narrow, and business relations too focused on contractual relations rather than impacts. The proposal’s introduction of civil liability with EU courts for victims from non-EU countries has been lauded. Yet this could and perhaps should also usher in a deeper debate on the fundamental characteristics of what constitutes adequate or meaningful remedy for harmful impacts on human rights impacts or the environment, and as importantly, how host-country victims will be ensured a de-facto equal standing with frequently well-resourced EU companies in front of EU courts. This short note addresses all of the above issues.

Part of EU corporate sustainability law

After a slow start up to around 2011, the EU has been moving fast since in an incremental development of increasingly detailed obligations on companies, including institutional investors, with the aim of creating transparency on business impacts on human rights, the environment and climate. Given the speed and political support for adopting EU law on these matters, it is quite likely that the proposed Directive will be adopted, although possibly with some changes. 

The proposal forms part of the larger package of corporate sustainability legislation undertaken by the EU recently. This includes the Taxonomy Regulation (which also refers to procedures that companies should undertake to ensure alignment with the UNGPs ad OECD Guidelines); the Non-Financial Reporting Directive (requiring some information on due diligence and risk assessments on human rights), which is expected to be replaced by the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive; and the Disclosure Regulation, which requires financial product providers to publish certain types of sustainability related information, including information on due diligence related to harmful impacts on environment and human rights.

The draft Directive builds on a proposal from the European Parliament, but it also follows trends in several individual EU countries to introduce mandatory risk-based due diligence. 

What companies are covered?

The draft Directive applies to ‘very large’ EU based companies (more than 500 employees on average and a worldwide net turnover exceeding EUR 150 million). ‘Large’ companies (having more than 250 employees on average and more than EUR 40 million worldwide net turnover) are included if they operate in specific high-risk sectors: textiles (including leather and related goods), renewable natural resources extraction (agriculture, forestry and fisheries), and extraction of minerals.

The draft Directive’s listing of activities related to minerals is quite wide and applies regardless of the place of extraction. They will therefore apply to many types of raw-materials used in the EU, including those used for power and heating, construction and the ‘green’ energy transition.

Non-EU-based companies are covered if their turnover in the EU corresponds to that of ‘very large’ companies, or that of high-impact sector companies for activities in those sectors. It is expected that requirements will be cascaded onto SMEs through the value chains that they are part of. 

What are companies required to do?

Importantly, like risk-based due diligence and human rights due diligence, corporate sustainability due diligence is not a compliance obligation simply discharged by undertaking and documenting a specific action.

Rather, as established by the UNGPs and the OECD Guidelines, it is an ongoing task that requires continuous assessments of risks or actual harm, and re-assessments, follow-up and efforts to prevent risks from becoming actual harm, and mitigation and the provision of remedy when harm has occurred.

Although the draft Directive seeks to establish that, it does rely heavily on companies applying contractual assurances, audits and/or verification. As argued by the expert organization SHIFT, these are not necessarily the best options for the purpose.

The due diligence obligations proposed are generally in line with the UNGPs and the OECD Guidelines, but in some ways narrower. This applies in particular to the limitation of some aspects of the due diligence process to what the draft Directive defines as ‘established business relationships’, i.e. relationships of a lasting character. This contrasts with the UNGPs and OECD Guidelines which do not require a business relationship (e.g. with a contractor, a subcontractor or any other entity such as a financial partner) to be lasting but, rather, focus on the connection between the company and risk or harm. This is one of the points that have generated criticism of the draft. 

Directives must be implemented by Member States. The means that some specific requirements may differ across EU countries. However, regardless of this companies will be required to integrate due diligence into all their policies and have a policy for due diligence that describes the company’s approach, contains a code of conduct for its employees and subsidiaries, and its due diligence process.

This must include verification of observation of the code of conduct and steps to extend its application to ‘established business relationships’. In terms of specific steps, companies must identify actual and potential adverse impacts; prevent potential adverse impacts; and bring actual impacts to an end (whether they were, or should have been, identified) or minimize impacts that cannot be stopped. In that context they should seek to obtain cascading by seeking contractual commitments from business partners in the value chain.

However, contrary to the UNGPs’ recommendations, there is no requirement that the company actively engages with business partners in its value chain to enhance due diligence cascading. Moreover, the provisions on involving potential or actual victims (‘affected stakeholders’) meaningfully in the development of prevention action plans, let alone the identification and redress of risks and impacts, lags behind the UNGPs.

In line with the UNGPs and OECD Guidelines, ceasing business relationships is not considered the first option. Rather, collaboration should be sought in order to advance better practices. If that is not possible, cessation a relationship may be appropriate.

Companies must also set up a complaints mechanism that can be used by affected individuals, trade unions and civil society organisations. Moreover, companies must regularly monitor their operations and due diligence processes, those of their subsidiaries and ‘established business relationships’ in the relevant value chain. They must also regularly report on these non-financial issues. 

Overall responsibility for the due diligence actions is charged on a company’s directors as part of their duty of care.

Enforcement: administrative and civil liability

Companies’ compliance will be monitored by authorities in each EU country. They may request information from companies and carry out investigations based on complaints by individuals or organisations, or on their own initiative. They may impose interim measures to try to stop severe or irreparable harm, and sanctions for violations of the due diligence requirements.

Companies will not be entitled to public support if they have been issued with sanctions under the directive. 

Importantly, companies can be subject to civil liability for damages resulting from a failure to adequately prevent a potential harmful impact or bring an actual impact to an end. Civil liability means that victims (or in the terminology of the UNGPs and OECD Guidelines: ‘affected stakeholders’) must themselves sue the company. 

A step forward for accountability and victims – but multiple challenges remain

The institution of civil liability for third-country victims in front of courts in EU-based companies’ home states is clearly an advance in regard to establishing formal accountability. However, the complexities of the legal system, especially for those seeking damages through civil liability, can hardly be overestimated. This challenge has been absent from most discussions leading up to the current draft Directive.

By contrast to criminal courts, civil courts generally make judgments based on the ability of one party to convince the court of its arguments. Research has shown that formal civil liability regimes tend to favour those who have the legal knowledge resources to do so. A market based good, legal expertise can be very expensive. The better the record in obtaining results that a client wants, the higher the cost. This may cause a highly problematic discrepancy between the possibilities of victims/affected stakeholders and companies to argue their case. Even if some victims are able to be assisted by civil society organisations, their legal expertise for arguing a case in court, or their resources to obtain such expertise, will not necessarily match those of companies.

Moreover, the civil liability regime focuses on economic damages and compensation. Although that may be relevant in some cases, in others a sum of money does not adequately redress harm suffered. Indeed, the UNGPs emphazise that remedy can take many forms of which economic compensation is only one. 

Arguably, the draft Directive falls short of adequately considering the situation of victims in non-EU countries in regard to having not just formal but actual meaningful access to justice in front of courts. It presents an approach to remedy that does not necessarily fit the complex situations and limited resources of victims/affected stakeholders. It is to be hoped that as the draft will be negotiated and amended towards the version that may be adopted, this issue will gain further prominence.

Conclusion 

The draft directive is an important development towards ensuring that companies based or operating in the EU take steps to identify and manage their harmful impact on the environment and on human rights, and to provide accountability. Although the draft does not cover all EU-based companies, it does cover the largest ones, and large ones in the textile, renewable and non-renewable natural resource extraction, all of which are known to be high-problem sectors. However, the affected stakeholder engagement, remedy and accountability provisions of the draft display too limited understanding of the situation of victims/affected stakeholders.


About the Author

Karin Buhmann is Professor of Business and Human Rights at the department of Management, Society and Communication at CBS, as well as the Director of the Centre for Law, Sustainability and Justice at University of Southern Denmark. Her research and teaching focus on sustainability and responsible business conduct (RBC) with a particular emphasis on social issues, especially in climate change mitigation, business responsibilities for human rights, and sustainable finance.


Photo by Guillaume Périgois on Unsplash

How do we find the green elephant in the classroom?

By Lavinia Cristina Iosif-Lazar, Jens Riemer and Caroline A. Pontoppidan

“Environmental sustainability to be at the core of EU education and training systems” – So reads the latest recommendation from the European Commission to EU education ministers, which highlights that “learning for environmental sustainability is not yet a systemic feature of policy and practice in the EU.” How then do we better inform practice and policy? Where does one even start to look at what has already been achieved and what more needs to be done on environmental sustainability, especially in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs)?

Coupled with the complexities of incorporating sustainability in HEIs and the diversity of methods used by HEIs in advancing these efforts or curriculum  overhaul, the task of bringing about systemic change and reaching the targets set on climate mitigation and biodiversity can seem daunting. But this is where a good picture of where we are now and where we want to be, can make a difference. 

Global pollution of, among other things, air, soil, and water, increasing exploitation of the resources of the Earth, and global climate change are challenging nature, environment, and public health. Also, Denmark and the world are in the midst of a biodiversity crisis caused by man-made pollution and exploitation of natural resources and habitats, global spreading of invasive species, and climate change. The intensive exploitation of the open land, forests, coastal zones, and marine areas has caused nature to be fragmented and continuously exposed to a number of stress factors, which means that biodiversity is on a constant decline

(p.17)
The EU Context: broadly speaking, all education needs to be green

At the EU level, we do not lack initiatives that have brought into focus the greening of the curriculum and the need to address climate and environmenal issues at all levels of education and training. The European Education Area (EEA) is an initiative aimed at strengthened collaboration between European Union Member States to build more resilient and inclusive education and training systems. One of the five focus topics of the initiative centers on Green Education. GreenComp – The European Sustainability Competence Framework developed by the European Commission was one of the cornerstones in the educational scope of the European Green Deal. Published in January 2022 and aimed at providing a shared competence framework on sustainability to guide educators and learners, the framework can be used by member states as a reference when rolling out educational initiatives on sustainability. 

However, even with all the attention given to education initiatives, there is little  direct appealing to HEIs at the EU policy levelMost of the time, communication is directed towards the whole sector leaving the specific directionality of the initiatives to the individual Member States and HEIs are most often mentioned together with schools and other training institutions. The GreenComp report mentions Higher Education a few times but only to illustrate that Higher Education has succeeded in creating a focus on competences for environmental sustainability in relation to preparing the students to address sustainability challenges and opportunities in their working life.

The Danish Context: The Danish Ministry of Education and the Green Transition

In September 2020, the Ministry of Higher Education and Science, Denmark, published ‘Green solutions of the Future’, a strategy for investments in green research, technology, and innovation. It also highlighted the important role of close collaborations between knowledge-institutions and the business community. To get things moving, the Danish government decided to allocate research funds to boost green research and also bringing more focus on green study programmes.  

And the issue of what was happening in HEIs on  green research quickly became a focal point. In December 2021, the Danish Ministry for Education and Science sent a request for data on the work HEIs were doing to integrate green themes in educational programmes. The Ministry asked institutions to submit an overview of seven green themes and the coverage of those themes in their programmes. Among these themes, two were focused on energy production and effectiveness, and the others addressed agriculture, transport, environment, biodiversity and sustainable behaviour. 

The CBS Context: Green Themes in study programmes 

There are multiple ways in which HEIs can find out what content in their educational offerings addresses the green themes described by the Danish Ministry. The way in which CBS did it, was to build on already initiated course content analysis and expand it to include the seven themes. In the academic year 2021-2022, CBS offered 18 Bachelor (undergraduate) programmes, 36 Master (graduate) programmes, as well as HD, Executive and special Master programmes. This amounts to a lot of data to go through and analyse. Other universities or schools might face the same issue of data being both diverse and difficult to gather, but once it is gathered, the managing the amount of data can become a challenge. 

CBS used the qualitative research tool NVivo, to analyse and code data from courses in all CBS’study programmes. This was done by identifying specific key words related to the given seven green themes (see table below). The data collected was derived from study programme competency profiles, course descriptions and learning objectives. For every search result returned, the context was analysed and only relevant hits were then recorded in the respective codes. 

Theme 1Theme 2Theme 3Theme 4Theme 5Theme 6Theme 7
Energy productionEnergy effectivenessAgriculture and Food productionTransportEnvironment and Circular economyNature and BiodiversitySustainable behaviour and Societal consequences
How do Green Themes look like in a study programme at CBS?

Once the data was collected and the content analysed,  a relatively comprehensive picture emerged of how and where the green themes are present in a study programme at a European business school like CBS. 

Case 1 below, illustrates a visualization  of an anonymised bachelor programme. It presents how the seven green themes can be visualized so to give an “as is” picture. With this information, study programmes can dive deeper into the green content that they already have embedded in their programmes and/or identify that they are interested in additional integration of the seven environment themes into education.

Figure 1: Case 1 – Bachelor Study Programme A (BSc. A)

Bachelor Study Programme A had extensive coverage of Green Themes 5 through 7. The numbers in each cell of the below table represent the number of hits (keywords) per theme. Within the Bachelor Study Programme A, the green themes were identified in both mandatory and elective courses, in their respective course descriptions (CD) and learning objectives (LO). Environment and Circular economy, Sustainable development and Social consequences, as well as Nature and Biodiversity were the themes found represented in the Bachelor Study Programme A courses. 

The continuous loop: research, policy, strategy and the classroom 

The analysis and reporting of course content on green and environmental themes can function as a basis on which discussions about environmental sustainability in an institution’s educational activities can be taken. Getting this overview can inform further work to advance both content and scope that strengthens the advancement of environmental sustainability competences. These can later also find their way into regional strategies as well as inform policy makers at the International and European level. Having a well-informed stance on how, where and which environmental content and competencies HEI graduates obtain during their education can  highlight where efforts need to be targeted. This also means that HEIs become a part of the action on “greening” the curriculum and, in turn, can better inform policy makers and education initiatives.

The business school sector has much to build upon. Pioneering scholars have long focused on issues of the environment and sustainability. There has been a dramatic uptake in the last decade of attention to climate change by business scholars, encouraged by editorial statements and special issues in the leading journals in every one of our disciplines. In the classroom, these issues are increasingly being discussed in core and speciality courses, representing significant curricular shifts, and supported by our accrediting bodies

(Galdon et al., 2022)

To read the full report, please visit CBS PRME InFocus Report series: https://www.cbs.dk/viden-samfundet/indsatsomraader/principles-responsible-management-education/resources/prme-infocus-reports


References

Bianchi, G., Pisiotis, U. and Cabrera Giraldez, M., (2022). GreenComp: The European sustainability competence framework, Punie, Y. and Bacigalupo, M. editor(s), EUR 30955 EN, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg, 2022.

Danish Ministry of Higher Education and Science (2020). Green solutions of the future – Strategy for investments in green research, technology, and innovation.

Galdón, C., Haanaes, K., Halbheer, D., Howard-Grenville, J., Le Goulven, K., Rosenberg, M., Tufano, P. and Whitelaw, A. (2022) Business Schools Must Do More to Address the Climate Crisis.


About the Authors

Lavinia Cristina Iosif-Lazar is a project lead on Principles of Responsible Management Education at the CBS Teaching & Learning Department. Lavinia’s work centres on curriculum development, climate and carbon literacy and systemic thinking in management education, as well as assisting in the development of teaching materials. 

Jens Riemer is a Green Transformation Officer at Copenhagen Business School, within Executive Support and Communcations. Jens works with the cross-cutting strategic initiative Green Transition, which focus on bringing together key players in establishing an organizational frame and initiate concrete problem-based research and educational activities.

Caroline A. Pontoppidan, Associate Professor department of Accounting & Academic director CBS PRME. Her research often engages with the institutionalization of global standards into local context – and challenges herein.


Photo by Alex Lvrs on Unsplash

CBS Permahaven: A new campus chapter

By Isabel Fróes and Maribel Blasco

◦ 2 min read 

Sustainability – finding ways to walk the talk

We report here on a new campus initiative to create a permaculture garden on the CBS campus, opposite the Kilen building and very close to Fasanvej Metro Station. CBS owns a piece of fairly large plot of land here that is currently unused.  

A design workshop was held on 4th March, where different groups of participants (students, faculty, representatives from Frederiksberg municipality and others) worked collaboratively on a design for Permahaven.

‘Permaculture’ stands for ‘permanent agriculture’, a term coined by Tasmanian Bill Mollison in 1978.  He defined it as:

“The conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive systems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems. It is the harmonious integration of the landscape with people providing their food, energy, shelter and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way.” 

Permaculture offers a holistic framework for creating sustainable ways of living. It aims to integrate land, resources, people and the environment by maximizing beneficial relationships, observing, emulating and working with rather than against nature to enhance resilience, diversity, productivity and stability (Hopkins 2020; Permaculturenews.org 2020). Permaculture advocates three overarching ethics: earth care, people care, and fair share, and twelve design principles – the petals of the so-called ‘permaculture flower’ (see Figure below.

Permaculture Flower – The seven domains of permaculture action (https://permacultureprinciples.com/flower)

Ultimately, the goal is to foster responsible cultivation, production and consumption through a whole-systems approach. But permaculture is much more than that – increasingly, the concept is being applied beyond the field of agriculture to support and inspire more sustainable lifestyles, to improve mental health, sanitize consumption, and design livable, humane social systems (Blasco, forthcoming).

What can a permaculture garden bring to a business school? Regenerating learning through permaculture


More from the event


About the Authors

Isabel Fróes is a postdoc at MSC Department at Copenhagen Business School working in three EU projects (Cities-4-PeopleiPRODUCE and BECOOP). Isabel also has wide industry experience and has worked both as a user researcher and service design consultant for various companies in Denmark and internationally. For more detail please see her Linkedin profile.

Maribel Blasco is Associate Professor at MSC Department at CBS. Her research focuses on management learning and higher education, notably at business schools; as well as cross-cultural inquiry. She is interested in learning not only as the transfer of know-how and technical skills but also more broadly as a process of identity formation, acculturation and development of tacit abilities such as intercultural competences, ethical awareness and creativity and innovation.


Sustainable labour market integration: challenges and advancements in algorithmic profiling of jobseekers

By Clément Brébion and Janine Leschke

◦ 5 min read 

The number of countries that are using algorithms to profile jobseekers has been on the rise since the 1990s. Algorithmic profiling aims at identifying individuals with little counselling needs, and those for whom intensive counselling and active labour market policies (ALMP) are expected to have the largest returns. The ultimate goal is to target services and thereby expenditures towards the latter. In a dual context of budget constraints and of technological innovations (which makes it possible to build and analyse large register databases), profiling algorithms are increasingly seen as an important vehicle to identify and target those unemployed who are most likely to become long-term unemployed. In an EU-funded project, HECAT – Disruptive Technology Supporting Labour Market Decision Making, we question this consensus. The goal of the project is to go beyond state-of-the-art profiling tools and develop a tool that will allow jobseekers and counsellors to get a snapshot of their labour market situation and a better sense of their labour market options.

State-of-the-art statistical profiling tools carry important shortcomings. One of them relates to the outcome category when used for defining the profiling categories. Most profiling algorithms approach jobseekers’ needs for counselling and for training programs by measuring their likelihood to remain unemployed for more than 6 or sometimes, 12 months. Usually, any type and length of employment spell is counted as a successful exit from unemployment in these models. Research on the causes and consequences of long-term unemployment (LTU) is extensive and we know that an early identification of the jobseekers that are likely to fall into LTU to take action at the earliest stage possible is key.

However, the mere focus on exits towards any type of employment is problematic. On individual grounds first, it disregards the agency of the unemployed by ignoring her lived experience of unemployment and wishes and aspirations for future labour market integration. Second, such a focus on exits without job quality in focus, can also be dysfunctional and inefficient both from the perspective of the individual and the PES as unsustainable labour market integration is likely to lead to vicious circles where people circle between (short-term) employment and unemployment.

In order to address this shortcoming, in deliverable 2.1 of the HECAT project, we discuss the scope for using job quality information in profiling and job matching tools. We develop a list of 24 items covering 7 dimensions that we see important to take into account to meet SDG (sustainable development goal) 8 on decent jobs and economic growth [1]. We do so by drawing on established job quality indices (e.g. here and here).

By putting the quality of jobs in focus, such an approach provides a more complete and sustainable vision of the labour market to the unemployed and the job counsellors and thereby increase their agency.

As we outline in the deliverable there are a number of challenges with this approach. This includes the high complexity of multi-dimensional job quality indices in view of an efficient and usable counselling and visualisation tool as well as a lack of sufficiently detailed job quality indicators on the level of occupations or sectors.

As regards data protection and data privacy, profiling algorithms also carry the risk of being in conflict with the GDPR and the case law of the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the European Union. Importantly, these legal bases provide no ready-made ‘checklist’ as to which data can be used, nor which algorithms can be implemented. Impact assessment of algorithmic profiling or job matching tools based on algorithms must therefore take place on a case-by-case basis that takes into account the impact of the algorithm on the citizens. Governments most often disregard the need for these impact analyses and entire profiling algorithm are therefore at risk of being shut down, such as in the Austrian case in 2020.

Impact assessments should first stress the necessity of using privacy-violating profiling algorithms. This can be justified in order to comply with a legal obligation to which the public authority is subject or for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest. The proportionality and fairness of profiling algorithms must also be checked and ensured. Proportionality relates to whether the ends justify the means.

For instance, collecting and analysing data carries a cost, in terms of privacy, which must be compensated by clear gains in accuracy. One should therefore not feed the algorithm with variables that have little explanatory power. Fairness concerns imply that one should ensure that profiling algorithms are not discriminatory. This is not straightforward. Profiling algorithms classify the unemployed based on the typical behaviour observed among other jobseekers with similar characteristics. As a result, individuals from social groups that are traditionally the least attached to the labour market will be profiled as high-risk individual more often than the rest.

While this behaviour of profiling algorithms seems intuitive, research has found that among jobseekers who happen to quickly find a job, those from foreign origin are more likely to be misclassified as high-risk individuals ex-ante than natives.

The fairness condition therefore seems hard to meet for profiling algorithms. Last, profiling algorithms should only use data that is up to date and relevant and, importantly, one should ensure that jobseekers and PES counsellors who use the algorithm have a good understanding of its functioning and limitations. 

Whether or not the use of an algorithm is legal must be continually assessed before, during and after development and implementation. In a working paper based on deliverable 2.2 of the HECAT project, we therefore propose a model for designing algorithms to sum up these considerations. The model is circular in order to illustrate that the assessment should be continually updated.

A proposed model for designing algorithms 
Source: Working paper based on HECAT deliverable 2.2
“Working with not on the unemployed”

Given these shortcomings of state of the art profiling tools, our European project HECAT puts the unemployed persons and their aspirations and needs centre-stage. It aims at building a sustainable digital platform “My Labour Market” which provides both information on the estimated length of time before one exits the unemployment record and a visualisation of labour market opportunities according to one’s job quality preferences. This digital platform, to be piloted at the Public Employment Services in Slovenia, builds on extensive sociological fieldwork on unemployed persons and case workers. This tool will not sort jobseekers into profiling groups associated with specific services and labour market measures. Instead, we believe that well-informed jobseekers will make the best choices for themselves.


[1] The dimensions are: pay and other rewards, intrinsic characteristics of work, terms of employment, health and safety, work-life balance, representation and voice, distance to work.


Further readings

HECAT, deliverables 2.1: https://hecat.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Deliverable_2_1_final-2.pdf

HECAT, Deliverable 2.2: https://hecat.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Deliverable-2.2-v.7-RR_final.pdf


About the Authors

Clément Brébion, postdoctoral researcher, received his PhD in economics in November 2019 from the Paris School of Economics. His main research interests are labour economics, economics of education and industrial relations. He has a particular interest into comparative research. More recently, he started working on the EU H2020 project HECAT that aims at developing and piloting an ethical algorithm and platform for use by PES and jobseekers.

Janine Leschke, political scientist, is prof MSO in comparative labour market analysis. Her research interests comprise issues such atypical work, job quality, labour mobility and migration, youth unemployment, as well as gender. She is currently the Danish lead partner in the Horizon 2020 project HECAT, participant in EuSocialCit and one of the editors of Journal of European Social Policy.


Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash

Do Tourists Like Nudges?

By Elizabeth Cooper

◦ 4 min read 

Nudges have been successfully implemented in various social settings, as a method of guiding people’s decisions in certain directions whilst maintaining their freedom of choice. A number of studies have found high levels of support for nudges across different cultures. However, the context of tourism brings with it some complexities that might make nudging tourists in particular both more challenging and less acceptable.

The “context of tourism” is, of course, not a distinct or objective place or time. Tourism as a practice is in many cases intertwined with the everyday lives of others, so the same nudges that we are exposed to in our local supermarket may also be encountered by a tourist who is visiting our town for the weekend. What defines the tourism context in terms of nudging, therefore, is that the nudge is specifically targeted at people who are on holiday. 

However, existing research suggests that it may be harder to nudge people when they are on holiday than when they are in their everyday contexts, for two main reasons:

  1. We behave differently on holiday than we do at home. We tend to see holidays as an escape from everyday life, and a context in which we deserve to indulge our bad habits without feeling guilty. Complying with a nudge should, by definition, not reduce the consumer’s pleasure – as a result, it is challenging to design acceptable nudges in a hedonistic context like tourism, in which pleasure takes priority. 
  2. We can be less inclined to do things for people we feel different to. While many nudges in our everyday lives are designed to guide us towards choices that are beneficial to ourselves (such as making healthier food choices, or encouraging us to save more of our paycheck), nudges targeted at tourists are often focused on the welfare of groups of people (often host communities) who can feel distant. Existing research in psychology has argued that we are more likely to connect with and feel empathy for others if we perceive similarities between us and them. This can make tourism settings unfavourable for nudging, since many people actively seek to experience difference when they plan a holiday.

Studies on nudging acceptance in general have consistently found that people tend to prefer ‘System 2’ nudges over ‘System 1’ nudges. System 2 nudges are more transparent and require more cognitive effort (for example, providing a hotel guest with information about the environmental impact of their stay). System 1 nudges tend to play on our intuitions and subconscious cognitive processes (for example, including carbon offsetting as a default in a flight purchase, so that customers have to opt out of it rather than in). There are not yet any studies on approval of nudges among tourists, but we can look at which kinds of nudges have been tested on tourists already, and how successful they are.

Some Examples of System 1 Nudges in Tourism
  • Commitment Signalling: In an experiment by Baca-Motes et al. (2012), hotel guests were asked upon check-in to make a commitment to reusing their towels, and then to wear a publicly visible pin indicating this commitment. This increased towel reuse in the hotel by 40%.
  • Providing Feedback: Pereira-Doel et al. (2019) found that inserting an AI display in hotel showers showing the duration of running water during each shower was effective in reducing guests’ water usage.
  • Changing defaults: Kallbekken and Sælen (2013) reduced food waste at a hotel buffet by 20%, simply by making the plates smaller. 
Some Examples of System 2 Nudges in Tourism
  • Increasing pleasure: Some scholars have argued that a hedonic context such as tourism requires more tangible benefits to achieve behaviour change. As a result, a few studies have experimented with nudges that are designed to increase pleasure for the tourist, while simultaneously promoting a desired behaviour. Dolnicar et al. (2019) found it much more effective to offer hotel guests a free drink if they opted out of room cleaning, than to appeal to their pro-environmental values by disclosing information about the environmental impact of room cleaning. Similarly, Dolnicar et al. (2020) managed to reduce plate waste by 34% at a seaside resort, by allowing families to collect stamps every time they did not generate plate waste at dinner. If they collected a stamp for every day of their stay, they could exchange the stamps for a small prize at check-out.

Although these kinds of nudges are ideal for a tourism context, given they increase the pleasure of the tourism experience and are also more likely to be approved of, they require more effort on the part of the tourism business. The tourism sector in many countries is dominated by SMEs, which often lack the resources required to implement nudges like this, even though they want to run a sustainable business. There is certainly a need for further research which works towards developing nudges which a) encourage behaviour that is beneficial for the planet and for host communities, b) are approved of by tourists, and c) are not burdensome for small tourism businesses to implement.


Further reading

Dolnicar, S., 2020. Designing for more environmentally friendly tourismAnnals of Tourism Research.

Juvan, E. and Dolnicar, S., 2014. The attitude–behaviour gap in sustainable tourismAnnals of tourism research.

Reisch, L. A., & Sunstein, C. R. (2016). Do Europeans like nudges?Judgment and Decision making.

Sunstein, C.R., 2016. Do people like nudgesAdmin. L. Rev.

Sunstein, C. R., Reisch, L. A., & Kaiser, M. (2019). Trusting nudges? Lessons from an international survey. Journal of European Public Policy.

Viglia, G. and Dolnicar, S., 2020. A review of experiments in tourism and hospitalityAnnals of Tourism Research.


About the Author

Elizabeth Cooper is a PhD Fellow at Copenhagen Business School, within the Department of Management, Society and Communication. Her research aims to link the fields of behavioural science and tourism, by experimenting with strategies to ‘nudge’ cruise tourists into behaving in more sustainable ways, specifically in the ports of Greenland.


Photo by Elizeu Dias on Unsplash

How Should Arctic Drilling Be Defined? The 3 Key Problems with Formulating Investment Exclusions

By Zuzanna Lewandowska and Dr. Kristjan Jespersen

◦ 7 min read 

Oil and gas development in the Arctic has long been a subject of controversies, due to the vulnerability and pristineness of the arctic ecosystem, as well as the challenges that the region faces because of climate change. In the light of growing pressure from stakeholders, legislators, and the public, an increasing number of banks, insurers, and investors have been committing to restricting financing of arctic drilling. Typically, this is addressed by formally excluding the funding of oil and gas development in the Arctic from the firm’s investment universe. 

However, several key issues with the current formulations of financial actors’ investment exclusions, make the restrictions potentially ineffective in curbing oil and gas expansion in the Arctic. Firstly, the exclusions typically apply only to financing and coverage, allowing for unrestricted provision of corporate support. Secondly, imprecise financial proxies are used to specify the activity levels at which an exclusion should be applied. For example, exclusions are often based on a revenue threshold, which does not cover early-stage exploration activities that typically do not generate revenue. Lastly, most restriction policies do not refer to a specific definition of the Arctic, which allows for the use of a case-by-case approach when making financing decisions. Where a definition of the Arctic is used, justification is rarely provided for why a specific exclusion zone had been chosen.  

Arctic restriction policies of 10 banks listed among the top supporters of arctic expansionists from 2016 to 2020 (Source: Reclaim Finance, 2021). 
Problem 1: How should the Arctic be defined?

Figure 1 below shows the geographic definitions of the Arctic which arctic restriction policies are most commonly based on. It is evident that they differ significantly in terms of scope. 

Definitions of the Arctic (Source: Nordregio, 2021). 

When choosing which definition of the Arctic to use in their exclusions, financial actors are presented with a difficult choice.

Selecting a wide-reaching exclusion zone, such as the arctic region monitored by the Arctic Monitoring Assessment Programme (AMAP), helps ensure that all assets located in the Arctic are covered. This said, however, such broad exclusions place investors at risk of missing out on profitable investments in ambiguous locations such as the Barents Sea, which has been argued to not be significantly different from the Norwegian sea in terms of oil spill response preparedness or ecosystem vulnerability. This dilemma becomes especially relevant in the context of asset managers’ fiduciary duty. 

At the same time, if the exclusion is based on a definition of the Arctic which is too narrow, the policy is rendered largely ineffective, as it fails to restrict the financing of arctic oil and gas projects which continue to have negative environmental and social impacts. Which definition of the Arctic should be used as basis of a restriction policy, needs to establish based on a nuanced understanding of the geographic distribution of material issues associated with oil and gas development in the area. 

Problem 2: Identifying the negative impacts of arctic drilling

To be able to argue for a targeted exclusion as part of a responsible investment policy, financial actors must credibly prove that the environmental and social impacts of a given activity are particularly dire. Indeed, the discussion is still ongoing as to what extent the documented harmful social and environmental processes in the Arctic can be categorized as by-products of arctic drilling, rather than as cumulative consequences of other activities.  

One of the most common environmental concerns regarding arctic drilling is that it contributes to the melting of the polar ice caps. However, research has found that while black carbon emissions from oil and gas exploration in the Arctic reduce the ice cover’s reflective properties, polar caps are primarily melting due to the increases in global temperatures. As such, one could argue that for an exclusion to significantly tackle the issue of polar ice cap melting, it should extend to investments in all fossil fuel developments worldwide. 

The negative environmental impacts which have been uniquely linked to arctic drilling (e.g., offshore oil spills, black carbon emissions, and biodiversity threats) are notably difficult to capture within a territorial exclusion zone. This is due to the lack of consistent data on their dynamically changing distribution. 

Black carbon emissions in arctic waters in 2015 (Source: ICCT, 2019). 

The issue with addressing the negative social impacts of arctic drilling (e.g., land conflicts, threats to food security) in an exclusion policy, is that similar issues are faced by local and indigenous populations in other vulnerable areas, where oil and gas extraction also takes place, and where investments are not subject to restrictions. Here, a notable example would be the Amazon. 

An additional complication results from the differing perspectives on arctic oil and gas development, with many local stakeholders crediting it with having improved infrastructure and employment opportunities in the region. 

Problem 3: A double materiality perspective – addressing the risks to oil and gas development operations in the Arctic 

From a risk management perspective, a comprehensive investment restriction policy should also account for the unique material risks to profitability of oil and gas projects in the Arctic, which make financing and coverage more volatile. This also falls in line with the double materiality approach to impact assessment. 

The most significant material risks to oil and gas operations which are distinctive to the Arctic are caused by permafrost thawing, sea ice and icebergs, and extreme weather conditions. Similarly to negative environmental impacts, the dynamic nature of these arctic risk factors makes them difficult to capture within a geographic exclusion zone.

The monthly arctic sea ice index for December 2021 (Source: National Snow & Ice Data Center).
What have we learned?

Based on the discussion of the complexities associated with arctic exclusions, it can be concluded that the weakness of key financial actors’ arctic policies is that they deploy ex ante investment restrictions as standalone policy solutions. Arguably, exclusions can be an effective instrument, but only as part of a comprehensive responsible investment strategy, which covers all stages of the investment process and addresses the extensive information needs regarding material issues. 

A well-formulated exclusion can help streamline the pre-investment negative screening process by filtering out investments which:

  1. Have been proven to be associated with unique material risks and negative impacts,
  2. Can be identified with high precision, accounting for the dynamic changes and complexities in the underlying material issues.  

Those of the material risks and impacts which cannot be captured in an exclusion policy should be addressed using other pre-investment (positive and negative screening, information requests and questionnaires) and post-investment (active ownership and thematic engagements) measures.

Such a nuanced approach to policy exclusions could provide a powerful responsible investment tool for financial actors in areas and sectors which require additional due diligence. 


About the Authors

Zuzanna Lewandowska is a student researcher in ESG and Sustainable Investments at Copenhagen Business School. She studies responsible investment strategies and the state of the art of measuring and reporting information on ESG factors. She has a background in international business and strategy, global market intelligence, and policy consulting.

Kristjan Jespersen is an Associate Professor at the Copenhagen Business School. He studies on the growing development and management of Ecosystem Services in developing countries. Within the field, Kristjan focuses his attention on the institutional legitimacy of such initiatives and the overall compensation tools used to ensure compliance.


Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Lobbying as if it mattered

By Dieter Zinnbauer

◦ 6 min read 

The corporate political activities of a business – let’s call them “lobbying” as a shorthand, although they comprise much more from public relations to political spending to sponsorship of thinktanks etc – have long played a rather minor role in discussions on corporate responsibilities. 

And this relative insignificance also converted into rather minimalist expectations about what responsible lobbying should look like: stay within the bounds of the law (i.e. in some jurisdictions, file some lobbying reports and do not hand out bribes); don’t lie egregiously, although puffery and other tricks of the trade are acceptable; and as some scholars in business ethics would cautiously add: don’t do anything that excludes others from contributing to the democratic discourse in an informed manner. 

In many ways this anodyne conception of responsible lobbying mirrors the equally thin conception of corporate responsibilities under the old shareholder-first-and-only paradigm that started and stopped with making profit bounded by legal compliance as the primary responsibility for business.

A growing mismatch

Such a close alignment is hardly surprising.  Yet while the broader expectations for corporate responsibility have substantively evolved and expanded since then, no such trajectory can be discerned for corporate political responsibilities. The former moved from negative responsibilities of don’t be evil to a growing set of capacious positive obligations of how companies ought to treat their various stakeholders and the environment. The latter – expectations for what constitutes responsible lobbying – appeared to largely remain stuck with this minimalist canon of obligations outlined above. True there have been some improvement at the margins, more reporting on political spending and lobbying and more ad-hoc pressure for taking sides on a small segment of social issues in some jurisdictions.  

But despite the best efforts of a small, dedicated band of good governance advocates the scope and urgency of public expectations on what responsible lobbying should look like have not budged much and certainly have not grown in line with broader corporate responsibilities. 

Enter the climate emergency

But things have changed dramatically over the last few years. Responsible lobbying is receiving much more attention in the policy debate and in academia and it is increasingly associated with a set of positive corporate obligations and much more stringent boundaries for which tactics are considered illegitimate. As I would argue, there is one principal engine that drives these much higher expectations for what responsible lobbying should entail: the climate crisis, the civilisational challenge to decarbonise the world economy and several dynamics that it has unleashed in the policy arena.

There is a growing recognition, for example, that what companies do in climate politics is at least as important and often more important than what  they do operationally to reduce their own carbon footprint. Then there is the emergence of a rapidly expanding climate governance and corporate accountability ecosystem whose tracking capabilities, incentive levers and accountability mechanisms dwarf anything that is available for governing lobbying in politics more conventionally. Unfortunately, there is not enough space here to elaborate on these and other such drivers. 

From projecting future aspirations to back-casting for present obligations

For the remainder of this blog I would like to suggest and focus on another, perhaps less obvious and more difficult to grasp contributing dynamic: a shifting normative corridor of what is considered responsible lobbying driven by the particular nature of the climate challenge. The argument goes like this:

Ever more precise climate science and the Paris Agreement to do what is necessary to reduce global heating to a 1.5 to 2 degrees rise to at least avert the most catastrophic scenarios provide a clearly defined, time-bound landing zone for policy action. The days of outright climate change denial are thus over. Seeding doubt about the facts of climate change or the decarbonisation goal has thus terminally shifted out of the Overton window of what constitutes acceptable viewpoints and (barely) tolerable public relations messaging. But more interestingly, things have not stopped here. The civilisational urgency of getting to net zero by 2050 leaves only a few years and a very narrow and rapidly narrowing corridor of necessary action options.

To oversimplify just a bit: responding to the climate crisis is by now more of an exercise of back-casting, deriving the necessary public and corporate policy action from what must be achieved, rather than an open-ended experimentation space guided by a rough compass for direction of travel.

We are by now so short of time and so clear-sighted about the science that we basically know what fossil assets must stay in the ground, what infrastructures need to be blitz-scaled etc. This clarity of goal and techno-economic pathway also means that most not-so-good-faith lobbying tactics aimed to stall, distract, or opportunistically suggest some costly detours are much easier to spot and call out – than would be the case if the option space was still more open.  The normal-times policy deliberation on what business could be imagined doing to help us move towards a desirable future has morphed into a policy imperative for what business must and must not do by when to help achieve net zero by 2050.[1]

Attesting to these dynamics, for example are the emergence of reporting frameworks, assessment exercises, shareholder action and CEO commitments that judge or design a company’s lobbying efforts against scientifically derived necessary policy actions for decarbonizing by 2050. But perhaps even more emblematic for the rising expectations for responsible lobbying is the action plan that one of the leading global PR agencies working for fossil fuel interests has been forced to put forward very recently amidst intense public pressure, including from its own employees. Here some excerpts:

  • Put science and facts first. We seek a better-informed public on climate issues so that we enable swift and equitable action. We will ONLY be led by the science and base our work on objective, factual and substantiated data.
  • We will establish and publicize science and values-based criteria for engagement with clients. This goes farther than our principle of not accepting work from those who aim to deny climate change. We will not take on any work that maintains the status quo, or is focused on delaying progress towards a net-zero carbon future. We will support companies that are committed to the Paris Agreement and transparent in reporting their progress in accelerating their transition to net-zero emissions. 
  • Hold ourselves accountable. We hold ourselves and our clients accountable to continual progress, with transparency on results through regular reporting.

A PR maestro engaging in PR spin for managing its own PR crisis? Perhaps. But there are enough concrete actions included that makes it worthwhile to track this and hold the company up to its commitments.  

And such a forced response by a world-leading PR company clearly demonstrates that expectations for responsible lobbying against the backdrop of the climate crisis, have rapidly matured from compliance and do no outright evil to a concrete set of positive obligations against which political footprint of companies and their service providers can be evaluated.

The ingenuity required to get us to net-zero is 20% technical and 80% political of how to incentivize, mobilize for and administer a just, legitimate transition. 

This outmost importance of climate politics and policy-making combined with the outsize role that businesses and their associations play in this space as the best-resourced and most influential interest group, clearly highlight that responsible lobbying as a set of substantive, positive obligations is an essential piece of the puzzle in solving this civilisational challenge. And my bet is that things will not stop here: higher expectations for responsible lobbying on climate issues are likely to lift all boats over time and translate into higher expectations for how business ought to behave in the political sphere more broadly. 


[1] There remain of course a number of important unresolved policy choices with regard to carbon capture, geo-engineering, bridging fuels etc. but the overall option space and available policy pathways are by now much narrower than two decades ago or relative to many other big policy challenges.


About the Author

Dieter Zinnbauer is a Marie-Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at CBS’ Department of Management, Society and Communication. His CBS research focuses on business as political actor in the context of big data, populism and “corporate purpose fatigue”.


Photo by Tania Malréchauffé on Unsplash

Are sustainable and healthy diets always compatible? Needs for an emic-oriented cultural research on sustainable consumption

By Fumiko Kano Glückstad

◦ 6 min read 

It is widely acknowledged that a plant-based diet is healthier than an animal-based diet (Willett, et al. 2019). However, a group of Japanese researchers recently published a thought-provoking article demonstrating that a lower diet-related Greenhouse gas emission (GHGE) has generally resulted in an inadequate nutrient intake among Japanese adults (Sugimoto et al. 2020).

Their results seem to support the fact that the Japanese Government has excluded any dietary-related initiatives from its long-term national strategies concerning the targeted 80% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. In other words, Japanese opinion leaders seem to challenge the generally accepted viewpoint of a direct positive correlation between a sustainable diet and a healthy diet, contradicting widely accepted European studies and initiatives (e.g. Sjörs et al. 2017). This apparent controversial observation motivated me to look into the historical development of meat consumption on a global scale. Most importantly, the recently published guiding principles by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and World Health Organization (WHO) in 2019 state that “Sustainable Healthy Diets” are a trade-off between the two dimensions: sustainability and healthiness of diets. Thus, countries should decide on such trade-offs in consideration with their situation and goals (FAO & WHO, 2019). 

The following figure indicates such a trade-off situation for various geographical regions and it clearly shows that the meat consumption in Western countries is obviously higher than the rest of the world such as compared to e.g., Africa or Asia, although a substantial increase of meat consumption is observed in both China and Japan.

In particular, the main increases observed in China and Japan seem to be well-synchronized with the periods of their respective economic developments that simultaneously triggered their modernization (Westernization) process in their markets. However, the curves of Japanese and Chinese meat consumption also show a noticeable difference. Whereas the meat consumption in China has steeply increased since the 1980es, Japan seems to moderate its increase from the early 1990es and ahead, which is most likely explained by their respective economic developments. However, in this blog, I want to supplement these observations with some personal insights on what has happened in Japan during this period through my work experiences in the related industry.

Meat consumption in this blog refers to the average supply of meat across the population shown in this figure. Food supply is defined as food accessible for human consumption meaning the food remaining for human use after deduction of all non-food utilizations. Source: Our World in Data https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/meat-supply-per-person

During the Japanese bubble economy in the 1980es to the early 1990es, the Japanese middle class had increasingly wider opportunities to be exposed to the Western food culture due to their Westernization. This somewhat alarmed key Japanese health professionals, nutritionists, food experts and industries who considered a ”Western lifestyle and food culture” as a source of lifestyle-related chronic diseases e.g., diabetes 2 and cardiovascular issues, which would gradually impact Japanese consumers.

This subsequently triggered a countless number of initiatives aimed to nudge a wide range of the population towards a healthier diet. The initiatives were eventually formalized as a Health Promotion Act in 2002 and the Basic Law on “Shokuiku (food and nutrition education)” in 2005 by the Japanese government (MAFF, 2019).

Source: Ministry of Agriculture Forestry and Fisheries. 2019. “A Guide to Shokuiku.” https://www.maff.go.jp/j/syokuiku/guide/pdf/00_en_guide.pdf

The Shokuiku act has since become a comprehensive program targeting everyone from school children to the elderly, and its initiatives have involved a broad range of Japanese stakeholders, not only the central and local governments, health professionals and nutritionists but also food and restaurant businesses and their consumers.

The Shokuiku program has promoted the nutritional education from a holistic viewpoint and emphasized the importance of enjoying healthy meals from societal and cultural perspectives through various sensory food experiences. As a consumer researcher in the 1990es in one of Japan’s largest high-tech companies producing various kitchen appliances, I also personally participated in a variety of initiatives involving consumer organizations, health professionals, nutritionists and food and restaurant businesses to nudge consumers towards a healthy diet at that time. 

In a European context, nudging consumers towards a sustainable and healthy diet usually implies the replacement of an animal-based diet with a plant-based diet with emphasis on ingredients. One major difference to the Japanese nudging initiatives is that the Shokuiku promotion has encouraged consumers to learn how to select “nutritionally balanced meals” in their daily life while enjoying variations in sensory food experiences. Consumers have many ways to achieve this by following the “Japanese food guide spinning top” that can be easily followed by a wide range of population groups, i.e. from school children to the elderly (see the below picture). The maintenance of a moderate meat consumption level observed from the Japanese curve in the above figure might be partially attributed to such ‘enjoyable’ Shokuiku initiatives (see Yoneda, 2019).

Japan has been able to moderate its overall meat consumption without specific promotions of plant-based diets also thanks to the traditional Japanese food culture that is originally rooted in a plant-rich diet. Thus, in a Japanese context, it is perceived possible to achieve a well-balanced diet while simultaneously enjoying variations in sensory food experiences, in other words, nudging a healthy diet can be perceived as an enjoyable experience. Interestingly, Kanemoto et al. (2019) recently reported that meat consumption only weakly explains the difference between high- and low food carbon footprints (FCF) among 60,000 Japanese households. This study ponders that Japanese should (also) consider restricting their consumption in other areas than meat consumption with a higher estimated FCF such as restaurant foods, confectionary and alcohol. 

Source: Ministry of Agriculture Forestry and Fisheries. 2019. “A Guide to Shokuiku.” https://www.maff.go.jp/j/syokuiku/guide/pdf/00_en_guide.pdf

These observed trends indicate the importance of fully understanding social, cultural and dietary contexts in various countries and regions when researching on sustainable food consumption because food is inherently deeply rooted in the specific cultures. In other words, sustainable consumption studies should ideally shed more light on an emic approach addressing a specific sample of that region and discuss adaptability of such studies to countries outside of the specific region with due respect of the embedded cultural contexts. 


About the Author:

Fumiko Kano Glückstad is Associate Professor of Cross-Cultural Cognition at the Copenhagen Business School. She works in the area of cross-cultural psychology and her recent project “iBeauty” funded by the third largest Japanese cosmetic company investigates associations between personal values, beauty and well-being in cross-cultural contexts. She previously worked as a consumer researcher and product concept designer of kitchen appliances at Panasonic Corporation, one of the largest Japanese electronics industry enterprises.

Negative Capability: Sustaining our discomfort towards a collectively responsible society

By Tali Padan

◦ 3 min read 

In my PhD studies, I work with a different type of sustainability. Not the sustainability of carbon footprints or systemic transformations but a sustainability of reflection. How we do keep ourselves in continuous reflexive dialogue (with ourselves and others) so that we don’t prematurely reach conceptual closure, stagnating in our own comfort?  

Maybe comfort is sustainability’s biggest threat. 

I say this considering the many years I’ve lived in the US, after a few formative years in Israel. Comfort is the reason my mom uses paper towels in lieu of regular towels in the kitchen, and the reason my dad cannot stand critics of Israel. Comfort is identity. It is plastic. It is the reason I throw away the whole moldy cream cheese instead of washing and separating. It is why it is easier not to participate in big group meetings. This blog post itself is a distraction from the discomfort that Chapter 5 of my PhD dissertation brings. 

When this comfort is shaken up, there are many ways of trying to get there again – avoiding, rejecting, resisting – and in the case of global shakeups like the Covid pandemic, the talk about ‘getting back to normal’. But what if we were able to maintain a state of uncertainty, of not knowing what the solution is or how to get there. And rather than spending energy trying, we settle into the unsettlement, letting it stir up the hurricane of trapped emotions and meeting visitors we thought we buried years ago? This is what the poet John Keats called ‘negative capability’, the ability to be in uncertainties, mysteries and doubts ‘without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’.

 What if that ‘irritable reaching’ was in reality counterproductive towards our individual and therefore collective growth? 

Here comes the ‘don’t get me wrong’ section. I am not suggesting we linger in the dissonance until the glaciers drown us. Nor that we use this approach as an excuse not to try, or ironically – get so comfortable with the discomfort that we disengage from any responsibility. But that we let each shake-up sufficiently run its course so that our demons can be faced, both individually and collectively.  

In the elective course that I teach for third year Bachelor’s students, this is what we practice. First, and maybe most importantly, we sit in a circle. The circle grounds us in our fundamental equality and triggers us to explore our many inequalities. The class engages in a series of activities dealing with democracy, using an Israeli democracy education method called ‘Betzavta’ (Hebrew for ‘togetherness’). Betzavta, developed in the Adam Institute in Israel, integrates and emphasizes dilemmas and conflicts in order to experientially learn how to live with others in a democratic society. Each activity in the method includes reflecting on the result of the activity but also on the process. By shifting the reflection towards process, students are provoked to examine their own dynamics. Subconscious assumptions and habits can then be revealed and questioned.  

It is by no means an easy process. As one student succinctly put it in the final evaluation: 

“I thought that the whole thing was very good, good questions, good topics, good dialogue. But man, did it suck. It was horrible actually. But very cool.” 

The ‘horrible’ part that this student is referring to could range from the discomfort of conflicting opinions to the tension of judgement, and the palpable, heavy silence that can be felt when students hold back from sharing these tensions. The good part, as I perceive it from the facilitator’s chair, is that these tensions are exposed, felt and explored, and subsequently used towards a reflexive type of learning. Lingering in these tensions cultivates our negative capability and is the doorway towards this learning. 

The class represents a miniature society. When going through such an experience, students start to naturally move away from an exaggerated individuality and become more considerate towards the collective. By exposing and sharing the more difficult emotions we usually avoid – anger, irritation, overwhelm, anxiety, boredom – students get the opportunity to practice living together more genuinely, modeling the society most of us wish to see in the world. Lingering in these emotions requires being negatively capable because the habit is to seek comfort, stability, a pleasant state of mind. In this way, the ‘negative’ in negative capability does not refer to what is undesirable but rather an absence, the absence of habit, identity, or ideology. It means having the ability to stay in uncertainty without resorting to previous knowledge structures or beliefs. It’s in the letting go, entering the vulnerable home of the unknown, where thought is not there to fragment and give birth to anxiety, that we may connect with each other more genuinely. This, in my view, is a sustainable practice that could benefit us individually and therefore collectively. 


About the Author

Tali Padan is currently in the final year of her PhD at CBS, writing about experiential learning techniques in the business classroom. As a facilitator and researcher, Tali is interested in how purposeful experiences of dissonance can contribute to learning. She is from Israel/USA and has lived in Denmark for ten years. 

To stay or to go: Corporate complicity in human rights abuses after the coup d’état in Myanmar

By Verena Girschik & Htwe Htwe Thein

◦ 2 min read 

Foreign investors in Myanmar have come under increasingly intense pressure to cut ties with the Myanmar military since the military coup on 1st February 2021. Immediately after the coup, Japan’s Kirin Beer announced its decision to cut ties with its joint venture partner MEHL, i.e. the commercial arm of the military. However, fellow investors did not immediately follow Kirin’s withdrawal. Instead, they appeared to be treading water to rid out the storm. 

Myanmar had been undergoing democratic transition since 2011, promising developments and luring investors’ interests as the last frontier of the Southeast Asian market. Indeed, the democratic transition had pathed the way for economic and developmental achievements, attracted investments in several sectors such as garment manufacturing. Yet then the military took back power, among others to secure its economic interests.

Governments and civil society in their home countries have been calling on companies to act responsible and not to do business with the military. 

The pressure on companies who had been sourcing from Myanmar, including popular fashion brands like H&M and Bestseller, has been mounting. H&M and Bestseller did respond to the call and did suspend their orders from Myanmar before deciding to resume orders in May. Several foreign investors have withdrawn as the military’s attack on the civilians intensified and the international community stepped up their sanctions regime. The latest step was the refusal of the ASEAN not to invite the military leader Senior General Min Aung Hlaing to the summit in October 2021. 

But is leaving the country really “the right thing to do”?

Companies who stay support the military in one way or another, for example by paying taxes directly to the military or paying rent or other fees to one of the military conglomerates (MEHL). Such payments from corporate investors provide a financial lifeline to the continuation of the military rule, hence, funding is a very important aspect of this dilemma for foreign investors and policy makers alike. The governments of the U.S., UK, Canada, the European Union have imposed sanctions targeting military interests. However, those sanctions so far have fallen short of targeting it where it would really hurt the military, in particular in the oil and gas sector that provides a lot of revenue. To weaken the military’s financial lifeline, the shadow government and activists have been calling for companies to stop all kinds of payments to the military. Inside the country, boycotts of military intestates have intensified. For instance, householders have been participating in an electricity bill boycott, thus using the withdrawal of this kind of support as a form of resistance. Not surprisingly, many companies have by now decided to pull out. 

Yet while leaving the country ceases support to the military, it also entails that companies no longer provide goods and services (including essential services) and support to the workers and civil society (e.g. Telenor;  Germany’s food retailer Metro. Companies have been supporting workers by sustaining safe workplaces, thereby securing workers’ incomes and stability.  What is more, their support has enabled and sustained social movements. For example, women union leaders in the garment industry have been a driving force in anti-military protests. 

Given the severity of human rights violations by the military, companies ought not to continue business as usual. Only by leaving can they cut all ties with the military and avert their complicity in atrocious human rights abuses. But by leaving, they also cease support to their most vulnerable stakeholders. The impact on the social contributions (via CSR) and Myanmar civil society, especially their workers, might be devastating. 


About the Authors

Verena Girschik is Assistant Professor of CSR, Communication, and Organization at Copenhagen Business School (Denmark). She adopts a communicative institutionalist perspective to understand how companies negotiate their roles and responsibilities, how they perform them, and with what consequences. Empirically, she is interested in activism in and around multinational companies and in business–humanitarian collaboration. Her research has been published in the Journal of Management Studies, Human Relations, Business & Society, and Critical Perspectives on International Business. She’s on Twitter: @verenacph

Htwe Htwe Thein is an Associate Professor in International Business at Curtin University, Australia. She is internationally known for her work on business and foreign investment in Myanmar and has published in leading journals including Journal of World Business, Journal of Industrial Relations, Journal of Contemporary Asia, International Journal of Cross-Cultural Management and Feminist Economics (and international publishers such as Cambridge University Press, Routledge and Sage). She is also well-known as a commentator in media and press on the Myanmar economy and developments since the military takeover on 1 February 2021.

“A Little Less Unsustainable Is Not the Same as Sustainable” – Why Including Fossil Gas and Nuclear Power Will Harm the EU Taxonomy

By Andreas Rasche 

◦ 3 min read 

The EU Taxonomy reflects a classification system that assesses whether certain economic activities are environmentally sustainable. Without doubt, the idea is a good one and the Taxonomy acts as a prerequisite for the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) to unfold their full potential. But: should fossil gas and nuclear power be included into the Taxonomy and hence count as environmentally sustainable? A leaked EU “non-paper seems to suggest exactly that… 

Including fossil gas and nuclear power will significantly harm the Taxonomy, both in terms of its perceived legitimacy but also in terms of its consistency with existing policy frameworks and regulations. I believe that there are three key points to consider: 

  1. Legal Inconsistency: Including fossil gas and nuclear power into the Taxonomy is likely to undercut the very regulation that the Taxonomy is based on. Article 10 of the Taxonomy Regulation (EU 2020/852) makes clear that an economic activity is considered sustainable if “that activity contributes substantially to the stabilisation of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere” (my emphasis); at least for fossil gas this is highly questionable. Although nuclear power is a low-carbon energy source, it is by no standards a safe alternative to renewables. In fact, it is a risky energy source, especially if we consider its entire life cycle. This is exactly why many investors see nuclear power as an exclusion criterion for sustainable finance products. When considering the entire life cycle of nuclear power, this energy source creates non-calculable risks vis-à-vis the Taxonomy’s environmental objectives (e.g., the protection of healthy ecosystems). For instance, the mining and processing of uranium has a questionable sustainability track record
  2. Policy Inconsistency: The EU itself suggested that to reach its goal to reduce emissions by 55% until 2030, there is need to cut 30% of the total consumption of fossil gas by 2030. However, including fossil gas into the Taxonomy will re-orient capital flows in a way that money is flowing into this sector (and not away from it). At the end, it is likely that this will lead to higher usage of fossil gas, much beyond the “transitional use” that the EU intends to establish. Further, a number of EU member states have pledged during COP26 to show “public support towards the clean energy transition and out of unabated fossil fuels.” This pledge does not seem well aligned with an inclusion of fossil gas into the Taxonomy. 
  3. Reduced Perceived Legitimacy: A factor that is less debated in the public, but still very relevant, is the reduced legitimacy of the Taxonomy. Although the Taxonomy, and linked regulations like SFDR, imply more work and a certain “bureaucratic burden” for financial market participants, many market actors have welcomed the new regulations. They increase transparency, make greenwashing harder, and hence have the power to re-orient capital flows into sustainable economic activities. Including fossil gas and nuclear power into the Taxonomy, endangers this legitimacy. In fact, the Taxonomy may move “from hall of fame to wall of shame”, as the WWF recently suggested. 

At the heart of the problem, lies a misunderstanding, I think. The EU Taxonomy is supposed to single out those economic activities that have the potential to make a substantial contribution to reaching six environmental objectives. Just because an economic activity is a little less unsustainable than comparable activities, it is not ipso facto sustainable. Being less unsustainable is different from being sustainable. Put differently, just because nuclear may be “cleaner” than coal does not imply that the former contributes to sustainability. 

It is often argued that fossil gas and nuclear power need to be included into the Taxonomy as they are necessary “transitional activities”. I believe this claim is misleading: 

  • Focusing on “transitional activities” sets the bar very low for Europe’s ambitions Green Deal. Ursula von der Leyen called the Green Deal Europe’s “Man on the Moon” moment, pointing to its ambitious character. If contested energy sources like fossil gas and nuclear power become part of the Taxonomy, we have not put a man on the moon. Maybe, then, we have not even managed to let the rocket start… 
  • Excluding fossil gas and nuclear from the Taxonomy does not imply that these energy sources will vanish overnight. It simply means that they will not be considered a sustainable economic activity (like a number of other economic activities). 

It is time to take the Taxonomy seriously, otherwise we may slow down or even hinder the necessary green transition of Europe’s economy…


About the Author

Andreas Rasche is Professor of Business in Society and Associate Dean for the Full-Time MBA Program at Copenhagen Business School. More at: www.arasche.com


Photo by Frédéric Paulussen on Unsplash

Moving towards mandatory CSR – EU’s mandatory Human Rights Due Diligence proposal

By Johanna Jarvela

◦ 2 min read 

Last March European parliament gave a proposal to create mandatory Human Rights Due Diligence directive. The aim is to prevent human rights and environmental harm in a more efficient way, through regulation. The commission proposal is based on the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and has three core elements: firstly, companies should themselves assess the risks of human rights violations in their supply chains, secondly, take action together with the stakeholders to address identified threats, and lastly – and most importantly – offer a system for access to remedy for those whose rights have been violated.  The commission is expected to give their resolution on the matter before Christmas, though the decision has been delayed already few times.

The EU proposal can be seen as a part of a continuum towards more mandated forms of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Traditionally CSR has been defined as something voluntary that companies do in addition to the letter of law in response to stakeholder pressures and societal expectations. At the level of individual organisations this has meant providing societal good through philanthropy and partnerships with NGOs or avoiding harm by improving the sustainability of business operations. Also, a great number industry level voluntary standards have been invented to solve the environmental and labour issues in transnational supply chains (Fair trade and Forest Stewardship Council being good examples). 

However, the past 20 years of voluntary measures have not been able to eliminate human rights violations in business operations. Indeed, it seems that voluntariness works for inspiring collaboration and innovating for better world.

In situations of wrongdoing, exploitation, and harm, stronger frameworks are needed to hold organizations accountable and offer remedy to victims. 

The recent development towards more mandated forms of corporate responsibility, like the French Due Diligence reporting Act or the UK Modern Slavery act, can be seen as efforts to respond to the accountability deficit. In June this year Germany passed a HRDD law stipulating that companies must identify risks of human rights violations in their supply chains and also take countermeasures. Also, Norway passed a similar law that requires companies to conduct human rights and decent work due diligence. Similar issues have been discussed in most of European governments.

There are caveats in creating this type of regulation. It might lead to tick-the-box type of exercises without true consideration for the human rights risk, burden companies if not given enough time and guidance to adjust, and transparency reporting does not seem to be enough to change business behaviour. One of the most difficult, yet most important, area in developing the new binding standards is the pillar three of UNGP: Access to Remedy. This pillar tries to ensure that in cases of violations, the victims will have a channel to make claims and receive remedy. Whether it should be civil or administrative liability or whether there should be an ombudsman in each country receiving complaints or via whistleblowing is all still in the air. What is clear is that whatever the final design of well-functioning HRDD system requires inputs and cooperation from businesses, civil society, and governments alike. Companies know best their supply chains, but sometimes NGOs may be a useful counterpart for identifying the risks and setting up stakeholder consultations. Finally, governments should be final proofers of the system ensuring accountability and enforcement. 

While some industry associations have raised concerns about the new regulations and the ability of European companies to oversee operations elsewhere, companies also evaluate that the new EU directive might level the playing field and give them a new tool in managing supply chains. Indeed, it seems that we are moving towards regulated CSR not only within EU but globally. UN has launched an intergovernmental working group to prepare a binding treaty on Business and Human Rights, there is an initiative for  minimum global corporate tax and efforts to close tax havens. More and more reporting is expected by companies, not only as increasing ESG reports to shareholders but more and more also as part of the mandatory legal requirements. 

Societal expectations are one of the key drivers for CSR. According to the latest polls it seems that European citizens and consumers expect the companies to upkeep good human rights and environmental standards within their global supply chains. 


About the Author

Johanna Järvelä,  is a postdoc researcher at Copenhagen Business School and member of the advisory committee for Human Rights Due Diligence Law in Finland. Her research focuses on the interplay of public and private governance in natural resource extraction and she’s especially interested in exploring how steer private sector towards providing societal good. 


Photo by Lan Nguyen on Unsplash

Sustainable brands on Black Friday: What do consumers perceive as authentic?

By Nina Böntgen, Sara Derse and Meike Janssen

◦ 4 min read 

The fashion industry has repeatedly come under fire for its negative effects on the environment. With heightened attention towards the climate crisis and scandals highlighting the industry’s social shortcomings (Rana Plaza, 2013), more and more ‘native’ sustainable fashion brands have emerged. However, parallel, we witness a trend towards ever-increasing consumerism. Frequently, Black Friday is seen as the epitome of consumerism which raises the question: How do sustainable fashion brands approach the biggest shopping day of the year – Black Friday – and how do consumers perceive these campaigns?

We reviewed Black Friday Instagram posts by self-claimed sustainable fashion labels and found they can be conceptualized along two axes: (1) the level to which consumption is encouraged / discouraged, and (2) the degree of action taken by a brand to express its commitment to sustainability. This conceptualization accounts for existing societal marketing strategies, particularly Demarketing, Green Marketing, and Cause-related Marketing. On the one hand, the brand Raeburn closes its shops and urges consumers to use Black Friday to repair their clothing rather than buying new items (Demarketing). On the other hand, the brand People Tree promotes 30% off everything claiming that consumers should “add some green to [their] wardrobe” (Green Marketing). 

Business-as-usual, a revolution, or planet-saving purchases – what is actually authentic?

By interviewing 20 consumers, we found that they judge authenticity by inspecting various cues that are leveraged to identify authenticity drivers. For example, donating to WWF (Cause-related Marketing) yielded legitimacy for TwoThirds’ Black Friday campaign. Authenticity is a complex concept – it is multidimensional, subjective, dynamic and socially constructed. Multidimensionality implies that one cannot answer “what is authentic?” precisely; it is an interplay of different attributes. In our case, respondents described an advertisement as authentic when it was credible, relatable, congruent, original and/or impactful. Next, subjectivity means that what is authentic for one person is not necessarily authentic for another. Influential consumer characteristics are a person’s general scepticism towards advertising, level of environmental concern, and understanding of sustainability, resp. do we simply need less- or better/greener consumption to mitigate climate change?

“and it’s kind of a contradiction: ‘Please shop to help the planet’ and I think you can’t shop and help the planet at the same time. So less or no consumption is at all times the best option” (Consumer 1)

“you’re using capitalism to make the world a little bit better. And I think in my eyes, that’s a good strategy to go for” (Consumer 2)

Third, authenticity perceptions can change over time, for example upon new information. Last, authenticity does not exist as a stand-alone concept but is always sensitive to societal changes.

What does this imply for marketers of sustainable brands?

Black Friday is a dynamic context in which brands have to actively reflect on their communication strategy and respective consumer authenticity perceptions. Consequently, no communication strategy shows clear advantages or can be labeled ‘most authentic’. We advise brands to reflect on: 

  1. Their standpoint regarding Black Friday
  2. The needs of their target group
  3. The statement they want to make on Black Friday
  4. The tone they want to adopt in their campaign

Sustainable brands increasingly embrace creative ways to distance themselves from the traditional Black Friday, e.g. by closing shops, ‘selling rubbish’ or even raising prices. It remains unclear, however, whether these forms of brand activism reflect a brand’s honest opinion or are employed as a tool to stand out.

We also observe brands who are holding their customers responsible: on Black Friday 2020, Armed Angels let buyers choose between a higher discount or rainforest protection. After Black Friday, the brand revealed that the majority of their customers had chosen the higher discount, which raises the question: 

Can consumers be held responsible for making more mindful purchase decisions or is increased action by companies and governments needed? 

Upon stating its disappointment about the outcome, followers accused the brand of shaming their customers for choosing higher discounts. This translates to another relevant consideration for sustainable fashion labels – choosing the right tone. While radical messaging conveys urgency and appeals to environmentally concerned consumers, others feel opposed to it and, instead, want to be involved in dialogues. Again, this shows that when it comes to Black Friday, there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution – rather, brands should take time to think about their values and how they can make a meaningful difference on Black Friday 2021.

Throughout the interviews in our study, multiple consumers shared with us how they were inspired by campaigns of sustainable brands and respectively questioned their purchase decisions. This demonstrates that sustainable brands’ communications can actually exceed Black Friday and have lasting effects – not only on their brands’ perceived authenticity but also on our planet’s future.


About the Authors

Nina Böntgen is a recent graduate from MSc Brand and Communications Management program at Copenhagen Business School. Next to her studies, she was actively engaged as team lead and board member of oikos Copenhagen, a student initiative driving change towards greater sustainability. She’s happy to share further insights or engage in discussions on the post or the broader thesis (how sustainable brands navigate authenticity and greenwashing) via email (n.boentgen@web.de) or Linkedin.

Sara Derse is a recent graduate of the Msc Brand and Communications Management program at Copenhagen Business School. Fascinated by the topics of consumer psychology and purpose branding, she was involved in the sustainability-focused student initiative oikos as a Project Manager. She is happy to discuss her thesis (consumer perceptions of fashion brands with a purpose centred around sustainability) in further detail via email (saraderse@live.de) or Linkedin. 

Meike Janssen is Associate Professor for Sustainable Consumption and Behavioural Studies, CBS Sustainability, Copenhagen Business School. Her research focuses on consumer behaviour in the field of sustainable consumption, in particular on consumers’ decision-making processes related to sustainable products and the drivers of and barriers to sustainable product choices.


Photo by Ashkan Forouzani on Unsplash

Climate Change and Magical Thinking

By Steen Vallentin

◦ 7 min read 

COP26, the 26th UN Climate Change Conference, has just ended. It was supposed to be ‘the next big and significant one’: the great follow-up to COP21 five years ago, the outcome of which was the Paris Climate Agreement, the first binding international treaty on climate change. The global urgency regarding climate issues has certainly never been greater. 

Although COP26 has yielded some results and some progress has been made, it has been a disappointment to many, including the iconic and omnipresent Greta Thunberg, who was filmed chanting “you can shove your climate crisis up your a…” along with other demonstrators at a rally in Glasgow – and who summarized the accomplishments of COP26 in three words:

Blah blah blah.    

Looking at the Glasgow Climate Pact and its immediate reception, we are certainly, once again, witnessing a political willingness to attribute considerable significance to (non-binding) declarations of intent regarding (possible) future actions and to the mere mentioning of the 1,5°C temperature increase target and efforts to phase-down (not phase-out) the use of coal power and fossil fuel subsidies.    

In the absence of truly transformational commitments and progress, the espoused political belief in the power of words to move action can seem quite magical at times, indeed reflective of magical thinking. Certainly, there was nothing magical about the moderate public and civil society expectations of progress preceding COP26. We have to look elsewhere for the magic. We have to look inside the established political system, where magical thinking is at play in definitions of climate problems and solutions, and where it, in itself, constitutes a problem worth addressing.

What is Magical Thinking?

To begin with a definition, magical thinking refers to “the idea that you can influence the outcome of specific events by doing something that has no bearing on the circumstances”. It is a well-known phenomenon in the area of human health and disease. Children are known to practice it. 

However, in the area of climate change and sustainability it is the grownups, in particular politicians, that tend to have a proclivity for magic – with the younger generation seeking to expose the deficiency and unrealness of subsequent courses of action.

In relation to sustainability, magical thinking is a matter of believing that certain outcomes – decoupling of economic growth and GHG emissions, a zero carbon economy – can be achieved by means that, although they may have some bearing on circumstances, are insufficient and ultimately unfit for purpose (according to the best available scientific knowledge). 

Ends and Means: Strong and Weak Sustainability

One way to frame this problem, at the most general level, is to distinguish between strong and weak sustainability, as illustrated in the table below. 

– source: developed from Sjåfjell (2018)

While strong sustainability calls for radical and systemic change guided by a biocentric preoccupation with planetary boundaries, non-negotiable ecological limits and safe operating spaces, weak sustainability signifies a more pragmatic and incremental approach to change, maintaining an anthropocentric focus on development as (economic) growth, human needs and intergenerational equity. An important point being that urgent calls for action tend to draw on the repertoire of arguments provided by strong sustainability, whereas most solutions ultimately fall under the heading of weak sustainability. They are not radical, only incremental, and certainly pragmatic. 

The question is whether it is indeed an act of magical thinking to believe that we can accomplish strong sustainability ends by weak sustainability means. In other words, that we can reach the climate targets we need to reach, according to science, by way of incremental, small steps change – holding onto the growth paradigm, the business case and win-win. 

The Magic of Win-Win

Andrew A. King and Kenneth P. Pucker, in a recent piece in Stanford Social Innovation Review, speak of “the costs of magical thinking” in relation to the prevalence of the win-win (or triple-win) mindset and associated terms such as CSV (creating shared value). They talk about “strategies [that] rely on improbable mechanisms, promise implausible outcomes, and boast effectiveness that outstrips available evidence.” Strategies that “inflict harm because they distract the business world and society from making the difficult choices needed to address pressing social and environmental issues”. 

This begs the question: What is located on the other side of win-win? How can we escape its magical allure and the often exaggerated claims made in its name? Unfortunately, King & Pucker do not have much to say about this. They speak only of how: “It is time to turn away from alluring unproven strategies and refocus our efforts on those interventions that have proven effective – such as government regulation”.

It is not a terribly convincing argument. Government regulation in the age of man-made climate change is not so much an escape from win-win as it is an embodiment of win-win – and arguably needs to be. Sustainable development is not only about climate change and climate solutions – the social and economic pillar of sustainability need to be considered alongside the environmental pillar at all times. That is, questions of social justice and of what is economically feasible also need to be addressed.    

The European Green Deal as a Win-Win Scenario

The European Green Deal is, for better or worse, an illustrative example of this. The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has referred to the green transition as ‘Europe’s Man on the Moon Moment’. Nevertheless, the framing of the European Green Deal reads like a textbook case of win-win, and not a very advanced one at that. As you can read on the Green Deal webpage: “Making Europe climate-neutral and protecting our natural habitat will be good for people, planet and economy. No one will be left behind.” The Green Deal is Europe’s new growth strategy, it will help cut emissions while creating new jobs and, again, it will leave no one behind.

Speaking of private businesses, the arguments for going beyond win-win are quite straightforward. There are ethical issues and matters of responsibility that need to be addressed regardless of whether the company can derive any commercial benefit from it. However, in the political realm of multiple and competing interests and policy concerns it is more difficult to escape the clutches of win-win.

Imagine if von der Leyen would have said: “We need to make sacrifices in order for the green transition to happen. We need to slow down growth, it will cost jobs and we cannot guarantee that some people will not be worse off as a result’. It is a virtually unthinkable scenario. Not least because we know that it is the poorest and most vulnerable population groups that are bound to be worse off.   

The Magic of Danish Government Policy

That is to say, government as we know it does not represent a solution to the problem of widespread magical thinking about climate change and sustainability. It is very much part of the problem and there is no apparent escape. Not even for the most advanced nations in Europe. Let us take Denmark as an example. Denmark was just ranked 4th in the 2022 Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI). As the three top spots were left empty to signal that not a single country currently deserves a ‘Very high’ rating, Denmark is supposedly the leading country in the world measured on criteria regarding climate policy, renewable energy, energy use and GHG emissions. 

This is not to say, however, that Danish climate policy is bereft of magic. Quite the contrary. Dan Jørgensen, the Danish Minister for Climate, Energy and Utilities, has become famous for waving his own kind of somewhat oversized magic wand: ‘the hockey stick’. The hockey stick was originally used (by American climatologist and geophysicist Michael E. Mann) to illustrate temperature changes over time and the transition from the Holocene era (the long shaft) to the Anthropocene era (the short blade). There is nothing magical about this science-based graph.

However, the image of the hockey stick has in recent years been appropriated by management consultants and policy makers who are using it to serve instrumental and sometimes magical purposes. In the instrumentalized imagery, the bend between shaft and blade represents the (magical) moment of innovative/technological discovery, an inflection point allowing, ideally, for a transition from a period of inferior – ineffective, unsustainable – solutions (the shaft) to a period of superior solutions (the blade). 

Dan Jørgensen has been widely criticized for his espoused belief in a long shaft (gestation) period, that tends to become longer and longer and is so far marked by a lack of truly groundbreaking results and postponement of difficult decisions (particulary regarding implementation of a CO2 tax). On the one hand, the inflection point is continually moved further and further away. On the other, it is assumed that the magical moment of discovery and transformative change will happen in time for Denmark to be able to deliver on the Paris Climate Agreement and the even more ambitious Danish climate law. 

A concrete example of magic at work in Danish climate policy is the below image from the recent government action plan on green transition. Notice in particular the small miracle that is supposed to happen from 2029-2030, where all the technical reduction potentials on display somehow reach their target of zero. It seems magical. It is certainly not well explained in the action plan how this can come about – or why the reader should find this sort of technical forecast even remotely believable.

The Great Balancing Act: Magic and Reality

There is an upside and a downside to magical thinking and political talk and action that can be said to reflect magical thinking. Today’s magical ideas may turn out to be next year’s (or the next decade’s etc.) realistic solutions or courses of action. Magical thinking blends into notions of aspirational talk and aspirational policymaking, suggesting that lofty goals can help inspire, motivate and accelerate change processes. 

However, the downside is if magical belief in win-win solutions becomes a sort of self-imposed constraint or censorship standing in the way of open and honest discussions about the changes and sacrifices needed to make the green transition happen.

This can exacerbate accusations of greenwashing and create more public cynicism regarding climate policy and the willingness and ability of the political system to act proportionately. Magical ambitions needs to connect with harsh realities.


Further Reading

King, A.A. & Pucker, K.P. (2021). The Dangerous Allure of Win-Win StrategiesStanford Social Innovation Review, Winter. Online first.  

Sjåfjell, B. (2018). Redefining the Corporation for a Sustainable New EconomyJournal of Law and Society, 45(1), 29-45.


About the Author

Steen Vallentin is Academic Director of the CBS Sustainability Centre and Associate Professor in the Department of Management, Society and Communication at Copenhagen Business School. His research is centered on CSR as a social and political phenomenon in the broadest sense, increasingly with a focus on corporate sustainability, circular economy and business model transformation – along with the politics and aspirational aspects of sustainable development more broadly. 


Heading photo by Kristopher Roller on Unsplash.

Why we should not call for experts instead of experiments

By Jan Michael Bauer

◦ 3 min read 

The recent elections in Germany turned out as the historic loss for conservatives that pollsters have predicted a few weeks before. Responding to the declining poll numbers, the conservative party presented a “team for the future” consisting of several field experts that should help the candidate addressing the big challenges of the country. Their slogan was „Experts instead of experiments“. The message was clear: we know how to solve these issues and voting for another party would be an experiment and therefore risky. While this might appeal to a conservative base, I think this slogan sends a wrong if not hypocritical message.  

Framing an experiment as something uncertain and dangerous that should be avoided taints one of sciences most successful methods and obscures the undeniable level of uncertainty associated with policy decisions.

Even after acknowledging the turbulent times during Merkel’s legacy, remarkably little was done to address the challenges of the future. While some inaction might be attributed to a lack of courage or lobbying by special interests, it certainly constitutes the lack of obvious and simple solutions for the many problems the country is facing. 

The challenges we face are new and unpredicted in magnitude. While few would disagree with the need for action, there is disagreement about what needs to be done. Experts argue with each other, often struggle to persuade their colleagues, and remain unconvinced by the evidence that substantiates the oppositions claims. Fierce debates about the right course of action often overshadow a sad truth that in many cases no one is and really shouldn’t be sure that the proposed path will be the most successful one. Even more disheartening might be that even after the implementation of a policy, we often have a hard time qualifying if the intervention did more good than harm or quantifying these benefits. 

A fundamental problem, particularly economists try to resolve through (quasi-) experimental research methods to understand how a specific policy intervention works. Broadly speaking, they become experts because they do experiments. Pioneers in the study of causal relationships were recently awarded the Nobel Price. Among them David Card who is famous for a study on the effects of a higher minimum wage on employment exploiting a so-called natural experiment.  

Experimentation can help us to find out if our ideas and theories work in practice. They should increase our confidence in the people applying them rather than creating a fear of uncertainty.

Our knowledge that COVID vaccines are effective mostly relies on the result of randomized experimental trials. An approach increasingly used to answer questions in the social sciences. For instance, we don’t know how people will respond to universal basic income, which is why a three-year experimental study is currently on its way in Germany.

Pharmaceutical trials are also designed to show that potential drugs have no sever side-effects. While the necessity to ensure the safety of a drug is quite intuitive, the unintended consequences of non-medical products and services are less straight forward. For instance, social media has been suspected to inadvertently contribute to political polarization and erode democratic processes. While many of these claims are based on anecdotes, recent experimental studies from researchers outside Facebook have added hard evidence to the debate and conclude: 

Our results leave little doubt that Facebook provides large benefits for its users [but also] make clear that the downsides are real. We find that four weeks without Facebook improves subjective well-being and substantially reduces post-experiment demand, suggesting that forces such as addiction and projection bias may cause people to use Facebook [..] it also makes them less polarized by at least some measures, consistent with the concern that social media have played some role in the recent rise of polarization in the United States.

– Allcott, Hunt, Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer, and Matthew Gentzkow. 2020. “The Welfare Effects of Social Media.” American Economic Review, 110 (3): 629-76.

There are obvious differences between vaccines and a social media platform, and probably nobody would suggest that Facebook should have undergone a randomized safety study in the mid-2000s before going public. Such products and services develop over time and can be used in very different ways. However, despite these differences there is an open question about the potential side-effects and the burden of proof. To ensure a healthy society, it might be worth considering that at least with a reasonable initial suspicion of harm, also non-medical companies should be obligated to proof their products’ safety using a suitable experimental design.

There will remain many problems where experiments are unfeasible, and, as seen with the development of Facebook, even the results of the best experiment today might not be a valid description of tomorrow in an increasingly complex and dynamic world. Such a world, however, should also humble us and our experts but foster an acknowledgement that there are many questions for which we don’t know the answer. Hence, we should make use of the best scientific methods available to reduce this uncertainty, which ultimately means that we need more experiments and not less.  


About the Author

Jan Michael Bauer is Associate Professor at Copenhagen Business School and part of the Consumer & Behavioural Insights Group at CBS Sustainability. His research interests are in the fields of sustainability, consumer behavior and decision-making.


Photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash

How the EU Taxonomy Impacts Businesses Beyond Europe

By Andreas Rasche

 4 min read ◦

In 2020, the EU launched its classification system for environmentally sustainable economic activities, the so-called “EU Taxonomy Regulation” (hereafter: the Taxonomy). The Taxonomy is part of an integrated system of new EU-wide sustainability regulations, including new disclosure requirements for investors. While the Taxonomy is based on EU regulation, it can be expected that it will also have effects on businesses beyond Europe. 

Basically, there are two ways in which the Taxonomy can affect non-EU companies. First, there are direct regulatory effects on non-EU companies. Because of the global nature of financial markets and the existence of global trade flows, non-EU companies will be directly exposed to the Taxonomy in different ways. Secondly, there will also be more indirect consequences, which I call “ripple effects”. Such effects exist because the Taxonomy raises the bar globally for how sustainability information should be disclosed, by whom it should be disclosed, and it which ways it can be disclosed. I briefly discuss both effects. 

Direct Effects 

In the short run, some non-EU companies will be exposed to the Taxonomy because of direct regulatory effects. Consider the following two examples: 

  • A non-EU investor or financial advisor that wants to offer products on the European markets will be exposed to the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) which requires an alignment with the EU Taxonomy. To offer financial products on European markets non-EU investors will therefore have to align with SFDR and hence the Taxonomy.  
  • A non-EU company with EU-based investors is very likely to receive questions from these investors about the company’s alignment with the Taxonomy. Investors need this information to meet disclosure requirements under SFDR, for instance to classify their financial products in terms of their sustainability exposure. In other words, at least some non-EU companies will start disclosing more on Taxonomy-related indicators. 

I could list more examples here (e.g., non-EU asset managers wanting to raise money in the EU), but the message is clear: the effects of the Taxonomy are not limited to businesses located in Europe. Particularly, the Taxonomy’s interaction effects with SFDR will affected non-European companies as well as investors.  

Ripple Effects

Ripple effects are more indirect effects. They occur if an intervention, such as the introduction of a new regulation, creates further effects that reach beyond the system that was supposed to be influenced by the intervention. Such regulatory ripple effects can occur in different ways.

In the context of the Taxonomy, one important ripple effect is related to the practices of European businesses. Many of these businesses are global players, and they will apply the Taxonomy to their global operations regardless of whether these operations occur in a country that is legally covered by the Taxonomy. Sustainability reporting is usually done at the corporate level and therefore also includes firms’ non-European operations. The EU’s new disclosure regulation the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) will require that such reporting at the corporate level is taxonomy-aligned. In this way, European global players will “export” the Taxonomy to other parts of the world.

There are also ripple effects at the political level. The system of new EU legislation – including, the Taxonomy, SFDR, CSRD and other regulatory elements – is unique in the world. So far, no other region or country has a comparable system. However, the major economic regions in the world have also realized that future business will be difficult without sustainability-related regulations that enhance transparency and prevent greenwashing.

Consider two recent examples: In June 2021, the UK announced the creation of a Green Technical Advisory Group. This Group is supposed to develop and implement a UK green taxonomy, which is expected to be based in part on the EU Taxonomy system (e.g., in terms of metrics). In the US, President Biden signed Executive Order (EO) 14008 during his first days in The White House. While this EO does not aim at creating a US-based taxonomy, it has created a National Climate Task Force across different federal departments, which at least some see as an important step into the direction of more rigorous ESG-related regulation. 

Other countries and regions are likely to look to Europe when thinking about how to design a workable taxonomy regulation, as the challenges that have driven the creation of the EU Taxonomy are the same throughout the world: we need more transparency around sustainable economic activities, we need to better benchmark firms’ sustainable activities, and we we need to prevent greenwashing.

It is too early to say whether there will be convergence among the taxonomies developed by different countries and regions, but one thing is for sure: they are here to stay… 


About the Author

Andreas Rasche is Professor of Business in Society and Associate Dean for the Full-Time MBA Program at Copenhagen Business School. More at: www.arasche.com


Photo by Krzysztof Hepner on Unsplash

White People and the Animals they Love

Book Review of Saving Endangered Species: Lessons in Wildlife Conservation from Indianapolis Prize Winners

By Lisa Ann Richey

 6 min read ◦

This book review has first been published by Conservation and Society and can be also found at CBDS blog.

According to the press website, Saving Endangered Species has wide and diverse aims:  ‘to win new recruits, inspire biologists and conservationists already in the field, and illustrate the profession’s fundamental scientific tenets through wildlife champions’ own exciting narratives.’ Overall the purpose of the book is to present a moral imperative for a conservationist approach to saving nature and to do this through a collection of personal experiences from great conservationists about their love of nature and experiences from the day-to-day workings of conservation. Seven of the book’s contributors are winners of the Indianapolis Prize ‘the world’s leading award for animal conservation’ (p. 12) and one that prioritizes the inclusion of people as a ‘primary factor in the equation’ of conservation, and high levels of exposure in celebration of these ‘heroes and role models’ (p. 13).  

The book is stunning. It is an aesthetically beautiful edited volume from its entrancing animal photographs, skilled illustrations and colloquial snapshots of its famous contributors. And yet, for all its beauty, this book could have been titled, ‘White People and the Animals they Love.’

I start with my fundamental critique because for some readers, this will be all they need to hear to check this book off their ‘must read’ list. These readers, however, will be hard pressed to find other works of conservation biography that aren’t also easily critiqued for their class, racial, gender, and geographical elitism.

Also, a disclaimer, I am a social scientist who works in some of the policy spaces, ‘partnership’ imaginaries of business and helping, and geographical areas covered in this book. Thus, I am among the ‘to be inspired’ of the intended audience for this book. Additionally, the introduction, written by Dr. Robert W. Shumaker (evolutionary biologist, president and CEO of the Indianapolis Zoo) calls for ‘a more integrative approach in which the centrality of humans is recognized in the conservation agenda’ (p. 6). Thus, a review by a scholar of humans might be reasonably appropriate. 

In spite of the fact that the index does not include the term ‘celebrity,’ the book epitomizes what has come to be called ‘celebrity environmentalism’ (see Abidin, et. al 2020). The practice of scientists, film stars and social media influencers among others, who ‘enjoy public recognition, publicly support environmental causes, and benefits from their sustained public appearances’ as celebrity environmentalism may be a way of bringing new resources to conservation. 

The celebritized approach to conservation is clear from the Introduction’s start. While the reader might expect the star of this chapter to be the American Bison, named the official mammal of the United States in 2016, and depicted as a steadfast and grandiose being in the illustration that precedes the text, it is not. The star is the celebrity conservationist William T. Hornaday who initiated the first-ever zoo-based conservation effort as a result of his initial desire to provide a live bison model for better taxidermy (p.2). Thus, the scientific model for which the book collects a series of testimonies, is linked to the efforts of Hornaday. He was the director of the Bronx Zoo in 1906 when Ota Benga, a Mbuti man from Congo, was displayed in a cage in the monkey house. Hornaday wrote to the New York city mayor that ’When the history of the Zoological Park is written, this incident will form its most amusing passage.’  

Many people at that time, such as the Black clergyman Rev. James H. Gordon, were not amused. Many readers today will question the unambiguous celebration of these violent and dehumanizing roots of a movement intended to provide a moral approach to saving nature. 

Distinctions are signaled between the scientific authors and the celebrity environmentalists through engraving the masthead of every other page with a  ‘Dr.’ before the scientists, with other names presented title-less. Yet, these contributors are all performing the limited scripts of celebrity environmentalism: notably contributions enact specific tropes outlined by Abidin and her colleagues. We see contributions from the ‘Ambassador’ trope of high-profile performers who are patrons of NGOs and foundations, but whose personal commitment varies between superficial co-branding and long-term engagement. Quite prevalent is the ‘White Savior’ trope in which ‘wild places’ need to be saved from ‘locals’ through the actions of white people.  The book also highlights the ‘Activist Intellectual’ trope promoting cerebral and scientific reasons to support conservation, that then become celebritized through a focus on funding, media and elite networking. Finally, the book’s promotional writing enacts the trope of the environmental ‘Entrepreneur’ where conservation is meant to provide a good investment for business-minded people. 

The book opens with a long vignette from Harrison Ford at the 2018 Gala celebration referring to his co-contributors and others like them:  ‘You can call them researchers or scientists or conservationists. But let’s call them what they really are: These are heroes. Real heroes.’ (p. 17). However, as this book shows, the heroic narrative structure makes forging alliances and political solidarity across lines of class, race, cultures and politics quite challenging. Heroes stand above others, they are exceptional. And, as such, conservation through heroism is unsatisfactory, if not oxymoronic.

Conservation and the environmental politics that can sustain life on our planet call for less singularity, fewer stories of individuals excelling over other people and nature, and more connectedness, cooperation and coexistence. 

The introduction tells us that  ‘these are the voices of the greatest conservationists of our time’ (p. 17). I have no reason to doubt that these are their voices and that they are great conservationists, whatever criteria make up ‘greatness’. The stories are full of passion and genuine concern for conservation, so there is no doubt that these heroes are acting from noble intentions. However, the heroic hubris prevents the reflection over either why chickens when pushed off a roof don’t ‘progress well in flight’ (p. 21) or why ‘with no prior thought’ wildlife conservation should be best achieved through ‘a big cash award’ and an ‘exciting and glamourous event’ (p. 305).

With some notable exceptions, this book presents the same old stories of great men who just happen to have no reproductive obligations (with the predictable exception of the female scientist), so they can go singularly or with the support of a doting wife into long-term relationships with animals.

These men also have friends with lots of money and political clout, and the documentation of elite networking practices that comes through in the chapters actually works counter to a singular hero at the helm of conservation. Finally, these conservation heroes rely heavily on a competent staff of Black and Brown people who can put lofty ideals into practice, while not usurping the limelight from celebrity environmentalists. 

Some of the more ‘Activist Intellectual’ celebrity environmentalists present compelling arguments in lively texts around global warming and the contentious politics of saving the polar bears. Many of them take the reader through a combination of wildlife daily habits, international fundraising, and management of research and training projects. These are narrated as a partial life-history of a single ‘hero,’ and while there are nods to ‘local supporters,’ ‘scouts’ and collaborations between ‘enthusiastic’ local staff and international volunteers, this book tells a dangerous single story.

It’s time to remind ourselves and our peers that the heroic narrative of celebrity conservation may be useful for raising funds from businesses and for garnering the attention of bored bureaucrats, but it has dangerous political consequences.

A close reading of the text finds examples such as four ‘community game scouts,’ the ‘local African supporters’ in Kabara, and the ‘young Samburu warrior’ who was ‘walking in the bush’ with David Quammen, a writer from National Geographic (p.80). Samburu people have proper names, no less notable than people from Cincinnati, and the young man was not working as a warrior when assisting on a conservation project. These people are being rendered mundane through the repetitive text of the white savior narrative. They are being de-humanized as they remain in the background of the African or Asian ‘habitat’ for animals. The heroic narrative is based on an ongoing history of inequality between races, classes, genders and cultures.  

The afterword, written by the CEO of the Indianapolis Zoological Society (2002-2019) reads like advertising copy for ‘Western Civilization’ complete with God, Guns and Gold. It is a colonial vision of men like Paul Erlich in which the ‘dangers of unchecked human population’ are called out as problems while fossil fuel addiction, or all those flights to the Galas celebrating conservation heroes, are left unmentioned. The ‘Danger of a Single Story’ by Chimamanda Adichie taught an important lesson in 2009: ’The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.’ This is a beautiful book in its intentions and its aesthetics; the stories are often compelling and transport us into the lives of cranes and elephants and into some of the world’s most notable conservation initiatives. Yet, despite its intentions, the people are missing from this heroic script of celebrity environmentalism.    

Perhaps these people are left-out by design. Dr. George B. Schaller writes clearly:  ’My account here demonstrates that conservation is not part of development’ (p. 78). But, conservation is part of development. It is impossible to define conservation otherwise (Adams 2004). Both conservation and development are part of the holistic process of living sustainably on our planet. This book is intended to celebrate ’people as a primary factor in conservation.’ We do learn a lot about a particular sub-group of privileged people, their psychology and insecurities, their dreams and aspirations, about networks of elites across the globe who happen to have farms, foundations or PhD scholarships to spare. But we learn far less about the non-celebrity people in the lives of animals. Surely a global conservation movement that manifests the holistic visions and ’the connectedness of all living things’ (p. 119) that many of these contributions also embrace, needs less heroism and single stories and more solidarity, comradery and complexity. 


Further Reading

Abidin, C., Brockington, D., Goodman, M. K., Mostafanezhad, M. and Richey, L. A. (2020) “The tropes of celebrity environmentalism.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources.

Adichie, C. (2009) “The Danger of a Single Story” TED Talk.

Adams, W.M. (2004) Against Extinction. The Story of Conservation. Earthscan, London.


About the Author

Lisa Ann Richey is Professor of Globalization at the Copenhagen Business School. She works in the areas of international aid and humanitarian politics, the aid business and commodification of causes. She is the principal investigator on the Commodifying Compassion research project. https://www.lisaannrichey.com


Photo by Katie Treadway on Unsplash

Are we asking the wrong questions in corporate social responsibility (CSR) research?

By Rikke Rønholt Albertsen

 3 min read ◦

The sustainability contributions of business are under increased scrutiny in society. Observations of greenwashing, blue-washing, corporate hypocrisy, and decoupling suggest the existence of an intentional or unintentional gap between espoused CSR strategies and actual sustainability outcomes at the societal level. In other words, there seems to be more “talking” than “walking”.

This has inspired a growing concern in parts of the CSR research community that maybe we have been asking the wrong questions. Is it possible that in some ways we are contributing to this gap between strategy and impact?

Next year, an entire subtheme of the annual European Group for Organisational Studies (EGOS) conference will be dedicated to “Rethinking the Impact and Performance Implications of CSR”. This subtheme will address the tendency in CSR research to focus on outcomes at the organisational level without analysing impacts at the societal level.

There are valid reasons for limiting the scope of CSR research in this way: from an organisational performance perspective, many of the traditional success criteria for CSR policies—such as strengthening legitimacy, market position, and employee satisfaction—do not require data to be gathered on sustainability impact from a societal perspective.

However, the urgency and magnitude of the current global crisis related to climate, biodiversity, and social inequality fuels the expectation that corporations should acknowledge their role in creating these crises and take decisive action to be part of the solution. From this perspective, one would expect CSR research to provide knowledge of how, when, and why CSR policies and practices truly contribute to solving sustainability challenges. Yet, as a review of current CSR literature shows, this is rarely the case [1].

So what constrains CSR researchers from addressing this impact gap? In the following, I will highlight two interrelated mechanisms that have emerged from my research.

1) Sustainability impact is non-linear, systemic, and complex.

The problem with measuring sustainability impact is that it does not conform to conventional systems of measurement and reporting. Company CSR reports primarily provide key performance indicators linked to resource use per unit of production or list company policies and protocols to ensure compliance with various sustainability standards. In general, companies tend to (self) report on the successful implementation of their (self-imposed) CSR strategy, which happens to align with existing business objectives. However, as dryly noted by former environmental minister and EU commissioner Connie Hedegaard: the need for CO2 reductions is not relative; it is absolute! The melting Arctic poles do not really care that a company has made an effort to reduce its relative emissions if the net result is still more CO2 [2].

The negative impact on ecosystems is subject to irreversible tipping points where effects compound and accelerate. Thus, the societal impact of a sustainability policy or protocol cannot merely be assessed at the organizational level. It must be traced up and down the value chain and checked for unintended systemic consequences and hidden noncompliance [3]. Think of ineffective emission off-set schemes or families impoverished by bans on child labour. Ultimately, being “less bad” does not necessarily amount to being good.

2) Researchers do not have the necessary information.

Analysing the societal impact of corporate CSR policies and practices is a highly resource intensive task, which requires an entirely different set of research skills and data access than traditional organisational research. Instead, researchers most often opt to evaluate sustainability performance through estimations, perceptions, and narratives offered by company staff in surveys and interviews [1]. This data is context specific and prone to subjective biases, making it difficult to draw objective conclusions about societal impact.

Consequently, because there is so little existing knowledge of the link between CSR initiatives and societal impact, the CSR contribution of corporations is primarily assessed based on compliance with reporting standards and commercial rating initiatives such as the Dow Jones Sustainability Index [4]. This, for lack of better options, becomes the go-to objective indicator of CSR performance used by CSR researchers. Through this self-fulfilling circular logic, these indicators are used to identify CSR high performers for research on best practice. CSR research thus potentially perpetuates the perception of what successful CSR policies and practices look like—all without examining the societal impact of these practices.

Is this a problem?

Just as corporations increasingly realise that addressing CSR issues is no longer optional, we as CSR researchers may need to move beyond asking how, when, and why corporations engage with sustainability and begin asking how, when, and why corporations contribute to sustainability. If we do not, we risk losing our relevance when corporations look to academia for guidance on how to design and implement CSR strategies based on maximum impact rather than just maximum compliance and minimal risk.

We are challenged to expand our field of enquiry and be innovative when assessing how the observed means ultimately align with desired ends. This will require forging research alliances with new knowledge fields and establishing relationships with new groups of informants beyond company employees. The first step, however, is to rethink the questions we ask.


Further reading

[1] J.-P. Imbrogiano, “Contingency in Business Sustainability Research and in the Sustainability Service Industry: A Problematization and Research Agenda,” Organization & Environment.

[2] C. Hedegaard, “Farvel til ‘logofasen’ -nu har vi set nok grønne slides,” Berlingske, 2020. [Online].

[3] F. Wijen, “Means Versus Ends In Opaque Institutional Fields: Trading Off Compliance And Achievement In Sustainability Standard Adoption,” The Academy of Management review.

[4] M. Zimek and R. J. Baumgartner, “Corporate sustainability activities and sustainability performance of first and second order,” 18th European Roundtable on Sustainable Consumption and Production Conference (ERSCP 2017).


About the Author

Rikke Rønholt Albertsen is a PhD Fellow at the Department of Management, Society and Communication at Copenhagen Business School and a member of the multidisciplinary CBS Sustainability Centre. Her research focus is on exploring and understanding gaps between the espoused sustainability objectives of corporations, and their actual contribution to sustainability. She has a background in consulting at Implement Consulting Group and in sustainability advocacy as co-founder of Global goals World Cup

LinkedIn Profile.


Photo by Emily Morter on Unsplash

Why transparency may not lead straight to CSR paradise

By Dennis Schoeneborn

 2 min read ◦

Business firms worldwide are increasingly engaging in practices of corporate social responsibility (CSR), a trend strongly driven also by the agenda of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. However, when doing CSR, firms tend to face recurrent suspicions by the media, NGOs, and other civil society actors that they would not put the money where their mouth is; in other words, that they would adopt CSR practices only ceremonially rather than substantially (a.k.a. “greenwashing”).

High transparency demands are commonly seen as the main ‘remedy’ that would ‘cure’ firms from mere ceremonial adoption and would drive them towards substantive adoption of CSR practices. However, in recent years we can find increasing evidence that high transparency demands do not always lead straight to CSR paradise. In a Financial Times article from 2020, Jason Mitchell raised the provocative question: Is greenwashing a necessary evil? The author argues that firms often require some leeway to experiment with CSR and sustainability practices to begin with, and without such leeway CSR efforts tend to get cut off too early by too high transparency demands and greenwashing accusations. After all, some decoupling between talk and action can also be due to a time lag between aspirations and the actual implementation of CSR practices within a firm (see here).

In the same context, Patrick Haack (HEC Lausanne), Dirk Martignoni (University of Lugano), and Dennis Schoeneborn (Copenhagen Business School) have recently published an article in the Academy of Management Review that draws on a computer-based simulation to study the dynamic interplay between transparency demands and CSR practice adoptions in a field or industry. By drawing on a probabilistic Markov chain model, the authors demonstrate that under certain conditions a regime of opacity followed by transparency (i.e. intially low and later high transparency demands) “outperforms” a regime of enduring transparency (i.e. high transparency demands right from the start) with regards to maximizing the share of firms in an industry that would adopt CSR practices in a substantive way. But what are such boundary conditions?

In the article, the authors explain that the optimality of the “opacity followed by transparency” regime tends to apply only for practices that are characterized by low adoption rates (i.e. those costly to implement) as well as by low abandonment rates (i.e. once adopted firms tend to stick with the practice, also since they may face public backlash if they abandon a practice after adoption). Interestingly, these are exactly the kinds of conditions that characterize CSR as a practice area.

What to learn from all this? NGOs and other civil society actors can benefit, in the long run, from cutting business firms some slack (i.e. putting rather low transparency demands onto firms), at least in the initial stages of CSR adoption processes. Instead, societal actors should then try to increase transparency demands at later stages in the adoption process to push firms further towards substantive adoption.

Haack et al. (2021) explain this process to work due to what they call a “bait-and-switch” mechanism of CSR practice adoption. Initially lower transparency demands allow for larger numbers of firms to adopt practices, even if they do so for ceremonial reasons to begin with. Importantly, when transparency demands are then increased over time, a number of firms tend to switch from ceremonial towards substantial adoption, thus leading eventually to the desirable outcome (from a societal viewpoint) of rather high rates of substantive CSR adopters in an industry. 


Further reading

Haack, P., Martignoni, D., & Schoeneborn, D. (2021). A bait-and-switch model of corporate social responsibility. Academy of Management Review46(3), 440-464. 

You can also access a (non-layouted) version of the same article at ResearchGate. The article has been picked up in a recent story by Forbes magazine. And if you want to learn more about the ‘backstory’ behind the AMR article, you can watch a video interview with two of the authors, Patrick Haack and Dennis Schoeneborn, on YouTube


About the author

Dennis Schoeneborn is a Professor of Communication, Organization and CSR at Copenhagen Business School and a Visiting Professor of Organization Studies at Leuphana University of Lüneburg. In his research, he focuses on organization theory, organizational communication, digital media and communication, corporate social responsibility and sustainability, as well as new forms of organizing.


Photo by Joel Filipe on Unsplash

Nudging for a Better Workplace: How to Gently Guide Employees Towards Ethical Behaviour

By Leonie Decrinis

 2 min read ◦

Corporate scandals caused by unethical behaviour can have dramatic consequences for a company’s bottom line. The Volkswagen emission scandal created a financial damage of over 45 billion US dollars thus far. The Enron accounting scandal ended in the company’s bankruptcy back in 2001. Most recently, the #MeToo movement has brought to light sexual harassment at the Weinstein Company, Fox News and Uber, to name just a few, all subject to payments of significant fines. How can we explain such scandals and what can companies do about it? 

Why good people do bad things 

In general, when we think of bad behaviour we think of it as a matter of bad character: bad people do bad things. But research tells us that this is view is misguided. Normally, employees involved in unethical behaviour have high moral values and good intentions, in line with their companies’ sets of ethical standards. Yet, their behaviour can deviate significantly from personal and organisational principles.

In fact, the moment they engage in unethical behaviour, they might not even realise that they are doing the wrong thing. 

Context matters in explaining such ‘ethical blindness’. Environmental cues in the workplace, like monetary signals, trigger the adoption of a business decision frame, whereby people favour self-interested choices over ethical behaviour without necessarily being aware of it. By applying mechanisms of moral disengagement, they think that they are doing the right thing, while in fact acting unethically. For example, they may justify their detrimental conduct by portraying it as serving a socially worthy purpose, which makes them temporarily blind to the harm they are causing.

Building a culture of control does not solve the problem

In response to issues of moral misconduct, companies usually tighten their internal control systems. They strengthen the requirements for ethics trainings by making them mandatory and introduce monitoring and surveillance systems. They also try to incentivise ethical conduct through rewards and punishments. However, these instruments do not always lead to the intended behavioural outcomes and instead might even aggravate wrongdoing. This is because such instruments send signals that reinforce the adoption of a business decision frame, which is prone to moral disengagement. For example, in the case of Volkswagen, a CEO who led through fear and bound high expectations for engineer development to tempting bonus payments encouraged employees to circumvent the rules by engaging in emissions cheating. 

Nudging – beyond carrots and sticks

To promote ethics in the workplace, building a culture of fairness and trust is pivotal. Nudges are instruments that align with these principles. They do not mandate or forbid choices nor do they meaningfully alter the financial incentives related to various behaviours. Instead, by considering the psychology of decision-making, they try to gently guide people towards certain outcomes while preserving their freedom of choice. Nudges do so by subtly altering the context (choice architecture) in which humans make their decisions. Examples include default settings or social norm feedback as well as the simplification of information or the framing and priming of messages.

While initially mostly applied by governments to steer the behaviour of private citizens or consumers, more and more companies are relying on nudges to improve the choices of their employees.

JP Morgan, for example, uses proprietary algorithms to predict unethical trading behaviour before it occurs. Traders then receive pop-up messages prompting them to reconsider transactions when they are at risk of breaking the rules. Scientific studies further support the power of nudges in form of photos of close others or moral symbols at the workplace that encourage employees to adopt an ethical decision frame, which helps them to act in line with moral values. Overall, while much remains to be explored when it comes to ethical workplace nudging, the gentle steering tool seems to provide a promising route for improving behavioural ethics outcomes in organisations. 


Further Readings

Desai, S. D., & Kouchaki, M. (2017). Moral symbols: A necklace of garlic against unethical requestsAcademy of Management Journal.

Hardin, A. E., Bauman, C. W., & Mayer, D. M. (2020). Show me the … family: How photos of meaningful relationships reduce unethical behavior at workOrganizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.

Palazzo, G., Krings, F., & Hoffrage, U. (2012). Ethical blindnessJournal of Business Ethics.


About the Author

Leonie Decrinis is PhD fellow at Copenhagen Business School with research interests in corporate social responsibility, sustainability governance and behavioral sciences. Her PhD project focuses on applying behavioral insights to corporate sustainability in order to align governance objectives with organizational behavior.


Photo by Shridhar Gupta on Unsplash

Are social media platforms good places to discuss global challenges?

By Daniel Lundgaard

3 min read ◦

According to a recent analysis by Datareportal, the number of active social media users grew globally by 13.2% from January 2020 to January 2021, which means that as of January 2021, there are 4.2 billion active social media users. With the increasing use of social media, it only makes sense that important discussions are moving to these platforms. This is especially seen during political elections, but social media are also becoming some of the most important platforms to discuss issues such as gender equality, racism, and climate change. However, while we have seen the potentials of social media for raising awareness about these issues, it is still unclear whether social media are suitable platforms for such discussions.

Throughout my research, I investigated the climate change debate on Twitter, and I want to highlight two important patterns that I found, each illustrating some of the potentials and challenges with the use of social media to discuss global challenges. 

The potentials

On the one hand, I found that the debates on social media platforms are characterized by equality and inclusiveness. It is common knowledge that everyone has a voice on social media, and anyone can contribute to a debate, but simply having the opportunity to contribute does not mean that everyone will have an impact.

Interestingly, what I found was that not only can anyone contribute – everyone can have an impact on the debate and affect how issues are discussed.

This both includes users with less than 100 followers and minority voices such as climate change skepticism. Seeing that even smaller users and minority voices can have an impact is particularly interesting on social media, where it has been argued that it is only the “popular” accounts, influencers, or central actors that shape the debate. Naturally, this does not mean that everyone will influence the debate, but it means that anyone can, which I see as an important part of creating a good place for discussing global challenges.  

The challenges

On the other hand, I found that the use of Twitter to discuss climate change rarely included ongoing dialogue.

There is very little exchange of opinions between two participants – instead, participants share their thoughts by engaging in broader conversations, e.g., by using specific hashtags or by mentioning central figures. In other words, what I found was that participants engage with an imagined audience, not directly with others.

Sometimes a discussion unfolds in the replies to a tweet or in the comments to a Facebook post, but the vast majority of contributions to debates about global issues are more about voicing an opinion, e.g., through retweeting, not back-and-forth dialogue between participants. This means that while most participants actively contribute to the debate, there is rarely any direct response to these contributions, which is a critical challenge, as I see some form of back-and-forth exchange of opinions as an integral part of good discussions. 

So, are social media platforms good places for debates about global challenges?

Well, yes and no – and naturally dependent on how you define a “good” debate. The inclusiveness and equality are great, and this is unparalleled compared to offline arenas that are limited by time and space, thus highlighting the potential for social media to empower citizens, both in their role as ordinary citizens and as consumers or activists that challenge corporate behavior. On the other hand, the distinct lack of ongoing, reciprocal exchange of information or dialogue is a critical challenge, highlighting issues with using social media to debate global challenges. This poses an interesting puzzle.

The lack of dialogue suggests that we need to be careful about using social media platforms to discuss global challenges.

Still, the use of social media to discuss global challenges is rapidly growing. Hence, we cannot disregard the importance of social media, but perhaps we can re-think their role in global discussions. 

I suggest that we move away from the expectation that social media platforms, by themselves, cultivate high-quality debates and instead see them as platforms that mainly inform and develop participants’ views. Hence, rather than providing platforms for dialogue, social media contributes to global debates by providing platforms where participants can become informed and better prepared for subsequent discussions – discussions that often unfold outside social media platforms. In other words, while social media, by themselves, are imperfect places for debates about global challenges, their role in informing participants, including both citizens, corporations, and politicians, illustrates that social media are a critical part of a more extensive media system, and we should not disregard their importance in debates about global challenges. 

A word of caution

However, if we accept that social media mainly serves to inform participants, we also have to consider that some potentials can become challenges. Specifically, the equality found in the debate can become a serious issue.

Without the ongoing dialogue, we miss opportunities to contest and challenge disruptive voices such as climate change skepticism.

Hence, while climate change skepticism, in an ideal and high-quality debate, could be beneficial by inspiring others to improve their arguments and refine opinions, the lack of dialogue on social media means that such voices are not contested and are not inspiring others to improve their arguments.

This is even more important with the increasing polarization we see on social media and highlights that if social media mainly serves to inform participants’ views, there is a greater responsibility on us as participants. Specifically, we still need to seek out these opposing opinions. Even though it might be futile to engage with those opinions, seeking out these opposing views may still inspire us to improve our arguments and, in some cases, even inspire us to refine our own opinions and ideas. 


About the Author

Daniel Lundgaard is a PhD Fellow at the Department of Management, Society and Communication at Copenhagen Business School. His research investigates how communication on social media (e.g. the use of emotions, certain forms of framing or linguistic features) shapes the ways we discuss and think about organizational and societal responsibilities.


Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

Connecting, Cohering, and Amplifying: The Work of Transformation Catalysts

By Sandra Waddock and Steve Waddell

◦ 4 min read 

The shocking 2021 IPCC report on the climate emergency makes clearer than ever that many human systems are in dire need of significant change. Today’s harsh growth-oriented economic systems are particularly implicated in the growing chorus of demands for purposeful system transformation towards a flourishing world for all. Significant systemic transformation is needed to bring human activities in line with both social and planetary boundaries now being breached. That means that the way we think about economics, how our businesses operate, and even how communities and whole societies operate likely need to change – and radically.  

But transforming such whole systems – economies, societies, communities, even organizations – is incredibly hard. Transformation inherently involves fundamental changes to core aspects of a given system. Things like purposes, values, goals, important assessment metrics, and even the mindsets or paradigms of people in the system must change, whether the system to be transformed is an organization, economy, or society. Our research suggests that a new type of entity – transformation catalysts – may be able to help.

What is a Transformation Catalyst?

A chemical catalyst brings about a chemical reaction without necessarily changing itself. Used in a social sense, a catalyst is a person or thing that makes something new happen or precipitates change. In the spirit of any catalyst, a transformation catalyst works with the mix of different efforts and activities that already exist and that are geared towards significantly changing a system – transformation. When this mix of change efforts, which is usually fragmented with different activities operating in separate silos, is organized, it can become a transformation system. Organized as a transformation system, these activities can be much more effective at producing desired change.

The transformation catalyst’s role is to bring together an array of efforts so that together they can emerge or develop new ways to do their work more effectively – that is, operationalize the transformation system.

We like to say that transformation catalysts connect, cohere, and amplify transformation efforts that are already underway. Four catalytic actions make this coherence and amplification of efforts possible: seeing, sensemaking, connecting, and radical action and learning.

The Four Catalytic Actions

Seeing means helping change agents figure out what their emerging transformation system is all about and who is doing what, where, and how. Seeing involves various forms of stakeholder analysis – figuring out who is in the system, which can use a variety of approaches, including interviews and mapping tools to identify key participants, resources, and system dynamics. Doing so helps participants identify where gaps and possibilities exist to create more effective action.

Sensemaking means creating a shared and coherent vision among various participants to, quite literally, make new sense of their actions and system, and tell new stories about it. These new, more powerful framings can have broad appeal to draw in other participants, raise funds, and create energy moving forward. Sensemaking also means helping participants understand how to pull together into a coherent transformation system so they can act in new ways to take more effective action.

Connecting is the process by which actors learn about each other and begin to devise new ways of acting more coherently together. Connecting involves aggregating, cohering, and, ultimately, amplifying efforts that may already be underway, but have not been as effective as desired to date. Connecting can mean creating a shared set of aspirations and identity and awareness of their own efforts as part of a broader transformation system. Then they can learn from those actions – the radical action and learning process.

Radical action and learning needs a safe space, so that participants in a transformation system can question, explore, analyze assumptions, and experiment with new ways of doing things that are transformative. Experimentation is crucial, since transformation is unpredictable by its very nature. Mistakes will be made, and things will not always work out as planned. Sometimes creating prototypes can be helpful, too, as a kind of testing ground for further action.

Catalyzing Change through 1000 Landscapes for 1 Billion People

One example that we describe in our paper is that of 1000 Landscapes for 1 Billion People. 1000 Landscapes is an initiative creating sustainable solutions by recognizing that long-term sustainability means emerging a shared foundation of land and water resources for all.

In its early stages, 1000 Landscapes consulted with more than two dozen landscape partnerships globally to figure out who was doing what (seeing). They identified what the barriers were to managing landscapes in new ways were (sensemaking).

1000 Landscapes is now building collaborative capacity for holistic landscape management in many different places, starting with an initial group of 20 and growing the number over time (connecting). Holistic land management means, as the initiative states on its website, “integrating action for food, water and health security, sustainable livelihoods, biodiversity conservation, climate action, and the transition to inclusive green economies” (sensemaking).

1000 Landscapes plans to expand to 50 areas in its second phase (amplifying). Its goal is reaching at least 1000 landscapes “meeting locally defined development and environmental goals, with benefits for over one billion people” by 2030 (amplifying and radical action). 1000 Landscapes even uses the language of catalysis to describe its work: “working in radical collaborations with dozens of organizations to catalyze system change”. It thereby “unlock[s] the transformative potential of inclusive landscape partnerships and to scale their impact”.

The Mantra for Transformation Catalysts

The key to understanding transformation catalysts is knowing that they themselves are not doing the actual transformation work. Instead, they are helping to organize other change agents who are already doing that work in new ways so that they can become more effective. Indeed, they are helping them to become effective transformation systems with the potential to overcome the many inertial forces that hold systems in place.

Small, fragmented, individual efforts cannot achieve that type of scale impact. But the potential that transformation catalysts bring is the ability to bring those actors together in new ways. They can help change agents see and understand new, radical possibilities for transformative change if they can act coherently together. Then they can amplify their own efforts by figuring out where the gaps in their transformation efforts are, filling those, sharing resources when appropriate, and acting more effectively.

Connect, cohere, and amplify. That is the mantra for transformation catalysts.


Further Reading

Waddock, S., and S. Waddell (2021). Transformation Catalysts: Weaving Transformational Change for a Flourishing World for AllCadmus, 4(4), 165-182.

Lee, J.Y. and S. Waddock (2021). How Transformation Catalysts Take Catalytic ActionSustainability, 13(17), 9813. 


About the Authors

Sandra Waddock is Galligan Chair of Strategy, Carroll School Scholar of Corporate Responsibility, and Professor of Management at Boston College’s Carroll School of Management.

Steve Waddell is founder and co-lead steward of Bounce Beyond, a transformation catalyst oriented to changing towards transforming towards next economies.


Photo by kalei peek on Unsplash

Social impact bonds in the Nordics: insights from ‘Copenhagen Impact Investing Days 2021’

By Mikkel M. Andersen and Ferran Torres

◦ 5 min read 

A social impact bond (SIB) is an innovative model for public service delivery characterized by flexible service interventions and an outcomes-based payment structure. SIBs use private investments to drive new types of welfare activities, shifting the risk from the public to the private sector. Today, several SIBs are emerging in Nordic countries, but do rich welfare states even need these financing mechanisms? And in case they do, for what? These questions were discussed by three leading SIB-experts during the ‘Copenhagen Impact Investing Days’ 2021.

During the last few years, the use of social impact bonds (SIBs) and other social finance-instruments has increased dramatically in Nordic countries. SIBs were originally used as financing tools supporting public organizations in the UK experiencing budgetary restraints. Thus, as the model spread into other contexts, the question begged whether this tool would be appropriate for Nordic countries as well. The following piece summarizes some key reflections from the panel discussion regarding this question at Copenhagen Impact Investing Days 2021 (CIID). 

SIBs in the Nordic countries: an emergent but fast-growing field 

While more than 200 SIBs have officially been developed worldwide, they are still an emergent phenomenon in most Nordic countries. Currently, 17 SIBs have been initiated in Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway – primarily within employment, preventive health, and social welfare. Also, at least 7 additional SIB-projects have been announced. The first SIB-evaluations are also starting to come up; for example, the assessment of the first Swedish SIB in Norrköping shows promising social effects, despite not creating a financial return for investors. Finnish intermediary-organizations are also planning to develop SIB-projects within environmental areas, including recycling and energy efficiency in housing.

Overall, Finland seems to be on the forefront in the Nordic regions, followed by Sweden, while Denmark and Norway are a few years behind. On the investment side, significant progression is also being made. A Finnish fund-of-funds is currently being developed with an expected capital of 100 million Euro. In Sweden, work is also being done to set up a national outcomes financing structure to ensure the scaling of future outcome-based initiatives. Last, legislative action to ensure social finance practices has been taken – most recently in Denmark with Børnene Først promising more focus on social investment-practices to ensure preventive social welfare.  

Emerging practices for Nordic SIBs 

Some early experiences regarding the relevance and usage of SIBs in the Nordic countries were discussed during the CIID-conference. First and foremost, SIBs seem to be a part of a much larger trend in public welfare, oriented towards measuring, incentivizing, and resourcing towards long-term social outcomes. While SIBs might constitute effective solutions in themselves, they are also catalysts for evolving social investment practices because they can 1) showcase the benefits of new types of welfare services by linking social and economic outcomes, 2) provide practical solutions for realizing preventive and proactive welfare services, and 3) facilitate cross-sectoral coordination through new procurement frameworks by bringing new stakeholders to the table. 

The SIB can be a useful way to show the municipalities, and the government, how to buy the solutions that actually work. 

Hans Henrik Woltmann, Investment Manager, The Social Investment Fund (DK)

What seems to be critical is also the perception that SIBs in the Nordic countries should not function as a replacement to or a privatization instrument for public welfare services. Instead, SIBs should be understood as a supplement to these, allowing public actors to change how they buy public interventions while testing new welfare solutions through de-risking strategies. Still, the novelty of the method, and its experimental character, makes it challenging to assess its true potential.

Does the SIB really allow us to scale or is it just a fancy way of financing projects? I think the question is still out there 

Tomas Bokström, Project Manager, Research Institutes of Sweden
Looking into the future: necessities for a social finance-ecosystem 

Summarizing the points from the debate, SIBs in the Nordics are on the rise and have the potential to become welfare instruments themselves, and a vehicle for promoting a social investment agenda. Looking ahead, three key aspects will be important for enhancing the Nordic social finance ecosystem: 

  1. Establish more evidence from practice and leverage these actively with public organizations to spark discussions. 
  2. Insist on experimentation and a methodological openness towards the SIB-model. Its value also resides in its ability to test innovative social interventions to later diffuse them through public practices fitting better into specific welfare situations. 
  3. Follow and engage in political discussions regarding the ambitions for SIB-practices. The SIB market is still in its infancy and relies heavily on market-maturement initiatives to develop better infrastructure.

Panelists for the discussion of Nordic Impact Bonds at ‘Copenhagen Impact Investing Days 2021’:  

· Tomas Bokström, Project Manager, Research Institutes of Sweden
· Hans Henrik Woltmann, Investment Manager, The Social Investment Fund 
· Mika Pyykkö, Director, The Centre of Expertise for Impact Investing, Finland
· Mikkel Munksgaard, PhD Fellow, Department of Management, Society, and Communication, CBS (moderator)
· Ferran Torres Nadal, PhD Fellow, Esade Entrepreeurship Institute & Institute for Social Innovation, ESADE (moderator)


About the Authors

Mikkel Munksgaard Andersen is PhD Fellow, at CBS Sustainability, Department of Management, Society and Communication (MSC) at CBS. Through his PhD-project, Mikkel studies the development and implementation of social impact bonds and payment-by-results methods in Denmark. His work centralizes around the distinct characteristics of Scandinavian impact bonds and their role in supporting and financing public services. The research is driven by a participatory research design and is co-financed by Region Zealand. Mikkel has earlier worked in the social finance-field both on an academic and practical level.

Ferran Torres Nadal is PhD Fellow at the Entrepreneurship Institute and the Institute for Social Innovation, ESADE Business School in Spain. His PhD advisors are Lisa Hehenberger and Tobias Hahn. His work is focused on understanding and explaining tensions and paradoxes around complex phenomena. He is particularly interested in studying the challenges and opportunities that come with cross-sector initiatives, such as social impact bonds.   


Photo by Katt Yukawa on Unsplash

The Concept of Fragmented Labour Markets

By Janine Leschke and Sonja Bekker

◦ 4 min read 

The employment and social impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic have been larger on some groups of workers than others. In particular, low-wage workers and workers in forms of employment that differ from full-time wage and salary work with a permanent contract seem to have been especially exposed to job and income losses (see ILO-OECD Covid-19 report). The concept of fragmented labour markets, which we propose here, highlights the large and growing diversity in employment relationships. It demonstrates the relevance of relating the impact of the crisis on jobs, income and social security to the degree of ‘resilience’ workers had prior to the crisis in terms of job stability and decent earnings. It is therefore very suitable for detecting vulnerabilities that have been built into labour markets over the past decades.

Rise of diverse types of non-standard employment relationships

The concept of fragmented labour markets focuses on the group of workers commonly termed ‘outsiders’ or the population in non-standard (also termed atypical) employment. It goes beyond traditional views on segmented, dual or primary versus secondary labour markets, which divide employment into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ jobs. There are a number of arguments as to why the use of binary divisions with regard to labour market status or outcomes are obsolete, such as the substantial variety within both the groups of standard and non-standard jobs.

Over the past decades, a further fragmentation of employment status has occurred. Some speak of an ‘explosion’ of diverse types of non-standard employment relationships, making these types of jobs an often occurring or even ‘normal’ phenomenon at least for some labour market groups, such as women. Consequently, within the group of ‘outsiders’, an ever greater variety of forms of employment is materialising, making the groups themselves far from homogeneous. 

Call for a new approach

The inadequate binary division of the labour market into groups of ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ has spurred a call for a new multidimensional approach to understanding inequalities in work and employment. These suggestions go beyond merely defining non-standard work as all forms of work that deviate from the standard employment relationship.

Based on the trends and observations highlighted above, we develop the concept of fragmented labour markets as a way to both define and explore the most vulnerable types of non-standard employment. We build on the work of authors who point at key elements of such a definition, including the different labour market groups that have different sets of rights and labour conditions, and refer to different employment statuses such as part-time work, fixed-term contracts, temporary agency work, self-employment, marginal employment, platform work and other ‘non-standard’ forms of employment.

Additionally, we look at the earnings that workers (can) generate with their jobs, and whether they combine several employment statuses (e.g. being part-time as well as fixed-term employed). Moreover, we zoom in on certain occupational groups. The latter focus is relevant in order to prevent certain vulnerable groups remaining ‘hidden’ in overall labour market averages (see, e.g., the example of the occupational groups of cleaners below).

Therefore, we define fragmented labour markets as:

Labour markets characterised by an accumulation of insecurities. Fragmentation is evident where workers combine non-standard employment with low wages or where they combine several forms of non-standard employment − situations that are dominant in particular occupational groups.

We argue that using the concept of labour market fragmentation may render visible which labour market groups are generally more insecure and vulnerable to job and/or income loss and fluctuations and would therefore need additional support particularly when crises occur.

Exploring selected occupational groups in Germany and the Netherlands

Using this concept exploratory with a focus on two affluent countries – Germany and the Netherlands – highlights vulnerability in some occupations, particularly among women, but at times also among men.

For instance, almost 70% of female personal care employees in Germany are part-time employed and 18% of those combine part-time employment with a fixed-term employment contract (see EU-LFS). In the Netherlands, 43% of women in the occupational group of cleaners and helpers & service employees are marginal employed (less than 15 working hours per week) and 27% of those combine marginal part-time employment with fixed-term employment. Both occupations, and particularly cleaning are at the same time characterised by low wages (see SES). These groups would have been ‘invisible’ if only data on the average economy had been used. 

Additionally, the use of the concept of labour market fragmentation shows that in some occupations and groups, there are hardly any standard jobs left.

For instance, among women in the Dutch personal care and cleaners and helpers occupations, nearly everyone has a part time job (>90%), while in Germany the vast majority of women with a cleaning and helpers occupation has a part time job (>85%). At the same time these jobs are commonly relatively poorly paid and it is not uncommon that these part-time jobs are combined with other flexible forms of employment to make ends meet.

This not only has consequences for employment and earnings security while being in a job but also has important knock-on consequences for accessibility to and adequacy of social security, which is affected to a large degree by the level of earnings and job tenure (with the exception of social minimum benefits).

The concept of fragmentation thereby transcends labour markets and its value becomes particularly evident in times of crisis. As a result of the pandemic, low-wage workers and workers in diverse forms of non-standard employment relationships have been especially exposed to job and income losses. Moreover, in times of economic downturns, new jobs will often be more likely to be non-standard contracts than in times of economic upturns.

Both in Germany and the Netherlands, social security coverage has been problematic for some of these groups during the coronavirus crisis.

Understanding the growing flexibility in labour markets

The concept of fragmentation thus assists in achieving a more profound understanding of what growing flexibility in labour markets really entails in terms of cumulative insecurities for some labour market groups. It helps fuel discussion on making social security more inclusive for workers, regardless of their labour market position. Last but not least, with respect to occupations where up to 90% of (female) workers are in non-standard employment, often combined with other forms of non-standard employment and/or low wages, it helps raise questions as to how much labour market fragmentation affluent societies can legitimise.


Further reading

Bekker, S. and Leschke, J. (2021), Fragmented labour markets in affluent societies: examples from Germany and the Netherlands, OSE Paper Series, Research Paper No.48, Brussels: European Social Observatory, 24p.


About the Authors

Janine Leschke, political scientist, is prof MSO in comparative labour market analysis. Her research interests comprise issues such atypical work, job quality, labour mobility and migration, youth unemployment, as well as gender. She is currently the Danish lead partner in the Horizon 2020 project HECAT, participant in EuSocialCit and one of the editors of Journal of European Social Policy.

Sonja Bekker is an associate professor European Social Policy at both Utrecht University and Tilburg University. Her research interests include European employment policies and social policies, particularly focused on vulnerable groups such as people with flexible employment relations, youth, people experiencing in-work poverty. She is part of the Horizon 2020 WorkYP project.


Photo by Danny Sunderman on Unsplash

The maker movement, the quiet, game-changing revolution near you #2

By Efthymios Altsitsiadis

◦ 5 min read 

One of the most overlooked and yet promising agents in the fight against climate change and towards realizing a circular society is the maker movement – a cultural trend that was founded on a simple premise: ordinary people manufacturing themselves what they need.

In the previous article, a glimpse of the transformative potential of democratized production for reaching the pressing societal, environmental and economic goals was attempted. The maker revolution, facilitated by the technological collaborative manufacturing capabilities can help citizens with getting access to advanced fabrication tools, skills and knowledge, to meet their own needs, reduce their carbon footprint, while creating new entrepreneurial opportunities for them and their community. For this potential to be realized, it is arguably increasingly important to understand how and why people become makers.

No movement can be successful, no community can be effective without engaging, growing, and sustaining its member base.

This was the organizing idea in the previous article. The empirical results from the Pop-Machina project were presented in overview to show the key motives, barriers and driving forces behind the decision to support and be involved in making. In this follow-up note, we complement this baseline with the next step: what can be done to act upon this knowledge.  

We draw this time insights from another running EU project – iProduce. Two large scale studies collected data from regular citizens, makers and manufacturers around Europe and the synthesis of the main quantitative results is taking place to compile some clear and actionable recommendations on how to engage with makers, existing and potential ones. The recommendations below are a preview of the upcoming report on the full findings, so it should be treated as work-in-progress snapshot.

Recommendation 1: Clearly communicate the culture of the community

On the one hand, many new makers seem to be driven by ecological and community progress beliefs and attitudes. The majority of people believe that makerspaces can make a big difference. On the other, respondents reported a lack of information with regard to the exact makerspaces’ scope and actions. Awareness about the maker-movement and its mission and benefits should not be considered a given, yet the alignment can make a considerable (and oftentimes ignored) difference in engagement. Community development and team building should be heavily promoted as in most makers, collaboration with like-minded peers is of highest priorities.

Recommendation 2: Encourage direct knowledge sharing: virtual training and skills exchange

Exchanging knowledge and gaining access to dedicated trainings is very important for makers. Such facilitations can take place digitally in which case users would expect to increase their knowledge and skills. Training could be targeted either to support a specific business venture, a creative project already underway, or for the primary purpose of gaining competencies for later use. Support in terms of direct knowledge sharing and mentorship, peer to peer online learning could be an additional option to allow existing technicians and experts to occasionally serve as mentors and advisors rather than teachers in platform-developed projects. 

Recommendation 3: Support matchmaking and professional networking

Participation in makerspaces opens up new horizons, enabling makers to reach out to a wider network which could also yield more professional opportunities. Or at least this is what the majority of the respondents expect. Makers and consumers want to be empowered, not only to depict their ideas for new products but to also be able to find expertise and manufacturing capabilities to implement them. Matchmaking services are deemed essential and at the same time, the analysis of existing roles and collaborations can set the ground for new synergies to be established and new opportunities to be identified. 

Recommendation 4: Diversity, inclusiveness, accessibility and empowerment

Makers tend to care a big deal about accessibility; they want to see action to involve groups which are underrepresented in the maker movement, such as women, elderly, low socioeconomic status groups or people with disabilities. They stress the importance of a respectful, inclusive and supportive culture, the unwarranted genderisation of tasks/interests and the need for more female role models in the social manufacturing world. While the maker movement has unique cultural elements, these are all cemented on the principles of diversity empowerment and unfettered access. 

Obviously, this list is not exhaustive. There are still so many lessons to learn, angles to explore, and diverse experiences and stories to be shared and studied that one should not treat this as anything more than a humble start. The empirical nature of these insights provides some needed confidence to these results, but as is often the case with self-reported data and online data collection methods, there are some limitations to the transferability and generalizability/representativeness of these results. Nonetheless, the people working in iProduce have put considerable effort to help practitioners, policy makers and makerspace managers better reach out to the maker base. These stakeholders sometimes must face an uphill battle, especially in the covid-era, in keeping things afloat, exploring different tools, triggers and business models. One can hope that such insights can still be useful or bring up more discussion about the way forward.   


This publication was based on the work undertaken by the European projects iPRODUCE “Unlocking the community energy potential to support the market uptake of bioenergy heating technologies”. iPRODUCE has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870037.


About the Author

Assistant Prof. Efthymios Altsitsiadis, PhD (male) is a behavioural economist with a mind for interdisciplinary research. A user-centricity enthusiast, Efthymios is set to help provide evidence-based answers to some of the most persistent and evasive behavioural questions in a variety of areas like sustainability, health, energy and mobility. His Phd was in decision support systems and he is currently teaching Machine Learning and Digital Behaviour at CBS. He conducts research in collaborative production and circular economy, in advanced technological agents (smart apps, avatars, chat-bot services) and has worked as a social scientist in several cross-disciplinary research projects. 

Like oil and water…. Shell’s climate responsibility and human rights

By Kristian Høyer Toft, PhD

◦ 4 min read 

In a landmark verdict at the district court in the Hague on 26th May this year, Royal Dutch Shell lost a case to the Dutch branch of ‘Friends of the Earth’, Milleudefensie, and other NGOs. The court ordered Shell to reduce CO2 emissions by 45% by 2030 against a 2019 baseline. The decision breaks new ground for the possibility of holding private corporations accountable for climate change – Shell-shocked and a Black Wednesday for the fossil fuel industry, according to expert commentators in international environmental law.

The verdict emphasizes the international consensus that corporations like Shell must respect basic human rights, such as the rights to life and family life. In the ruling, human rights are seen in the context of climate change and the aspirational 1.5-degree target stated in the Paris Agreement (2015), scientifically supported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2018).

The verdict is a significant example of a general surge in climate litigation cases globally in which human rights are invoked.

Holding a fossil fuel company accountable based on the standard of human rights might sound as futile as the effort to mix oil and water.

And this sort of skepticism has roots in the recent history of attempts to connect business, human rights and climate change in what could be seen as a ‘bizarre triangle’ of irreconcilable corners.

However, the Shell verdict can be seen as a firm rebuttal to such skepticism. The court argued that Shell had violated the standard of care implicit in Dutch law. To clarify the content of the standard of care, the court used the United Nations Guiding Principles (UNGPs) which provide a global standard for businesses’ human rights responsibilities. This is, however, a bold interpretation in light of the UNGPs silence on human rights responsibilities with regard to climate change. 

In fact, human rights might not fit so neatly with the difficult case of climate change. Firstly, it is difficult to trace the causal links between the emitters and the victims of climate change, although this is contested by recent studies that have traced two-thirds of historical emissions to the big oil and gas companies, the so-called carbon majors.

Secondly, human rights basically apply only to the state’s duty to protect citizens, and thus only indirectly to private companies. This state-centric approach is core to the human rights regime and tradition, and the UNGPs uphold this by allocating less stringent responsibilities to non-state actors such as corporations.

However, the UNGPs also state that private companies have human rights responsibilities independently of the state. The district court in the Hague reaffirms this in its ruling against Shell, stating that corporate responsibility “exists independently of States’ abilities and/or willingness to fulfil their own human rights obligations, and does not diminish those obligations. [..] Therefore, it is not enough for companies to [..] follow the measures states take; they have an individual responsibility.” (4.4.13). 

A third source of skepticism resides in understandings of environmental law and the central role of the polluter pays principle. Accordingly, emitters are responsible for their historical output of COas enshrined in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC 1992), but the scope is usually taken to be limited to the unit of production (scope 1), e.g. the refining of crude oil. The standard view of pollution is local, as for instance when a factory pollutes the local river. 

However, in the Shell ruling scopes 1, 2 and 3 are taken into account, meaning that consumers’ incineration also counts and therefore Shell must take responsibility for consumers’ emissions as well. The consequences of including all three scopes incur far-reaching and demanding responsibilities on corporations, where previously the distribution of responsibilities between producers and consumers has been disputed, for instance in the carbon majors case.

In sum, the Shell verdict raises the bar considerably for the expected level of corporate climate responsibility. The verdict also challenges the assumption that human rights don’t fit the complexity of climate change; though in fact the UNs first resolution on human rights and climate change appeared back in 2008. Moreover, the verdict goes against the widespread liberal assumption that businesses’ responsibilities are mainly to comply with the law of national jurisdictions and that consumers are comparably responsible for causing climate change. 

It might be time to rethink such assumptions and not simply continue ‘business as usual’ by seeing climate change and human rights-based climate litigation as a managerial risk factor to be handled instrumentally and in isolation from the moral duty to solve the climate crisis. 

One key lesson could be to acknowledge that corporate responsibilities are not just legal but moral as well, since the distinction is not so clear in soft law instruments like the UNGPs nor even in the notion of human rights themselves, not to mention the moral demands following from the need to respect and realize the targets of the Paris Agreement and related transition paths.

When the Special Representative to the United Nations on Business and Human Rights, John Ruggie, started exploring pathways for developing the field, he was inspired by the American philosopher Iris Marion Young whose ‘social connection model’ of global responsibility in supply chains suggests a forward-looking kind of responsibility for mitigating structural injustices. Young’s notion of responsibility was designed to solve large-scale structural problems like climate change by attributing responsibility to all agents according to their powers, privileges, collective capacities and level of complicity. 

This is the kind of thinking now supported in the court verdict against Shell, and it signals a new beginning where climate change reconfigures how corporations and human rights connect… perhaps making the ‘oil and water’ metaphor obsolete.


Acknowledgements

Among the many expert commentators, Annalisa Savaresi’s work provided particular inspiration for writing the blog. I am grateful to Florian Wettstein, Sara Seck, Marco Grasso, Ann E Mayer and Säde Hormio who all gave comments to my article ‘Climate change as a business and human rights issue’ published in the Business and Human Rights Journal (2020) 5(1), pp. 1-27. The blogpost is based on the approach of this article. Julie Murray was helpful with proofreading.


About the Author

Kristian Høyer Toft, PhD in Political Science, Aarhus University 2003. During 2020-21 a guest researcher at the CBS Sustainability Centre, Copenhagen Business School. His research focuses on corporate moral agency, political theory of the corporation and climate ethics and is published in Business and Human Rights JournalEnergy Research and Social Science, and in the book Corporate Responsibility and Political PhilosophyExploring the Social Liberal Corporation (Routledge 2020). 


Photo by Irina Babina on Unsplash

The fear of becoming the hotspot of infectious diseases: Who is concerned and why?

By Fumiko Kano Glückstad

◦ 4 min read 

Denmark is opening the borders for tourists from our neighboring countries in Northern Europe after a long period of lock-down restrictions. This is good news for the Danish tourism having suffered with substantial revenue losses as the consequence of the Covid-19 crisis. Whereas the European countries are optimistic about the opening of their societies along with the progress of their vaccination programs, Japan in the Far East is tightening its border entry restrictions due to the latest state of emergency declarations.

Recent Japanese opinion surveys clearly indicate that Japanese are concerned about hosting the Olympic Games in Tokyo expected to kick-off in just two months. At a glance, the adverse reactions by the Japanese population seem to be triggered by the current state of emergency in addition to the delay of implementing a nation-wide vaccination program.

However, such attitudes were already indicated in a cross-cultural study conducted for the period 10 – 24 July 2020 addressing residents in the following four countries: Denmark (n=1,005), Japan (n=1,091), Italy (n=1,005) and China (n=1,013). In this blog, I will present some fundamental cultural differences observed between the Europeans and the Far East Asians investigated in this study.

In an article recently published in Frontiers in Psychology by Glückstad et al., 2021, it is reported that Japanese are generally very concerned about their local community becoming a hotspot of infectious diseases. This study asked respondents how much they agree or disagree (1: Strongly disagree — 7: Strongly agree) to the statement:

It is concerning that our community will be crowded by foreign tourists and will potentially become a hotspot of infectious diseases

as well as other statements explaining several factors, amongst others: 

  • their intentions of pleasure seeking (enjoying cafés and restaurants, travelling abroad as soon as possible and similar enjoyments)
  • their risk perception (worried about becoming infected, getting ill and infecting others)
  • their risk avoidance (avoiding larger groups, public transportation and travelling to destinations with high reproduction, selecting destinations with hygiene and less crowded destinations)
  • their intention to behave responsible (keeping social distance, cleaning up public spaces, using disinfectants before and after shopping)   
  • their expectation for the society to behave responsibly (tourists visiting their local community should behave properly, local businesses should make their community clean and safe, individuals should contribute to minimize the risk of spreading, importance for their local businesses to have inbound tourism)
  • their attitudes to mask wearing and hygiene (wear mask, feel safe if businesses indicate sanitary standards and if staffs wear mask)

In our recent Frontiers article, we conducted a Bayesian Network analysis (see Fig. 1) which indicates that, in Denmark and Italy, respondents who expressed higher intentions for pleasure seeking behaviors have higher probabilities of being less concerned about their local community becoming a hotspot of infectious diseases, and vice versa.

This European trend is rational in a way that the motivational drivers to seek hedonistic experiences are conflicting with the conservative risk avoidance attitudes and behaviors. However, in Japan, disregarding the level of intentions for pleasure seeking behaviors, the level of concern about their community becoming a hotspot of infectious diseases stays around 5.5 (at the level between ‘somewhat agree’ and ‘agree’). The Chinese reacted rather similar to the Japanese respondents, however, their level of concern stays around 4.6-4.8 (at the level between ‘neutral’ and ‘somewhat agree’). 


Figure 1: Total effect of factors X on the target variable Y (concern about one’s local community becoming a hotspot of an infectious disease) 

Source: modified from (Glückstad et al. 2021)

The results of our studies clearly highlight an important cultural difference. That is, Japanese who seek hedonistic experiences expressed their concern about their local community becoming a hotspot of infectious diseases caused by inbound tourism, whereas Danes and Italians who seek hedonistic experiences were less concerned about this issue, as for the Summer 2020. This difference could be explained by the so-called “independent self-schema” typically held by Westerns (Europeans) and the “interdependent self-schema” typically held by Far East Asians.

In other words, Danes and Italians who are typically based on an “independent self-schema” would realize the “positivity of the personal self” through their pleasure-seeking behaviors. In such a scenario, they would be less concerned about their local community becoming a hotspot of infectious diseases. On the other hand, Japanese who are typically based on an “interdependent self-schema” would consider a balance among different selves in their in-group relationship important and prioritize the protection of their in-group communities. The survey results presented in Glückstad et al. (2021) and the adverse reaction by Japanese to the recent Japanese opinion surveys about being host of the Olympic Games in Tokyo are good examples of such protective attitudes identified in the society based on the interdependent self-schema.


Further reading

Glückstad F.K., Wiil U.K., Mansourvar M. and Andersen P.T. (2021) Cross-Cultural Bayesian Network Analysis of Factors Affecting Residents’ Concerns About the Spread of an Infectious Disease Caused by Tourism. Frontiers in Psychology.

Schwartz, S. H. (2012). An Overview of the Schwartz Theory of Basic Values. Online Readings in Psychology and Culture.

Markus, H. R., & Kitayama, S. (2010). Cultures and selves: A cycle of mutual constitution. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5(4), 420–430. 

Uchida, Y., Norasakkunkit, V., & Kitayama, S. (2004). Cultural Constructions of Happiness: Theory and Empirical Evidence. Journal of Happiness Studies, 5, 223–239. 


About the Author

Fumiko Kano Glückstad (FKG) is Associate Professor of Cross-Cultural Cognition at the Copenhagen Business School. Her main research interests are currently centered on cross-cultural psychology, cognitive psychology, consumer psychology and data sciences. Her research focuses on data-driven consumer analyses centers on consumers’ value priorities in life and other factors that affect their attitudes and behaviors. In particular, FKG has extensive experience in consumer research on health, dietary, environment and personal care products from Far East industries.


Photo by takahiro taguchi on Unsplash

Start me up – helping citizen engagement become the hot new kid on the block

By Isabel Fróes

◦ 4 min read 

In recent years, through experience and discussions in various projects and workshops dealing with urban development, this key question keeps returning: 

How to best promote citizen engagement? 

While citizen engagement is a large topic within urban development, so are entrepreneurship and grassroots movements. How do we perceive these various terms? In which ways do these forms of organization converge, where do they diverge?  More importantly, could we change the civic engagement rates if this work would be perceived as steps towards further opportunity (gaining) instead of ‘volunteer work’ (giving)?

A known challenge within citizen engagement deals with age groups. It is not difficult to engage young children (up to 12 years old) and older citizens to take part in local actions, however it becomes a struggle to engage youth and young adults as they see little return in value as results tend to be intangible or unclear.  Within this group, perception plays a big role in how ideas are sold (and consumed), so it might be time to possibly bring the concepts of civic engagement and entrepreneurship closer together.  But where do we start? 

A first point to consider is how these key concepts might be popularly understood. When mentioning citizen engagement, images of volunteers coming together to discuss, collaborate, work and vote on ideas come to mind. When talking about entrepreneurship, notions of highly driven visionaries or million dollar companies emerge.

Citizen engagement and entrepreneurship are rarely seen as equals. However, in both cases you find similarities. It is not uncommon for both groups to engage in a large amount of unpaid labour, long days, hard work and convincing people to join you and (most probably) gathering funds to execute whatever dream you may have. 

Literature covering the concepts of social entrepreneurship or community-based entrepreneurship highlights distinct formats of social entrepreneurship, both of which are top-down. In the case of grassroots entrepreneurship initiatives, articles highlight movements that emerge from “acute socio-economic, institutional, and financial resource constraints, as well as out of local knowledge and a commitment to community”, such as the one seen recently during the Covid-19 pandemic (see blogpost). It is not necessarily about creating something new, but instead, something that works for the case in focus. 

In these settings, co-creation has received a deserved attention as a method, and it has proven to be a valuable tool as it allows for diverse stakeholders to come together to develop and carry out ideas, creating shared agency. However, before that first co-creation session lies the true challenge in both user engagement and entrepreneurship: Creating momentum before the momentum, to make one person (or a few) motivated ‘out of thin air’.  

Therefore, a second point to consider is the top-down setup of projects, inviting citizens to engage with a specific topic or local pre-defined issue. Although project results might impact locals’ everyday, the personal gain might be too dissolved into the hours spent, thus people refraining from engaging. 

In order to challenge the current top-down scenario, the perception and format of these activities could be transformed to facilitating processes to let locals themselves suggest and carry the types of projects that interest them, seeing a clearer link to ‘what’s in it for me’. For unpaid efforts, the pay-off has to be visible and tangible.

Furthermore, associations, municipalities and other public institutions need to create means to replicate successful bottom-up initiatives. Some of these initiatives could then be linked to local businesses and related opportunities. 

From a service design perspective, a way to bring this information into people’s households could be to use the existing information channels popular amongst the local community to allow for an initial knowledge entry point. For instance, as citizens receive a public waste sorting information sheet, one could attach a ‘waste project opportunity’ sheet. This initial touchpoint could be a it’s your turn blueprint, a step-by-step guide showing what to do to bring your ideas out into the world. So, a project idea invitation presented as an opportunity at your fingertips.  The ‘hot themes’ in the current market should be highlighted while also offering inspirational examples. Programmes to support these initiatives should be in place, facilitating the citizen engagement startup process as a possible social ladder. Such a setup could transform current structures, making cities and citizens, not venture capitalists, the true cradle for entrepreneurship. 


This blog was inspired by a recent participation in a workshop focusing on urban development, discussing visions for green and social meeting places in urban residential areas. During the discussion, a number of key questions were raised concerning how to best promote citizen engagement.  The workshop was organized by Copenhagen University and VIVAPLAN, with presentations from VIVAPLAN, Urbanplanen Partnerskab, C40, KAB and Copenhagen Municipality. The visions discussed during the workshop are to feed into policy recommendations for sustainable and inclusive developments in Denmark and Sweden.


References

V. Ratten and I. M. Welpe, “Special issue: Community-based, social and societal entrepreneurship,” Entrepreneurship and Regional Development.

M. Wierenga, “Uncovering the scaling of innovations developed by grassroots entrepreneurs in low-income settings,” Entrep. Reg. Dev.

S. Sarkar, “Grassroots entrepreneurs and social change at the bottom of the pyramid: the role of bricolage,” Entrep. Reg. Dev.


About the Author

Isabel Fróes is a postdoc at MSC Department at Copenhagen Business School working in three EU projects (Cities-4-PeopleiPRODUCE and BECOOP). Isabel also has wide industry experience and has worked both as a user researcher and service design consultant for various companies in Denmark and internationally. For more detail please see her Linkedin profile.


Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

Corporate democratic responsibility – messy and difficult, yet urgent and without alternative

By Dieter Zinnbauer

◦ 4 min read 

We live in politically tumultuous times. Authoritarianism is on the rise again across the world. Democratic freedoms have been in decline for 15 years in a row. The share of people living in free societies has shrunk to a meagre 14% of the world population. Meanwhile polarisation and populism, disinformation, mistrust and rising inequality have begun to hollow out the fundaments of even the strongest democracies. Votes for populist parties in mature democracies have risen from 3% in the 1970s to more than 20% today.

With democracy under attack everywhere how does and how should business position itself? What are the democratic responsibilities of companies? A tricky question well beyond the scope of a blog entry, but here some rather random notes and provocations on current trends and gyrations as input to this highly topical conversation.

Inaction is untenable, political neutrality unlikely.

It is less and less of a practical option anymore to hide behind a veneer of political neutrality no matter if rationalized instrumentally  (the Republicans-are-buying-sneakers-too argument), normatively (it’s undemocratic for business to engage in high stakes politics beyond its own narrow business interests) or intuitively (the empirically tenuous claim that business tends to only support moderate, mainstream politics anyway).  Here some reasons why:

For a start, it is not easy to find  real-world contexts, where a principled commitment to free and fair markets and a principled rejection of crony capitalism would not also imply and indeed be predicated upon a commitment to competitive democracy.  Or from a slightly different angle, the normative minimum for business – to respect human rights in its sphere of operation and influence –also entails respect for basic democratic rights and a related duty of care.

Remaining silent on democracy is therefore only an option as long as democracy is not in danger, as long as none of the substantive political forces in a country seek to actively dismantle load-bearing democratic norms and rules.

Yet in many countries this is not the case (any more). From Brazil to the Philippines from Poland or Hungary to the US, formally democratic regimes are under attack from within the political establishment. And in many more other countries fringe groups with dubious democratic credentials and intent often propelled by a toxic mix of populism and nativism are moving closer to becoming part of government. 

Enter corporate democratic responsibility

Corporate responsibility in such contexts entails having a plan for and executing on corporate democratic responsibility on at least three different levels / time horizons. 

  • For a start and most immediately it requires aligning non-market strategies with regard to corporate support for politicians, lobbying, public relations and other business and society interactions with an active stance and role in support of democracy.  E.g. no funding for politicians and parties that have taken to destroying basic tenets of inclusive political participation (not just temporary bans until the PR tempest calms down), no lobbing on issues that corrode the fundaments of political equality, an active promotion of democratic values, for example along the lines of campaigns by German business associations against extremism.
  • In the medium term it calls for a democracy auditan active interrogation of one’s own operations’ “democracy footprint”, and how one’s business model can best respect, protect and promote democratic values. Big tech platforms, for example, are being pushed to better understand and address their role for a healthy democratic discourse. 
  • In long-term perspective it demands a deeper probing on how corporate conduct is linked to some of the underlying drivers of democratic decline and disillusionment. Growing inequality and declining social mobility, status anxiety and a profound sense of losing out and losing authorship of one’s life are all empirically confirmed to provide fertile ground for populism and creeping authoritarianism. To help restore a sense of individual economic and political efficacy, trust in societal fairness and public as well as private authority companies may wish to interrogate how practices around tax avoidance, regulatory arbitrage, shareholder primacy etc. intersect with these issues. This also includes questions around how reforms and new formats in corporate governance can help resurrect a sense of being in it together and revive the idea of the business organisation as a shared venture, an important venue for exercising citizenship and co-authoring one’s economic life world and, capable of collectively evolving  a strong, responsible corporate purpose.
A rough, but necessary ride ahead

Good corporate democratic responsibility does not come easy. It means wading into a messy terrain and facing up to the perennial tension between defending democracy and curtailing freedom. 

It involves business decisions on whether fitness-bikes should be permitted to spread rumours about voter fraud, whether couches and guest rooms should welcome riot tourists, whether rumour-mongers deserve cloud hosting or whether the president of the United States should be kicked off the world’s largest social network.  Yet, all these things need to be reckoned with one way or the other as doing-nothing only cements a status quo of what is often democratic backsliding.

All these tricky questions around corporate behaviour in the context of democratic countries that are at risk of backsliding will also bring into sharper relief the perennial question of what companies can and should do when operating in outright authoritarian settings – a discussion well beyond the scope of this short blog entry but one that is returning with a vengeance given high-growth prospects in authoritarian settings or military coups in popular foreign investment destinations.

Finally, an honest grappling with corporate democratic responsibility will be agnostic to partisanship in principle and approach. But it is highly likely to be partisan in outcomes. Political incivility and anti-democratic behaviour are unlikely to be evenly distributed across the ideological spectrum in any given setting. So brace yourself for a partisan backlash and for a constant tight-rope walk between supporting democracy and being drawn into day-to-day politics.  Getting this right will require the best of corporate strategy, corporate governance and corporate communication. But ultimately there is no escaping from corporate democratic responsibility. Flourishing economies and flourishing democracies ultimately depend on it.  


About the Author

Dieter Zinnbauer is a Marie-Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at CBS’ Department of Management, Society and Communication. His CBS research focuses on business as political actor in the context of big data, populism and “corporate purpose fatigue”.


Photo by Fred Moon on Unsplash

Mapping unchartered territory: Ecuador’s journey to sustainable palm oil

By Mathilde Birn, Sanne Qvarfordh, & Dr. Kristjan Jespersen

◦ 3 min read 

Sustainability certifications have become a widely used mechanism to signal to consumers that a product was ostensibly produced sustainably. Nevertheless, such certifications typically fail to scale beyond at most a fifth of global production. Within the palm oil sector, widely known as a major deforestation driver, the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO)’s Jurisdictional Approach is one of a growing number of examples of upscaling strategies. Under the Jurisdictional Approach, all value-chain actors within a province or even an entire country would be certified simultaneously. Ecuador is piloting the initiative at the national scale and is currently developing a national commitment.

The research is informed by 21 interviews with a variety of actors in the Ecuadorian palm oil sector. After qualitatively coding these interviews and looking for common patterns, we identified four main motivations behind Ecuadorian interest in jurisdictional palm oil certification. First, interviewees reported a concern that Ecuador risked losing market access due to sustainability-related import restrictions and consumer preferences in certain markets. Second, 90% of Ecuador’s palm oil producers are smallholders, whose resource limitations make it difficult to achieve RSPO certification on their own. Under the Jurisdictional Approach, smallholders would be grouped together, allowing them to pool resources and share costs. Third, the Jurisdictional Approach facilitates governmental sponsorship for smallholder capacity building. Fourth, previous experience and institution-building around sustainability in general and anti-deforestation in particular produced forward momentum on the part of the civil society and the Ecuadorian government that has led to an institutional infrastructure favourable to ideas like the Jurisdictional Approach.

In the most optimistic scenario, the Ecuadorian government’s commitment to the Jurisdictional Approach, strengthened by multi-stakeholder support, could encourage more sustainable production practices. However, we also identified certain risks associated with the implementation of the initiative. These risks especially significant given the Jurisdictional Approach’s relative novelty. As one interviewee put it: “we have been flying the plane while we’re building the plane”.

We have identified six key risks to Ecuador’s implementation of the RSPO Jurisdictional Approach and paired them with mitigation recommendations. This list is certainly not exhaustive and ought to be further assessed and developed by local stakeholders equipped with relevant expertise.

The Jurisdictional Approach affects several different stakeholder groups with diverse interests that must be actively engaged in the process to achieve success. To this end, efforts should be made to include representatives of stakeholders that are currently missing (or insufficiently represented) in the governance structure of the RSPO Jurisdictional Approach in Ecuador. These stakeholders include academia (which was involved in the beginning of the process but no longer is), domestic civil society organizations, local communities (including Afro-Ecuadorian and indigenous peoples), local governments, and representatives of the global palm oil industry.


About the Authors

Mathilde Birn graduated from CBS with a BSc and MSc degree in International Business and Politics. Academically, her main interest is within the field of sustainable development and the impact of stakeholder dynamics on such development, with a focus on emerging economies.

Sanne Qvarfordh graduated from CBS with a BSc. and a MSc. degree in International Business and Politics. Her main academic interest is sustainable development in emerging economies, with a focus on multi-stakeholder initiatives in Latin America.

Kristjan Jespersen is an Associate Professor at the Copenhagen Business School. He studies on the growing development and management of Ecosystem Services in developing countries. Within the field, Kristjan focuses his attention on the institutional legitimacy of such initiatives and the overall compensation tools used to ensure compliance.


Photo by Andrés Medina on Unsplash

Is Seeing Knowing? When Visibility Reduce Transparency

By Lars Thøger Christensen

◦ 3 min read 

We are arguably living in an era of visibility in which our communicative interactions with others are accessible to the gaze of third parties. Does this mean we understand our fellow beings, our organizations and our governments better? Well, not quite and maybe not as expected.

We tend to assume that we understand what we see. Yet, we see a lot that we do not grasp.

Increased visibility is often taken to represent an increase in transparency. Thus, for example, it is commonplace to associate organizational transparency with visibility management. Many writers use the notions interchangeably as if we automatically comprehend what we see. Such assumption is misguided. Although transparency has come to refer to a host of different qualities and activities, its original and fundamental promise is to increase knowledge and insight and, this way, reduce manipulation, ensure fairness and avoid power abuse (see previous blog). Visibility on its part merely signifies the ability to identify by the eye.

Although it intuitively makes sense to treat these terms as related, especially because they both invoke an ocular metaphor, they differ significantly in terms of the depth of the involved perception. Transparency, in spite of its complexities, absurdities and unexpected consequences when implemented in practice, continues to invoke the ideal of some deeper understanding. What is visible, by contrast, may arouse our attention only in passing without producing any further insight. The conflation of the two therefore weakens our approach to transparency and reduce society’s ability to develop more sophisticated transparency practices.

Visibility is not the same as transparency and may not enhance understanding and insight. 

‘Visibility’ has several related meanings, including the state of being visible, the ability to see or be seen under certain conditions, and the distance at which a given object can be identified with the unaided eye, also known as visual range. In all these senses, visibility is related to observation and suggests that the object in question is accessible to the eye and can be distinguished more or less clearly from its surroundings. While technological developments have turned visibility into a mediated quality freed from the temporal and spatial constraints of the here and now, the visible still refers to “that which is perceptible by the sense of sight”, perhaps augmented by other senses. 

What is perceptible to the eye is heavily shaped by contexts, such as norms, cultures and social structures.

In everyday usage, the notion of visibility is frequently invoked in a more abstract sense that combines sight with understanding. Notions such as discover, observe, notice, recognize, monitor, viewpoint, or perspective, for example, all invoke both dimensions and contribute to the impression that what we see is what we comprehend. As Brighenti (2007) puts it “vision is alias for intellectual apprehension” (p. 327). This belief may explain ambitions to uncoverand expose reality to the naked eye. Although such ambition is often driven by social indignation and a desire for fairness and change, major data leakages such as WikiLeaks illustrate that visibility may confuse, frustrate or pacify rather than inform.

The eye and what it allows us to see is a frequent source of illusion.

Leaving aside the possibility of optical illusions, although this is a quite realistic prospect in a world saturated with images, the gaze is a frequent source of blindness. While the promise of transparency is to help the spectator see into something, there is always the risk that the gaze is blunted or bored by impressions to the effect that objects accessible to the eye are seen through and ignored. Even when this is not the case, the lack of an Archimedean point of observation from which an observer can perceive the object of inquiry in its totality seriously challenges the notion of a single perspective on reality and thereby conventional conception of transparency as visibility. 

Without knowing in advance what to look for, visibility is likely to confuse more than inform.

While the gaze is obviously never “naked” or innocent, it takes a trained gaze as well as understanding of local norms, mores and myths, as anthropologists are aware of, to look systematically and to know what to look for. This problem is evident when we are invited to “see for ourselves”, but lack professional experience to differentiate between relevant and irrelevant material and events. When organizations of various sorts, for example, host “open house” days – a practice that is quite common in in all kinds of organizations from organic farming to higher education – visitors may be able to see a lot without necessarily knowing what to make of it. Here, visibility only makes sense because it is placed in a context of a well-known social ritual.

What happens to insight if visibility affects the objects we intend to understand?

In addition to the limitations of the gaze itself, it is well-known that objects of attention are significantly affected by processes of observation. While system theorists have argued that the properties of an object are relative to the observer, breakthroughs in quantum physics have demonstrated that even small particles behave quite differently when observed. The behavioural effects of visibility are likely to be even more dramatic when the objects of attention are human beings. In such cases, whatever is visible is likely to be shaped by power plays and image management. 

Visibility is a trap.

(Foucault, 1977, p. 200).

The very possibility of being observed affects the behavior of those within visual range. While Foucault described this tendency in the context of prisons, Bernstein has demonstrated how it affects work practices. However, whereas Foucault emphasized that visibility enforce self-discipline, Bernstein illustrates that visibility may reduce productivity because it removes attention from working effectively to practices of signaling that the correct procedures are followed. 

When impression management is prevailing, what we see are ideals rather than actual practices.

When scholars and social critics take visibility to mean transparency, they reproduce a deep-seated conviction that the gaze is a primary source of insight. By maintaining a close link between visibility and transparency, transparency is reduced to a surface phenomenon that only requires accessibly to the eye. Hereby, what visibility does or conceals is ignored. Increasing visibility may hide an object in plain sight. It may also dazzle the observer in ways that reduce the ability to understand what goes on.

The fascination with visibility needs to be tempered by a persistent aspiration for knowledge and real insight.

Further readings

Bernstein, E.S. (2012). The transparency paradox: A role for privacy in organizational learning and operational control. Administrative Science Quarterly, 57(2), 181-216. 

Brighenti, A. (2007). Visibility. A category for the social sciences. Current Sociology, 55(3), 323-342.

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish. The birth of the prison. London: The Penguin Group.

Neyland, D. (2007). Achieving transparency : The visible, invisible and divisible in academic accountability networksOrganization, 14(4). 499-516.

Roberts, A. (2012). WikiLeaks: The illusion of transparencyInternational Review of Administrative Sciences, 78(1): 116-133.

Stohl, C., Stohl, M., & Leonardi, P. M. (2016). Digital age—Managing opacity: Information visibility and the paradox of transparency in the digital ageInternational Journal of Communication10, 123-137.


About the Author

Lars Thøger Christensen is Professor of Communication and Organization at the Copenhagen Business School, Denmark.


Source: Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash

Unaccounted Risk: The Case of Sulfur Hexafluoride (SF6) in Offshore Wind Energy

By Esben Holst & Dr. Kristjan Jespersen

◦ 5 min read 

Carbon accounting provides a science-based measurement of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, achieving greater accountability of companies’ emissions causing global warming. GHGs are reported in CO2 equivalents (CO2e), meaning GHGs with widely different chemical qualities and environmental impact can be presented in a single understandable metric. However, the underlying methodology is debatable. This article questions whether the CO2e of Sulfur Hexafluoride (SF6) is misreported.

What is SF6 and why is it a hurdle for a green energy transition?

SF6 is used as an insulator in a wide variety of electrical equipment, mainly to prevent fires in incidents of short circuits. It is found in transformers inside windmills, offshore and onshore substations, and in power cables.


(Illustration to the left shows a sideview of a windmill turbine – Source: CAT-Engines. Right: an offshore wind energy system – Source: Nordsee One GmbH)


SF6 is a synthetic man-made GHG and cannot be reabsorbed naturally like CO2, meaning once emitted, it does irreversible damage. Most GHGs remain in the atmosphere around 100 years – SF6 remains for 3,200 years. These numbers are given by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GGP) based on calculations by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). 

The IPCC’s metric Global Warming Potential (GWP), reveals environmental harm of a given GHG in CO2e. What then, makes SF6 problematic when converted into CO2e? SF6 has a GWP 23,500 times higher than CO2 – a value that is difficult to comprehend. The GWP metric is calculated using a 100-year timeframe based on GHG’s environmental harm. Yet, SF6 has an atmospheric lifetime of 3,200 years, essentially leaving 3,100 years of environmental harm unaccounted for. Using a simple logarithmic function incorporating IPCC data accounting for the missing 3,100 years, the GWP almost doubles. As illustrated below, this indicates how SF6 may be misrepresented in terms of environmental harm in CO2e emissions reporting.



As found by AGAGE – MIT & NASA, other worrying trends are observed. The atmospheric concentration of SF6 has more than doubled in the past 20 years. Luckily, its current concentration in the atmosphere remains low relative to other GHGs such as Methane or Nitrous Oxide.


Source: AGAGE


Regardless, the GWP of these two GHGs pales in comparison to the mindboggling detrimental effect of SF6 on the environment. Emitting this gas should therefore be strictly regulated.

Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reporting – Diverging Approaches

It only takes a little digging into offshore wind energy players to uncover diverging conversion methods of SF6 into CO2 equivalents (CO2e). The GHG emissions reporting methodologies of industry leaders use different emissions factors to convert SF6 into CO2e. An example of underreporting is illustrated by Vattenfall in their 2019 sustainability report, reporting SF6 as 15,000 times more potent than CO2. The emissions factor given by the GGP is 23,500. Ørsted uses a GGP emissions factor for the same gas in their 2019 ESG report. Yet, while Energinet also states it uses the GGP reporting framework in their 2020 CSR report, it uses an emissions factor of 22,800. The ownership distribution between Vattenfall and Ørsted in the Danish wind farm Horns Rev 1 of 40% and 60% respectively, thus blurs accountability and severity of reported emissions. As highlighted by the BBC, atmospheric concentration of SF6 is ten times the reported amount by countries. The IPCC and GGP are also aware of this.

During the past decade…actual SF6 emissions from developed countries are at least twice the reported values. (Fifth Assessment Report of the IPPC)

Measuring Impact of SF6 Leaks by Offshore Wind Players

SF6 emissions will rise exponentially alongside expanding electrified energy infrastructure using equipment containing this gas. This, together with repeated SF6 leaks, perpetuates the worryingly steep upward trend in atmospheric content of SF6 shown above. In 2020, Energinet reported a leak of 763.84kg SF6, or 17,950,240kg CO2e. The environmental impact of this leak is about the same as the emissions of 53 SpaceX rocket launches. Energinet has since admitted to years of underreporting of SF6, leading to amended SF6 emissions related to normal operations doubling.

Leaks of SF6 are too common. In Ørsted’s 2020 ESG report, a major leak at Asnæs Power Station was mentioned without disclosing the actual amount – withholding important risk-related data from investors. However, Energinet disclosed an SF6 leak of 527kg at that same facility in their 2020 CSR report. The leak for which Ørsted is responsible, yet feels is not material to disclose, is therefore potentially around 12,384,500kg CO2e. Indicating light at the end of the tunnel, Vestas has included SF6 on their Restricted Materials list since 2017, as well as introducing a take-back scheme for infrastructure containing this gas – setting a better example for business models of our green energy transition leaders.

Strengthening the Global Response to Climate Change Risk

It is vital that we understand SF6 is so detrimental to fighting climate change beyond 2100 that it has no place in sustainable business models today. Even if CO2 emissions are reduced in alignment with 2100 Paris Agreement goals, reporting in a 100-year timeframe will not save a planet billions of years old. GHG reporting must be better regulated and scrutinised in order to deliver a truly green energy transition. Releasing a gas causing irreversible damage cannot be an acceptable trade-off for a short-term “green” transition. While most company reports claim no alternatives exist, this is not true. Therefore, SF6-free equipment must be mandatorily installed.

A green transition goes beyond 2100, yet poor regulation enables energy companies to present SF6-CO2e favourably by using lower emission factors. Offshore wind energy players have not provided comparable, accountable, and transparent reporting – indicating stricter regulations on GHG reporting are necessary.

The Way Forward: Better Regulation

In 2014, an EU regulation banned the use of SF6 in all applications except energy after lobbyists argued no alternatives exist. The EU acknowledges the environmental harm of SF6, yet EU action has been described as inadequate. Asset managers, institutional and retail investors are exposed to hidden environmental risks related to SF6 in terms of double materiality. Double materiality referring to the financial costs related to management of SF6 incurred once completely banned. Non-financial reporting of GHG emissions and CO2e needs to be regulated far more than current global regulations. Investors, society, and most of all our environment deserves better protection.


NOTE: This article is based on a Copenhagen Business School (CBS) research paper in the course ‘ESG, Sustainable & Impact Investment’ taught by Kristjan Jespersen – Associate Professor at CBS – as part of the newly introduced Minor in ESG. The paper questions the greenness of wind energy by using the case of three large offshore wind energy farms in Denmark: Horns Rev 1 & 2 and Kriegers Flak. The findings are based on ESG, sustainability & annual reports from 2015-2019 of all involved OEMs, manufacturers, operators, and energy grid providers. Implications of the findings point to a coming hurdle within the electrification of a global green energy infrastructure transition. 


About the Authors

Esben Holst, an SDG and CSR research intern at Sustainify, is a Danish-Luxembourgish masters student at Copenhagen Business School. Besides attending the newly introduced Minor in ESG at CBS, his past studies focus on international business in Asia and business development studies.

Kristjan Jespersen is an Associate Professor at the Copenhagen Business School. He studies on the growing development and management of Ecosystem Services in developing countries. Within the field, Kristjan focuses his attention on the institutional legitimacy of such initiatives and the overall compensation tools used to ensure compliance.


Photo by Karyatid on Unsplash

Responsible to whom and for what?

Contestations of CSR across time, space, and experience … and a Call for Papers 

By Jeremy Moon

◦ 3 min read 

It is well known that globalization of business has thrown up a host of new governance challenges and new governance solutions. Conspicuous in this regard are the various ‘responsibility remedies’ for challenges posed in the supply chains of multinational corporations.

The growth and transformation of supply chains, particularly in agricultural products and garments has reflected a pattern of business expansion and penetration of host country markets. These have been followed by revelations of short-comings in the treatment of workers and communities, and in environmental responsibility. And in turn, these have been followed by responsibility remedies, often in the form of partnerships, international standards and multi-stakeholder initiatives.  

Formerly, if corporations were asked to whom they were socially responsible they might well have answered ‘to their communities’ or ‘to their stakeholders’. The concept of responsibility to communities makes sense in an industrial model of production in which the company, its management and workers are united not only by association with the company but also by the place in which the company had its most obvious impacts. The concept of responsibility to stakeholders is premised on its offer of an alternative to exclusive responsibility to shareholders, combining an ethical and a functional logic. But with global supply chains, the concepts of community and stakeholder responsibility are stretched.  In the former case this is to relationships with no face-to-face interaction or even common identity with place and culture. In the latter case it is to corporate relationships with workers who have no contractual relationship with the respective corporation, and may even be unaware that they are working in that corporation’s supply chain.

So we have witnessed numerous alternative models of supply chain responsibility often in the form of partnerships of businesses and civil society organizations, sometimes also involving local, national and international governments. The legitimacy of these partnerships, standards organizations and Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives (MSIs) is usually premised on some reference to, what are taken to be, universal principles, and on the plurality of participants, particularly those reflecting societal voice – ostensibly the surrogates of community and stakeholders.

But notwithstanding the legitimacy that these responsibility remedies initially attracted, research increasingly sheds doubts on their ability to resolve the responsibility question because they tend to obscure conceptions to whom and for what business is responsible for, and specifically by marginalizing representation from the global South – or the production-based economies of the supply chains.  

In my own work, I have seen tensions between host governments and international remedies for oppressive labour standards, with the former regarding such ostensibly well-intentioned initiatives as subversive to their own authority. There are tensions between host country suppliers and international brands and retailers with some of the former going out of business for not readily complying with new standards or complaining that they bear disproportionate costs of factory upgrading. And there are tensions experienced by workers whether with their own governments for regulatory failure, with their immediate employers for low wages and poor conditions, or with international supply chains which structure their livelihoods. But these tensions are often not articulated by virtue of the weak labour organization (often compounded by political environments hostile to organized labour). 

As a result from global South perspectives the new variants of the social responsibility model look ill-suited to the ‘on the ground’ economic, social and environmental challenges, at best. At worse, they look like a legitimization of a continuing model of exploitation.


A forthcoming special issue of the journal Human Relations, ‘Contesting Social Responsibilities of Business: Experiences in Context‘ is devoted to addressing such issues.  Core questions that the SI is designed to address include:

  • How do individuals, groups and communities from various geographic and geo-political contexts experience the imposition of social responsibilities and practices from businesses of all forms? 
  • How are social responsibilities and their related institutions and practices transformed, subverted and/or resisted within, across and outside of organizations and workplaces?

Moreover, the SI editors will also welcome papers on wider issues arising from the social responsibility of business, specifically to highlight perspectives borne of contextual experiences.  

A Special Issue workshop will be held on Thursday 16th September 2021 (applications by Monday 21st June 2021. To be considered for this special issue, full-length papers should be submitted through the journal’s online submission system between February 1st and 28th 2022.

For full details on the call, the workshop and the submission processes please follow this link.


About the Authors

Jeremy Moon is Professor at Copenhagen Business School, Chair of Sustainability Governance Group and Director of CBS Sustainability. Jeremy has written widely about the rise, context, dynamics and impact of CSR.  He is particularly interested in corporations’ political roles and in the regulation of CSR and corporate sustainability.

On behalf of the Guest Editors: Premilla D’Cruz, Nolywé Delannon, Lauren McCarthy, Arno Kourula, Jeremy Moon and Laura J. Spence; and the Human Relations Associate Editor: Jean-Pascal Gond.


Megacorporations

By Glen Whelan

◦ 2 min read 

Whatever you did today, there is a fair chance that you used a product or service that is somehow connected to Alphabet. If you watched YouTube on your Android phone in an Uber, for example, then you were simultaneously contributing to Alphabet’s coffers in three ways. And on the off chance that you were thinking of enjoying your evening by first reading two new papers – on the naked mole-rat as a non-aging mammal and what classic Atari video games can tell us about the human brain respectively – and then planning out your possible life on Mars, then you would once again be thrice-engaged with Alphabet investments.

As these examples suggest, Alphabet, whose most famous asset is Google, is not just any other corporation. Rather, it is what can be termed – in building on an idea associated with the novelist William Gibson – a megacorporation.

For the present purpose, a megacorporation can be simply defined as a corporation that influences the lives of a huge number of people in fundamental ways; whose sway is greater than that of most other organizations combined. 

Perhaps the clearest historical example of a megacorporation is the English East India Company. Following its establishment in 1600, ‘the Company’ proved itself a formidable commercial, governmental and military force. Indeed, and whilst the Company was gradually disbanded around the middle of the 19th century, it still exerts influence today through its having shaped, amongst other things, a worldwide thirst for tea, the way in which people conceive of the ‘firm’, and, more controversially, how people understand the ‘orient’.

When the continuing influence of the English East India Company is acknowledged alongside Alphabet’s current scale (e.g., it is currently valued at more than $1.5 trillion), vague claims from the latter’s elite that it might exist 100 or even 1000 years from now, are not as ridiculous as they might first seem. Moreover, if predictions by Google’s Director of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil, come true, then at least some of us could still be around in digital form, and able to confirm whether or not Alphabet is still going strong a thousand years hence. Of course, if your (happy) digital existence is dependent on Alphabet technologies, then you would have reason for wanting the megacorporation’s reign to be a very long one.  

Such speculations about Alphabet’s centrality to our future existence may ultimately prove more fanciful than factual. Be this as it may, it is difficult to deny that Alphabet already records, stores and shapes the past in major ways. For many people Alphabet is the custodian of their personal memories, the story of their life. Through its control of Gmail and Google Photos, and its vast array of ‘smart home’ technologies, Alphabet collects seemingly ever-increasing amounts of information on us. And as anyone familiar with the academic pissing contest that is Google Scholar will know, the megacorporation also goes to some length to make sure that one’s back catalog of scholarly writings is ‘unforgettable’.

When these individual collections of personal memories and activities are noted alongside Alphabet’s vast digital store of world culture and heritage, the extent to which Alphabet can influence the writing and creation of social histories becomes clear. Whilst historians worldwide can currently access a great deal of information through the megacorporation’s various platforms, Alphabet itself can play the role of historian too. Given its expertise in information storage and machine learning, Alphabet is in a prime position from which to conduct macro level, cross-cultural, historical analyses. And as the megacorporation arguably has a better understanding of what retains attention than most (through its tracking of YouTube viewing practices for example), it seems uniquely capable of presenting such historical analyses in ways that prove captivating to a wide-ranging audience. 

In short, Alphabet’s influence over how we live, and how we make sense of, the past and the future, results in it being uniquely deserving – amongst contemporary firms – of the megacorporate label. In all likelihood, and for good or bad, this influence will continue for some years to come. As a result, people in general, and business and society scholars in particular, are well advised to further consider the profound ways in which it shapes existential concerns worldwide.


About the Author

Glen Whelan’s book, Megacorporation: The Infinite Times of Alphabet, is out now through Cambridge University Press. He sometimes teaches at McGill, and researches the moral, political and social influence of corporations, amongst other things. He is on twitter @grwhelan.


Photo source: chrome unboxed

Remote research: A story about “being there”

By Elizabeth Cooper

◦ 2 min read 

It has now been more than a year since researchers have been forced to move most of their data collection online and, where this has not been possible, to cancel it completely. Doing research remotely has revealed some benefits: it is much cheaper, it is better for the environment, and it usually saves time, to name just a few. So, why should we go back to the “field” when this is all over? The following is a story about the importance of ‘being there’ – and about how the things that go wrong can indirectly lead to better quality research.

The settlement of Kulusuk is home to about 200 people and is located on a small island off the eastern coast of Greenland. As I touch down in a helicopter, I can see nothing but empty and dull terrain – different shades of brown rock contrasted against the electric blue sea, which glitters with the even brighter white of scattered icebergs floating endlessly into the distance.

The year is 2017 – summer, although the untrained eye wouldn’t guess so, judging by the snow-covered mountains drawn sharply on the horizon. I have been travelling around Greenland for a few weeks now, and my task is to interview tourists about their experiences in the country, as part of a market research project for Greenland’s national tourism board. 

The problem with interviewing tourists in one of the most remote places in the world, however, is that there aren’t that many. This is a problem I have been dealing with throughout my travels, but one that is markedly more pronounced here on the east coast. There simply aren’t that many tourists who have the perfect combination of sufficient wealth and excess adventurous spirit that it takes to travel to Greenland, and most of those who do, head to the more accessible and well-equipped towns on the west coast. Here in the east, things feel incredibly…local. It’s an atmosphere that simultaneously excites me and fills me with panic about how on earth I will secure enough interviews to make my research statistically valid.

I drop my bags off at the town’s only hotel and start preparing for the twenty minute walk into the settlement itself, where I’ve heard there is a museum – and perhaps the chance to bump into a tourist or two. However, as I begin to march determined out of the door, a member of the hotel staff blocks me. She tells me that there is a “piteraq” on its way, and although I have no idea what a piteraq is, her expression in itself is grave enough to stop me in my tracks and make me step back into the warmth for an explanation. 

The Greenlandic word “piteraq” literally translates to “the thing that attacks you”, and refers to a cold and incredibly fierce wind that originates on the polar ice cap and sweeps down the east coast. With wind speeds that are usually comparable to a category 1 or 2 hurricane, these storms effectively cut off the island for days on end, as flying in or out, or sailing anywhere, is made impossible. 

Overcome by renewed frustration about the feasibility of my research, I head upstairs to the hotel restaurant, where the first stages of the piteraq are already playing out on its huge, panoramic windows – spatters of tiny raindrops are gathering on the glass, accompanied in surround sound by the occasional distant roar of wind gusts picking up momentum. To my surprise, the restaurant is full. As I soon learn, these are tourists who were supposed to be passing through, but who have now become stranded due to the weather. Grabbing a plate at the buffet, I sit down with an Austrian family who invite me to play cards with them.  

Over the next two days, I don’t go anywhere – and neither do the tourists. We are imprisoned by the storm, and for lack of anything better to do, my fellow inmates are happy to engage me. I move from table to table, drinking coffee after coffee, and then wine after wine, with all of the other characters who have found themselves at this point in the world at this point in time. I hear stories from the British man who accidentally left all of his luggage (including his phone and wallet) on the tarmac at Reykjavik airport, and, upon arrival in Greenland, knocked on the nearest front door, told the family who lived there his story, and was taken in by them for three days; the elderly Canadian woman who had been dreaming about visiting Greenland since she was 14, when she saw a picture of a Greenlandic Inuit woman who, to her, “exuded happiness”; the two skittish French ladies who mistook a sled dog for a polar bear and sent the whole town into emergency response mode for no reason. 

The skies after a piteraq are some of the bluest and clearest skies you will ever see in Greenland – it’s like going to sleep in black and white and waking up in colour. Mother Nature’s twisted sense of humour, I conclude, as I finally head to the airport, with a folder full of interview notes, a deeper connection to my research environment, and a newfound appreciation for going with the flow.


About the Author

Elizabeth Cooper is a PhD Fellow at Copenhagen Business School, within the Department of Management, Society and Communication. Her research aims to link the fields of behavioural science and tourism, by experimenting with strategies to ‘nudge’ cruise tourists into behaving in more sustainable ways, specifically in the ports of Greenland.

Impact of COVID-19 on mortality inequalities: The case of France

By Clément Brébion

◦ 3 min read 

Despite an unprecedented worldwide decline in mortality over the last century, a substantial income gradient in life expectancy persists within most countries. In the US for instance, the 1% richest men have a life expectancy at the age of 40 that is 15 years larger than the poorest 1% (difference of 10 years for women) and this spread is currently increasing. In France (on which this blog post is based), the income gradient is of a similar size despite a more egalitarian access to health care.

Pandemics likely amplify this spread because they reveal latent inequalities in individual health capital and because they spread differently across living environments. Our recent study reveals that the COVID-19 crisis, which epitomizes such massive mortality shock on a worldwide scale, is not an outlier in this respect.

A few definitions

We analyse the impact of COVID-19 on mortality inequalities over the whole year 2020 in France, one of the most severely hit country in the world. We use comprehensive registered data, allowing us to study the evolution of mortality as well as the income level of each municipality of metropolitan France. Given the unreliability of public data on deaths attributed to COVID, we focus on excess mortality occurring in each municipality, defined as the deviation in 2020 all-cause mortality with respect to the average of 2019 and 2018. The link between poverty and morality related to the epidemic is thus analysed by comparing excess mortality between ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ municipalities, where ‘poor’ is defined as belonging to the poorest 25% of municipalities (‘Q1’ hereafter).

Two waves that have affected more the poor municipalities 

Figure 1 below shows that, as in many European countries in 2020, France has been hit by two distinct waves that peaked in April (17,000 extra-deaths) and November (15,100 deaths), respectively. Each time, a lockdown was implemented at the national level to reduce the spread of the disease (March, 17 to May, 11 & October 30 to December 15). The first lockdown was the most stringent and has seemingly worked best to reduce casualties to COVID-19.

Figure 1: The figure represents the difference between the monthly number of deaths in 2020 and its average over 2019 and 2018 in France

Figure 2 shows the distribution of excess mortality across municipalities according to their income. Each month, the figure shows the average number of abnormal deaths that occurred since the beginning of the year in each group of municipalities (per 10k. inhabitants). While no specific pattern can be seen over the first three months of 2020, a marked difference between the two groups of municipalities appears in April (wave 1), that further grows as the second wave takes place (October-December). 

In-depth analyses tell us that excess mortality in poor municipalities was 30% larger than in non-poor municipalities in 2020 (2.6 more extra-deaths per 10k. inhabitants). Our research shows that this spread directly relates to COVID-19 and is not explained by differences in the geographical localisation, in the share of old-age inhabitants or in the life conditions under the lockdown between rich and poor municipalities.

Figure 2: The graph plots the cumulative sum of all excess deaths per 10,000 inhabitants from January 2020 for poor and non-poor municipalities in French urban areas.

The fact that the income gradient uncovered during the first wave is not compensated during the second wave, but rather reappears with regularity every time the epidemic returns must be emphasized. One can indeed show that the income gradient is the strongest in areas that got most affected by COVID-19 in 2020. If further epidemic waves occurred – and some signs suggest that it has already started in France as well as in several other countries – our result suggest that, once again, the poorest municipalities will suffer greater losses.

Worse housing conditions and higher exposure through employment

What are the main differences between poor and non-poor municipalities that explain the income gradient in Covid-19 mortality? Our analysis highlights the key mediating role of labour market and housing conditions, in line with the idea that local factors are important determinants of the spread of epidemics. More specifically, the larger share of essential workers and of overcrowding housing almost fully explain the income gradient in COVID-19 related mortality. Interestingly, labor-market exposure remains an important determinant of COVID-19 mortality across both waves, while the role of housing conditions decreases over time, probably because the second lockdown was less stringent. 

Our work shows that the current health crisis amplifies already existing socio-economic inequalities. It also suggests that public policies aiming at limiting its effects should primarily focus on the poorest municipalities, notably by protecting workers as much as possible in the short term and by improving housing conditions in the medium term.


References

Brandily, P., Brébion, C., Briole, S., & Khoury, L. (2021). “A Poorly Understood Disease? The Impact of COVID-19 on the Income Gradient in Mortality over the Course of the Pandemic” , Working Paper, n° 2020-44, Paris School of Economics.


About the Author

Clément Brébion joined CBS in September 2020 as a postdoctoral researcher.  He received his PhD in economics in November 2019 from the Paris School of Economics. His main research interests are labour economics, economics of education and industrial relations. He has a particular interest into comparative research. More recently, he started working on the EU H2020 project HECAT that aims at developing and piloting an ethical algorithm and platform for use by PES and jobseekers.

March for Gender #4: Leaving no one behind

By Maria Figueroa

◦ 3 min read 

To mark International Women’s Day 2021, the University of Bath’s Business and Society blog and Copenhagen Business School’s Business of Society blog have teamed up to present March for Gender. This month we will explore research focusing on gender, or research findings that have specific implications for women.

In our final piece of the month Maria Figueroa looks beyond gender, and explains how business education and research can create a fully inclusive society that leaves no one behind.

The ethos of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is that society should be inclusive, environmentally just and enabling economic prosperity leaving no one behind. Business knowledge, education and research in these areas keep however advancing in separated disciplines, often directing the focus of attention to partial responses that may contribute to perpetuate conditions that leave people behind. Cohesion in achieving the SDGs goal of leaving no one behind cannot rely in adapting sameness of solutions. It requires attending to societal differences and facilitating the multiplication of ideas, creativity and forms of collective action and knowledge production and dissemination.

There is a critical role for research and education to help deepen the inquiry of what it takes to leave no one behind particularly a key role in business education.  

The ethos of business education and research for sustainability is to prepare private actors, investors, new business models, organizations and institutional actors in finding ways of addressing SDGs. In the selection and adoption of seventeen development goals of 2015 involvement of a great array of societal actors, from national governments to business representatives, big corporations and civil society organizations was ensured. The resulting agenda for action made emphasis to acknowledge the central role in achieving SDGs to be played by private actors, private finance, and businesses in forms of public private partnerships.

However, more than five years later, only marginal changes are tangible within business school education and research and a weak articulation of the bold SDG agenda for change.

Besides individual courses and occasional initiatives, no major overhaul or programmatic educational shift effort within or across departments has challenge the operation and scope of business education. 

A common approach in universities and business schools has been identification of how many SDGs goals are being targeted in their scope of education and current action, and reporting on these as evidence of engagement with SDGs. A similar approach serves to help businesses and public actors learn and report on what they are already doing to engage with SDGs. This together with helping business explore effective reactive stances to avoid societal or environmental crisis or challenges emerging.  These two common approaches to business research and education make no clear inroad for how business and private actors can contribute to leaving no one behind. 

The ethos of civil society is to generate voices and manifestations that reveal the extent of economic, social and environmental discontent, lack of improvement and unjust conditions and of articulating demands for action and changes at all levels. Recent events have elevated voices in movements such as Black Lives Matter, Me Too, Fridays-for-the-Future, Extinction Rebellion, Indigenous communities and other organized voices in society ranging from extreme right movements to nature representatives organizing other than human voices (forest, soil, pollinators, biodiversity).

The complexity of the current climate and environmental challenges and increasing volume and presence of these voices cannot be dismissed in business education and research, or handled in separated efforts as matter of concern only to businesses operating in international or developing regions and localities.

Leaving no one behind requires engaging in knowledge production that gives attention to all forms of engagement in business and societal interactions. This attention should facilitate changes in education that to produce exceptional novelty and innovation and to nurture a potential to advance knowledge of practical and academic high quality, education that is capable of setting new frontier research bringing in systemic interactions within a variety of academic disciplines and ensuring practical and transformative business knowledge with a holistic and environmentally just take toward sustainability transition. 

Business schools are posed to advance breakthrough knowledge to meet the “leave no one behind” goal, tackling several areas from the production and service processes transparency specifically in value creation, to emphasising sustainability and environmental justice through the company’s technological advancements and presenting sustainable values, mission and vision.

Furthermore, business education need incorporating appraisal of systemic change associated with challenging processes and their ecological and social impact and behavior change. With the capability to increase the value for the environment, participation of nature in business innovations, the understanding of what enhances people’s agency, what provision safe wards participation, and improves cooperation and what helps to unleash individuals vitality and imagination and can contribute to co-create new market niches and business opportunities. 


Maria Figueroa is an Associate Professor in Sustainability Management at the Department of Management Society and Communication at Copenhagen Business School.  Her research intersects scholarship from urban sustainability science, comparative international politics of climate mitigation, innovation, and partnerships for sustainable development. She focuses on the assessments of drivers, trends and challenges of low carbon transitions and sustainable development. 

SFDR, NFRD and the EU Taxonomy – What is their relationship?

By Andreas Rasche

◦ 5 min read 

The new Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) is on the minds of many investors these days. While a lot has been written on SFDR itself, I discuss how it relates to the Non-Financial Reporting Directive (NFRD) and the EU Taxonomy on sustainable economic activities. Taken together, these regulations can be overwhelming and maybe even confusing. While this is not the right place to comprehensively discuss all three regulations, I make some clarifications on their interlinked nature. 

SFDR, NFRD, and the EU Taxonomy – What are we Talking About? 

To start with, let us briefly review the three legal instruments, all of which belong to a series of EU regulations under the EU Action Plan on Sustainable Finance.

  • NFRD is the EU legal framework for regulating the disclosure of non-financial information by corporations. It was adopted in 2014 and states that corporations have to report on ESG information from 2018 onwards (for the 2017 financial year). NFRD is rather flexible – it applies only to so-called “public interest entities” (basically rather big corporations) and it contains so-called comply-or-explain clauses (allowing for non-disclosure of information if this is made transparent and reasons are given). 
  • SFDR is the new EU regulation that introduces rules for financial market participants (FMPs) and financial advisers (FAs) to report on how they account for sustainability risks. SFDR applies at the “entity level” (i.e. requiring financial firms to report on how the whole organization deals with such risks) and also on the “product level” (i.e. requiring firms to report on how their financial products are affected by such risks). SFDR contains few comply-or-explain clauses (e.g., smaller firms, with less than 500 employees, can opt out of reporting on due diligence processes). The regulation asks all FMPs and FAs to report on sustainability risks even if they do not offer ESG-related products. If an entity offers ESG-related products, SFDR requires additional disclosures depending on how “green” the product is considered to be. SFDR came into force on 10 March 2021. 
  • The EU Taxonomy regulation (hereafter: the Taxonomy), which entered into force 12 July 2020, reflects a common European classification system for environmentally sustainable activities. Basically, the Taxonomy tried to answer the question: What can be considered an environmentally sustainable activity? Answering this question is essential for investors to prevent “greenwashing” – i.e. a situation in which financial products are marketed as being sustainable without meeting sustainability criteria. The taxonomy defines six environmental objectives, and it defines an economic activity as sustainable if this activity contributes at least two one of these objectives without, at the same time, doing significant harm to any of the other objectives. 
Differences and Commonalities 

To start with, it is important to note the different legal status of SFDR/the Taxonomy as well as NFRD. NFRD is based on an older EU Directive (2014/95/EU). Directives imply that EU member states have to translate the broad requirements into national regulation. By contrast, SFDR (2019/2088) and the Taxonomy (2020/852) are both based on European regulation, which is immediately enforceable and does not require transposition into national law. 

To understand how the three legal frameworks relate to each other, look at the Figure below. NFRD applies to corporations of all kinds. Hence, for investors NFRD is mostly relevant because it stipulates how investee companies report ESG data. SFDR, by contrast, most concerns financial market actors and ensures transparency about how these report on sustainability risks to their audiences (e.g., retail investors). The Taxonomy was introduced to have a common reference point when trying to figure out whether an economic activity really is sustainable. The Taxonomy therefore has the power to further specify the regulations set out in SFDR and NFRD. 

source: Andreas Rasche
Emerging Relationships  

The linkages between the three frameworks will be further specified throughout the coming years. While SFDR has been in force since 10 March 2021, it is only in the so-called “level 1 stage of development”. As with many EU regulations, level 1 development sets out the basic framework principles for a regulation, however without specifying technical details. SFDR level 2 will come into force once the regulation is complemented with Regulatory Technical Standards (RTS), which are developed right now. The RTS will also specify the linkages to the Taxonomy in more detail (e.g., related to the “do-no-significant-harm” concept inherent in SFDR). 

So, what can we say right now? The current versions of SFDR and NFRD do not yet link disclosures to the Taxonomy. This is likely to change, especially with the SFDR RTS being further specified and rolled out (in early February the European Supervisory Authorities released their final draft of the SFDR RTS). Moreover, the NFRD regulation is currently under consultation and will be revised in the near future. However, two important linkages are important to consider right now.  

  • First, the scope of the Taxonomy is defined through NFRD and SFDR. In other words, if an organization is affected by NFRD and/or SFDR, the Taxonomy will also be relevant for its disclosure practices. It is important to note here that the EU Taxonomy defines further mandatory disclosures in addition to what is laid out by NFRD and SFDR. 
  • Second, the Taxonomy asks companies (incl. asset managers) to report the percentage of their turnover and capital as well as operational expenditures that are aligned with the Taxonomy. It also asks asset managers to report the percentage of their portfolio which is invested in economic activities that are aligned with the Taxonomy. 
The Future

We will witness a good deal of technical specifications of all three regulations throughout the next years. SFDR level 2 reporting will kick in once the RTS standards are part of the reporting (probably by mid-2023); also by 2024 year-on-year comparisons of data points under SFDR will be likely mandatory. The six environmental objectives of the Taxonomy will be specified through technical screening criteria, some of which will be released very soon. 

It is good to see non-financial reporting and sustainable finance being backed by strong European regulations. It allows for more comparison and benchmarking and hence transparency. But, of course, we should also be prepared for a good deal of clarifications that will be necessary until institutionalized reporting cycles can fully kick in and unfold their potential. 


About the Author

Andreas Rasche is Professor of Business in Society at the Copenhagen Business School (CBS) Centre for Sustainability. His latest book “Sustainable Investing: A Path to a New Horizon” (with Georg Kell and Herman Bril) was published recently. Email: ar.msc@cbs.dk Homepage: www.arasche.com

March for Gender #3: We need a manifesto for Maya, not just a celebration of John

By Pierre McDonagh and Andrea Prothero

◦ 5 min read

To mark International Women’s Day 2021, the University of Bath’s Business and Society blog and Copenhagen Business School’s Business of Society blog have teamed up to present March for Gender. This month we will explore research focusing on gender, or research findings that have specific implications for women.

Here Pierre McDonagh and Andrea Prothero call out gender discrimination in the marketing academy. Their latest study, looking at gender representation in marketing’s academic journals, showed that women were significantly underrepresented on editorial boards, and that special issues and awards favour men over women. They use these disappointing findings to call for meaningful change, outlining how the problem could be addressed.

Despite the progress made in recent years, gender inequality persists in all walks of life. In our workplaces, the statistics are especially troubling. In 2020, men earned 15.5% more than women for the same work. As of 2019, only 7% of FTSE 100 companies had a female CEO.

Discrimination also comes in less easily measurable ways, and many women feel that their work is not taken as seriously as their male counterparts or that their gender has caused them to lose out on a promotion.

Wake up! It’s 2021!

We decided to explore this important issue in our latest paper in the Journal of Marketing Management. We looked at gender representation in marketing’s academic journals, through three key areas – the gender composition of editorial boards, special issue celebrations and the awards process. This study is a continuation of a larger research project which examines ‘the development of feminist thought within marketing scholarship from 1993 to 2020’.

Our results painted a disappointing picture. It’s a sad indictment of our field that in 2021 the facts are as stark as they are. So, we think it’s important to pause at this point in the process, to empirically call out one major issue – gender discrimination within our academy.

We wrote about this as we believe many scholars might not realise what is happening in our academy and, as our recent paper suggests ‘it’s hard to be what you cannot see’!

Our goal is to get scholars in the marketing academy to think differently about things that are hidden in plain sight. We also want them to join us in asking for meaningful change with respect to existing gender discrimination in the marketing academy.

A sad indictment of the field

For this study, we examined the gender composition of 20 leading journals [i], considering Editor-in-Chief, Co-Editor, Advisory Board, Associate Editor and Editorial Review Board positions within the journals. We found that, while there has been improvement since 2017, nonetheless in 2020 over two-thirds of the editorial board positions within leading journals in the marketing academy are held by men.

At the same time our research highlighted how journal celebrations also favour men. Special issues for example include reflections from previous editors (who are mostly men), and invited commentaries (who are mostly men). And, where journals and/or their related associations celebrate outstanding research through awards processes, those awards which are named after leading figures in the field are all named after men! We are not arguing that women are deliberately excluded from celebrations, but that there are structural, systemic and institutional biases at play, which means male colleagues are privileged over women. And this of course, also means that injustice and inequality for female academics are perpetuated.

Addressing the problem

How then can the marketing academy and the publishing houses which publish our research help rectify this sad state of affairs? First of all, we can all ask our journal editors and gatekeepers in the Academy to act now. Specifically, we are asking journal editors and publishing houses to review their activities, and we offer here 4 simple steps to tackle gender discrimination specifically, and inclusion and diversity more broadly, in the marketing academy:

  1. Build diversity into existing journal review boards which extends across the globe. Cry out for each Editor-in-Chief to publish a statement for their journal making clear ‘why’ its gender and race composition is the way it is. Ask that they embrace the principles of unity & diversity. Editors-In-Chief are well positioned to lead the charge moving forward.
  2. Introduce a quota system to ensure diversity of people involved in journals from advisory boards, manuscript review boards, Associate Editors, Co-editors, to the Editors-In-Chief.
  3. We should ask awkward questions of the leaders in our field. Why do the majority of named awards in our field honour white men? We request awards which also honour the leading people of colour and females in our field. Quite simply the current status quo is an injustice – not everyone is a white male academic, so why do they dominate everything!?
  4. Celebrations – Our Editors-in-Chief can shape the field by celebrating those who remain invisible within our field. We have female role models for younger scholars to inspire them to greatness, but they are not celebrated or included either in editorial boards or in special issue celebrations to the same extent as men. Let’s rectify this.

Can we please bring the marketing academy up to speed in the year 2021? Let’s not procrastinate here or leave it to DC or Marvel fantasy movies to inspire change, let’s do it ourselves.

We know Rome wasn’t built in a day and change takes time, but we’ve heard all the clichés before – we are fed up, we are here, and we want to be listened to. Our marketing academy should reflect the values we cherish and those we wish our students to emulate. For too long the marketing academy has favoured one gender (and one race) and as a result, women have been pushed to the periphery of the wider academy.

Change, not tokenism

What’s more we want fundamental change, not tokenism.

We need an intersectional approach now more than ever; this recognises issues of race and gender, alongside other examples of subordination such as appearance, class, religion, sexuality and ability which are not independent of each other.

We need what Marian Wright Edelman (founder of the Children’s Defense Fund and civil rights activist) calls a global sense of connection – where everyone can be seen, and all voices are heard and rewarded, whether by being invited to contribute to special issues celebrating our journals or by membership of our editorial boards! We deserve ‘marketing joy’ to underscore what we have in common with others in a multiracial, multicultural, democratic society.

This is important, not only in providing role models for aspiring academics who are not solely “pale, male and stale”, as well as providing equal opportunities in terms of key indicators of esteem within our academy, but also in terms of harnessing what gets published in our journals. In 2021 it is simply not acceptable that 88% of advisory board members within our journals are men or that some journals in our field have never had a female Editor-in-Chief. When publishing houses claim on their websites to be fully committed to inclusion and diversity in their journals, we also need this to shine through within our journals. In the marketing academy, while there has been improvement in recent years, gender representation is still appalling.

We call on those who can to change this. We need parity. Now.


References

[i] Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Retailing, International Journal of Research in Marketing, European Journal of Marketing, Industrial Marketing Management, International Marketing Review, Journal of Advertising, Journal of Advertising Research, Journal of Interactive Marketing, Journal of International Marketing, Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, Marketing Letters, Marketing Theory, Psychology and Marketing, Quantitative Marketing and Economics.


About the Authors

Andrea Prothero is Professor of Business and Society at University College Dublin, Ireland, and Co- Director of the UCD Centre for Business and Society (CeBaS). Her research broadly explores the area of Marketing in Society with a key focus on sustainability and gender issues.

Pierre McDonagh is Professor of Critical Marketing & Society at the School of Management, University of Bath, UK. Pierre has researched sustainable consumption & production since the early 1990’s and helps people understand what sustainable communication entails. He also writes about issues in gender equality in marketing and the benefits and challenges of critical marketing communications. He recently co-authored ‘The Dark Side of Marketing Communications’ with Tim Hill, which features as part of the Routledge series on Studies in Critical Marketing.

Arguing for Climate Adaptation

By Stella Whittaker

◦ 3 min read

This month saw the publication of the Climate Policy Initiative’s (CPI) long awaited analysis of climate finance flows in cities.  Each year the CPI publish an analysis of the global landscape for climate finance but this year that work was supplemented by this urban analysis.  There will also be another forthcoming CPI report  due in April 2021 – State of Cities Climate Finance Report which will help paint the full picture.  

Cities and urban communities across the globe are highly vulnerable to climate change – heat waves, extreme weather volatility, floods, droughts, coastal inundation, and vector borne diseases. The Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) data indicates that in 2018, 85% of cities reported major climate-related disruptions, including flash and surface flooding and extreme weather events like heat waves and droughts.

There is an urgency for much more discussion, research and attention on climate finance to address climate adaptation needs in cities. While many cities have begun planning policies and programs to build resilience towards climate hazards, the how and where of finance for those activities is less understood.  

It is plain to see from this practitioner-based work that climate finance for adaptation is not being supplied or demanded at a scale that is commensurate with the size of the impacts of climate change.  Scholars have found that here are significant data and reporting challenges and a myriad of policy challenges and barriers.  I am stressing here the need to argue loud and long for adaptation along with mitigation activities.

CPI recorded annual global climate finance flows of USD 546 billion in 2018. Of this only 4% can be attributed to adaptation. Finance flow in cities for adaptation is particularly problematic. The CPI also found:

Between 2010 and 2014, cities received less than 5% (in the range of USD 109 Million) of global adaptation finance.

Morgan RichmondNidhi Upadhyaya and Angela Ortega Pastor, CPI, 2021

So, based on current estimates, despite all the difficulties with measurement and tracking, potentially less than 1% of global climate finance is flowing to cities each year for adaptation, which is much less than the USD 11-20 billion that what the World Resources Institute (WRI) stated be needed on an annual basis to protect global urban infrastructure from climate risks (WRI, 2019).

This month I launched a new Linkedin Group Adaptation Finance – this is a discussion, research and professional development group for investors, governments and academics alike dedicated to developing an understanding of climate finance for adaptation. By following the Group there is an opportunity to participate in my PhD climate finance research (survey, interview, focus group or information provision), whilst learning and sharing in the latest research and trends from various industries. As climate adaptation practitioners, investors, governments, academics, scientists and researchers we rarely meet to share knowledge and experiences, please join in this unique collaboration. I want to build an active research environment for both investors and city government focused on climate adaptation. 

In addition, in the Group:

  • WE will analyse climate finance flows in cities.
  • WE will also analyse activity against internationally recognized benchmarks for appropriate urban climate change adaptation financing. 
  • WE will collate innovative climate finance practice.
  • WE will generate new knowledge on how to deliver and finance large-scale innovative city financing solutions through public and/or private stakeholders. 

In Arguing for Adaptation there are five practical things to think about in getting the balance right:

  1. Make climate adaptation an equal priority to climate mitigation
  2. Understand future climate risks to your business and/or constituency (look at the guidance from the Taskforce on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD)
  3. Understand climate finance flows in your city and region(s) you operate in
  4. Enter into a dialogue with investors and cities to understand each other’s challenges and opportunities
  5. Look for and prioritize climate initiatives that deliver dual or even multiple benefits – climate resilience, mitigation, natural capital etc. such as nature-based solutions NbS

If you like a good cause and a good argument, then please join me


About the Author

Stella Whittaker is a PhD Research Fellow who is undertaking a PhD in climate finance at Copenhagen Business School, at the department of Management, Culture & Communications. Stella is a specialist in the field of sustainability, circular economy and climate change. She has worked for over 30 years as a senior executive in sustainability, climate change, infrastructure sustainability & environment.

March for Gender #2: The Gendered Impact of Covid-19

By Maha Rafi Atal

◦ 5 min read

Most years, International Women’s Day is greeted by articles highlighting both progress made towards gender equality, and the distance still to close. 2021 is different. This year, organizations from the European Parliament to UN Women have instead drawn attention to how women have been pushed backwards – economically and politically – during the coronavirus. It has been “a disaster for feminism,”and a “great amplifier” which has exacerbated existing inequalities and unraveled tenuous gains. What does the research show?

First, the global economic contraction of the past year has disproportionately harmed women. In the United States alone, more than 2 million women have dropped out of the labor force altogether, a regression to 1988 participation levels, erasing a generation of gains. 

Globally, women account for 54% of jobs lost during the pandemic, even though they make up only 39% of the global formal workforce.

Women bore the brunt of job losses in 17 of the 24 member-states of the OECD in 2020, and in South Africa, a survey found that two-thirds of workers laid off or furloughed in the first wave of the pandemic were women.

In part, this is a reflection of the sectors women work in, such as travel, tourism, restaurants, and food production, which have been largely shut down over the past year.

Women are also more likely to be employed on precarious or zero-hours contracts within these sectors, which made them vulnerable to job cuts, or in informal roles which left them outside the reach of government income-support schemes.

Finally, 190 million women work in global supply chains, including garments and food processing, and these industries have contracted as buyers either withdrew orders from suppliers during the recession, or sought to re-shore production closer to home. Labor market dynamics also mean women who stayed in work are among the most exposed to contracting the virus itself. A majority – estimates range from 67 to 76 percent – of the global health care workforce are women.

Yet only one quarter of the gendered discrepancy in job losses can be explained by the sectors where women are employed. Far more significant is the burden of care labor, both paid and unpaid, which disproportionately falls on women in both developed and developing countries. 

Working mothers in the United Kingdom, for example, are 50% more likely than fathers to have either lost their jobs or quit in order to accommodate the responsibilities of caring for children with schools closed, with European women doing on average twice as much care labor as men during this period.

Over a million women in Japan left the job market in the first wave of the pandemic due to childcare needs at home, erasing tenuous progress the country had made towards workplace gender equality in the last decade. This unequal weight of the pandemic builds on pre-existing inequalities, as women are lower earners in many societies, meaning their jobs are considered a lower priority – by both employers and households – in times of crisis.

This economic crisis is not just a blow to women’s economic position, but to their political freedom. The “Local Diaries” podcast in India recounts the stories of women whose personal, political and sexual freedoms have evaporated as they have been locked down at home. As in pandemics past, covid-19 has seen a significant spike in domestic violence, femicide and other gender-bases violence in countries under lockdown. These include including developing countries like Nigeria, Argentina, Brazil, India, Pakistan, and China, and developed countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Ireland, Lithuania, Sweden and Italy, a reminder that the home is not a safe place for many women. UN Women has referred to these spikes in violence as the “shadow pandemic.” 

Moreover, despite early warnings from international organizations and women’s rights advocates, many countries shut down or diverted resources away from reproductive health care during the pandemic, leading to a rise in maternal deaths, unsafe abortions and pregnancy-related deaths. Finally, lockdowns themselves – and the expansion of policing and military powers associated with their enforcement – can themselves pose a risk to women, as police forces can themselves be significant perpetrators of violence against women, and as governments take advantage of these powers to suppress political organizing, including feminist organizing, as seen recently in both the UK and Poland.

At the same time, in a punishing political environment, women and feminist organizations have been at the forefront of pandemic response. The Chilean feminist movement has released a useful guide for governments and employers for responding to the pandemic in a gender-just way, while the Indian Kudumbashree women’s collective organized grassroots community kitchens and takeaway restaurants to provide food and employment to women, especially migrant women, during the country’s shut down, and repurposed textile micro-enterprises, largely women-owned, for the manufacture of PPE.

Despite calls from international experts for governments to respond directly to the crisis facing women by keeping services for reproductive health or shelters for victims of gender-based violence open, targeting cash transfers to women in informal employment and providing for paid child care, UNDP reports that only 12% of governments have adopted adequate gender-sensitive measures in their pandemic response.

Meanwhile, employers who have disproportionately laid off women in the crisis now report that gender equity will take a backseat to restoring their financial sustainability as the pandemic ends. This is made more difficult by the fact that some governments, such as the UK, have suspended requirements for companies to report on their gender pay gap or comply with other equality requirements, as part of pandemic support.

In our own research on corporate responses to covid-19, we found brands advertising luxury fashion goods to women and presenting the pandemic lockdowns as a welcome relief from labor in which women could enjoy them, a regressive image that shows how women’s work is still seen as frivolous and extraneous.

This International Women’s Day, then, we must reflect not on what progress we have made or can make, but on how women, internationally, can recover what we have lost.


About the Author

Maha Rafi Atal is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Copenhagen Business School, where her research focuses on corporate power, corporate social responsibility and corporate influence in the media. She is a co- Investigator on the Commodifying Compassion research project. http://www.maha-rafi-atal.com


Photo by Giacomo Ferroni on Unsplash

Distraction and manipulation: the two horsemen of the digital economy

By Jan Michael Bauer

◦ 2 min read

Even before COVID, people have spent more and more time online. Particularly mobile devices have become a large part of our daily routines and for many there are few moments when the phone is not within direct reach. While studies have shown that even teenagers think they waste too much time online, surprisingly little is done to stop this trend. 

But how did we get here? Several dovetailing factors enabled this development and give me little hope that this trend will slow down any time soon. While technological advancements in mobile internet and device components were necessary conditions that allow for an easy and enjoyable interaction with platforms and services at all times and places, the real champions of compulsive internet use are social and data scientists driven by monetary incentives and unrestrained by a lack of proper ethics training. 

Despite the frequent regrets about the many hours wasted on the internet, people are struggling with self-regulation and apps, like “RescueTime”, with to sole purpose to block oneself from using other apps are becoming increasingly popular. 

While internet addiction has not been officially recognized as a disorder by the WHO, close parallels can be drawn to officially acknowledge gaming and gambling addictions. 

And this is certainly no coincidence as tech companies hire psychologists and designers to make their products and services as tempting as possible, frequently borrowing elements from the gambling industry. However, even though some tweaks based on the knowledge of capable social scientists will increase user engagement, much more can be learned about consumer behavior and how to manipulate it through the application of the scientific method itself. The use of experimentation, collection of big user data and application of machine learning algorithms are the big guns in the fight for user attention and their money.  

All these efforts are used to make social media more “engaging” but ultimately sales and advertising campaigns more effective. To do so, user interfaces and features are explicitly designed to grab attention and contain what has been termed as “dark patterns”. Design elements that often tap into the subconscious decision-making processes and therefore manipulate user through purposefully curated interfaces. While such practices benefit the company, they can have detrimental effects on individuals and society as a whole. 

We know that individual choices reflect individual preferences only under certain conditions, including the absence of deceptive choice architecture or marketing messages. Hence, I can’t stop wondering about the opportunity costs and side-effects of these miraculous little devices in our pockets that have grown into an ugly hybrid between a snake oil salesman and one-armed bandit. 

We have free markets based on the belief that they create value for society and make people better off by efficiently satisfying their needs. The recent U.S. opioid scandal has shown that for some products, sellers’ profits might not be positively related to consumer value. It certainly gives me pause that the best offline equivalent to the “RescueTime” App is probably the Betty Ford Clinic.

We are faced with many pressing issues that would require our full attention, while people are increasingly plagued by credit card debt, the planet is suffering from overconsumption and we spent 30,000 years alone, watching Gangnam Style on YouTube. 

Regarding the larger point that any efforts against these trends would hurt innovation, jobs and growth; let us take one step back and point out that the Western world has made it an imperative to ensure individual property rights and outlaw the use of violence with the explicit goal to increase investment and productivity. People can just do more good stuff, when they do not have to spend time protecting their property and family. Given our current technology and knowledge from the behavioral sciences, I think we have seen enough and should start treating distraction and manipulation as similar threads to human flourishing. 

So, what could we do? In the short run, we need to find ways to reduce the stream of big data feeding these efforts, force these practices out in the open and raise awareness about their use and effects, and find effective regulation to limit manipulation efforts in a dynamic attention economy. In the long run, we probably need to go beyond those patches as these issues not only hurt individual lives and careers but also the fabric of our democracy. 


Further reading

We recently published a paper showing how users can be manipulated through dark patterns to provide more data:

J. M. Bauer, R. Bergstrøm, R. Foss-Madsen (2021) – Are you sure, you want a cookie? – The effects of choice architecture on users’ decisions about sharing private online data, Computers in Human Behavior.


About the Author

Jan Michael Bauer is Associate Professor at Copenhagen Business School and part of the Consumer & Behavioural Insights Group at CBS Sustainability. His research interests are in the fields of sustainability, consumer behavior and decision-making.


Source: photo by ROBIN WORRALL on Unsplash

March for Gender #1: How a feminist collective took on a media giant to challenge everyday sexism

By Sarah Glozer & Lauren McCarthy

◦ 4 min read

To mark International Women’s Day 2021, the University of Bath’s Business and Society blog and Copenhagen Business School’s Business of Society blog have teamed up to present March for Gender. This month we will explore research focusing on gender, or research findings that have specific implications for women.

Here Sarah Glozer and Lauren McCarthy present their latest research into the activities of the feminist group ‘No More Page 3’. They explain why online activists should take a step back for campaigning in order to maintain the energy needed to affect change. This piece was originally published in The Conversation.

The daily image of a topless woman on page three of the Sun newspaper was considered by some to be a “British institution”. Yet it was also increasingly seen as a relic of institutionalised sexism in the media and society.

Then in 2015, nearly 50 years after it was first introduced, the feature was quietly removed from the publication. This decision was credited, in part, to the online campaign efforts of the “No More Page 3” (NMP3) movement, which gained the support of 140 members of parliament and numerous charities, including Women’s Aid and Girlguiding. It also attracted more than 240,000 petition signatures.

The campaign, which helped to force change at one of the UK’s most popular and powerful media companies, was widely acclaimed, described by one MP as a “seismic victory”. Activist Katherine Sladden wrote, “No other campaign has done as much to inspire a new generation of young feminists,” adding that it “became the gateway for women finding the courage to speak out on issues they care about”.

But beneath this success story lies a complex tale of how emotional energy sustained the NMP3 campaigners through personal and painful trolling.

Our research into the campaign reveals how supporters were met with online abuse on a daily basis. They regularly encountered rape and death threats aimed at themselves and their families. Campaign founder Lucy-Anne Holmes has told how she suffered an “overwhelming feeling of helplessness” and “burnout”, recalling:

It was terrifying. I was spent: financially, emotionally, creatively. Just going on Twitter with all of those voices coming at me would bring on a panic attack. I felt like I was being strangled by invisible hands.

Her experience was far from unique. For while the liberating potential of social media to mobilise collective action is widely valued, the toxic climate many experience on social media is all too familiar, and can lead to stress, anxiety and depression.

Yet the relentless online abuse aimed at the NMP3 campaigners – who deliberately tried to engage with their opponents through reasoned and polite posts – was tempered by messages of encouragement, both from each other and from supporters of their cause.

This complex interplay of positive and negative emotions led us to dig deeper into the campaigners’ survival story, and investigate the powerful techniques which kept them going in the face of such overwhelming adversity.

One important element was the underlying sense of solidarity which became a powerful force in helping the campaigners to recharge and replenish, sustaining momentum through emotional highs and lows. Faced with trolling and harassment, many campaigners felt energised simply by being online with other women with shared experiences. This feeling of alignment with others created a valuable store of emotional energy.

As one campaigner told us: “It wasn’t just a campaign … it was a space where we could go and feel completely confident, we could share anything with each other, and work out what we thought about things.”

Stepping back to move forward

Interestingly, this solidarity led to the coordinated and tactical use of a relay system adopted by the team. An exhausted campaigner wrestling with a hostile social media thread would “pass the baton” on to a colleague via a system of online messaging or “tagging” across platforms.

This system became a vital part of keeping the campaign’s momentum at times when some members felt the need to retreat from the front line. There was time and space for activists to step away from their screens, to disengage with the onslaught of social media.

Usually temporary, these moments of stepping away were deliberate and empowering – they offered protection. And in preserving individual wellbeing, they also ensured the continuation of the campaign.

Retreating, far from being seen as a form of weakness or defeat, was supported by the campaigners. It was a strategy which allowed for recovery of emotional energy and healing and, crucially, it rejuvenated the campaigners to return to campaigning.

A genuine connection to the roots of the campaign was also something that sustained the (mostly female) volunteers. They drew on their aligned personal experiences, often reminiscing about teenage shame they experienced related to their bodies or of later episodes of sexual harassment. The emotions related to these experiences meant the campaigners didn’t just “think” shame or anger, they felt it deeply.

One explained to us: “The feminist stuff still remains the thing that really lights me up.” She continued: “I feel it’s personal, it’s maternal, because I have a daughter, and a son who’s affected by toxic masculinity. It’s in my experience of abuse in relationship. I’m angry about it and passionate about it because it’s personal to me and people that I love.”

Another said: “Standing up for what is right is enough to make your legs go weak, your voice grow hoarse, and your hands shake with rage.”

Six years on from the NMP3 victory, more action is needed to fight inequality in both our online and offline worlds – there is still plenty to campaign for. Digital platforms certainly need to better police social media channels which continue to tolerate and excuse trolling and hate speech, particularly that directed towards women.

But we should be encouraged by NMP3’s story of grassroots collective strength, and its journey to success. And we should also consider the lessons it provides about activism and the common advice for women to always “lean in”. Sometimes, it seems, it’s better to simply retreat, replenish and come back stronger.


About the Authors

Dr Sarah Glozer is Associate Professor in Marketing and Society in the School of Management at the University of Bath. She obtained her PhD from the International Centre of Corporate Social Responsibility (ICCSR) at Nottingham University Business School. Sarah has also held a number of industry positions, such as Global Sustainability Manager at Cadbury Plc, UK. She is also Deputy Director of the Centre for Business, Organisations and Society (CBOS). Sarah researches and teaches on topics including corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication, digital marketing and ethical markets / consumption.

Dr Lauren McCarthy is Co-Director of the Centre for Research into Sustainability (CRIS) and a Senior Lecturer in Organisation Studies and Sustainability at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research explores in what ways business can contribute to gender equality, with a focus on global supply chains. Lauren’s research has covered cocoa production in Ghana, cotton farming in India, and most recently, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on women garment workers in Cambodia. Equally, her research has explored how feminist social movements interact with business and CSR, particularly through the use of social media.


Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash

Portfolios at risk of Deforestation

How can financial investors better understand underlying risks and act accordingly

By Amanda Wildhaber, Dominik Wingeier, Jessica Brügger, Nico Meier, and Dr. Kristjan Jespersen

◦ 4 min read ◦

Forests play a crucial role in tackling climate change and protecting biodiversity. Around 12 million hectares of tropical forest worldwide were lost in 2018 and approximately 17% of the loss stem from the Amazon alone. The main drivers of deforestations are soy, palm oil, cattle and timber production. As deforestation may harm a company’s reputation, directly affect its supply chains and increase regulatory risks, many institutional investors are concerned about the impact deforestation can have on their portfolio companies.

How can deforestation be measured?

The definition of deforestation risk from an investor’s perspective is difficult to lock-in because different frameworks and approaches focus on different aspects of the risks. The amount of information and the lack of transparency can be overwhelming to financial investors. Therefore, a helpful framework for financial institutions to systematically evaluate the deforestation risk management of portfolio companies has been developed. The framework is divided into two parts, an internal assessment of a company’s commitments and achievements regarding deforestation and an external assessment of outside policies related to deforestation, namely binding laws and private sector initiatives. The framework may serve to complete a scorecard which gives an overview of how well prepared a specific portfolio company is and if it is able to deal with deforestation risks and future regulatory changes. The final scorecard reflects the deforestation risk of financial institution’s portfolio companies.

Is voluntary support sufficient?

Many companies voluntarily support sustainability initiatives and follow zero deforestation commitments (ZDCs) to signal their intention to reduce deforestation associated with the commodities in their supply chain. The reasons behind their commitments include demonstrating corporate social responsibility (CSR), reducing the risk of potential reputational harm and supply chain disruptions. To understand the value of these commitments in mitigating deforestation and associated risks, it is important to critically analyse them in terms of their scope, effectiveness, monitoring and achievements. This includes for example, assessing how companies define deforestation and whether they systematically measure the compliance with their commitments.

External pressure to facilitate internal commitments

It is valuable to see companies implementing robust internal policies and commitments to manage and monitor their deforestation risk. However, it is also important to have external policies in place to hold companies accountable. There are two types of external policies the proposed framework is based on.

  1. The first type are binding laws which apply for portfolio companies and thus represent a regulatory risk. The EU Timber Regulation (EUTR) of 2010, which prohibits the sale of illegally logged wood in the EU, is one example for such a binding law.
  2. The second type are initiatives by third parties, which are of a non-binding nature and complement the binding law. One such initiative is the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), which is an initiative by private companies as well as external parties targeted to eliminate unsustainable palm oil production.
How do the companies score?

Based on the assessment of the two pillars of the framework – internal and external – a scorecard is derived which assists investors to better understand how a portfolio company or a new potential investment is managing its deforestation risk. Answering questions with scores from 1 to 3, whereby 1 is the best score and 3 the worst, the proposed scorecard allows the quantification of the deforestation risk management of a company. While the distinction between 1, 2 or 3 is not always straightforward, the final score gives a tangible assessment of how well a company is positioned to manage its deforestation risks and associated future regulatory changes. The following scorecard provides an overview of the assessment and indicates how well Nestlé is managing deforestation risks.

Having such a scorecard allows investors to manage and mitigate the deforestation risks they face in their portfolios. In addition, the final scorecard enables investment analysts to directly compare potential investments with other companies and can be used as a parameter in the investment process.

The call for action is getting louder

New regulatory requirements, growing public scrutiny and extended private sector initiatives (such as the investor-led initiative Climate Action 100+), mean that it is becoming increasingly important to properly manage deforestation risks. This is also becoming a key concern for financial investors and it is time to think about systematic approaches on how to include deforestation into the investment process. The proposed framework is intended to serve as a starting point for just that. It allows a quantification of deforestation risk and the identification of critical factors. Building the basis upon which investors can engage with companies. This is a first step to support the mitigating of not only financial but also ecological risks.


About the Authors

Amanda Wildhaber is completing her masters in Economics at the University of St. Gallen. She works as a Junior Consultant in the Strategy team of Implement Consulting. Her interest in ESG and sustainable investments developed when she wrote her bachelor thesis on social enterprises in India.

Dominik Wingeier is studying master’s in Banking and Finance at University of St. Gallen. Dominik has been working for BlackRock where he was responsible for executing and monitoring primary, secondary and direct investments in infrastructure projects.

Jessica Brügger is studying master’s in Business Innovation at the University of St. Gallen. Jessica is currently a board member of the Private Equity & Venture Capital Club of the University of St. Gallen and is particularly interested in making the financial industry more attractive to women.

Nico Meier is studying master’s in Accounting an Finance at the University of St. Gallen. Nico has been working at BLR&Partners where he is responsible for private equity investments. Additionally, he has experience providing M&A, ECM and DCM services.

Kristjan Jespersen is an Associate Professor at the Copenhagen Business School. He studies on the growing development and management of Ecosystem Services in developing countries. Within the field, Kristjan focuses his attention on the institutional legitimacy of such initiatives and the overall compensation tools used to ensure compliance.


Source: photo by Justus Menke on Unsplash

Under the radar: How companies can redefine what we consider socially responsible

By Verena Girschik

◦ 2 min read ◦

Notwithstanding promises of win-wins and synergies, we have good reasons to question whether companies address social problems in society’s best interests. As many critics have pointed out, companies tend to promote solutions that foster their commercial interests – often without considering their broader social impact.

Do our suspicions stop them? Of course not. Companies are usually well aware of any concerns and continuously evaluate the risk of prompting a controversy around their social activities. When they don’t have the social license to operate, they simply cultivate relations with organizations that do and get them to act on their behalf. Using such relational strategies, companies’ efforts remain hidden from public scrutiny insofar as they operate under the radar. Smart!

It’s not quite that simple, however. Legitimate organizations such as NGOs are just as aware of those widespread suspicions, and they are therefore often reluctant to work with companies. Indeed, if an organization’s relations with companies are perceived to be inappropriate, the organization risks exacerbating concerns around corporate influence and may thereby jeopardize its legitimacy too. The widespread suspicions of companies’ intentions thus make it more difficult for companies to participate in social change. Let’s call this a legitimacy barrier. 

Overcoming the legitimacy barrier through relational work

How do companies overcome the legitimacy barrier and become legitimate actors in social change? In a recent publication (Girschik, 2020), I theorize how companies may engage in relational work to cultivate and shape their relations with legitimate organizations in such ways that redefine their involvement as socially responsible and thus legitimate. The paper details that companies can take four interdependent steps:

  1. Cultivating communal relations: As a first step, companies can form or strengthen personal relations with people who work for legitimate organizations and who are likely to be interested in addressing the social problem in question. On a personal rather than organizational level, it is easier to align and create a shared understanding of potential courses of action.
    
  2. Extending organizational support: Once a shared understanding is evolving, the company can start diligently targeting resources that enable the other organization to boost its activities and address the social problem. Such support has to happen on the organizational level to make sure that it is not considered for individual gain.
    
  3. Articulating a partnership: Because the second step produces salient practical outcomes and illustrates the benefits of corporate involvement, it opens a window of opportunity to formalize collaboration through a partnership agreement. As part of this agreement, the company can participate in defining not only further courses of action but also the company’s role.
    
  4. Differentiating as a socially responsible company: At this point, the company’s competitors have likely become interested and may try to imitate the company’s involvement by forming partnerships with the same or similar legitimate organizations. That’s a good thing for the first-moving company because it promotes the legitimacy of such partnerships. And benefiting from its strong relational embedding, the company is likely to outperform competitors through superior compliance with expectations. Being perceived as less sincere, competitors’ efforts are thus less strategically valuable and the first-moving company stands out as most socially responsible.

This process is time- and resource-consuming, but my study shows that it may pay off: it may enable companies to legitimate their involvement in social change while securing a competitive edge.

For better or worse?

These four steps explicate subtle yet consequential efforts through which companies may shape social change. The good news is that it is not easy and takes genuine long-term commitment. The bad news is that companies’ commercial interests may inform and mold trajectories of social change while their actual influence is hidden under a CSR veil. We need to keep deconstructing the relational constellations through which companies establish and exert their influence. 


Reference

Girschik, V. (2020). Managing Legitimacy in Business‐Driven Social Change: The Role of Relational WorkJournal of Management Studies57(4), 775-804.


About the authors

Verena Girschik is Assistant Professor of CSR, Communication, and Organization at Copenhagen Business School (Denmark). She adopts a communicative institutionalist perspective to understand how companies negotiate their roles and responsibilities, how they perform them, and with what consequences. Empirically, she is interested in activism in and around multinational companies and in business–humanitarian collaboration. Her research has been published in the Journal of Management Studies, Human Relations, Business & Society, and Critical Perspectives on International Business. She’s on Twitter: @verenacph


Source: photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Who really cares about the SDGs when it comes to nobody’s responsibility?

By Suhyon Oh

◦ 2 min read ◦

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are the common goals of global development as we all agreed. Since its endorsement in 2015, it has become the norm. Multilateral corporations, aid agencies, development finance institutions and international organizations all refer to one or two Sustainable Development Goals (as their priorities) to legitimize environmental and social impact of their business activities. (I must confess here that I was also one of them). However, what are the actual changes in practices? Does it merely work as one other additional reference to our work? Otherwise, does it provoke transformational changes in our business strategies and practices for sustainability? Ironically, the Sustainable Development Goals are at once too sophisticated and too vague to do so.

The complexity of the goal structure should not be an excuse.  

The development process of SDGs has been grounded based on lessons learnt from the Millennium Development Goals. Because the MDGs excessively focus on the social aspect of development, the SDGs embrace economic, social, and environmental aspects. This led the number of goals to increase from 8 to 17. In relation to the goals, 169 target goals and 231 indicators have been developed to track the progress of 17 goals (In comparison, the MDGs only have 21 target goals and 60 indicators). These vast numbers intend to strengthen progress monitoring and enhance result management; however, such complexity seems problematic to fulfil the initial purpose. Some indicator selection processes are still under the technical review process after five years of SDGs have once passed and almost half of the indicators (106 out of 231) contain technical difficulties producing data on a regular basis to track the progress. I know that measuring the fulfillment of the whole massive SDGs is complex and may not be an easy task. However, when it comes to wrestling with such a giant, the sophisticated skill set (here, seeking clear target goals and indicators) would be a winning strategy rather than hurdles. Thus, how should we deal with the giant?  

 We have to consider which specific target goals and indicators are aligned with my actions if you have a will to achieve the SDGs. Simply stating one of the goals does not track your achievement. Each goal cannot be even drawn in parallel rather they are all interlinked.

Universality matters, but not everyone is in the same boat. 

We know why the SDGs have a principle of “No one left behind” across all the goals. This principle is again a result of lessons from the MDGs, which were criticized for the fact that they did not consider inequality and vulnerable groups in a development process. So that, this core principle is embedded into seventeen goals with the terms “inclusive”, “for everyone”, “for all” regardless of the developmental stage of their nations. Then, how can we make sure this would go far beyond the rhetoric?

We need extreme caution here. Do we have enough knowledge on those who are left behind? To move forward beyond the rhetoric, we need to unpack the word ‘everyone’. Even though ‘universality’ is an essential principle, we have to find out ‘who is left behind’ in every different context to make them not left behind, rather than concealing those excluded people under the name of “for everyone”.

Let’s see microfinance. It was expected as a universal means to reduce poverty and inequality since it provides a way of financial inclusion to those previously excluded to access credit. However, many research findings demonstrate that a particular type of “financial inclusion” which is embedded into microfinance cannot solve the marginalized groups’ economic challenges by itself. Without complementary social support, it was not enough to empower the poor, and even sometimes it resulted in an exacerbating situation for the people. I think this tells us the importance of deeper understanding of the poor, thus the need for a carefully targeted approach for impact. 

In brief, working for “everyone” requires additional attention and effort. Whose reality should count first? How could we guide us to hold clear accountability to turn the “No one behind” catchphrase into concrete actions? I believe one of the roles of research on the SGDs should be founded here.

SDGs as a norm: it should be embedded into everyone’s everyday life. 

Unlike the age of the MDGs, the SDGs involve a variety of actors such as private sectors and civil societies, who were not officially a part of the MDG process. Various stakeholders can create synergy through cooperation, but the responsibility to fulfil the SDGs become vague. According to Jurkovich (2019), three essential elements are needed to become a norm: “a moral sense of “oughtness”; a defined actor “of a given identity”; a specific behaviour or action expected of that given actor”. The SDGs as a global norm neither identify relevant actors for each specific goal and indicator nor have a compliance mechanism.

Sadly, the SDGs do not assign the responsibilities to anybody and the technical difficulty to monitor them also implies oughtness can be weakened. Frankly speaking, we officially have no obligation to contribute to the SDGs. 

Despite its non-obligatory identity, I strongly believe that most of us have a willingness to dedicate to the SDGs. Although we all understand its complexity of monitoring, ambiguity of target people and non-compliance mechanisms. I urge you as an individual, a scholar or a member of the whole global development community to carefully consider what goals/target goals/indicators and for whom I can contribute with a strong responsibility. Otherwise, the SDGs risk losing its political power and may be on track to decay its status as the norm before its completion in 2030.


About the Author

Suhyon Oh is a PhD fellow at the Department of Management, Society and Communication, Copenhagen Business School, and has over ten years of professional experience working with the donor agency, international organizations, development consultancy, NGOs as well as private sectors. As an international development expert, she has worked with the projects on development finance, financial inclusion and global value chain development, etc. Her current research interest is development finance institutions, impact investing funds in developing countries, hybrid organization strategy and strategy as practice.  

How organizations avoid to hire highly-skilled migrants

By Annette Risberg and Laurence Romani

◦ 2 min read ◦

Labor integration of migrants is a topic frequently on the public and political agendas, as it is increasingly seen as the first step to successful societal integration. Often the light is turned on the migrants and what they need to change and improve to get a job. They are expected to make themselves employable by learning the local language, by adapting to local ways of applying for jobs, and by adding local skills to their existing competencies. So, it seems, the moment migrants show some form of adaptation, they should do fine on the job market. But do they?

Why do organizations under-employ highly-skilled migrants? 

Well, maybe there is more to it. Highly-skilled migrants are often underemployed. This means they get jobs below their qualification level. We have all heard of the medical doctor driving a taxi. But who asks ‘why does a taxi company hire a medical doctor as a driver’? In a recent study, we decided to turn the light on the employers, the hiring organizations, instead of the migrants. We searched for an answer to the question of why organizations under-employ highly-skilled migrants.

We followed a mentor program aiming to integrate highly-skilled migrants in the labor market through mentorship and internship. In this program, support was given to migrants to learn the rules of the Swedish employment game, how to write a strong CV, cover letters, the importance of networks, for example. In our interviews, we talked to both mentors and mentees (migrants). They told us about arguments used in organizations to explain (or shall we say justify?) the under-employment of highly-skilled migrants. 

Alleged risk, but for whom?

They said that migrants are often described as lacking local job-seeking skills, how to write a CV, how to present oneself in the application letter, how to get in contact with a potential employer. At times, they may lack local language skills too. Yet, these skills were precisely what they acquired in the program (and in internships) and many of the migrants we interviewed possessed those skills, yet, remained unemployed. More interestingly, we got to hear that the highly-skilled migrants were also talked about in terms of bringing with them the unknown and the unfamiliar: unknown diplomas, unfamiliar job references, unfamiliar working cultures, and habits, for example. And, interestingly, in the interviews, this unknown was associated with a risk… but a risk of what? And, a risk for whom?

Keeping migrants in a lower symbolic position to maintain the power of ‘normality’.

Using the relational theory of risk, a theory where risk is seen as socially constructed, we realized two things. First, if people talked about risk, it was because they felt that something that they value was being threatened.  We found that they valued their usual (habitual) ways of doing things, the organizational normality, more than the new skills and experiences the skilled migrants could bring to the organization.

Hence, highly-skilled migrants were perceived to be a risk to the valued organizational normality and kept away from employment, to avoid disruption of this normality.

Second, if employed, they were hired at a level that did not allow them to fully contribute to the organization, at a level that indicated: your skills are not valued here, they are not to be considered, they are not to transform our usual way of doing things. 

These findings point to an organizational ground for the underemployment of migrants, independent from migrants’ skills and adaptation efforts. In simple terms, organizations may have an interest in under-employing migrants: they assure that their ‘normal’ way of working is not changed, that they are not challenged in their comfortable, everyday routines. The organization’s interest in under-employing migrants goes beyond having a (cheap) skilled workforce without recognizing its value, it is also to clearly indicate that ‘the way we do things around here is valued and we don’t want to question it’.

Who should be seen as a risk? The migrants or the organizations?

In a nutshell, we got to hear that migrants are presented by some as being a risk. But, frankly, a risk for whom? For those comfortably installed in their routines? How about we turn things around and consider that those organizations, not the migrants, should be seen as a risk.

Indeed, by stopping the integration of highly-skilled migrants, are those organizations not a risk to a sustainable society and the (labor) integration of the migrants we welcomed?

The good news is that often, this comfort of the ‘normality’ is not so difficult to change. Organizations’ routines are constantly in the making and it is actually beneficial to challenge and change them from time to time to continuously adapt to the organization’s changing environment.  So, the next time you hear that it is ‘normal’ to expect a local degree for this position, ask yourself: who really benefit from this ‘normal’? And, who should be seen as a threat here?


Further reading

Risberg & Romani (forthcoming) “Underemploying highly skilled migrants: An organizational logic protecting corporate ‘normality”. Human Relations. 


About the Authors

Annette Risberg is a Professor of Diversity Management at Copenhagen Business School and Professor of Organization and Management at the Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences. Her research focus is on practices of diversity management in general and the inclusion of immigrants in organizations. Her latest co-edited book is The Routledge Companion to Organizational Diversity Research Methods and Diversity in Organizations.

Laurence Romani is an Associate Professor at the Stockholm School of Economics. Her work focuses on representation and interaction with the cultural Other in respectful and enriching ways. She currently investigates the conditions of integration of the perceived cultural Others (e.g. ethnic minorities, migrants) in the Swedish labor market. She critically studies race, gender and class hierarchies in organizations’ work with cultural diversity.

Is Pollution the Only Road to Business Prosperity?

Sustainable Visioning as a driver of Corporate Transformation

By Heather Louise Madsen

◦ 4 min read ◦

CO2 reduction is a hot topic for almost every company today. Here the focus is not just on the CO2 generated by the company itself, but also on the carbon emitted along its value chain. The problem is that changing processes, or even products and services, to make them more environmentally friendly can be a daunting and costly task. This can leave CEOs and other top managers wondering what the real cost and impact of CO2 reduction is, where to start, and whether it is even possible to create a prosperous business without generating pollution.

In answer to many of these tough questions, an increasing number of companies are succeeding in reducing carbon and completely transforming their businesses into sustainable and profitable powerhouses, using a combination of strategic vision and sustainability orientation.

A new CEO for a Company Topping the Sustainability Ranking Charts

January 1st, 2021 was Mads Nipper’s first day as CEO of the Sustainable Energy Giant Ørsted. And before the end of his first month in this new position, Ørsted ranked the most sustainable energy company for the third year in a row, and the second most sustainable company in the world after Schneider Electric. This raises the question, what is Nipper’s position on sustainability,  and are these views important for his role as CEO of Ørsted?  

In 2016, as the then CEO of Grundfos, Mads Nipper gave a presentation for the Global Compact Leaders Summit in New York where he stated: “I represent an SDG 6 and 13 company, who also happens to be the biggest water pump company in the world.” The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), representing a global platform and common language for addressing 17 core sustainability issues and their impact, also figure prominently in Ørsted’s corporate language. From Annual Reports to investor letters, Ørsted identifies SDG 7 (energy) and SDG 13 (climate action) as their primary impact areas. This indicates that there may be some very fundamental alignment between Nipper’s visionary statement and the mindset of his predecessors at Ørsted.

What led Ørsted to up-end their core business and undertake a sustainable transformation?

In 2001, Ørsted (then DONG Energy) hired CEO Anders Eldrup, just as Denmark was going through a liberalization of the electricity and gas sectors, which was putting extreme financial pressure on the company. Eldrup was the former Danish Secretary of State, and as such had extensive experience with both financial and political mechanisms. Seeing an opportunity to take advantage of an emerging political demand for climate action and policies to accelerate the development of offshore wind, Eldrup began increasingly to focus innovation resources on offshore wind and renewable energy, while the primary business of the company remained oil and gas. As renewable energy subsidy schemes increased in Denmark and the EU in the years that followed, Eldrup formulated a new company strategy that was released in 2009 called 85/15: “to transform our company from a situation of 15% renewable energy and 85% of fossil-fuel based energy to the opposite”. Jakob Askou Bøss, Head of Strategy and Communication at Ørsted, identified the strategic analysis of CEO Anders Eldrup as “The driving force behind formulating the new vision of the company,“ referring to the 85/15 objectives.

Despite the sacrifices that would need to be made as the core competencies of the company would have to be completely re-designed and transformed to focus on not-yet price competitive technology, the decision had been made. And this strategy was then further anchored to sustainability with Ørsted’s vision: “creating a world that runs entirely on green energy”. This vision made explicit the desire to reach outside of the organization with their “green” aspirations, connecting not only to ideals of wealth and prosperity, but also to planetary concerns.

These ‘green aspirations’ were then followed up by Eldrup’s successor Henrik Poulsen, who became Ørsted’s CEO in 2012. As stated by Poulsen:

“In the world of energy, the fundamental challenge we face is to transform our energy systems so that more and more of the energy we generate comes from renewable sources such as wind power, biomass and solar energy.”

Ørsted, Our sustainability reports, 2012, DONG Energy’s GRI Reporting 2012  

Poulsen then backed these aspirations by setting very specific targets for the company including “quadrupling our offshore wind capacity, from 1.7 GW in 2012 to 6.5 GW in 2020“. By 2017 Ørsted had completely divested all upstream oil and gas. This was also the year that newly built offshore wind became cheaper than black energy for the first time in history. By the time Ørsted reached 2020, the company was ranked number 1 of more than 7500 international, billion-dollar companies in the Corporate Knights’ 2020 index of the Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World, making Ørsted the most sustainable energy company in the Global 100 index. As demonstrated by Ørsted, strategic vision and sustainability orientation were used as drivers for innovation, transformation  and growing the company’s sustainable business and investment portfolio. But how can Ørsted’s story help other businesses? The answer lies in sustainable visioning. 

How can sustainable visioning help businesses onto a path of prosperity AND sustainability? 

Sustainable Visioning is a new term defining the management process of combining a strong strategic vision with the acknowledgement of the necessity of committing more profoundly to people, planet and prosperity concerns.

Madsen & Ulhøi, 2021

The following are guiding principals of sustainable visioning that Ørsted can be seen as applying, and which may be able to help other companies onto a similar path. First, in order for businesses to achieve sustainable visioning, they need to practice proactive, extroverted and visionary, rather than introverted approaches to sustainability. When working on sustainable innovations, it can also be wise to engage the Tripple Helix model including industry, universities and government working together. Innovation can also be usefully extended beyond products and services, to include business model innovation. This can help to navigate to a desirable sustainable future through direct planning, decisions, actions and behavior in all aspects of the business. And finally, taking a clear long-term orientation is also seen as important for sustainable visioning to be successful. 

In practice, following these key guiding principals of sustainable visioning may make it more likely to effectively link strategic visioning to long-term sustainability objectives, providing the necessary support for corporate growth and innovation needed to ensure a successful transformation.


Further Reading

Madsen, H.L., Ulhøi, J.P. 2021. Sustainable visioning: Re-framing strategic vision to enable a sustainable corporate transformation. J. Clean. Prod. 228.


About the Author

Heather Louise Madsen, Ph.D. is the PRME Strategy Manager at Copenhagen Business School, and has over ten years of professional experience working with sustainability. As a sustainability expert, she has worked with the organizational implementation of the UN SDGs in the private sector, and has extensive experience working with CSR, the UN Global Compact, carbon footprint reporting and social, environmental and economic sustainability. Heather is dedicated to topics of innovation, strategy, business transformation, organizational learning, business model innovation, renewable energy and sustainability.

A Southern-centered perspective on climate change in global value chains?

By Peter Lund-Thomsen

◦ 2 min read ◦

The garment and textile industries account for around 10% of global CO2 emissions, and their fast fashion approach consumes huge amounts of water in production and processing stages. While the fast fashion model incentivizes the overproduction/consumption of clothes, more sustainable solutions lie in the configuration of value chains towards slow fashion (durable products produced on demand) and the introduction of circular business models. Such a transformation will have consequences for the environment, workers’ conditions, and economic development.

This is particularly the case in the light of COVID-19, which led to a temporary disruption in the global garment and textiles value chains as stores closed in Europe and the United States in the spring of 2020. The cancellation and non-payment of garment orders particularly affected suppliers and workers in Bangladesh, leaving hundreds of thousands of workers without jobs and possibly facing destitution. 

This is the focus of a new research and capacity-building project on ‘Climate Change and Global Value Chains’ coordinated by the CBS that has recently been funded by the Danish Development Research Council. In this research project, we will be working with colleagues from the University of Aalborg and Roskilde University in Denmark as well as BRAC University and the University of Dhaka in Bangladesh. Private sector partners include the Danish Ethical Trading Initiative and Danish Fashion and Textile. 

I think that a key challenge in this new project is how we approach ‘climate change’ in the context of global value chains.

In the Danish debate on climate change, it is almost universally accepted that climate change should be at the top of the political and corporate sustainability agendas. However, both employers and workers in the Bangladeshi garment and textile industries may not perceive climate change mitigation as an immediate priority.

First, the purchasing practices of major brands sourcing garments from Bangladesh tend to result in downward price pressures, seasonal fluctuations in demand, and shorter lead times while, at the same time, these brands are also imposing ever greater environmental and labor standard requirements on their suppliers (not only in Bangladesh but elsewhere in the global South). Economic value is very unevenly distributed along the textile/garment value chain, with major brands reaping up to ten times higher economic value than suppliers – and even less reaching workers.

Hence, Bangladeshi suppliers often perceive the environmental and labor requirements of brands as adding to their costs without bringing additional business benefits.

In this context, suppliers may have very few, if any, incentives to address climate concerns in their value chains, while workers in the industry are trying to survive in a context of economic uncertainty.

In my view, a critical aspect of this new project is therefore that we will not only look at climate change from a Northern-centered perspective; that is, we are not only concerned with how brands and factories engage in the process of decarbonization. We will also zoom in on the importance of climate change adaptation, which I would label a more Southern-centered perspective on climate change in global value chains.

In fact, Bangladesh is one of the countries most affected by global climate change whose coastal areas and ports are prone to flooding, resulting in disruptions of the garment/textile value chain and economic losses for local manufacturers and workers.

Moreover, garment factories in greater Dhaka have extremely high lead and CO2 emissions, while many factory workers live in parts of the city that have unhygienic water supplies and must cope with living conditions that affect their health. Hence, integrating climate change and global value chain analysis from a Southern-centered perspective, I would argue, involves looking at the ‘business case’ for climate change adaptation – in other words, we must understand how can climate change adaptation can help in securing the future viability, competitiveness, and jobs in the garment industry and textile industries of Bangladesh. 


About the Author

Peter Lund-Thomsen is Professor at the Department of Management, Society and Communication at Copenhagen Business School. His research focuses on sustainable value chains, industrial clusters, and corporate social responsibility with a regional focus on South Asia.

Do we need to sacrifice to mitigate climate change?

By Laura Krumm

3 min read

It is not news anymore that a change of consumer behavior is needed in order to have a chance at mitigating climate change. Almost every consumer action today can be quantified in terms of environmental impact. We know that we should opt for the tofu sticks instead of the steak at our neighbor’s barbeque, and we know that we should avoid the all-inclusive vacation to the Caribbean and take a cozy camping trip at Denmark’s beaches instead. What we don’t know is what those behavior changes mean for consumers. What are the consequences for our individual quality of life and well-being?

Self-sacrificing for the planet

The expectation does not seem to be very satisfying. Most of us have heard the word “sacrifice” in the context of environmentally friendly behavior before. The message we receive from climate activists, journalists and researchers is very clear:

We need to change our behavior today to avoid the catastrophic consequences of climate change tomorrow. We need to change our behavior for our children, the animals, other people in other countries, or our own future lives – even if we don’t want to.

We are expected to change our behavior for the greater good, while our own desires have to wait in line [1, 2].

This sacrifice narrative cannot only be found in climate change communication but also in consumers’ minds: When investigating what was hindering consumers to act environmentally friendly when they generally value the environment, the expectation of sacrifice and lowered quality of life was found to be one important factor [3]. Consumers seem to equate environmentally friendly behavior with a loss in quality of life and comfort. This anticipation, among others, prevents them from changing their behaviors and joining in the efforts of mitigating climate change.

Why is this important?

While altruistic motivation – driving us to self-sacrifice for the greater good – is positively related to environmental behavior [4], it can only get us so far. Another main driver of our actions is egoistic motivation. And as it seems, behaving more environmentally friendly is not perceived as a particularly egoistic action. While there sure are people with very strong altruistic motivation who enjoy behaving in a morally right way, many people are egoistic some or most of the time.

If the perspective of an environmentally friendly life is a bleak one, environmental engagement will be limited.

This is not only relevant for individual consumer behavior and environmental engagement, but also for policy and activism. When an environmentally friendly life seems bleak and uncomfortable to many people, it will be a difficult task to get them on board. Why would I support or vote for somebody who wants my life to become worse right now as a tradeoff for a potentially less catastrophic future?

Aside from elections, citizens who equate environmentally friendly behavior with sacrifice and lower well-being may also have lower acceptance of necessary policy interventions aimed at mitigating climate change. Consequently, the necessary change towards more environmentally friendly consumption will be hard to realize without considering its effects on well-being.

Does it have to be sacrifice?

Is it even true that environmentally friendly consumption can be equated with sacrifice, discomfort and a bleak existence?

Contrary to what the public opinion seems to believe, the relationship between well-being and environmentally friendly (or unfriendly) behavior is empirically not yet clear.

Some correlational studies even suggest the opposite: a positive relationship between environmentally friendly behavior and well-being [e.g., 5, 6]. These studies find that people who behave environmentally friendly are more satisfied with their lives. We cannot infer any causality of course – but these findings at least challenge the sacrifice assumption. This means that there may be a discrepancy between consumers’ expectations and the reality of behavior change. The sacrifice assumption might therefore not only be unhelpful in engaging consumers to behave differently, it may even be completely untrue.

What does that mean for us environmental researchers? We need to explore why consumers expect negative consequences of environmental behavior change and how to change that. We need to understand what these negative expectations are exactly. We need to take consumer well-being seriously and keep it in mind when designing behavior change policies and initiatives. And we need to rethink how we communicate about environmental behavior change and climate change mitigation.


References

[1] Kaplan, S., 2000 – Human Nature and Environmentally Responsible Behavior, in: Journal of Social Issues, 56 (3), 491-508.

[2] Prinzing, M., 2020 – Going green is good for you: Why we need to change the way we think about pro-environmental behaviour, in: Ethics, Policy & Environment, 1-18.

[3] Lorenzoni I., Nicholson-Cole, S. and Whitmarsh, L., 2007 – Barriers perceived to engaging with climate change among the UK public and their policy implications, in: Global Environmental Change, 17, 445-459.

[4] De Groot, J.I.M. and Steg, L., 2008 – Value orientations to explain beliefs related to environmental significant behavior, in: Environment and Behavior, 40 (3), 330-354.

[5] Binder, M. and Blankenberg, A., 2017 – Green lifestyles and subjective well-being: More about self-image than actual behavior?, in: Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 137, 304-323.

[6] Brown, K. W. and Kasser, T., 2005 – Are psychological and ecological well-being compatible? The role of values, mindfulness, and lifestyle, in: Social Indicators Research, 74, 349-368.


About the Author

Laura Krumm is a PhD fellow at the Department of Management, Society and Communication and a member of the Consumer & Behavioural Insights Group. In her PhD project she explores the intersection of environmental consumer behavior and well-being.


Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Innovating Under Pressure – Grassroots’ social and distributed manufacturing during the pandemic

By Isabel Fróes

As Bowie almost made a prediction when he sang in his lyrics from 1981: ‘It’s the terror of knowing what this world is about/Watching some good friends screaming “Let me out!”/’, 2020 proved to be a year of challenges, which however took us to higher grounds of learning and collaboration in many unexpected ways.  

The sudden changes and lockdowns across the world led by Covid-19 sparked many initiatives and innovation in various fields. As presented in a previous blog post, it created opportunities for urban spaces to be rethought, experimenting with expanding and further developing various mobility formats.

Beyond urban spaces, the pandemic also became a fuel to push initiatives in other fronts, such as social and local manufacturing. 

Makerspaces and local production initiatives were well described in a recent blog post by my colleague Efthymios Altsitsiadis. During the pandemic, makerspaces became more than a niche, through shared content and distributed leadership, these spaces became relevant production resources. Makers collaborated and engaged in locally producing personal protective equipment (PPE), helping cities and countries better cope with the shortages and international supply chain issues during the first lockdown.  

CBS has followed this process closely as it is currently a partner in the EU-funded iPRODUCE project. The project started in January 2020 focusing on developing a novel social manufacturing platform that embraces manufacturing companies in the consumer goods sector. In short, the project is committed to bringing closer manufacturers, makers and consumer communities (MMCs) at the local level; to engage them into joint co-creation challenges for the manufacturing of new consumer products and the introduction of novel engineering and production (eco)systems; to fuse practices, methods and tools that both makers and manufacturing companies (SMEs specifically) are employing.

The project, as an innovation action (IA), has formed clusters in six locations, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy and Spain composed of Fablabs, makerspaces and research institutions. These clusters are defined as Collaborative Manufacturing Demonstration Facilities (cMDFs). In Denmark, CBS is the research institution working closely together with betaFACTORY forming the DK-cMDF.

In the context of this project, social manufacturing can be described as a primary ground to democratise innovation.

The ‘Do it yourself’ (DIY) movement, assisted by makerspaces and fablabs, offers opportunities for real exchange towards solutions to inform the development of many products through an open platform, to not only support, but also to expand these processes and broaden their reach across society. 

During the onset of the pandemic, when the project was only in its third month, while project activities required adjustments and re-planning, the fablabs and makerspaces in the distinct locations became important resources for local manufacturing facilities, closing a gap of problems related to international supply chain production and distribution regarding protective medical gear.

The open source community’s umbrella became a key local asset in bridging various groups and bringing makers together towards one goal – manufacturing products that would help save lives.

Spain, which was hit hard by the pandemic early on, spearheaded this movement in Europe. Already in March 2020, DIY groups organised themselves online (primarily WhatsApp and Telegram), sharing questions and designs through these social media platforms. Doctors and other types of stakeholders also joined some of these groups, providing expert information. They shared requests, talked together and developed designs and models, which were then 3D printed widely across in various makerspaces, sparking a local production and distribution supply chain. The distribution, which was initially done by volunteers, was carried out by taxi drivers and local police in an extraordinary mode of collaboration during the most extreme lockdown phases. By June 2020, over one million face shields had been produced and distributed across Spain [1].  

The Spanish face shield design, under the creative commons licence, was picked up by makers everywhere, including in Denmark, where the Facebook group ‘DK Makers mod Corona’ (DK Makers against Corona) was quick to adapt the design to specific Danish regulations and started locally producing the face shields during the first Danish lockdown. Over 63000 face shields were produced and distributed across the country by July 2020 and the Facebook group grew from 50 to over 2500 members during the same period.

In both cases, what stands out is the fact that the expertise, manufacturing capability and human resources are without doubt available everywhere and when a common and purposeful goal is set, fast and impactful results can be achieved.

These civic responses also bring forward questions on how society could make better use of these valuable resources for other distinct local challenges, and how we can positively disrupt mass global manufacturing towards distributed local manufacturing. As the pandemic initiatives have shown, by reorganising and setting common goals, makers and industry can bridge gaps, creating wider societal benefit that challenge the status quo and push new manufacturing opportunities that can define ‘new normals’ also for local production – taking all of it to higher and more sustainable levels in the 21st century.


iPRODUCE – “A Social Manufacturing Framework for Streamlined Multi- stakeholder Open Innovation Missions in Consumer Goods Sectors” (2020-2022) has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement no. 870037. This publication reflects only the author’s view and the Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.


References

[1] MAKERY, 2020. Spanish makers’ ongoing fight against COVID-19. Published by Cesar Garcia Saez.


About the Author

Isabel Fróes is a postdoc at MSC Department at Copenhagen Business School working in three EU projects (Cities-4-People, iPRODUCE and BECOOP). Isabel also has wide industry experience and has worked both as a user researcher and service design consultant for various companies in Denmark and internationally. For more detail please see her Linkedin profile.


Photo source: NC State University

Counting Trees in the Hopes of Managing Forests – Technological solutions to palm oil deforestation?

By Isaac Caiger-Smith, Izabela Delabre and Kristjan Jespersen

In recent years, companies dealing in global commodities – such as palm oil, soy and timber – have faced increasing criticism for failing to meet zero deforestation targets in their supply chains. In response to these concerns, the use of innovative technological solutions, such as satellite monitoring systems to monitor deforestation in supply chains, are becoming increasingly commonplace.

Companies such as Global Forest Watch, Satelligence and MapHubs provide such platforms, though many large companies also choose to create their own monitoring systems in-house. It is in the palm oil sector that adoption of satellite monitoring has (so far) been most widespread. The palm oil sector is commonly characterised as being ‘hourglass’ in shape, with hundreds of thousands of growers/producers, mostly in Indonesia and Malaysia, being connected to hundreds of thousands of end users all around the world by a handful of powerful traders and refiners. Previously, single companies aiming to monitor their supply chains for deforestation risk would thus be faced with the impossible task of keeping track of (potentially) thousands of suppliers simultaneously.

In principle, satellite technology platforms signify a ground-breaking shift in possibilities for those concerned with monitoring deforestation risk.

By making it possible to map out suppliers’ concessions and monitor in ‘near real-time’ for deforestation events, consumer goods manufacturers and palm oil traders are able to cheaply and accurately ensure suppliers’ compliance with their commitments to zero deforestation, punishing non-compliant suppliers, encouraging and incentivising good environmental practice (Global Forest Watch, 2020). The clear promise such technology brings has led to their rapid uptake by the majority of the world’s largest palm oil traders and refiners, as well as many influential consumer goods manufacturers and non-governmental organisations. The hope of companies and non-governmental organisations is that such technological initiatives will play an important role in supporting zero deforestation efforts. As such, many of these actors are investing significant capital to increase their monitoring capabilities, and are highly vocal about doing so, speaking of the positive environmental impacts they claim will flow from their use. 

Through a series of in-depth interviews, it quickly became clear that despite the far-reaching functions these actors claim satellite monitoring can serve, its impact on the palm oil sector thus far has been far more limited in scope (both in terms of impact on supply chain relations and environmental outcomes) than the PR teams of the world’s palm oil giants seem to suggest.

Despite some positive developments in the realm of certified palm oil, the widespread adoption of satellite monitoring schemes across the palm oil sector has thus far failed to significantly reduce the rates of tropical deforestation associated with the industry.

Lyons-White and Knight, 2018.

Although satellites provide timely data on exactly where and when deforestation is occurring, traders and refiners have thus far been largely unable to use the data to influence the behaviour of offending firms. There are numerous reasons why this is the case. 

Decontextualised data

Knowing where deforestation is occurring does not necessarily tell you who is responsible. In many instances, palm oil traders simply do not know who their third-tier suppliers are – if the alerts provided by remote sensing data cannot be combined with full knowledge of a firm’s supply chain (‘traceability to plantation’), they will often be unable to act on them. Achieving 100% traceability to plantation is a task all of the major traders are currently engaged in, yet it is a long and difficult process – as previously mentioned, the structure of the palm oil sector is complex, with numerous tiers of suppliers separating those engaging in monitoring from those being monitored.

In addition, the difficulty of the task is further exacerbated by inaccurate data on land ownership, competing claims, and unofficial occupation. Until these systemic issues are addressed, the situation regarding monitoring will remain much as it is today – satellite monitoring systems will continue to provide accurate alerts, but in the vast majority of cases (approximately 90%, according to interviewee from palm oil trader) traders will be unable to attribute it with certainty to actors from their supply chain, and thus will not be able to meaningfully respond. 

Leverage issues

In instances where technology users are able attribute a deforestation alert to an actor from within their supply chain, firms often lack the leverage to change suppliers’ behaviour and ensure compliance with their sustainability standards. Buyers have two options: negotiate with producers or blacklist them.

Given that buyers are unwilling to pay a premium for deforestation-free products (Delabre et al, 2020), providing incentives for non-compliant suppliers to stop harmful behaviours is challenging – expecting growers to bear all the costs associated with non-expansion without any reward is not a sustainable system. Furthermore, the threat of being blacklisted from a company’s supply base is also unlikely to have the desired impact; suppliers will likely have no trouble finding other buyers, in markets where sustainability credentials are generally seen as less of a priority (Schleifer & Sun, 2018).

In this context, it is clear that thus far, satellite monitoring has not been capable of producing the far-reaching effects, which may have been desired.

Despite this, satellite monitoring has certainly contributed to several interesting developments in the palm oil sector. For example, interviewees emphasised the positive impacts of environmental non-governmental organisations armed with satellite monitoring technologies, acting as unofficial but powerful ‘watchdogs’, ‘naming and shaming’ consumer brands and traders associated with deforestation events.

It seems the ever-present risk of exposure (and subsequent brand damage) posed by non-governmental organisations’ use of satellite monitoring is a significant driver of new norms and practices within the industry.

These norms emphasise that it is necessary for powerful actors, such as traders and consumer goods manufacturers to be proactive in effectively addressing deforestation, both within and outside their supply chains. Interviewees also emphasised increasing levels of dialogue/cooperation across actor types, through for example, the creation of focus groups made up of producers, traders, local governments and community leaders, for the purpose of discussing the data provided by satellite monitoring, and working together to create solutions. In light of the ever-increasing levels of transparency that satellite monitoring brings, such institutions seem an inevitable and positive consequence of implementation.

However, given the severity of the contextual constraints hindering the industry’s sustainability, it is unlikely that such noble intentions (or even significant capital investments) will be capable of truly addressing the problem. 

Satellite monitoring technology has dramatically expanded the realms of possibility for forest governance, yet its implementation in the palm oil sector remains hindered by the structures, institutions and political and legal realities of palm oil production, and producing countries more broadly, dramatically reducing its ability to create positive change. Whilst they are clearly useful tools for environmentally conscious actors aiming to reduce their deforestation risks, they are only one small piece in a very complex puzzle. The problem of tropical deforestation caused by palm oil expansion is at once an economic, political, social and historical problem. As such, ‘technological fixes’ or the actions of individual firms (or even groups of firms) are themselves unlikely to lead to significant environmental improvements. In order to address such a vast problem, the underlying context must shift. Nothing less than large-scale international public and private sector cooperation is required. 


Bibliography

Delabre, I., Alexander, A. & Rodrigues, C. (2020) Strategies for tropical forest protection and sustainable supply chains: challenges and opportunities for alignment with the UN sustainable development goalsSustain Sci 15, pages 1637–1651

Global Forest Watch (2020) Global Forest Watch Pro: Securely Manage Deforestation Risk in Commodity Supply Chains.

Lyons-White, J., Knight, A. (2018) Palm oil supply chain complexity impedes implementation of corporate no-deforestation commitments, Global Environmental Change 50, pages 303–313 

Schleifer, P., Sun, Y. (2018) Emerging markets and private governance: the political economy of sustainable palm oil in China and India, Review of International Political Economy Volume 25 Issue 2, pages 190-214


About the Authors

Isaac Caiger-Smith is a Junior Research Associate and undergraduate at the University of Sussex, studying philosophy politics and economics. His current research project focuses on the use of satellite monitoring technologies for addressing deforestation risks. 

Izabela Delabre is a Research Fellow at the University of Sussex, examining sustainable forest governance, sustainable production and consumption of food, and sustainability transformations. Izabela worked for the Business and Biodiversity Conservation Programme at the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) managing ZSL’s global oil palm work. Her PhD (Human Geography) examined the political ecology of participatory impact assessment practices in the context of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) in Indonesia and Malaysia.

Kristjan Jespersen is an Associate Professor at the Copenhagen Business School. He studies the growing development and management of Ecosystem Services in developing countries. Within the field, Kristjan focuses his attention on the institutional legitimacy of such initiatives and the overall compensation tools used to ensure compliance.


Photo by Carles Rabada on Unsplash

Marching toward the end of enlightenment?

How management and organization scholarship can help explain new forms of anti-enlightenment organizing

By Dennis Schoeneborn

In the scholarly field of management and organization studies, which is traditionally primarily concerned with business firms and their performance, we can lately observe an increasing attention toward addressing some of the most pressing societal challenges of our times, such as climate change, pandemics, inequalities, etc. (see George et al., 2016). At the same time, one of the most striking societal challenges has found comparably little attention by management and organizational scholarship up until today: the rise of anti-enlightenment movements and the potentially corroding effects they have for democratic societies.

The rioters’ march on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021 has showcased in painstaking ways how democracies can be endangered through social movements that center around anti-enlightenment and “post-truth” sentiments, incl. conspiracy theories, “alternative facts”, or other negations of scientific reason (for an overview, see Farkas & Schou, 2020). In the same context, the question arises how the scholarly field of management and organization studies can help address and explain the emergence of such anti-enlightenment movements and how they organize themselves.

To study the phenomenon of anti-enlightenment movements (i.e. coordinated agitation against scientific reason and facts, democratic values, or the rule of law), I suggest three research areas in organizational scholarship are of particular relevance and that each (in one way or another) cross-connect to the neighboring field of media and communication studies: 

(1) Explaining organizational emergence and dissolution

First, management and organization scholarship can explore questions of organizational emergence and design. This may involve questions like: To what extent can new forms of anti-enlightenment organizing (e.g., conspiracy theorists like QAnon or science denialists like the anti-vaxx movement) be explained with existing organizational theories – or to what extent are novel theoretical vocabularies needed to account for these phenomena? Also, how can anti-enlightenment forms of organizing be dissolved or “deconstituted” (cf. Bean & Buikema, 2015)? For example, how to counter and delegitimize anti-enlightenment ideologies in the public debate, if they are based on entirely different language games (Knight & Tsoukas, 2019), where the same signifier may have completely different meanings (e.g., truth is what is factually right vs. truth is when it serves my own interests)?

(2) Studying transformations of how the public discourse is organized

Second, management and organization scholarship can explore transformations of how the public discourse is organized. For instance, how did the media landscape change, especially through the rise of digital media, and how do these changes affect the possibilities of deliberative dialog and public will formation in democratic societies (Bennett & Livingston, 2018). In a similar vein, organizational scholars have critically addressed the spread of “fake news”, incl. the erosion of “the public” into multiple fragmented “publics” that gather info by-and-large from within their own filter bubbles and echo chambers (see also Knight & Tsoukas, 2019; Foroughi et al., 2019). Furthermore, in the same context, the question arises how to “detox” an increasingly polarized public discourse (Ward, 2019)?

(3) Exploring socio-technological conditions of “organized immaturity”

Third, management and organization scholarship can explore the underlying socio-technological conditions under which anti-enlightenment movements tend to emerge. For instance, in a recent working paper, Scherer and Neesham (2020) propose the term “organized immaturity” (which alludes to the notion of immaturity or Unmündigkeit in Immanuel Kant’s theory of enlightenment). As the authors hypothesize, individuals’ delegation of decision-making to socio-technological systems (such as algorithmic filtering of content in social media) tends to lead over time to an “erosion of the individual’s capacity for public use of reason” (p. 4; version from Dec. 22, 2020). Put this way, the concept may also help explain some of the root causes of what observers of the Capitol Hill events termed the “spoilt child version of America – so ‘free’ [that] it ignored the truths, laws and decency that actually enabled that freedom” (Paton Walsh, 2020).

To conclude, while we can find some first and important steps in the direction of exploring anti-enlightenment movements, further research in this direction is urgently needed, also as a chance to demonstrate management and organization scholarship’s ability to address (and potentially help solve) large-scale societal problems. In the same context, a recent Call for Papers by the journal Business Ethics Quarterly (Scherer et al., in preparation) invites for scholarly submissions that address the socio-technological conditions of “organized immaturity” and neighboring phenomena.


References

Bean, H., & Buikema, R. J. (2015). Deconstituting al-Qa’ida: CCO theory and the decline and dissolution of hidden organizationsManagement Communication Quarterly29(4), 512-538.

Bennett, W. L., & Livingston, S. (2018). The disinformation order: Disruptive communication and the decline of democratic institutionsEuropean Journal of Communication, 33(2), 122-139.

Farkas, J., & Schou, J. (2019). Post-truth, fake news and democracy: Mapping the politics of falsehood. New York: Routledge.

Foroughi, H., Gabriel, Y., & Fotaki, M. (2019). Leadership in a post-truth era: A new narrative disorder? Leadership15(2), 135-151.

George, G., Howard-Grenville, J., Joshi, A., & Tihanyi, L. (2016). Understanding and tackling societal grand challenges through management researchAcademy of Management Journal59(6), 1880-1895.

Knight, E., & Tsoukas, H. (2019). When Fiction Trumps Truth: What ‘post-truth’ and ‘alternative facts’ mean for management studies. Organization Studies40(2), 183-197.

Paton Walsh. E. (2020, Jan. 8). America was lucky to be saved by its democracy – even if some don’t realize itCNN.com.

Scherer, A. G., & Neesham, C. (2020). New challenges to enlightenment: Why socio-technological conditions lead to organized immaturity and what to do about it. Working Paper (version from Dec,, 22, 2020).

Scherer, A. G., Neesham, C., Schoeneborn, D., & Scholz, M. (in preparation). Socio-technological conditions of organized immaturity in the 21st century. Special issue in preparation for Business Ethics Quarterly (submission deadline: 31/05/2021).

Ward, S. J. A. (2019). Ethical journalism in a populist age: The democratically engaged journalist. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.


About the Author

Dennis Schoeneborn is Professor of Organization, Communication, and CSR at Copenhagen Business School and Visiting Professor of Organization Studies at Leuphana University of Lüneburg. In his research, he mainly focuses on organization theory, organizational communication, digital media and communication, corporate social responsibility and sustainability, as well as new forms of organizing.


Photo from Unsplash

How do the arts impact our societies in times of digitalisation?

By Kirsti Reitan Andersen and members of the Artsformation consortium 

Two decades into the new millennium it is almost impossible to imagine a future in which digital technologies do not play a key role. Today, digitalisation changes the way things are done across business and society alike. 

This includes for example the impact of new technologies on processes of democratisation, like the role of Facebook in the UK referendum in 2016. Or the increasing collection and analysis of personal data in the use of any social media. Another area in which technology is having an enormous impact is in our ways of communication and being together, for example through technologies like Zoom or Facetime.

Throughout history, the arts have always reflected major transitions as they unfold.

Therefore, it is perhaps no surprise that the social, environmental and economic consequences of the digital transformation are now also increasingly addressed by artists. For example, with the project SOMEONE (2019), Lauren McCarthy tries to address the advances in human-machine relationships represented in ‘smart houses’ and try to give back a human identity to artificial intelligent devices through active human participation.

As part of the H2020 research project Artsformation, we explore the current and potential role of the arts in the digital transformation. Exploring the role of the arts across both business and society, one part of the project has a particular focus on marginalized groups of people who today do not reap the acclaimed benefits of the digital transformation (e.g. Gangadharan and Niklas, 2019; Gebru, 2018; Neves, Franz, Munteanu and Baecker, 2018; Park and Humphry, 2019). In this context, the “socially engaged arts” (Bishop, 2012) is of particular interest.

In contrast to more traditional forms of art, socially engaged artists often work closely with their audiences in one way or other.

For example, by gaining in-depth knowledge of particular challenges in specific communities and creating awareness about such issues through the artwork or by directly engaging people in the production of art. One such example could be the engagement of people in the production of artwork using the so-called maker spaces as a place of work and thereby also introducing “audiences” to new digital technologies and skill sets. Catch, a center for art design and technology located in Elsinore, for example, has much experience facilitating such processes of learning.  

In recent years we have seen artistic examinations of the digital transformation become increasingly complex, evolving from what we might understand as a fascination or embracement of digital tools to reflections on the transformation itself. In general, we find that socially engaged artists are addressing societal issues (of the digital transformation) in three ways (Andersen et al., 2020):  

  • The artist as a commentator:  The artist as a commentator is not directly concerned with audience engagement as part of the artistic process. The work of Dr. Ahmed Elgammal and an artificial intelligence named AICAN exemplifies “the artist as a commentator”. In this case Dr. Elgammal and AICON created an exhibition of prints called Faceless Portraits Transcending Time. While there is no direct audience engagement, the work of Dr. Elgammal and AICON brings attention to current debates about technology and creative work.
  • The artist as one who gives voice to a community:  More than ever, artists have become ever more important as voices of reason and clarity, pressing for social justice and engaging the public conversation about the controversial issues shaping the world in which we live. Forensic Architecture’s attempt to raise awareness of oil and gas pollution in Vaca Muerta, Argentina, is a good illustration of this approach. Vaca Muerta has become one of the world’s largest shale oil and gas fields. It is also the home of indigenous communities, including some of the Mapuche people who live between Chile and Argentina. In collaboration with The Guardian newspaper, Forensic Architecture investigated a local Mapuche community’s claim that “the oil and gas industry has irreversibly damaged their ancestral homeland and eroded their traditional ways of life.”
  • The artist as a social entrepreneur: consults and facilitates a community problem in a much more ‘organised’ and ‘long-term’ manner than is typical of the two previous roles. This, for example, is what happened when artist Olafur Eliasson and engineer Frederik Ottesen at London’s Tate Modern launched the social enterprise Little Sun in 2012, setting out to change the world with ‘solar art’. Little Sun aims to bring clean, reliable and affordable energy to the 1.1 billion people who live without electricity while raising awareness of energy access and climate action worldwide. Eliasson demonstrates his conviction that art can change the world by continuing to promote Little Sun as an extension of his art practice, arguing that many of Little Sun’s “current and future projects stem from art, involve artistic thinking or use our products themselves to create art”.

While all three roles co-exist, intersect and share the ability to imagine new ways and generate change, each role does so in slightly different ways. We suggest that each of the three roles requires artists to organise in different ways, which may also impact the kinds of change they can facilitate. Moving forward, we are extremely eager to explore the ways in which artists as social entrepreneurs may inspire and offer new and more sustainable ways of organizing


Further Reading


About the Author

Kirsti Reitan Andersen is a Post Doc at the Department of Management, Society and Communication, Copenhagen Business School. In her current work, she explores the role of the arts in the transformation towards more sustainable ways of organizing.


Photo by Stan Narten and Otto Saxinger, SOMEONE.

Can we pay for success in healthcare?

By Mikkel Munksgaard

Demographic megatrends, such as ageing populations, challenges public health budgets in developed countries. Currently, health costs in OECD countries are growing at roughly double the rate as the average growth in GPD. ‘Pay for Success’ is an emergent, and highly innovative, partnership model promising both increased cost-effectiveness and patient-centric services in healthcare. Whether or not the model will constitute a critical feature of future health systems, only time will tell. 

Due to critical leaps in modern healthcare and medicine, the average life expectancy in developed countries has doubled since 1900 [1]. While this is an important success, it also challenges public health systems because chronic diseases occur much more often at old age. In fact, a Danish report states that the average health costs for an 86-year-old are 16 times higher than for a 20-year-old [2].

In addition, public health sectors are experiencing structural challenges inhibiting their capacity to deliver services effectively.

The lack of systematic assessments towards quality and outcomes of services creates disproportionality on financial priorities. Evidence indicates that up to 30% of healthcare expenses are wasted on unproven or unnecessary treatments.

World Economic Forum 2017

An example of this is the general de-prioritization of preventive health interventions over short-term illness treatment. 

Introducing ‘Pay for Success’ 

‘Pay for Success’ (PFS) has emerged as an organizational solution to the problems of asymmetry and ineffectiveness in public health.  A PFS-program is fundamentally a public commissioning model based on two distinctive features 1) an outcome-based contract and 2) the engagement of an external ‘investor’.

In an outcome-based contract service delivery is outsourced to a provider and the public commissioner pays for the realization of long-term health outcomes. Hence, the public “pays for success”. Because services, such as preventive interventions, could take several years to deliver the PFS-model involves an ‘investor’ that provides working capital for the provider – and thus, takes the majority of the financial risk. This could either be a non-profit organization, a for-profit organization, or both.  The first PFS-program was developed in 2010 and since then 200 programs have been initiated mobilizing a total capital of 420 Million Dollar [3]. Especially in the UK, the PFS-market has grown and is predicted to soon reach a total value of 1 Billion Euro (Carter 2019).

A simplification of the PFS-model inspired by Third Sector (2016) 
Challenges and future directions of ‘Pay for Success’ 

While empirical studies from the UK and US does indicate that the PFS-model performs better than other commissioning models [4], they also highlight a more complex organizational structure that takes time and resources to develop – which, consequently, creates high transaction costs ultimately challenging the model’s cost-effectiveness. Technical problems related to valuating health outcomes, and creating a payment structure around such, has proven difficult and time-consuming. Additionally, the complex governance structure of PFS-programs in the UK and US has been criticized for being too rigid and focused on short-term performance – thus, inhibiting innovation. 

The emergence of PFS-programs in Scandinavian countries poses an interesting field as emerging research indicates that these programs are fundamentally different from traditional PFS-models. The tendency to utilize more networked practices as well as the existence of comprehensive public data systems in Scandinavian welfare states could potentially solve some of the most critical challenges currently faced in PFS-development. What would seem critical for future PFS-development is to leverage these emerging insights and shine more light into the ‘black box’ of PFS-development.


References

[1] World Economic Forum 2017

[2] Kjellberg and Højgaard 2017

[3] The Brookings Institution 2021

[4] Albertson et al. 2018


About the Author

Mikkel Munksgaard Andersen is Ph.D. Fellow at CBS, MSC. Through his Ph.D.-project, Mikkel studies the development and implementation of social impact bonds and payment-by-results methods in Denmark. His work centralizes around the distinct characteristics of Scandinavian impact bonds and their role in supporting and financing public services. The research takes a point of departure in the Danish research- and innovation project PreCare which seeks to develop new services and organizational models for preventive and digitalized healthcare.  See more here.

The maker movement – the quiet, game-changing revolution near you

By Efthymios Altsitsiadis

Anyone can and should have access to the tools and knowledge necessary to build anything they might need or want. This statement struck me when I first read about the makers movement – a cultural trend that is associated with democratized manufacturing, 3D printing and maker spaces.

At the heart of the movement lies a simple premise – ordinary people manufacturing themselves what they need. Makers, alone or in communities, from any career or skill level are pulled into making something, from calligraphy to furniture to technology and lately to personal protective equipment.

Large institutions like the European Commission, the White house and the Chinese government herald the maker movement as a major driver for the new “industrial revolution”, a thriving multibillion market and a potential asset in the fight against climate change.

But as with every nascent field, there are many hurdles on our way there – this piece will touch upon what many (including me) consider the most important: understanding how and why people embrace the movement.

We already know that the increase of availability and affordability of digital fabrication tools such as 3D printers and laser cutters and the advance in certain collaborative technologies have favored the creation of a rapidly increasing number of Do-It-Yourself communities. What we know much less about is why people choose to become makers. This matters gravely, not only because makers are the lifeline of the movement – but because we need to be sure that everyone can enjoy the same access to fabrication. In a large study supported by the EU, we asked thousands of citizens around Europe their opinions regarding the maker movement [1].

We wanted to understand better what people know about the maker movement, how aware they are about fabrication and how they perceive the different facilities (e.g. makerspaces). We also investigated various attitudes and potential reasons that could be driving or hampering people’s support to the movement. More importantly, however, we asked participants about their intentions to become makers and what motivates them. 

Findings of our study

What we found confirmed many of our initial thoughts.

Most of the participants were not well aware about the maker movement (40% had no familiarity with the term), but about 1 in 5 respondents had some previous experience with making. These people come from all walks of life, and despite some small differences in demographics, every cohort is represented.

A very positive finding was that most people were very open to visiting, supporting or participating in making activities in their local area. For the majority of respondents, their participation in maker spaces would provide them with benefits and help them improve their skills. The majority also believes that makerspaces will have a positive impact on their region and will open-up new professional opportunities. We dug a bit deeper so we can get a better understanding of people’s motivations.

We found that respondents who have positive perceptions about sustainability and circular economy, who were familiar with the maker movement and who defined themselves as persons who like to repair or make things were significantly more likely to join the movement.

The results also indicate that demographics like gender and age could be playing a role in driving respondent’s perceptions and participation.

This study is useful in providing some additional evidence and answers regarding the engagement of Europeans with the Maker Movement to the existing body of knowledge. But it is obviously not enough. There are literally dozens of overlooked dimensions and potential levers for getting people involved or at least for actively supporting the movement. Essential issues like awareness, knowledge and skills, safety and accessibility, tools and incentives are all open for inquiry and experimentation. The movement itself is still shaping and many of the key characteristics should not be taken for granted; least of all its openness to everyone and its sustainability/circularity character.

The good news is that there are already major initiatives being deployed at various levels that are working on many of these angles (for interested readers I would like to refer you to projects like Pop-Machina, iProduce, Reflow, all sponsored by the EC and open to interested members of the public). In all these initiatives, cross-collaboration is key. Academics should work hand in hand with practitioners, industry and policy makers to embrace and support this amazing revolution and help nudge it towards its greatest ambitions – democratized access to circular production.   


References

[1] Panori, A., Piccoli, A., Ozdek, E., Spyridopoulos, K. and Altsitsiadis, A. (2020). Market research report. (Deliverable 2.2). Leuven: Pop-Machina project 821479 – H2020


About the Author

Assistant Prof. Efthymios Altsitsiadis, PhD is a behavioural economist with a mind for interdisciplinary research. A user-centricity enthusiast, Efthymios is set to help provide evidence-based answers to some of the most persistent and evasive behavioural questions in a variety of areas like sustainability, health, energy and mobility. He is currently teaching Machine Learning and Digital Behaviour at CBS. He conducts research in collaborative production and circular economy, in advanced technological agents (smart apps, avatars, chat-bot services) and has worked as a social scientist in several cross-disciplinary research projects.

The Uberization of corporate political action

By Dieter Zinnbauer

With more than USD 12 billion spent the 2020 US election cycle may well have been the most expensive political campaign in the world so far. Yet in the shadows of this epic political contest another campaign unfolded that in my view provides some really interesting early signals on emerging trends in corporate political activity.

Alongside the national election Californians went to vote on a number of plebiscitary ballot measures. Among them Proposition 22 that like no other exemplifies how business lobbying unfolds in the era of what is often called the gig-and platform economy.

Prop 22, as it is known for short, was spearheaded by Uber and Lyft as a last ditch effort after exhausting all judicial and legislative tactics to win an exemption from a new Californian labor law that aimed to force these companies to classify their drivers as employees, rather than independent contractors.

A special type of thing

Leaving aside the merits of the argument – as consequential and hard to defend the position of Uber and peers may be-  Prop 22 is remarkable on many fronts.  It exemplifies the growing use of what was once meant to be a plebiscitary counterweight to corporate influence by these very corporate actors to advance their own interests.  

It saw platform companies that connect millions of drivers and tens of millions of passengers in so called two-sided markets take fully advantage of these relationships by intensely lobbying and mobilizing these constituencies for their cause.

It witnessed the deployment of targeted push messages and suggestive survey snippets through the proprietary app infrastructure, administered and tracked by a black-box algorithm that also sets prices and assigns business opportunities and thus commands Foucauldian-like disciplinary allure. Which driver would want to be seen and classified to be unsupportive of the company’s political project while the day’s earnings depend on being assigned this one lucrative trip to the airport? 

Ballot 22 also starkly illustrates the chimera of political equality or of even the resemblance of a level playing field in a world with unconstrained campaign expenditures that resulted in the gig-side outspending the labor side by a factor of 10 to 1.  And it is truly remarkable in its brazen disregard of democratic legitimacy. It aimed to expressly derail a provision that was not hidden on page 1205 of a large body of complex legislation and stealthily whisked through without much public scrutiny. Instead it took aim at a piece of legislation that had been in the public, even international spotlight for quite some time, extensively discussed and lobbied on and resoundingly tested and confirmed in court.

Even more astounding, Prop 22 sought to prevent any future democratic course correction through including a clause that would require an unprecedented 7/8 supermajority in the legislature for overturning it – a much higher hurdle than is set for amending the US constitution.

All these features are fascinating in themselves and deserve a much more detailed examination which has already begun in academic circles, for example with regard to platform-led mobilization  or data-driven corporate advocacy and to which I hope to contribute to in a longer essay elsewhere soon. Here and now I just wanted to offer some very early and unpolished ideas on one more, largely overlooked angle that makes Prop 22 and the corporate political actions of Uber et al. so fascinating.

In very broad brushes the thinking here goes as follows: 

Businesses that are not explicitly chartered as public benefits corporations derive their social license to operate primarily by making a positive economic contribution in terms of innovation, resource efficiency et al. (and yes, by doing this as responsible corporate citizens that respect the spirit of applicable laws, planetary boundaries etc.). The longer-term ability of a company to be financially self-sustaining in a competitive, externality-free market situation is – absent any other claims about achieving non-financial societal benefits – a first approximation for such a positive economic contribution.

Society puts a higher economic value on the contribution of the corporation than the costs of its fairly priced inputs. The business model adds overall economic value, the business organization – not just the people involved in it as individuals claiming their citizenship rights – can invoke this overall economic contribution to justify a certain degree of standing in the democratic discourse.  

Yet this is precisely not the case with companies such as Uber and Lyft.  They have been losing vast sums of money for years, bleeding cash on every ride even while exploiting many regulatory gaps that lower their cost structures relative to their competitors in the ride-hailing business. All this was made possible by enormous sums of venture capital funding – USD 26 billion for Uber alone up until April 2020. Venture funders bet on those companies to eventually achieve a winner-takes-most status and commensurate pricing power in a market characterized by strong network effects and economies of scale /scope. 

The envisioned route to economic dominance, however, also requires to simultaneously build and assert the political influence necessary to stave off regulatory efforts such as categorizing drivers as employees and many other pricey regulations that threaten to close the very regulatory arbitrage opportunities on which large parts of the business model  of Uber, Lyft and other gig companies are ultimately built. 

Overall this results in a situation where venture-funding is at least as much about blitz-scaling political power as it is about financing hyper-growth for market dominance. Both are necessary, both reinforce each other. The build-up of political good will and supportive constituencies is not a by-product of building customer loyalty. It is an essential part of the strategy to architect a business model that critically depends on regulatory accommodation and complicity. Yet, all along and rather ironically this heavy reliance on political action and political success stands in stark contrast to the relative normative weakness of claims made by companies without a clear route to profitability that cannot convincingly back up their political voice with an obvious net positive contribution to overall economic welfare. Stripping away all ornaments what’s left is a story of VC-funded particularistic political rent-seeking. 

Now, much more needs to be explored here and there are many holes that can be punched into this storyline as described in these very broad terms. So please check back here soon for a more developed version of this argument. In the meantime I would love to hear your comments and criticism to help advance this conversation. 


 Epi-epilogue

Uber et al. won Prop 22 by a large margin of 58% to 41%. Prop 22 turned out to be the most expensive ballot initiative in US history. So far.  After the vote Uber’s CEO announced in an analyst call that the company will “more loudly advocate for laws like Prop 22  [and] work with governments across the US and the world to make this a reality.”  The company continues to loose large sums of money.


About the Author

Dieter Zinnbauer is a Marie-Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at CBS’ Department of Management, Society and Communication. His CBS research focuses on business as political actor in the context of big data, populism and “corporate purpose fatigue”.


Photo by ryan park on Unsplash

Sustainable livelihoods? The informal sector beyond Covid-19

By Søren Jeppesen

As a number of the CBS Sustainability blogs have mentioned since March 2020, the official reactions to Covid-19 have (so far) not been doing much for sustainable development (apart from lower CO2 emissions from air travel). Despite concerned voices criticizing the limited attention to combating climate change (‘environmental sustainability’) in the longer run, little impact on policy makers has been registered.

If we focus on ‘social sustainability’ the picture is similar. Discussing the social side of sustainability is part and parcel of assessing the situation in the informal sector and among the estimated two billion people reliant on their livelihoods through the informal activities across the Globe. Sadly, the situation has shown that this group of people and their families have suffered from the imposed restrictions due to Covid-19 (see here).

While the negative impact on income and livelihoods probably is the most severe consequence of inability, lack of willingness (and in some cases maybe even sheer ignorance) among authorities, the events since March can also be viewed ‘an opportunity missed’ regarding (more) sustainable practices.

The classical example is waste handling where informal workers (or scavengers) are involved in waste collection, sorting and identifying material for recycling and reuse. The Indian system where almost all component of waste are sorted and reused is well-known. But additional examples are found in areas like minimizing food waste and establishing social safety nets (Tucker and Anantharaman, 2020). Had governments appreciated the role of the informal sector and the activities undertaken, the period since March could have been used to change towards a ‘sustainability footprint’.

So, instead of using the (unfortunate) challenge to aim for positive change why have governments then been so keen to do the opposite and merely lockdown the informal sector (including denying poor people of their meagre livelihoods)? As Tucker and Anantharaman (2020) argue, it might be due to informal work being perceived as a ‘deficit’ (lack of contracts, lack of permits, lack of tax payment, lack of this and lack of that). International organisations like ILO have long been arguing in favor of ‘formalization of the informal’ (ILO, 2019). And not to romantize the informal sector, nevertheless it is intriguing that this is and has not been a sector perceived as ‘creative, agile, flexible’ and all the buzz that the present glorification of the private sector and individual initiative otherwise has been marked by.

Now, we can’t change what have been the typical type of reactions to the Covid-19 situation across the globe, but we do note that we have increasing social challenges ahead due to rising poverty levels, the naïve, optimistic wish for the New Year is that attention will be placed on how to engage the informal sector and all its resources in the strive for a more sustainable development path. It will not only open up the Pandora’s box regarding new and valuable ways on dealing with the Global trajectories, but could provide avenues for the informal sector to be reckoned as ‘a contributor’ (instead of ‘a deficit’).


References:

CGAP, 2020. Covid-19 Briefing. Insights for Inclusive Finance. Relief for Informal Workers: Falling through the Cracks in the COVID-19 Crisis. August.

ILO . International Labour Organization; 2019. Work for a Brighter Future. Geneva.

Tucker, J.L. and Anantharaman, M. 2020, Informal Work and Sustainable Cities: From Formalization to Reparation, One Earth. 2020 Sep 18; 3(3): 290–299. (doi: 10.1016/j.oneear.2020.08.012)


About the Author

Søren Jeppesen is Associate Professor at the Department of Management, Society and Communication at Copenhagen Business School. His research concerns the development of firms in developing countries. He focuses on SMEs, CSR and driving forces (or lack of same) for strategies of SMEs in developing countries in engaging in CSR (or not engaging).


Photo by The Ian on Unsplash

Sustainability claims: In what sense are they performative?

By Lars Thøger Christensen

The number of products advertised as “green” or climate neutral has exploded in recent years, according to several newspaper articles. Should we be alarmed? To some extent, yes. In addition to cases of blatant fraud and manipulation, there is reason to be concerned when a plethora of green labels for products – ranging from milk over burgers to gasoline – competes for attention, especially when the variety confuses understandings of what it means to be sustainable.

Moreover, since carbon offset programs tend to obscure the fact that neither air travel nor fashion clothing is or can be CO2 neutral, the need to question and test green advertising claims is more pressing than ever. It is therefore commendable that politicians and NGOs in some countries call for more control with corporations that claim to market green or CO2 neutral products. 

The growth in green advertising claims attracts increased scrutiny, regulation and control.

At the same time, the expansion in green advertising claims illustrates the growing social, political and economic premium put on sustainability. Even if many such claims are superficial and hypocritical, their combined existence is performative beyond what individual corporations, NGOs and regulators can imagine and control. 

When all social actors express the significance of sustainability, something has changed.

Scholars of communication often emphasize that communication is constitutive of organizational and social reality. Communication, in their view, is performative because it does something more than simply describe a preexisting reality. Yet, in what sense does this logic apply to issues of climate change and the broader sustainability arena? 

To what extent has communication performative potential in the sustainability arena?

Critics of the performative view on communication view argue that green messages often fail to change anything, either because the senders are insincere or because larger social forces, such as profit motives or efficiency demands, override any talk about sustainability. The power of sustainability communication to shape organizational practices is therefore often described as naïve or overly optimistic. These are important objections to the performativity perspective. Yet, communication still plays a significant role in instigating better practices.

The articulation of sustainability ideals is often “the leading incident” in its performance (Austin, 1962, p. 8).

It is certainly true that sustainability communication is insufficient in and of itself to ensure more sustainable practices. Some sustainability claims may even prevent organizations from moving in the right direction. Nonetheless, communication about sustainability is an important dimension of sustainable action. Without a communicative engagement of major corporations with the values and ideals of sustainability, changes in that arena are likely to be significantly slower. 

Interestingly, critique and control of sustainability claims may help such claims to perform.

Talk about sustainability and green products tend to attract attention of critical stakeholders and increase internal and external pressure to walk the talk. Bold statements combined with public exposure and critique are important dimensions of what we might call the performativity “cocktail”. Green advertising claims and public statements about CO2 neutrality can be used to apply pressure on corporations and remind them of their promises. If major corporations, out of fear of attracting negative stakeholder attention, decide to remain silent on the sustainability issue, critics and regulators have less material to work with. In other words, a willingness on the part of corporations to expose themselves to critique is key.

Communicative performativity in the sustainability arena is a macro phenomenon.

Obviously, an organization does not become sustainable by simply “talking green”. In fact, it is a mistake to think of performativity – especially in complex areas such as sustainability – as a result of discrete and isolated organizational messages or claims. It doesn’t work that way. Even with the best intentions, green talk takes considerable time and effort to materialize into more sustainable practices. Moreover, it is rarely an organizational effect. Performativity is an outcome of multiple claims that are repeated and reformulated again and again over time and across multiple organizations, public as well as private. The sedimented effect of such dynamic interaction that lead to what Butler (2010) calls “socially binding consequences” (p. 147).

The performativity of sustainability claims should be understood as sedimented effects of multiple claims and understandings. 

The communicative performativity of sustainability claims involve reactions of stakeholders, competitors, legislators and consumers who are variously affected, inspired or provoked by the claims to expect and demand better practices. Still, there is no guarantee that the claims will stimulate significant changes. That, of course, is true for all types of messages. Messages and claims can be ignored, forgotten or outright contradicted by subsequent claims or other types of action. Without the claims, however, society and the physical environment is likely to be worse off. The trick is to use them actively to remind the senders of their social and environmental responsibilities. 


Further readings

Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Butler, J. (2010). Performative agencyJournal of Cultural Economy, 3(2), 147-161.

Christensen, L. T., Morsing, M., & Thyssen, O. (2020). Talk-action dynamics: Modalities of aspirational talk. Organization Studies

Fleming, P., & Banerjee, S. B. (2016). When performativity fails: Implications for Critical Management StudiesHuman Relations, 69(2), 257-276.


About the Author

Lars Thøger Christensen is Professor of Communication and Organization at the Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. 


Photo by Helena Hertz on Unsplash

Polarization and polarized opinions – that only happens to other people, right?

By Daniel Lundgaard

Recent developments in politics, especially during the American election, but also within the Danish system, has inspired a lot of talk about how social media is breeding polarization and radicalized opinions. However, from my experience, polarization is often seen as something that only happens to “those people” – often those of opposing views, and as a result, we often fail to recognize that we ourselves might fall victim to the issue of polarization. 

So, with this blog I hope to encourage you to think about how this could be happening to you – and maybe also help you recognize it when it is happening for “those people”, because polarization is a growing problem in our society. 

What is it?

Polarization – it refers to the division of people or opinions into opposing groups, and while it has been discussed since the 1800s, it has gotten much worse with the emergence of social media.

This is especially seen with regards to politics, in particular in countries with two-party systems, but research suggests that there is also significant levels of political polarization in countries with plurality electoral rule (Urman 2020). Importantly, polarization also extends beyond the political system, and it is a growing issue within society, and this is not just about Apple vs Android or Pc vs Mac, this is happening within both the climate change and the anti-vaccine debate, and it is sowing conflict and stopping us from collectively working to solve global challenges. 

How does it emerge? 

Often when I hear people talking about this topic, they talk about how certain groups of people (rarely themselves) manage to seclude themselves from opposing views. This is what is called selective exposure, and it refers to how certain people only pick news and information that align with their views.

This often leads to the growth of the so-called “echo chambers”, where the same opinions are echoed back to you again and again – eventually reinforcing current views and potentially leading to more radicalized opinions. 

Of course, a lot of you are actively seeking out opposing opinions, and might therefore not see polarization as an issue for you. However, there are some problems with only seeing polarization as something that emerge when people seclude themselves from opposing views, in particular two things are in my opinion overlooked: 

  1. Exposure to opposing views has actually been found to increase polarization (Bail et al. 2018). This means that just because you might be aware of the trap of selective exposure, and actively seek out opposing opinions you might not avoid the issue of polarization. 
  2. Polarization is not just a product of the news sources you are exposed to – but just as much, a result of the people you surround yourself with. This tendency for us to surround ourselves with like-minded others is often referred to as homophily

Homophily, is, from my experience, often overlooked in conversations about polarization, and that’s a mistake, because as humans we all tend to engage with and follow people that are interested in the same things. We watch YouTube videos about things that we are interested in, and we follow people on Twitter and Facebook that are similar to us – just take a look at who you follow on Twitter and I suspect that most are either from within your profession or share your world-views. Importantly, you also need to remember, that this behavior is further amplified by the social media platforms that are built to cultivate this, to consume as much of our time as possible and to ensure that we keep using the platform. So just by using these platforms, you might fall victim to increased polarization. 

Why is it a problem? 

Throughout history the idea of a “good” debate has always emphasized the importance of diversity – and not only that you are exposed to different views, but also that you listen to people with opposing views. However, when you mainly listen to opinions and information shared by linked-minded others, or information confirming your current views, we end up with the echo chambers, where you constantly are exposed to “echoes” of the same opinions. This is highly problematic, because not only does it stop people from developing their current views, it can also lead to more radicalized opinions. 

One example from my own research is from my analysis of climate deniers that often discuss the issue of climate change within more polarized communities. However, while some of these are willing to engage in debates about the issue, others fall victim to the same stories being echoed over and over again. In one of the more extreme cases I have seen how a group of people are arguing that climate change is happening because of a giant red dragon flying around our solar system, hiding behind a second sun. And while I am skeptical about their “evidence”, which includes badly photo shopped images or optical illusions, I also see that others, because it is shared by like-minded others, accepts the “proof” and how it reinforces their belief in the narrative. 

What’s next?

Naturally, I am not saying that any of you believe in a giant red dragon flying around our solar system causing climate change by spitting fireballs, but every time I have investigated an echo chamber, I see that they are certain that they are in the right, and that the other side is being brainwashed. Of course, the fact that a smaller group of people believe this theory might not be a problem in itself, but as we have seen time and time again, radicalized ideas seeps into the general debate, such as Mark Zuckerberg being a robot or in the Pizzagate-case that was covered previously on this blog. I just hope, that with this blog I have inspired you to be aware of the growing polarization in society, to think about how you might experience polarization in your everyday life, and reminded you that it is about more than excluding yourself from opposing views, because polarization and radicalization is a growing issue that goes well beyond politics. 


About the Author

Daniel Lundgaard is a PhD Fellow at the Department of Management, Society and Communication at Copenhagen Business School. His research investigates how communication on social media (e.g. the use of emotions, certain forms of framing or linguistic features) shapes the ways we discuss and think about organizational and societal responsibilities.


Photo by Andrew Shiau on Unsplash

Insecure work: rethinking precarity through Kenya’s tea plantations

By Hannah Elliott

Over the last decade, the term ‘precarity’ has become ubiquitous in studies of work and labor, as jobs are increasingly characterized by temporary and insecure contracts; lack of basic welfare provisions such as paid leave; and low pay. The informalization of work has gained pace in a post-Fordist world. And we can expect to see more precarity. The COVID-19 pandemic is pushing employers the world over to think of new ways to reduce labor costs as economies flounder.

Anthropologist of work Kathleen Millar has argued that we need to be careful about how we think about ‘precarity’ when we talk about insecure work. The term can inadvertently “smuggle in a conservative politics”, valorizing and romanticizing a Fordist past of full-time wage labor. This employment past is not universal. In the majority of the world, economies have historically been characterized by informality. Here, formal secure work has been more of an idea, a promise tied up in teleological ideals of modernization and development, than a reality. Furthermore, in former settler colonies such as Kenya and South Africa, formal wage employment has roots in colonial capitalism, coercion and exploitation.  

I’ve been thinking about precarity through the case of changing employment conditions on Kenyan tea plantations, where I’ve been researching the production of certified sustainable tea as part of the SUSTEIN project. I carried out my latest fieldwork between January and March this year, right up until the majority of European countries went into lockdown. A few weeks later, Kenya followed suit. In Kericho, the heart of Kenya’s tea production and where I spent most of my stay, there was little sense that the world was on the brink of an impending global pandemic, let alone reflection on what that could mean for the tea industry. And yet, in conversations with diverse actors in the sector, there was a shared narrative that the industry, responsible for one of Kenya’s biggest export commodities and foreign exchange earners, was struggling.

Enduring low prices of tea on the global market and rising costs of production have led multinational companies owning large tea plantations to look for ways to cut labor costs.

Tea is a labor intensive crop, and companies have historically depended on large resident workforces to pluck tea, plant and prune tea bushes and operate factories, among a multitude of other tasks required to maintain vast tea plantations. Biannual collective bargaining agreements led by the workers’ union have seen wages increase at a rate companies say is unsustainable for business. Citing high wages relative to other agricultural sectors in Kenya and the additional costs of employee benefits such as free housing and water, payment of retirement funds, and contributions to health insurance, along with the costs of maintaining infrastructures used by workers and their dependents such as schools and dispensaries, companies argue for the need to reduce labor forces.

The gradual reduction of company-employed low-level or ‘general’ workers has been taking place through parallel processes of mechanizing tea harvesting and outsourcing tasks outside of companies’ core activities of tea harvesting and factory processing. While workers carrying out core tasks continue to be employed directly by the company, thus receiving a union-negotiated wage and the package of employment privileges described above, outsourced workers are hired on insecure terms by external service providers who hold contracts with tea plantation companies. Outsourced workers are typically employed on short contracts, sometimes for as little as a few days. This renders them ineligible for union membership, and most earn less than half the daily salary of a company employee. If they are unable to work due to sickness, they will not be paid. The contractors who employ them are required by the company to make deductions from their salaries to national health insurance and social security schemes, but low wages and short-term employment mean that contributions are meagre.

Kenya has a large work-seeking population, and people are prepared to take outsourced jobs because of few employment opportunities.

In spite of the striking unsustainability of labor outsourcing for these workers, international sustainability standards say surprisingly little about this category and establish few mechanisms to safeguard them.

In the context of decreasing opportunities for employment in permanent company jobs on tea plantations, current and former workers talk with nostalgia about a time when company jobs and their related securities were a plenty. This nostalgia echoes the valorization of stable, full-time wage labor that Millar identifies as lurking in the notion of precarity. But, without dismissing workers’ nostalgia, we should be careful not to romanticize plantation jobs of the past which were, in spite of their securities relative to outsourced work, inherently precarious.

During the early twentieth century, the colonial administration sought to disrupt and undermine subsistence economies so that people would be forced to seek work on infrastructure projects and in settler industry and agriculture, including tea plantations. For decades, the industry struggled with labor shortage which undermined its growth and expansion. During the 1940s and 50s, efforts were made to create permanent resident labor forces through welfare provisions such as housing, kitchen gardens and retirement funds. Yet workers could never own the houses they lived in, nor the land they were given to cultivate, which remained the property of the company.

In seeking to create a stable workforce that could make Kenya’s tea industry sustainable, the colonial administration destabilized rural economies and created a class of people who would be forced, for generations, to seek wage labor.

If, in these uncertain times, we shouldn’t wish for a whole-sale return to permanent, full-time wage labor, what might we hope for instead? Millar argues for a critical politics of precarity that problematizes the centrality of economically productive work and its promise in contemporary capitalism rather than calling for a return to stable full-time work. Campaigns that propose alternatives to work include Universal Basic Income – where governments makes regular unconditional payments to every individual – and Universal Basic Services. A 2017 study by UCL’s Institute for Global Prosperity proposing Universal Basic Services in the UK argues that government provision of basic services such as food, shelter and transport has the potential to reduce dramatically the cost of living for those on the lowest incomes, making participation, belonging and cohesion possible in the face of increasingly precarious work. These initiatives are becoming more compelling as the world reels from the pandemic and we try to imagine a recovery that prioritizes social and environmental justice.


References

Kathleen M. Millar (2017) ‘Towards a critical politics of precarity’. Sociology Compass, 11 (6), pp. 1-11.

Henrietta Moore, Andrew Percy, Jonathan Portes and Howard Reed (2017) Social prosperity for the future: A proposal for Universal Basic Services. Social Prosperity Network Report: Institute for Global Prosperity, UCL.


About the Author

Hannah Elliott is a postdoc at MSC focusing broadly on the political and economic anthropology, in particular in eastern Africa where she has been conducting research since 2009. Her current research examines the production of certified sustainable tea in Kenya as part of the SUSTEIN project. 

Delivering and Financing Better Societies

How can cities self-finance environmental and social solutions?

By Luise Noring

Every week, more than three million people move into cities looking for places to work and live. This puts an enormous strain on cities’ finances and capacity to provide for their residents. We can no longer – if we ever could – assume that taxes will pay for growing urban populations with growing demands for public infrastructure, goods and services. We need to find new ways of delivering and financing good societies for the billions of people living and working in cities.

Therefore, the challenge is not only to find the best environmental and social solutions for cities, but also to address how these solutions can be delivered and financed. All too often, for example, brilliant climate solutions are presented, but nobody wants to take responsibility for delivering and financing them. All too often, we hear of good solutions for social preventive action and public health that are never put into action. The solutions are there. The challenge is that the business case and investment proposition are either weak or non-existent. As a result, the only one with the incentive to implement the solutions is the cash-strapped government itself.

Hopeful scholars demonstrate how investing taxpayers’ money today could prevent massive expenditure tomorrow. Yet today’s tax revenues are already accounted for to pay for schools, roads, housing, hospitals, etc. This leads me to my principal research question and mission in life:

How do we deliver and finance better societies?

All too often, the only financial solution on the table is to increase and spend tax revenue. But there is no financial innovation in increasing and spending taxes. This ‘solution’ just means that bonds are repaid with future taxes even though we know full well that, in the future, taxes will still be needed to finance schools, roads, housing, hospitals, etc. Spending future taxes today only jeopardizes future generations’ ability to finance their schools, roads, housing, hospitals, etc. The same applies to tax increment financing (TIF), which is a common practice in urban development and economic revitalisation used in the US and subsequently adapted across much of the world.

The idea behind TIF is that local governments issue bonds based on future tax revenue increases. TIF assumes that urban regeneration can be financed by bonds that are serviced and repaid by future tax revenue increases. The proceeds of the TIF bonds are thus used to stimulate economic development through investments in urban regeneration, infrastructure and other public goods. The bonds are repaid mainly through property taxes resulting from investments and development activities. What happens though when the public investments fail to increase tax revenue paid by private owners? In such cases, local governments remain obliged to repay the government- guaranteed bonds.

Conventionally, in the US, local property taxes fund elementary and secondly education, supplemented by federal and state contributions. However, when future property taxes are used to finance infrastructure, public investment capital is in effect flowing from elementary and secondly education to infrastructure and other development activities in order to secure projected tax increases.

Thus, while TIF creates new economic development opportunities in one area, such as derelict neighbourhoods, it hollows out potential future investments in other areas, such as education.

Finally, it is common in many US cities for governments to woo private investment by offering tax reductions or exemptions. This amounts to making investments today with the tax revenues of tomorrow. This is how cities acquire unfunded liabilities.

The above paints a bleak picture of future financing of good solutions for better societies. However, during my research, I have come across many sound finance mechanisms. For instance, land value capture (LVC), which is commonly used in Northern Europe. LVC bundles publicly owned land, such as former port and military areas, or areas over which the public can take ownership, such as derelict areas. Once the local government has secured land ownership, it rezones and repurposes the land.

For example, former industrial land can be repurposed for commercial and residential use. This increases land values, which enables the government to take out loans based on the increased value of the land. With renewed borrowed capital, local government can make infrastructure and other investments in the land. This again increases land values. Once the land has been properly matured, it is sold to private investors and developers, including institutional investors, such as pension funds. Revenues from land sales are used to service and repay the debts. You can read more about this model in my Copenhagen City & Port Development report.

Another solution is for local government to raise seed capital, for instance from philanthropies, pension funds and other large institutional investors that invest with long time horizons. This seed capital is used in projects as low-yield and high-risk investment capital that is capable of attracting other investments that are more high yield and low risk. Once projects have been realised, they are refinanced, and the seed capital is withdrawn and put into another project. This is a kind of project-by-project financing. You can read more about this model in my Cincinnati Development Corporation report.

This blog post has offered a snapshot of several research projects I have conducted over the years. All my works contain key enabling features for replication, which allow me to scale solutions to other cities. If you want to learn more, please visit this page or get in touch with me: lno.msc@cbs.dk.


Further Reading

Luise Noring (2019) Public asset corporation: A new vehicle for urban regeneration and infrastructure finance. Cities.

Bruns-Berentelg, J., Noring, L., & Grydehøj, A. (2020). Developing urban growth and urban quality: Entrepreneurial governance and urban redevelopment projects in Copenhagen and HamburgUrban Studies.


About the Author

Dr. Luise Noring is an Assistant Professor at CBS, where she also attained her Ph.D. in supply chain partnerships. Noring challenges taken-for-granted and commonsense solutions – which are only ever taken-for-granted and commonsense within their specific contexts. Part of what makes her work innovative and has assured its impact in research and practice is precisely her insistence on reaching across national and sectoral contexts, drawing experiences from a great diversity of urban systems. This has allowed Noring to identify what kinds of city solutions work best in particular contexts and how certain kinds of institutional vehicles and finance mechanisms can be adapted to diverse cities and countries.


Photo by Denys Nevozhai on Unsplash

Cultural sensitivity and diversities in the measuring of sustainable development

Lessons learned from the responsible behaviors of individuals during the Covid-19 crisis

By Fumiko Kano Glückstad

The Covid 19-crisis has had – and still has – a very serious impact on a global scale. The New Normal guideline published by WHO [1] suggests that the responsible behaviors of individuals during the Covid-19 crisis have a critical impact on how a country is able to control the spread of  infection. However, the reactions of individuals to aspects of the New Normal such as “social distancing” and “wearing a mask” have been considerably diverse depending on who they are and which society they belong to [2].

Who they are?

To overcome a challenge like the Covid-19 crisis, but also e.g. the long-term crisis on climate change, socially responsible behaviors from individuals are required. Roughly speaking, such behavioral changes may be motivated by four types of personal value priorities [3]: i) anxiety-free values, ii) anxiety-based values; iii) personal-focused values; and iv) social-focused values (See the Figure).

Adapted from Schwartz (2012) [3]

Schwartz [3] states that: 

Socializers and social control agents discourage values that clash with the smooth functioning of significant groups or the larger society. Values that clash with human nature are unlikely to be important. The basic social function of values is to motivate and control the behavior of group members (Parsons, 1951). Two mechanisms are critical. First, values serve as internalized guides for individuals; they relieve the group of the necessity for constant social control. Second, people invoke values to define particular behaviors as socially appropriate, to justify their demands on others, and to elicit desired behaviors. Socializers seek, consciously or not, to instill values that promote group survival and prosperity.

Schwartz, 2012, page 12

This statement is highly relevant to the two aforementioned challenges: Covid-19 and climate change. 

Let us for instance think about the economic situation that the Covid 19 crisis has brought upon the tourism and experience economy (EE) sector. In order to thrive and secure the jobs of the employees involved in the sector, the EE sector needs to maintain a certain number of tourists visiting its destinations. On the other hand, society needs to prevent further spreading of Covid-19. Hence, the responsible behaviors of individuals expressed in association with their travel activities play a crucial role in maintaining the EE businesses.

However, individuals’ attitudes to traveling and to the Covid-19 crisis substantially differ, and manifest in different behaviors. For example, some individuals may prefer to enjoy traveling because they prioritize “personal-focused” values, seeking to fulfill their hedonistic needs, their needs of self-expression and to obtain a sense of achievement. Such internalized personal values may trigger a negative reaction to the constant social control enforced by Covid-19. On the other hand, a person inclined to “social-focused” values may instead tend to choose socially appropriate behaviors required to prevent the spread of Covid-19.

Which society they belong to?

While the value priorities of individuals within and across societies may differ, cultures also influence the formation of selves. Markus & Kitayama’s [4] [5] phenomenal theory, ‘Culture and Self’, defines the independent and the interdependent self-schemas that demonstrate “how sociocultural contexts can shape self-functioning and psychological functioning (Markus & Kitayama, 2010, page 425)”.

Adapted from Markus & Kitayama (2010)

Markus and Kitayama (2001; 2010) explain that:

When an independent schema of self organizes behavior, the primary referent is the individual’s own thoughts, feelings, and actions. Alternatively, when an interdependent schema of self organizes behavior, the immediate referent is the thoughts, feelings, and actions of others with whom the person is in a relationship.

Markus and Kitayama, 2010, page 423

Accordingly, feelings of happiness also differ depending on whether a person is rooted in a culture emphasizing the independent or interdependent self-schemas [6].

Specifically, in North America happiness may most typically be construed as a state contingent on both personal achievement and positivity of the personal self. Negative features of the self and negative feelings are thus perceived to be a hindrance against positivity and happiness. In contrast, in East Asia happiness is likely to be construed as a state that is contingent on social harmony and, thus, on a balance among different selves in a relationship.

Uchida, Norasakkunkit, & Kitayama 2004, page 227

Following the arguments of the aforementioned East Asian cross-cultural psychologists, the formation of value priorities might have been influenced by such culture-rooted self-schemas. Thus, the value priorities and culture-dependent self-schemas of individuals become important factors when scholars do research on sustainable and responsible consumer behaviors. In other words, if the mechanism of feeling happiness is fundamentally different between the independent and the interdependent cultures or between the social- or the personal-focused individuals, the motivations for behaving in a socially responsible way may substantially differ.

Socially responsible reaction to the New Normal

These existing individual and cultural differences may cause us to think about the definition of “socially responsible behaviors” in the context of the Covid-19 crisis.

On Wikipedia, “social responsibility” is defined in the following way:

Social responsibility is an ethical framework and suggests that an individual has an obligation to work and cooperate with other individuals and organizations for the benefit of society at large. Social responsibility is a duty every individual has to perform so as to maintain a balance between the economy and the ecosystems. A trade-off may exist between economic development, in the material sense, and the welfare of the society and environment…

From this viewpoint, the Covid-19 crisis could be an excellent opportunity for individuals to exercise “socially responsible behaviors” for the benefit of society, i.e. in order to return to a Covid-19 free society. However, it generally seems that the young generation of Scandinavians who have been world-leading in sustainable behavior changes have been less engaged in the socially responsible behaviors encouraged during the Covid-19 crisis. What we have learned from the Covid-19 crisis is that the cultures emphasizing the interdependent self-schema have had a smoother path to the New Normal behaviors.

An Australian writer, Paul De Vries posted his interesting observation of the Japanese people’s reactions to Covid-19 in Japan Times [7]:

A stumbling block of the “assumption of carrier” countermeasure is that it requires people to endure discomfort for the sake of the collective good, despite the likelihood of being COVID-19 free. Persuading a critical mass of the population to accept such an imposition is a challenging task, especially when new case numbers are in decline.

Three of the motivating factors that induce Japanese nationals to adhere are courtesy, obligation and shame. Courtesy is the willingness to act out of genuine concern for others. Obligation involves placing the needs of the group before those of oneself. Shame is fear of what others might think if one does not comply to group or societal norms.

There is no shortage of courtesy among the silent majority of the West, as unlikely as that can sometimes seem. A sense of obligation also exists, but typically toward groups less large than society as a whole. Shame, on the other hand, is not a dominant Western trait.

Cultural sensitivity and diversities in the measuring of sustainable development

The diverse reactions to the Covid-19 crisis observed in the past months are good examples demonstrating a need “to prepare a new cultural map of developmental goals, and to create and adapt development indexes that are more culturally sensitive [2]”.  

However, the mapping of cultural differences is not enough to capture heterogeneities of the respective societies. Here, the individuals’ value priorities play in. The theory of basic human values by Schwartz [3] implies that individuals prioritizing the “self-transcendence” value, for example, might be more prone to engage in the socially appropriate behaviors specifically required to prevent the spread of Covid-19. In order to effectively implement a policy for the various sustainable development goals, a new cultural map integrating the heterogeneities of societies will become necessary. In this way, a policy maker could distinguish messages suitable for the respective target segments and optimize their effects on the citizens’ responsible behaviors.

The recent development of machine learning technologies has made it possible to classify populations into such personal value typologies, to describe who they are, and to predict how they will respond to various situations [8]. In our project, UMAMI (Understanding Mindsets Across Markets, Internationally) [9], we developed a workflow and methodologies to investigate such heterogeneities of societies based on personal value priorities. It would be interesting to explore how these can be exploited in various application domains addressing the sustainable development goals in the coming years.


References

[1] https://www.who.int/westernpacific/emergencies/covid-19/information/covid-19-new-normal

[2] Krys K, Capaldi CA, Lun VM-C, et al. Psychologizing indexes of societal progress: Accounting for cultural diversity in preferred developmental pathways. Culture & Psychology. 2020;26(3):303-319. doi:10.1177/1354067X19868146  

[3] Schwartz, S. H. (2012). An Overview of the Schwartz Theory of Basic Values. Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 2(1), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.9707/2307-0919.1116

[4] Markus, H. R., & Kitayama, S. (1991). Culture and the self: Implication for cognition, emotion, and motivation. Psychological Review, 98 SRC-(2), 224–253.

[5] Markus, H. R., & Kitayama, S. (2010). Cultures and selves: A cycle of mutual constitution. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5(4), 420–430. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691610375557

[6] Uchida, Y., Norasakkunkit, V., & Kitayama, S. (2004). Cultural Constructions of Happiness: Theory and Empirical Evidence. Journal of Happiness Studies, 5, 223–239. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-004-8785-9

[7] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2020/05/22/commentary/japan-commentary/covid-19-versus-japans-culture-collectivism/

[8] Albers, K. J., Mørup, M., Schmidt, M. N., & Glückstad, F. K. (2020). Predictive evaluation of human value segmentations. The Journal of Mathematical Sociology, 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/0022250X.2020.1811277

[9] http://sf.cbs.dk/umami


About the Author

Fumiko Kano Glückstad is Associate Professor of Cross-Cultural Cognition at Copenhagen Business School. She works in the area of cross-cultural psychology. She has developed a workflow and methodologies enabling data-driven segmentation and typological analysis of consumers based on their personal value priorities in close collaboration with the Section of Cognitive Systems, DTU Compute at the Technical University of Denmark during the UMAMI project (2017-2020) funded by Innovation Fund Denmark. She previously worked as a consumer researcher and product concept designer of kitchen appliances at Panasonic Corporation, Japan and as a Japanese market specialist at Phase One A/S, Denmark.


Photo by Kate Trifo on Unsplash

Friedman’s critique of CSR at 50: birthday surprises

By Jeremy Moon

Sorry I am late in sending a 50th birthday card for Milton Friedman’s essay “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits [1]. Many would say that it is a birthday not worth celebrating. I agree with my colleagues Steen Vallentin (see blog) and Sandra Waddock (see blog) that we should move beyond Friedman’s assumptions and prescriptions. So why do I use a seemingly outdated newspaper article in my introductions to courses on corporate social responsibility (CSR)? In Steen’s terms, should I continue to flog the ‘somewhat dead horse’? As I think this horse still has legs I wouldn’t flog it, but I would continue to take some of the CSR journey with it. And here’s why. 

By reading and thinking about “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits” students have gained insights into how business and its context changes, and into some key abiding issues (e.g. the relationship of business responsibility to government, the purpose of business). Friedman packs an awful lot into the essay. Despite my belief that it is anachronistic and misguided in parts, Friedman – sometimes unwittingly – brings a few interesting surprises to the class.

Surprise No. 1 is that it was even worth penning a critique of business social responsibility in 1970. It is sometimes assumed – especially in business schools – that business concerns with responsibility and sustainability are relatively new fads (the sad truth is that many schools have been slow to address these concerns). But, yes, there was a lot of talk about CSR in the late 1960s USA, and Friedman castigates GM Motors for its social initiatives. So CSR is not new but it has its ups and downs. Its focal issues, modes and rationales differ over time and vary among contexts.  

The biggest change to CSR since 1970 is probably globalization bringing with it global supply chains and new corporate agendas of responsibility for labour & human rights and for the natural environment. Friedman envisaged that the only governments relevant for social issues were democratically accountable (i.e. American) and thus did not envisage the difficult responsibility issues for corporations in sourcing from, and selling to, countries which are undemocratically and corruptly governed. 

Surprise No. 2 is for those who know that Milton Friedman had already achieved fame or infamy for his libertarian position. In his book Capitalism and Freedom (1962), he presented government as inefficient and ineffective on key public policy issues. As Sandra Waddock points out, neo-liberalism, of which Friedman is a standard-bearer, generally contends that ‘less government is invariably good’. Yet in “The Social Responsibility of Business” Friedman is positive about government as an accountable and competent actor for resolving societal problems.

Friedman suggests a dichotomous view of the responsibilities of government and business because he assumed that business could best pursue its responsibilities – to increase profits – unencumbered by public policy obligations, and that government could legitimately raise taxes to address social issues. But this dichotomy rather belies the realities, then and now, of business organizations seeking favorable governmental intervention in markets and society… and of governments seeking business contributions to addressing societal challenges.

Surprise No. 3Friedman acknowledges the virtue of social investments by business … ‘excuse me?’. Yes. In a rather over-looked passage, he comments that: 

It may well be in the long-run interest of a corporation that is a major employer in a small community to devote resources to providing amenities to that community or to improving its government. That may make it easier to attract desirable employees …or have other worthwhile effects.

M. Friedman (1970). “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits”, p. 124 col. 3.

This looks like an early version of the business case for CSR – re-labeled Creating Shared Value by Porter & Kramer [2]? But Friedman just doesn’t want you to call social investments CSR. Like today’s critics of CSR, Friedman sees this cloaking of a business strategy as a form of “window-dressing” and as “approaching fraud”. This introduces the fascinating point of class discussion about whether something can be described as socially responsible if it also benefits the benefactor, and specifically the corporate benefactor?

Surprise No. 4 is for students of business and management.  It lies in Friedman’s misrepresentation of corporate governance. His main argument about CSR constituting misuse or even theft of shareholders’ property is predicated on his contention that shareholders are the legal owners of publicly traded corporations. But in fact the corporation itself owns its assets: indeed the whole point about limited liability is that shareholders are exempted from liabilities that would otherwise rest on owners [3]. Of course, there are duties to shareholders – legal and ethical – but these are tempered in corporate governance regulation and judicial rulings (details vary among jurisdictions).

This is also a surprise for some corporate critics who see the problem of corporate irresponsibility as simply a function of a shareholder model [4].  In other words, they believe Friedman’s myth of the managers simply being the agents of shareholders. That this myth has achieved such standing is, perhaps partly testimony to the appeal that Friedman’s argument has had… and another reason why I like to introduce him to students.  

Surprise No. 5 is one that, in retrospect, Friedman himself may have had to face. It is clear that investors do not conform to his fairly unidimensional assumptions of shareholders’ motivation: not all are interested in short-term profit. Some are motivated by long-term security of their investment and others by values (e.g. avoidance of risky products, preference for products not tested on animals). Today we see evidence of greater mainstreaming of investor concerns with sustainability issues that Friedman would have contended are beyond corporate responsibility and which are properly in the sphere of government (see Rasche blog).  

Of course, much else has changed which students like to ponder, including:

  1. the extent to which corporations adopt the business case for responsible and sustainable goods and services, be it for their own sake, or reflecting changing consumer, employee or investor preferences or, more broadly, reflecting their understanding of the expectations of societies and regulators.
  2. the institutionalization of CSR through private authority (principles, standards, audits, reports) and its intersection with civil society and democratic government.
  3. skepticism about corporate motivation for “promoting desirable social ends” is no longer the sole prerogative of libertarians like Friedman (and Hayek).  I now also comes from the very socialist perspectives that Friedman feared the most.

So yes, we certainly need to move on, but we may move on more assuredly if part of our journey (on horseback or otherwise) is engaged in the conversation he spurred (sorry for flogging these equine metaphors…). 


References

[1] M. Friedman “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits”, New York Times Magazine, 13 September 1970.

[2] M. Porter & M. Kramer “Creating Shared Value”  Harvard Business Review, Jan  – Feb 2011.

[3] E.g. Lynn A. Stout. The Shareholder Value Myth: How Putting Shareholders First Harms InvestorsCorporations, and the Public, 2012.

[4] E.g. Not Fit-for-Purpose: The Grand Experiment of Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives in Corporate Accountability, Human Rights and Global Governance (Summary Report), MSI Integrity, 2020.


About the Author

Jeremy Moon is Professor at Copenhagen Business School, Chair of Sustainability Governance Group and Director of CBS Sustainability. Jeremy has written widely about the rise, context, dynamics and impact of CSR.  He is particularly interested in corporations’ political roles and in the regulation of CSR and corporate sustainability.


Photo Source: Milton Friedman blowing out the candles on his birthday cake, while his wife Rose and other party attendees look on. 15 July 1987. ©Hoover Institution Archives.

Top Leadership Compensation: From Hockey-Stick to Shared Pay-checks

“Sharing is Caring” is a way to manage post-COVID19 Economic Crises and Layoffs

By Anirudh Agrawal & Bharat Dhamani

10 of the 25 Linkedin review of best companies to work in India published in 2019 are firing their employees in 2020.  They paid huge performance based salary to top management, who drove performance by reducing pay of the lower rung employees [1].

There is a moral dilemma when we compare top management compensation with those employed at the lower levels or those employed on temporary contracts in India Inc. The median top management salary in India is as much as 243 times than those at the lowest strata of the organisation [2]. During the recent Covid-19 crises, this wage asymmetry between the lowest rung employees and top management the resulting crises of legitimacy were further highlighted. This opinion piece discusses three strategies to control hockey stick pay-outs to the corporate leadership. Contrary to current narrative on free market  and invisible hand, the corporate must self-reflect and implement policies for greater employee rights and dignity, collective bargaining and equality of pay to create  sustainable competitive advantage. 

India Inc. must learn from Scandinavian enterprises about their top leadership compensation model where the compensation is decided collectively ( along with the employee union), ensuring fairer pay and shared accountability towards organizational performance. Scandinavian strategy of collective bargaining has ensured multiple benefits [3].

  1. It has ensured that the rights of the lowest-ranked individual is protected.
  2. It has ensured that organizations follow sustainable policies both internally and externally, keep sharing the impact from shareholders to stakeholders, and
  3. The employees at each level and the communities work in sync towards ensuring organisational mission and competitiveness politics, cliques and influence of personal interest groups are limited.
  4. The collective agreements ensure that the employee flights to competitors are limited.

The effect of Scandinavian model has ensured an overall positive impact on organisational longevity, brand recall and competitiveness [4].

The India Inc should engage with their Indian public sector counterparts and learn their functioning and how they treat their employees through fairer pay and work conditions. India Inc should reflect and study the pay structure adopted by the Indian Public sector [5].

The public sector salaries have ensured respect for each, preservation of rights, longevity in the job and service to all irrespective of caste, colour or religion.

For example, the public sector banks like SBI ensure delivery of financial services to the poorest of the poor while ensuring that its banking officials are paid well. Our common sense would suggest that the Indian private sector to emulate some of the public sector compensation methodology, ensuring that the employee at the lowest strata get decent wages. The private sector can learn from the public sector on how to manage organisational compensation and increase organisational loyalty and in doing so, it must also increase benefits to the lowest ranking employee in the organisation. Similarly, the public sector should develop agility to reflect on market forces and learn to innovate to ensure that it is aligned and competitive as the competition demands. 

Narayan Murthy of Infosys rightly questioned his senior management about the lack of accountability despite hockey stick payouts. He pointed out that shareholders might approve the actions of the top management but the corporate leadership must be accountable to the stakeholders that includes the public and the employees [6]

Therefore, top management compensation should be duly decided by following a strong corporate governance principles, transparency and by installing elements of corporate ombudsman

Firms with strong accountability and stakeholder interests would perform better in the long run, than those firms which are driven by offering high incentives to top management for performance.

Some Indian private sector organisations belonging to distressed industries and markets had taken large public owned capital to run their businesses, paid hefty compensation to higher management but when things went wrong, both the promoters and top management had no public accountability. Besides, when the business failed to perform, the top management were just let go while the lower-ranked employees struggled to pay their bills. The audit reports were hardly made public and the accountability measures and corporate governance rules of such organisations were never questioned.  

The organisations while deciding top management compensation must also bring proportionality in accountability and stakeholder engagement.

Collective bargaining, equality in pay similar to public sector and corporate social and moral accountability are three strategies that the Indian corporations must reflect and incorporate in their managerial processes. Some of the NIFTY fifty Indian corporations like the Tata Group, Infosys, Mahindra and Mahindra, Hero Motors, ICICI Bank have implemented in their processes and one can see these effects on the employee satisfaction on Glassdoor employer ratings, brand recall by the consumers and overall stakeholder satisfaction is reflected positively.

Therefore, if the Indian private sector implements the policies that lead to greater accountability, equality in pay, collective decision making while ensuring its flexibility to market forces, we will see a disruptive and positive change in the image, governance mechanism, competitiveness and longevity of Indian corporations.

While the hockey stick model of compensation shifts the responsibility entirely on the top management, the collective bargaining and equitable compensation distributes the responsibility to each and every employee, bringing greater sense of employee engagement and employee accountability. Such a strategy has a potential to create long term competitiveness and shareholder value.


References

[1] https://www.businessinsider.in/here-are-the-25-most-popular-workplaces-in-india-according-to-linkedin/articleshow/68704338.cms
[2] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/company/corporate-trends/india-incs-top-executives-earn-243-times-more-than-average-staff/articleshow/63359591.cms
[3] https://www.socialeurope.eu/why-trade-unions-at-work-do-work
[4] http://norden.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:816030/FULLTEXT02.pdf
[5] https://www.spjimr.org/blog/learning-public-sector
[6] https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/narayan-murthy-recounts-his-spat-with-vishal-sikka-to-drive-home-point/story-YNG126VbaGMO5nDgFx0XCM.html


About the Authors

Anirudh Agrawal is Impact Investing and Social Entrepreneurship Fellow at Copenhagen Business School and Lecturer of Entrepreneurship and Strategy at Department of Entrepreneurship at FLAME University India. He is researching on the institutional theory framework to reflect on debates in social entrepreneurship and social innovation. 

Bharat Dhamani is a Lecturer of Entrepreneurship and Strategy at the Department of Entrepreneurship at FLAME University India. He practices engagement oriented learning through simulation and practical work. His subjects include financial management, business plan preparation, new venture business strategy and social entrepreneurship.


Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

Branding in the COVID-19 pandemic

Not every time is the right time for real-time marketing

By Maha Rafi Atal and Lisa Ann Richey

This article is based on previously written piece for the Centre for Business and Development Studies.

As the global Covid-19 pandemic spread through Europe and North America, companies raced to communicate how they were responding to the crisis. Advertising that focuses on a company’s response to humanitarian crises is hardly new. Every holiday season features a parade of brands touting their seasonal partnerships with charitable causes. Yet these exercises in “Covid-branding” struck a particular nerve with both consumers and media commentators because so many of the brands stuck to the same script. Quickly that script even became the subject of satire.

‘The hallmarks of the coronavirus ad are so consistent they could be generated by bots. They begin with eerie drone footage of empty streets, a shot of a child staring plaintively out the window and then — cue the upbeat musical key change — a medical worker peeling off a mask, a guy jamming on a home piano, maybe a deeply pregnant woman rubbing her belly as if summoning a genie from its bottle.’

Amanda Hess, The New York Times, May 22, 2020

These patterns are important. In the uncertain early weeks of the pandemic, as governments were still crafting their responses, the stories brands told played a role in shaping how the public made sense of the crisis. What kind of a crisis was it? What sort of solutions did it need? What role should business play in delivering them? Covid-branding offered answers to those questions.

In this briefing note, we present a preliminary analysis of Covid-branding by companies in Europe and North America during March and April 2020. Our analysis finds that messaging clustered clearly into two ways could engage: ‘Covid-helping’ and ‘Covid-coping.’ These messages of ‘managing the pandemic’ and ‘managing yourself’ frame the consumption of goods and services as a way that consumers can show they care, presenting shopping as a form of everyday heroism. In this way, they make the case that private sector has a role to play in humanitarian response.

Economic Context

The Covid-19 pandemic has taken an extraordinary toll on the global economy. Measures to combat the spread of the virus, including border closures, and national lockdowns affecting one-third of the world’s population, shut down much industrial production and pushed white-collar professionals to remote work. These measures, coupled with a fall in consumers’ own confidence in response to the health crisis, contributed to rising unemployment, falling consumer activity, and the worst global recession since the Great Depression.

This context, with consumer activity declining overall and shifting from closed stores to online retailers, placed pressure on brands to compete for a share of the smaller e-commerce pie. At the same time, the recession placed pressure on marketing professionals to demonstrate their relevance at a time of overall corporate retrenchment.

Marketing Context

We focus our analysis on online communications, especially social media output. Social media marketing is often informal in tone and crafted quickly to respond to real-time events, so that brands can ride the waves of attention paid to viral news stories, from royal babies to sporting events.4 Most research about this practice has suggested brands choose to focus on positive or neutral stories to avoid mistakes, as humorous tweets about a serious event can backfire. That makes Covid-branding in the early weeks of the pandemic, when infection and death rates were rising, unusual.

We also examine promotional emails and newsletters, a form of content marketing. Content marketers have begun to develop more journalistic skills, including as storytellers and explainers of complex phenomena, and indeed many former journalists are employed as content marketers. Covid-branding, in which brands help consumers make sense of the emerging crisis, is an example of this phenomenon.

These online forms have not received much attention from researchers of corporate humanitarianism, which has focused on more traditional forms of print and broadcast advertising. We hope that this brief typology of how marketers used these newer forms in the Covid-19 pandemic encourages further research into these formats.

Covid-branding as Covid-helping

Brands that emphasized their role in helping to manage the pandemic did so in distinct ways. To understand this, we considered two aspects of each marketing message: First, whether companies are making an engaged or disengaged intervention. Companies which are engaged use their own business capacities toward the Covid-19 cause. Second, we consider whether companies are claiming to directly or indirectly impact the Covid-19 crisis itself. We investigate whether the brand claims to address the medical situation (direct) or indirect societal outcomes of the pandemic, including economic impacts.

The four modes of engagement
Direct Engaged: Business puts its core capacities into directly fighting Covid

Some companies with core operations in the fields directly linked to fighting the pandemic (i.e. health care or logistics companies) quickly began communications around their role.

This Novo Nordisk Facebook advertisement shows healthcare workers holding up a sign reading “Thanks” in Danish. Novo Nordisk is a leading pharmaceutical company. Photographs of healthcare professionals at work in Novo Nordisk-made protective gear signaled company’s direct engagement.


Examples of countries where these products are in use underscores that the company serves a modern, global, and racially and gender-diverse group of professionals. Other direct engagement included shipping company Mærsk tweeting about “Mærsk Bridge,’ an air bridge and supply chain operation to transport PPE to healthcare workers.

Indirect Engaged: Business puts its core capacities into indirectly managing Covid

Since direct business engagement was only possible for companies whose core business was in medical or logistical operations, many companies emphasised managing indirect societal impacts of the pandemic in their early response.

As a food and drinks business with a national supply chain, Starbucks was able to use its core capacities to address indirect economic impact of pandemic on food supply. Promotional email highlights corporate donations of 700,000 meals to food banks and use of company logistics network to assist foodbanks with transport.

Makes the case that hunger “is part of the crisis” to underscore relevance of this indirect engagement.

Other indirect engagement included Draper James, the American actress Reese Witherspoon’s fashion brand, announced on its Instagram account on April 2, donations of dresses for teachers (deemed essential workers during pandemic); campaign backfired when dress supplies ran out.

Direct Disengaged: Business helps others directly fight Covid

Businesses who could not easily link their core operations to medical needs instead highlighted partnerships to help others managing the Cover crisis.

A promotional email from Camper highlights the use of 3D printers from its manufacturing operation to produce medical visors. The Email also highlights donations of shoes and slippers to staff and patients in hospitals.


Camper does not claim that they are themselves engaged in work to combat the medical crisis, but rather that they are making resources and equipment available to others who can do so.

Other direct disengaged examples included fashion brand Armedangels making cloth masks while explicitly stating on Facebook that they could not protect the wearer – “we can’t produce medical masks” – but that 2 euro from the sales of each mask would be donated to Doctors Without Borders, or gas company Crusoe Energy Systems announcing that they were donating computing power to Stanford University coronavirus research.

Indirect disengaged: Business helps others indirectly manage Covid

Businesses who could not easily link their core operations to urgent economic or societal needs instead highlighted partnerships to help others managing the impact of the Covid crisis.

Instagram post by crowd-funding platform GoFundMe promoting that its platform can be used by consumers to identify causes to support. Following the link to “learn more” shows company also offering free consulting to nonprofits on how to raise additional funds.


The company is not mobilizing its own resources to support Covid-related causes, but rather facilitating donations to other organizations through information sharing. Such consulting activity is not an ordinary part of the company’s core business.

Other indirect disengaged examples included Facebook offering grants for small businesses in the United States and using its network to promote the existing loan program from the US government.

Covid-branding as Covid-coping

Many brand engagements we examined did not make any claims to be helping combat the crisis, or its social impact, at all. Rather they focused on helping individual consumers to cope with the circumstances surrounding the crisis and its personal impact on themselves.

Because these “Covid-coping” messages focused on helping individuals, rather than society or the economy, our analysis focused on the demographics of what kind of consumers each type of “coping” message addressed, as well as what the messages said. We identified three coping mechanisms brands sold to consumers in these Covid-coping messages: coping-through-practicality, coping-through-pleasure and coping-through-denial.

1) Coping-through-practicality

Like indirect Covid-helping, it portrays shopping as way to address consequences of the pandemic, but instead of focusing on consequences for society, it targets how consumers can address their own needs.

An Instagram post by Zoku, a real estate company managing coworking spaces, offered private office rooms for professionals needing a socially distant office away from their household. Emphasis is put on a spare and clean layout of the office and “peace and quiet” for workers.


It suggests appeal to professionals with children struggling with disruption to work practices in shared family homes. Coping-through-practicality engagements largely addressed themselves to consumers in their identities as professionals and parents.

Other coping-through-practicality examples included laptop manufacturers advertising tools for working from home; home furnishings brands advertising tools for cooking at home; and phone, internet and electricity providers advertising their services as essential infrastructure for remote working and home-schooling. Marketing of this type emphasizes how brands could help families and businesses carry on “as normal” during a period of crisis.

2) Coping-through-pleasure

Exclusively comprised of brands in the fashion, fitness and lifestyle industries, with messages targeted to young and predominantly white women; present luxury goods as means of coping with pandemic through ‘self-care’.

A promotional newsletter for the “athleisure” brand Jolyn depicts a slim and muscular white woman on an inflatable pool float wearing sunglasses and painted toenails. Sunlight appears to reflect off the body of water in which she floats, with a caption advertising a “Bikini for staycation.” The Image and caption present the lockdown, which compelled individuals to stay home from their usual recreational activities, as a “staycation,” an unexpected source of free time at home.

Other coping-through-pleasure messages included advertisements from fashion brands including Anthropologie and Nicole Miller advertising loungewear as “self-care style” and clothing for “virtual dates or happy hours,” as well as make-up brands offering online tutorials for those with “more time (inside) on our hands.”

These messages present the health crisis as an opportunity for women to take a “break” from work outside the home and relax with home-bound versions of their usual recreational activities. They draw on influencer culture, which depicts recreation as a full-time occupation. Coping-through-pleasure offers the chance to purchase some of the influencer lifestyle, where the pandemic is not a stressor, and one can escape at a moment’s notice to a sunlit pool.

3) Coping-through-denial

Targeted widely to all consumers, these messages suggested that consumers shop as though the pandemic were not taking place, or advertised products which made light of the pandemic.

A full page newspaper advertisement in Corriere della Sera, Italy’s mostread newspaper, on 7 March, by two Italian ski resorts, Bormio and Livigno, captioned “Live the mountain with full lungs: There’s a snowy place where feeling great is contagious!”


At the time of advertisement running, lockdown was dissuading tourists from traveling to Italy, putting pressure on ski resorts, while deaths from the respiratory virus – which kills by targeting the lungs specifically – were at their highest in northern Italy, where ski resorts are concentrated.

Other coping-through-denial advertisements included Passports, a travel rewards program, contacting members in mid-March, when concerns about virus spread were focused on cruise ships, to advertise “the best pricing and exceptional bonuses” on celebrity cruises, and online retailers of topical and humorous T-shirts advertising limited range clothing with coronavirus-related captions. Notably, these engagements came broadly from the early weeks of our sample, and brands appeared to shy away from explicitly seeking to make light of the crisis or encouraging consumers to travel in spite of it, by the end of March 2020 when more severe lockdown and suppression measures were in place across Europe.

Implications for Brands

The different types of early Covid-branding in our sample, whether they focus on helping or coping with the pandemic, offer some cautionary lessons for brands.


About Commodifying Compassion

‘Commodifying Compassion: Implications of Turning People and Humanitarian Causes into Marketable Things’ is a research project focused on understanding how ‘helping’ has become a marketable commodity and how this impacts humanitarianism. An international team of researchers funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research (2017-2021), we examine ethical consumption intended to benefit humanitarian causes from the perspectives of consumers, businesses, NGOs and recipients. The research will produce a better understanding by humanitarian organizations and businesses leading to more ethical fundraising, donors weighing consumption-based models as part of more effective aid, and consumers making more informed choices about ‘helping’ by buying brand aid products. To learn more about our work, visit the website.

Download full briefing here


About the Authors

Maha Rafi Atal is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Copenhagen Business School, where her research focuses on corporate power, corporate social responsibility and corporate influence in the media. She is a co- Investigator on the Commodifying Compassion research project. http://www.maha-rafi-atal.com

Lisa Ann Richey is Professor of Globalization at the Copenhagen Business School. She works in the areas of international aid and humanitarian politics, the aid business and commodification of causes. She is the principal investigator on the Commodifying Compassion research project. https://www.lisaannrichey.com


Photo by Colton Vond, “Obey Consumerism,” March 3, 2019. Licensed under Creative Commons CC BY 2.0.

Has COVID-19 changed our relationship with food?

CBS is involved in two large-scale international studies about people’s changes in food-related habits during the pandemic 

By Meike Janssen

It might sound familiar: Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, photos of homemade bread, fancy meals and desserts are circulating on social media while empty pizza cartons are piling up in the neighbours’ garbage bin. It seems that many people have changed their food-related habits during the pandemic, partly in opposite directions.

That is why consumer researchers from the Consumer and Behavioural Insights Group (CBIG) at CBS Sustainability launched two large-scale consumer studies [1] in collaboration with international colleagues. The studies analyse the shifts in terms of buying, cooking and eating habits that have been brought on by the pandemic and the related restrictions and lockdown measures. 

Food-related behaviour is to a large degree subject to habits and routines. Changes in eating patterns are normally occurring rather slowly over longer periods of time.

Besides, we know that food consumption is largely influenced not only by personal preferences but also by context, i.e. where we eat and with whom we eat.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, we have been experiencing the unprecedented case that many people have spent much more time at home. That also means many people have eaten more meals at home than before the pandemic. Now, we are beginning to understand what consequences these changes in the context of food consumption have had, e.g. in terms of how (un)balanced the diets have been or whether people’s cooking skills have improved. 

Findings

Our data was collected at the end of April / beginning of May 2020 among more than 1.000 consumers in Denmark. The food frequency questionnaire revealed a number of interesting trends. Depending on the type of food, 10-45% of consumers changed their consumption frequency during the pandemic compared to before. In all food categories, we observed diverging trends with some people having decreased and others increased consumption. We observed the highest rates of change in the categories frozen food, canned food, and cake and biscuits, while the lowest rates of change occurred in the categories bread, dairy products, and alcoholic drinks.

For all types of fresh food analysed, the proportion of people who had decreased their consumption was higher than the proportion of people who had increased consumption, i.e. the overall average consumption of fresh food significantly decreased during the pandemic. The consumption of sweet snacks, by contrast, significantly increased.

Partly, the observed changes in food consumption can be explained by decreases in food shopping frequencies. As expected, a decrease in shopping frequency was significantly related to a decrease of fresh food consumption and an increase in the consumption of frozen food and canned food but also of sweet snacks. 

Photo by  Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

We further found significant effects of restriction and lockdown measures on changes in food consumption, i.e. the effect of the closure of:

  • physical workplaces
  • work canteens
  • cafés and restaurants
  • schools and kindergartens.

While it is not surprising that these restrictions impacted upon people’s food consumption, we were surprised to see that those people affected by the same restrictions were likely to change their consumption of certain types of food in similar ways. 

For instance, people affected by a closure of their physical workplace were likely to decrease the consumption of bread, cake and biscuits. Families with children tended to increase the consumption of fruit and veggies, presumably in a pursuit to eat more healthily. At the same time, they also increased the consumption of bread, sweets and chocolate, and alcoholic drinks, perhaps as a means to cope with stress.

Single-person households, by contrast, tended to decrease their consumption of fruit and vegetables and fresh meat, probably because they ate less cooked meals. They also tended to decrease the consumption of bread, and sweets and chocolate. 

The results demonstrate that the relatively strict restrictions and lockdown measures in spring 2020 affected different people and households in very different ways. While some people spent more time with meal preparation and cooking, others did the opposite.

The results provide insights, e.g. for the areas of healthy eating, food system resilience, and behavioural change. We are currently compiling recommendations for decision-makers in the food sector on how to prevent detrimental effects of the pandemic on people’s food-related habits. Key insights of the two studies will soon be published in scientific journals.


References

[1] Our relationship with food (www.food-covid-19.org), and Corona Cooking Survey (https://coronacookingsurvey.com)


About the Author

Meike Janssen is Associate Professor for Sustainable Consumption and Behavioural Studies, CBS Sustainability, Copenhagen Business School. Her research focuses on consumer behaviour in the field of sustainable consumption, in particular on consumers’ decision-making processes related to sustainable products and the drivers of and barriers to sustainable product choices.


Photo by nrd on Unsplash

Making Corporate Sustainability More Sustainable

For too many firms corporate sustainability is itself not a sustainable endeavor

By Andreas Rasche

Corporate sustainability initiatives are blossoming around the world. While some firms have built robust infrastructures around their efforts, other firms struggle to do so, making their engagement a short-lived endeavor. In other words, corporate sustainability is itself often not sustainable enough to create lasting change in organizations. While there is hope that firms’ sustainability strategies are becoming more robust (e.g., because basic market conditions have shifted in favor of sustainability and make it difficult to ignore), there is still much work to be done to create sustainable corporate sustainability efforts.

The Challenge of Integration

One important barrier is the belief that “integrating” sustainability is more important than having an own dedicated organizational infrastructure around it. In 2019, the Danish multinational Maersk laid off a significant part of its sustainability team (including the head of the division). The aim of the reorganization was to merge its ongoing sustainability activities with work undertaken in other departments of the company. While integration may sound like a sound strategy and for many years consultants advised firms to make sure that sustainability work is not detached from the core of the firm, it also comes at a price:

In many firms, integration “waters down” sustainability efforts, makes them less visible in the organization and hence easy to neglect.

Don’t get me wrong: I am not arguing against integrating sustainability into organizations. I am arguing against using integration as a cover-up strategy to make sustainability efforts themselves less sustainable. Integration can easily be misused. Take the example of business education. For many years, business schools have struggled with finding the right balance between creating standalone courses on sustainability topics and integrating related content into the regular curriculum. Over time, integration proved to be difficult and only very few schools succeeded with truly embedding sustainability content across their curriculum. The main hurdle was to free up room in otherwise already packed courses and to also move beyond a symbolic adoption of sustainability content in classes.  

Business schools’ experience holds a lesson for corporations. If you integrate, you need to ensure that wherever integration happens enough resources support the journey (e.g., time, knowledge but also interest). Often, this is where integration fails…

The Challenge of Corporate Size

Another barrier to making sustainability more sustainable is corporate size. Recently, I published a paper that analyzed which types of firms are delisted from the UN Global Compact (UNGC). We analyzed over 11,000 firms (both active and inactive participants in the UNGC). One key finding was that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) were much more likely to leave the initiative than larger firms. It would be easy to conclude from this that SMEs are less sustainable than larger firms – but this would be the wrong conclusion.

What it shows is that SMEs struggle to develop lasting organizational structures around their sustainability efforts. UNGC delisting is based on firms’ failure to submit a mandatory annual implementation report. While larger firms usually do not struggle with such reporting, because this task is anchored somewhere in the organization, smaller firms find it more difficult to make reporting a lasting endeavor (e.g., because of resource constraints or lack of knowledge). Often, sustainability commitments by SMEs are based on internal champions who push relevant efforts and also sign the organization up to the initiatives like the UNGC. Once these people leave the organization or assume a different role within the firm, there are little formal structures that could fill the void that is left behind.

SMEs sustainability work is often more implicit and tied towards the communities they operate in. However, in a more transparent world where sustainability is increasingly datafied and benchmarked such implicit efforts may be easily confused with corporate sustainability lacking sustainable implementation.

Sustainable Corporate Sustainability

So, what is the bottom line? Making corporate sustainability itself more sustainable remains a key management challenge, both for larger and smaller firms. Creating durable organizational structures that can withstand the pressures of crisis situations and related cost-cutting efforts is one important way to address this challenge. Such structures have to be integrated with the rest of the organization to be not an add-on, but they also need to have a life on their own. What may even be more important is that corporate leaders and associated Boards need to develop an unambiguous vision for where the firm is supposed to go with its sustainability activities. This puts Board-level engagement with sustainability topics at the very top of the agenda, both for practitioners and academics.


About the Author

Andreas Rasche is Professor of Business in Society at Copenhagen Business School and Visiting Professor at the Stockholm School of Economics. He just released “Sustainable Investing: A Path to a New Horizon” (together with Herman Bril and Georg Kell). More information at: http://www.arasche.com


Photo by Egor Vikhrev on Unsplash

Economics for Life

Time for a New Economics

By Sandra Waddock

Steen Valentin recently pointed out in a BOS blog that we – and particularly economists – need to look beyond Milton Friedman’s famous New York Times argument that ‘The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits’. Friedman’s argument underpins today’s dominant ideology and the economics that shapes it – neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism has a core and often repeated set of tenets or memes – the core building blocks of narratives and of culture (ideas, phrases, words, images, symbols). These well-rehearsed memes include that markets and trade are ‘free’, economic actors are self-interested profit maximizers, free markets will resolve societal problems, responsibility is individual, less government is invariably good, and continual economic growth through globalism is feasible and desirable.

Fundamentally, Friedman stated that the sole purpose of the firm is to maximize profits or shareholder wealth, despite that shareholders are, as Charles Handy long ago pointed out, hardly actual owners of the firm in any real sense.

This narrative completely overlooks both societal and ecological impacts of economic activity because nature is completely ignored, even assumed away.

As former UK Prime Minister once put it, ‘There is no such thing as society’. More to the point, Thatcher also stated, ‘There is no alternative’ to neoliberalism, a phrase that got shortened to TINA – still widely believed today.

There Really Are Alternatives!

Is there really no alternative? Particularly in the era of the Covid-19 pandemic, climate emergency, massive species extinction, and growth global inequality? In a recent paper ‘Reframing and Transforming Economics around Life’ I argued for just such an alternative, and also that economics that supports all of life needs to be the mainstream economic orthodoxy. It cannot be considered ‘heterodox’ or come with a modifier that sets it apart from the mainstream.

That means finding new memes as powerful and compelling as the neoliberal ones they need to replace.

Such thinking, while fundamentally based in economics, also needs to encompass core societal and ecological considerations to reframe how business is done and how economic activity in general is undertaken.

The paper synthesizes six new memes that frame an economics in support of all of life. It draws from a wide swath of economics and other literature (including now ‘heterodox economics’) and supports new approaches like Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics – with a few core memes. The six memes are briefly described below.

Six Core Memes for Economic Orthodoxy in Support of All of Life
  • The first new meme is stewardship of the whole, which means that all economic actors have a shared responsibility for the whole system (or nested set of subsystems) that their activities impact. This meme explicitly recognizes both the broader social – societal – system in which economic activity is embedded – and the natural environment in which societies are intimately, inextricably, and interdependently nested. The good of whole systems needs to be kept constantly in mind, whether that is the good of a whole company, a community, a nation, or the planet itself.
  • Another is Co-creating Collective Value. Here I draw from the pioneering work of Donaldson and Walsh, who stated the purpose of business as creating collective value absent dignity violations. The idea of co-creation invites collective participation in the production of value for the whole system – not just for one stakeholder but for the many that are affected by businesses and other economic actors. Multiple values and multiple stakeholders will inevitably mean new metrics by which to assess economic productivity and activity. Co-creating collective value brings back the original meaning of wealth, which has been corrupted to meaning only financial wealth, but which originally meant health, wellbeing, and prosperity.
  • A third relates to cosmopolitan-localist governance. The idea here is that though we live in a globalized world (and some things will remain globalized), many decisions – economic and other – need to be placed at the most local level feasible. That ensures access, voice, and participation by many more actors, and encourages sharing of ideas, knowledge, and other resources in contextually appropriate ways.
  • A fourth is that of regeneration, reciprocity, and circularity, which acknowledges the interconnectedness and interdependence of humans and nature, and that todays so-called take-make-waste production processes are no longer either truly efficient from a whole systems perspective. Regeneration means that production processes need to allow time for the Earth to regenerate resources that will be needed long into the future. Reciprocity means that trade and exchanges need to be mutually beneficial among other humans and with respect to nature. Circularity embodies the idea that ‘waste equals food’ as frequently expressed by the concept of circular economy.  
  • The precept of relationship and connectedness places human economic and social activity into the full complexity and ‘wickedness’ of its connected and relational socio-ecological context. It recognizes that people are social creatures by nature, who only exist in the context of community. It acknowledges, as the African saying Ubuntu goes, ‘I am because we are’.
  • Finally, equitable markets and trade recognizes that markets exist and are important to meeting real (not manufactured) human needs, and that they need to be fair to all participants throughout the supply chain. That means that products and services need to be fully-costed and priced accordingly – and that all so called ‘externalities’ or negative by-products of production need to be incorporated into prices.

Though far more detail is provided in the actual paper, this brief outline synthesizes some of the core aspects of a framing for economics that has the potential to support all of life, rather than as is the case with neoliberalism, ignoring life and our Earth itself as a living system. It is past time for such a shift in thinking – and core memes – to take place. These ideas are offered as a tentative framework for beginning to reshape economic thinking in the direction of what works for all of life – wealth in its original meaning!


Further Reading

Sandra Waddock, Reframing and Transforming Economics around Life, Sustainability, 2020, 12, 7553; doi: 10.2290/su1218755


About the Author

Sandra Waddock is the Galligan Chair of Strategy, Carroll School Scholar of Corporate Responsibility, and Professor of Management at the Carroll School of Management, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA USA. Her research interests include large system change; management education; cross sector collaboration; corporate responsibility; and social and organizational change.


Photo by Echo Grid on Unsplash

Making the case for and against and beyond Friedman in 2020

On the anniversary of Friedman’s “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits”

By Steen Vallentin

September 13th marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of Milton Friedman’s famous New York Time Magazine essay entitled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits”. This has occasioned a slew of testimonials and opinion pieces on Friedman’s legacy in general and the legacy of this free market manifesto in particular. 

Not surprisingly, the tone of testimonials have differed. From those lamenting Friedman’s enormous influence on the discipline of economics, economic policy, modern business and finance over the last three to four decades in particular, to those celebrating these very same developments. One commentator, in The New York Times, speaks of how a generation of C.E.O.s have been brainwashed to believe that the only businesses of business is business. That the sole responsibility of business is to make money. 

Dwindling relevance

Anti-Friedman sentiment, and this is nothing new, takes aim at the single-mindedness and moral blind spots of free market capitalism, market fundamentalism, the shareholder paradigm, finance capitalism, you name it.

Indeed, ‘Friedman was wrong’ was for many years a recurrent theme in arguments made in support of CSR and stakeholder capitalism. But Friedman is not as relevant as he used to be.

In recent years, as far as specialized discussions of CSR go, the Friedman doctrine has increasingly been displaced by ‘the Porter doctrine’, that is, the strategic view of business responsibilities promoted by renowned, now retired, Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter along with Mark Kramer.

Porter & Kramer’s more accommodating brand of economic instrumentalism – encapsulated in the influential notion of Creating Shared Value (CSV) – has turned out to be much better attuned to present circumstances than the message of Friedman’s antagonistic and polarizing opinion piece.

The critique of free market capitalism has arguably gained urgency and currency with the climate crisis and calls for sustainable development and green transition. This is not to say that the Friedman doctrine has been abandoned by all those who used to support it.

However, given the opportunity to reflect, supporters of Friedman tend not to dwell much on the minutiae of the 1970 essay.

The devil is in the detail, and few seem to be willing to argue that what Friedman wrote 50 years ago is a proper representation of how the problem of corporate social responsibility is constituted in the year 2020.

The strength of Friedman’s wonkish essay was always its crude simplicity. For many years it seemed to encapsulate everything that needed to be said about CSR – according to mainstream economists and ideologues of a similar persuasion and the discipline of neoclassical economics. In other words, very little needed to be said. 3000 words were enough.  

However, with the rise of ESG and sustainable finance it seems to be dawning even on the disciplines of economics and finance that more indeed needs to be said – and that the crudeness of Friedman falls terribly short in capturing the challenges, risks and opportunities ahead.

Friedman’s article has served as a moral cornerstone for the shareholder value paradigm. Its moral shortcomings are increasingly showing, though.

The Friedman doctrine nonetheless

What supporters of the Friedman doctrine nevertheless argue, is that he was (and is) right about fundamentals: that the shareholder value paradigm is a superior economic principle and form of governance. The argumentative support structure for this paradigm does, however, need adjustment in order to achieve better alignment with changing historical conditions, opinion climates, societal norms and expectations.

In other words, supporters of shareholder capitalism need to fight for their cause. They need to renew their engagement in the ongoing ‘battle of ideas’ over business and society.

Their main opponent in this battle is well-known, but has been gaining new and more widespread support as of late. The opponent is stakeholder capitalism, the virtues of which have found high-level affirmation recently in the Davos Manifesto of 2020 and in the Business Roundtable statement on the purpose of business from 2019. 

Importantly, the American brands of stakeholder and shareholder capitalism have a common denominator. Both Friedman and R. Edward Freeman (the great popularizer of stakeholder thinking) have described themselves as libertarians. Stakeholder capitalism, US-style, begins and ends with voluntary initiatives and stakeholder engagement by business. Government and regulation are not supposed to have central roles to play in such endeavors. They are supposed to work better, more smoothly and efficiently without government interference. 

Thus, the first line of battle – for Friedman supporters – has to do with regulatory failure. Sure, there are market failures that we need to take account of when assessing the responsibilities of business. But regulatory failure should be no less of a concern. 

The second line of battle has to do with principles and practices of governance. According to its supporters:

Stakeholder capitalism is supposed to be more open, democratic, responsive and responsible than its counterpart. But what does stakeholder governance mean in practice, at the corporate level, unchecked by government regulation and without agreed upon rules of engagement? It is far from clear. 

Will it ultimately be good for business and society if companies are governed in accordance with the diffuse model and principles of ‘stakeholderism’? It is equally well imaginable that stakeholder capitalism can turn out to create less value for the stakeholders whose interests it is supposed to reflect and serve, and that stakeholders will ultimately be worse off if this is the direction the development of the economy takes. And it may be that shareholder capitalism, with its more clearly defined purpose and governance principles, is ultimately better equipped to keep business leaders on their toes and create value not only for shareholders but for stakeholders at large. So the argument goes in conservative circles.

Ideology and the ongoing ‘battle of ideas’ over business and society

While many of these arguments seem to fly in the face of public opinion of the more progressive kind, we must acknowledge how, in a polarized opinion climate, public opinion is divided on many political topics. Andrew Hoffman (2012) speaks of how the climate change debate in the US has become enmeshed in the so-called ‘culture wars’. Acceptance of the scientific consensus regarding climate change is now seen as an alignment with liberal views consistent with other cultural issues that divide the country (i.e., abortion, gun control, health care, and evolution). This tendency has only worsened under the Trump presidency.

On top of this we can observe how sustainable development and green transition are evolving as government-driven agendas, involving a high level of social and economic planning – not to mention the COVID-19 crisis and how the pandemic, for better or worse, has provided a large-scale affirmation of the primacy of government intervention in dealing with grand societal issues.

Under these conditions it has once again become relevant to speak not only of broader socialist tendencies in politics and society, but also of how CSR/corporate sustainability can be a Trojan horse or slippery slope leading from market capitalism into a new socialist order. In other words, the ideological underpinnings of the CSR debate are once again becoming more apparent.

This calls for more in-depth studies of the ideological commitments sustaining the theory and practice of CSR. It does not necessarily call for rejuvenation and regurgitation of Friedman’s short essay, though. Friedman is not as relevant as he used to be in discussions of CSR. The anniversary has done nothing to change this.

We need to look beyond Friedman and see him (only) as one part of the larger ideological tapestry. We need contextualized, updated engagements, not more flogging of a somewhat dead horse.


References

Hoffman, A.J. (2012). Climate science as Culture War. Ross School of Business Working Paper No. 1361, June 2012 / Stanford Social Innovation Review, 10 (4).


About the Author

Steen Vallentin is Director of the CBS Sustainability Centre and Associate Professor in the Department of Management, Society and Communication at Copenhagen Business School. His research is centred on CSR (corporate social responsibility) and sustainable development in a broad sense.

Is Tourism an Essential Industry?

Can it really be true that we don’t need to travel?

By Elizabeth Cooper

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically highlighted those workers and industries which we rely on in a time of crisis such as this – and those which we don’t. In a world in which doctors and nurses work extended hours to ensure our vulnerable citizens get the best possible care, workers in the food service industry expose themselves daily to give us access to food, and epidemiologists compete to break new medical ground with a reliable vaccine, the tourism industry has, understandably, taken a back seat. But as we desperately envision a post-pandemic utopia in which we will have supposedly learned from the lessons of the pandemic – can it really be true that we don’t need to travel? 

How do we define an essential industry?

So what actually is an “essential” industry? According to the Cambridge English dictionary, an essential industry is “an industry that is considered necessary for a nation’s economy”. Knoema.com has a neat map showing the percentage of national GDP made up by tourism for (almost) all countries of the world, and the figures vary greatly, as might be expected. On a global scale, tourism in 2019 was reported to account for 10.3% of global GDP, and 1 in 10 jobs around the world. Although there are no official numbers on exactly what percentage of GDP qualifies an industry as essential, 10% is surely significant. 

Source: lectrr.be

In a rather provocative blog post in July this year, tourism academic Jim Butcher argued against the ‘degrowth’ of the tourism industry – a movement that many propagators of the ‘new normal’ rhetoric have been calling for. He emphasised the impact of tourism standstill specifically on low-income citizens, who are more likely to work in the industry. Butcher writes:

The lesson of COVID-19 is surely that “undertourism” is a far, far bigger problem [than overtourism]. From Margate to Marrakech, Miami to Massawa, the poor are hit hardest. The UN has predicted that COVID-19, or the response to it, could lead to hundreds of millions of people becoming impoverished.

As wealthy, Western tourists, we travel in our leisure time, with our ample disposable income and our agreeably emblazoned passports. To be a tourist is certainly a privilege that is not available to everyone. From this perspective, tourism is a luxury and is non-essential. But from the perspective of those who rely on tourism’s low-paying service jobs to feed their families, it is absolutely essential.

Is tourism just an industry?

Part of the reason for this misalignment in perspectives is the framing of tourism as an industry and only that. If tourism is nothing more than an industry, then a tourist is a simple consumer, who consumes a destination. The negative connotations of this (not to mention the mental image!) are almost too much to bear.

All industries are essentially about people, but tourism perhaps more so than most, since many of its products themselves are encounters between people of different cultures.

Tourism, therefore, is much more than an industry – it is a social process with a plethora of complex implications. And contrary to the beliefs of many, a lot of these implications are positive. A good example is the wildlife tourism sector, where there are numerous cases in which the conservation of a destination relies heavily on philanthropic donations by tourists (Powell & Ham, 2008Ardoin et al., 2016).

On a more general level, tourism fosters understanding and awareness, and a world (permanently) without travel is arguably an even scarier prospect than the instability we are living in today. Few articulate this argument more powerfully than Taleb Rifai, former Secretary-General of the UNWTO.

He argues that the reason we care so much today about the negative impacts of tourism is because we are more aware than ever before – and that we should be grateful for this heightened consciousness. It is largely international travel itself that has enabled this increased awareness – nowadays, it is easier than ever before to have real connections with other cultures. And real connections create genuine concern. Rifai argues that this should be seen as progress, and that ceasing to travel would be counterproductive. Here, he’s talking in the wake of recent terror attacks in 2016, but the sentiment is valid today:

It’s very important for us never, ever to allow these forces of darkness to win the battle. That’s exactly what they want us to do. They want us to stop traveling. They want us to build walls, they want us to close borders, want to isolate us from each other and they want us to hate each other. That’s why they’re targeting tourism.

The notion of degrowth supported by ‘new-normalists’ can be realised in ways which still create value for economies that rely on tourism. Tourists can travel less frequently and less far and still provide increased value for destinations. Fewer tourists who create more value for destinations is the kind of regrowth we should aim for.

The argument for tourism being not just an essential industry, but also essential to society, is perhaps best expressed by a quote that is attributed to Mahatma Gandhi (and which also happens to be a strong candidate for my next tattoo): 

“Travel is the language of peace.”


References

Ardoin, N.M., Wheaton, M., Hunt, C.A., Schuh, J.S. and Durham, W.H., 2016. Post-trip philanthropic intentions of nature-based tourists in Galapagos. Journal of Ecotourism, 15(1), pp.21-35.

Powell, R.B. and Ham, S.H., 2008. Can ecotourism interpretation really lead to pro-conservation knowledge, attitudes and behaviour? Evidence from the Galapagos Islands. Journal of sustainable tourism, 16(4), pp.467-489.


About the Author

Elizabeth Cooper is a PhD Fellow at Copenhagen Business School, within the Department of Management, Society and Communication. Her research aims to link the fields of behavioural science and tourism, by experimenting with strategies to ‘nudge’ cruise tourists into behaving in more sustainable ways, specifically in the ports of Greenland.


Photo by KaLisa Veer on Unsplash

Private Standard-setting Organizations and the Theory of Change

Theory of Change – Evaluating Supply Chain Outcomes

By Kamilla Hvid Andersen, Eileen Ryll, Dr. Caleb Gallemore and Dr. Kristjan Jespersen

Due to globalization, supply chains are becoming increasingly complex, challenging national governments’ regulatory capacity, or, perhaps, political will. Amid these “governance gaps” some private-sector organizations have begun setting voluntary standards promoting sustainable production practices. As they are not backed with legal force, private standards must demonstrate both positive impacts, credibility and inclusive decision-making to be perceived as legitimate in the eyes of external observers and member firms. Due to the complex and interrelated nature of sustainability issues, it can, however, be difficult to relate outcomes back to activities of the standard setting system.

To monitor their programs and evaluate their impact, many standard-setting organizations have adopted a Theory of Change (ToC).

Based on Carol Weiss’s theory-based evaluation approach, a ToC is a cause-and-effect illustration that makes explicit often implicit beliefs and assumptions about how different actions should generate impacts.

Evaluating impacts then requires collecting data that show how the proposed causal sequence plays out and, if discontinued, where it broke down. On this account, the ToC is necessary because practitioners often rely on tacit knowledge or even guesswork, rarely articulating the conceptual foundations of their actions explicitly.

ISEAL – The Standard for Standards

The ISEAL Alliance has been a key ToC promoter for many major sustainability standards. The organization is in essence a benchmarker for certification systems, working to disseminate better practices across sustainability standards. While the organization has a relatively small membership, its members include prominent standards like the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). Its Impact Code strongly encourages, though does not require, a ToC as the foundation for robust Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E).

While couched in an M&E framework, ISEALs’ framing of a ToC as a way to articulate building blocks for long-term goals also links it to strategic planning.  For the organization, a ToC is both product and process. As a product it maps out what to measure to assess a standard’s impact. As a process, it can help define a shared vision of how the standard should be making change, helping get member and observer buy-in on its strategic trajectory.

Case in Point – RSPO

The RSPO is a good example of how ToC procedures can influence organizational operations. Following ISEAL recommendations, the RSPO constructed an elaborate ToC in 2017. While its stated primary goal of making sustainable palm oil the global norm has remained since the standard’s early days, the ToC outlines the strategies deemed necessary to achieve this vision. By explicating the assumptions behind its actions, the RSPO’s ToC is simultaneously an M&E tool and a strategy. Though, like ISEAL, the RSPO introduced the ToC as an impact evaluation tool, the process generated critical discussions on the organization’s shared vision and explicated previously implicit beliefs regarding what making sustainable palm oil the norm actually means and how it could be achieved.

Because ToCs have both M&E and strategic planning components, responsibility for their development and implementation should not reside solely in M&E departments. Rather, effective ToC processes should include the whole organization and external stakeholders, requiring strategic decision-making support. Continuous feedback from all actors implementing elements of the ToC into their daily work can be valuable to highlight shortcomings of the ToC in place and guide future strategy reviews.

The Mechanics of TOC

A ToC process includes two broad phases. In the first, relevant actors develop or refine a shared vision and outline causal sequences necessary to achieve it. In the second, actors must incorporate the ToC into day-to-day routines.

The ToC as it emerges from the first phase is an intermediate outcome, part of a continuous learning loop that can be influenced by other processes surrounding the organization. It also may trigger other processes, as was the case within the RSPO when the ToC heavily informed another strategy document outlining member responsibilities across the value chain. The division between these phases, of course, is blurry, and it is always possible to re-evaluate and re-model the intermediate ToC, making the process iterative. All this work goes far beyond simple M&E, a lesson the RSPO learned the hard way, at first significantly underestimating the effort necessary to develop its ToC, regarding is simply as mapping out what was already there.

The Role of Interactive Adaptivity in Supply Chains Evaluation

Based on the example of their use by ISEAL and the RSPO, ToCs can serve several purposes:

  • First, they can support strategic planning while structuring strategic reconsiderations over time. Their iterativity might make it particularly important for organizations to revisit their ToCs before strategic re-alignments or in times of upheaval.
  • Second, in a complex field that spans multiple stakeholder groups, which as is case with the RSPO, most likely have divergent underlying assumptions, the ToC process can help illuminate blind spots. To be effective, the ToC needs to be inclusive of as many of the actors affected by the organization’s activities as possible.
  • Third and more prosaically, a ToC, while more than impact evaluation, can support evaluative work, serving as the backbone for M&E activities.

About the Authors

Caleb Gallemore is an Assistant Professor in the International Affairs Program at Lafayette College. He holds a Ph.D. in Geography and within his teaching, he focuses on southeast Asia, global land use, sustainability, research methods and geographic information science.

Eileen Ryll graduated from CBS with a degree in MSc. Business, Language and Culture with a focus on Diversity and Change Management. She has previously studied Business and Cultural Studies in Germany and Sweden. Her main interests are organizational strategy and intercultural encounters. 

Kamilla Hvid Andersen studied her bachelor’s and master’s degree at Copenhagen Business School. In June 2020, she graduated from the MSc. in Business, Language and Culture with a specialization in Diversity and Change Management. Her personal interests include sustainability, intercultural communication, and organizational change. 

Kristjan Jespersen is an Assistant Professor at the Copenhagen Business School. He studies the growing development and management of Ecosystem Services in developing countries. Within the field, Kristjan focuses his attention on the institutional legitimacy of such initiatives and the overall compensation tools used to ensure compliance.


Photo by Jungwoo Hong on Unsplash

Normative foundations for stakeholder involvement in environmental and societal impact assessments

A complex issue of global relevance

By Karin Buhmann

This article is based on previously written piece for the Centre for Business and Development Studies. It focuses on the normative foundations, such as guidelines and legislation as well as some common features or practices for good stakeholder involvement in environmental and societal impact assessments. As a part of the blog-post series on Consultations, Public Participation and Meaningful Stakeholder Engagement, it considers various aspects of stakeholder involvement as an element in the planning and decision-making relating to renewable energy, mining, infrastructure etc.

These blog-posts disseminate preliminary results from project examining best practice in stakeholder engagement as part of impact assessment. The project partly builds on investigations and interviews in Greenland in August 2018 and Sápmi in June 2018. [Ref: NOS-HS project, ref. 2017-00061/NOS-HS, on Best practice for Impact Assessment of infrastructure projects in the Nordic Arctic: Popular participation and local needs, concerns and benefits, Principal Investigator: Karin Buhmann)].

Public requirements on consultations and corporate management of risk to society

Consultation of the public in the context of assessments of societal or environmental impacts is not only common but mandated by law in several countries. In many places mandatory environmental impact assessment goes back to the 1970s. Mandatory impact assessments of other issues, such as societal sustainability or human rights, is a more recent phenomenon that to an extent builds on experiences gained around environmental impact assessment.

Even when impact assessment is not mandatory, it may be wise for a company to reach out to the local community and other potentially or actually affected stakeholders in order to map societal risks. This may contribute to counteracting a loss of the corporate ‘social licence to operate’.

Recommendations on ’meaningful stakeholder engagement’ in societal impact assessments

It is a general expectation that companies conduct so-called ‘meaningful stakeholder engagement’ in order to identify potential or actual adverse impacts on, for example, the environment, labour conditions and human rights. This is a result of the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises – a detailed set of recommendations from OECD member states as well as several countries in Africa and Latin-America.

The recommendations target companies operating in or out of the relevant countries. Likewise, all companies (regardless of form and countries of registration or operation) engage meaningfully with affected stakeholders whose human rights are or may be harmed by a business activity, in order to understand and map the impact from the perspective of these affected.

The United Nations (UN) Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights, which were a source for the 2011 update of the OECD Guidelines, refer to meaningful stakeholder engagement in this context. The objective is that the impact assessment will be conducted in a manner that takes account of the affected stakeholders’ perception of risks or actual harm caused, that is, adopting a bottom-up perspective.

The company is expected to prevent risks and actual harm that it causes or contributes to. It can only do so if it understands the problems from the perspective of those who experience or fear the problems.

OECD has developed a detailed Guidance on Meaningful Stakeholder Engagement for the Extractive Industries. The guidance includes an annex particularly on engagement of indigenous people. A translation into the Sami language was introduced at a seminar taking place back-to-back with the assembly of the Sami Parliament in Northern Norway in June 2019.

Even so, at a meeting on mining and sustainability, which took place in Northern Sweden later in June 2019, we observed very limited awareness of the guidance and relevant global guidelines among local NGOs and other civil society organisations. In fact, awareness is higher with some companies. Lack of knowledge of the normative standards that apply to companies make it difficult for civil society to require that companies observe the norms.

The OECD Guidelines and the UN Guiding Principles are not binding but mark a tendency towards recognition of individual access to influence through making one’s views and concerns known, even if this may not take place through a formalized process.

Overall, the past 40 years have witnessed a development in international environmental and human rights law towards direct access for the individual to partake in decision-making on business activities affecting one’s life [Pring and Noé, 2002]. Rights of indigenous and tribal peoples to be involved in decision-making on mining and other forms of natural resource extraction are often highlighted in this context [Triggs, 2002]. Consultations can form one element among others in ensuring such participation.

Mandatory requirements

The Nordic countries, which include Arctic areas, have long mandated planning of specific types of activities to include assessments of the environment so that the information can form part of the authorities informed decision-making. In some Nordic countries environmental impact assessments include broader societal aspects, such as impacts on health, employment, traditions and business operations [Nenasheva et al. 2015].

Specific requirements of separate assessments of societal impacts are less common in a Nordic context. However, Greenland’s self-government has introduced explicit requirements in the Act on Raw Materials mandating social sustainability assessments of activities that are may have significant societal impacts. Greenland has also introduced rules enabling authorities to make permits conditional on the company contribution to society, for example through vocational capacity building, employment of local labor, or locally based processing of explored raw materials.

Our project has shown that there are diverse opinions of such ’Impact Benefit Agreements’ (IBAs) that are tailored to each specific project and local context. While IBAs offers opportunities to agree on specific local measures, limited transparency on the contents reduce opportunities to develop solutions across projects.

Authorities can introduce specific requirements on the consultation process through general or special legislation. While such demands vary between countries, involvement of local communities and other affected stakeholders is a general element [Vanclay and Esteves, 2012].

Common demands on a good consultation process

As regulations and levels of detail vary between countries and types of impact assessments, specific demands on the process will not be described here. However, general indications are given by the so-called Aarhus Convention [UN 1998], which fleshes out the implications of the political decisions from the 1992 Rio Summit concerning public participation in decision-making concerning projects with environmental impacts.

The convention also covers human health and safety, locations of cultural significance etc., provided the impacts have a connection to the environment.

The Aarhus Convention establishes that:

  • the public must be informed about an activity in the early stages of a decision-making process;
  • the information must, among other things, include the character of the activity; what permit is applied for; the responsible authorities, timeline, place and procedure for public consultations on the activity; and available information on the activity’s impacts on environment, health etc.;
  • the information must be free and provided as soon as it is available;
  • reasonable time should be set aside between different phases of the process, and therefore both to inform citizens and for citizens to prepare and actively participate in the decision-making process;
  • the applicant for a permit is encouraged to actively engage in dialogue and to contribute information on the project;
  • authorities are responsible for making relevant information accessible, for example on the location for the activity, impacts on the environment in a the above sense (inclusive of health and safety), what measures will be taken to prevent adverse impacts, and alternatives to the proposed plan;
  • a summary of the information must be provided in a non-technical form that can be understood without technical prerequisites;
  • the consultation process must provide citizens with opportunities to express comments, information, knowledge and views that they find relevant. Citizens or NGOs who perceived their rights to be infringed upon are to have access to remedy provided by a court of law or another independent institution.

The Aarhus Convention has been signed by most European countries, including the Nordic states, and a few Central-Asian states.

Obviously, participation in a consultation process should not require participants to be familiar with the law, nor should the quality in principle depend on participant’s awareness of the informing normative foundations. It is possible, especially in countries with well-functioning public institutions, to ask the relevant authority to explain the rules and requirements and their implications. Elsewhere, civil society organisations are often able to provide advice and guidance.

Consultations aim to create dialogue, not conflict

Even if participation in a consultation is not a claim to having one’s view win out, a consultation is ideally a dialogue between citizens and the authorities or companies that conduct the consultation.

Consultations build on an aim of exchanging knowledge, views, concerns and needs and thereby to provide the best possible informed foundation for decisions and for projects to be adapted and regulated in response to the concerns and needs that have been voiced or identified through the consultation.

Both process and outcome depend on the involved understanding and respecting that the process builds on a conversation which is not about identifying a winner and a loser, but rather a dialogue towards an adapted result which may be a compromise between the original project idea and the thoughts, concerns and views expressed during the consultation process.


References

Esteves AM, Franks D, Vanclay F (2012) Social Impact Assessment: the state of the art, Impact Assessment And Project Appraisal 30(1) 43-42.

Nenasheva M, Bickford SH, Lesser P, Koivurola T & Kankaanpää P (2015). Legal tools of public participation in the Environmental Impact Assessment process and their application in the countries of the Barents Euro-Arctic Region, Barents Studies: Peoples, Economies and Politics 1(3) 13-35.

Pring, George (Rock) and Susan Y. Noé (2002). The Emerging International Law of Public Participation Affecting Global Mining, Energy, and Resources Development, in Zillman, Donald M., Alastair Lucas and George (Rock) Pring (eds) Human Rights in Natural Resource Development: Public participation in the Sustainable Development of Mining and Energy Resources, Oxford Scholarship Online, DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199253784.003.0002.

Triggs, Gillian (2002). The Rights of Indigenous Peoples to Participate in Resource Development: An International Legal Perspective, in Zillman, Donald M., Alastair Lucas and George (Rock) Pring (eds) Human Rights in Natural Resource Development: Public participation in the Sustainable Development of Mining and Energy Resources, Oxford Scholarship Online, DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199253784.003.0004.

UN (1998). Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-Making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters (Aarhus Convention).


About the Author

Karin Buhmann is Professor at Copenhagen Business School, where she is charged with the emergent field of Business and Human Rights. Her research interests include what makes stakeholder engagement meaningful from the perspective of so-called affected stakeholders, such as communities, and the implications for companies and public organisations carrying out impact assessments.


Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

Aspirational talk for a challenging walk

Professor Mette Morsing takes over the UN PRME  

By Jeremy Moon

The CBS Sustainability Centre and the Department of Management, Society & Communication (MSC) recently held a Panel Discussion to farewell Mette Morsing as she becomes the new Head of PRME (Principles for Responsible Management) based at the UN Global Compact office in New York.

This is clearly a challenge. Mette will be a rare academic in a world of international officials. She will lead a small team that supports the PRME initiative. PRME is intended to transform business and management education through research and leadership. It consists of 800+ business and management schools that have signed up to implement six principles concerning responsible and sustainable business education.  

Of course, the 800+ schools reflect very different educational and business cultures, and may have very different understandings of responsible and sustainable business. Doubtless the schools have other concerns so they may prioritize these differently… not least in these troubled times.

So in order to help – as well as challenge – Mette, we designed the Panel around the question: “What Should Business Schools Know and Do about Sustainability?”  The Panel duly raised challenges for Mette, reflecting their various vantage points around business and management education. The Panel members were:

  • Lise Kingo, Independent Board Member and former CEO & Executive Director, United Nations Global Compact (by video)
  • Florence Villeséche, Co-Director of the Diversity and Difference Platform and Associate Professor at Dept. of Management, Politics and Philosophy
  • Gregor Halff, CBS Dean of Education
  • Caroline Aggestam Pontoppidan, Academic Director of CBS PRME & Associate Professor at Dept. of Accounting
  • Claus Meyer, food entrepreneur and Adjunct Professor at the Department of Management, Society & Communication.

Mette Morsing responded to the perspectives raised by the Panelists and other participants were drawn into the conversation. This covered a range of issues and approaches to the sustainability challenges:

From the role of the ethic of care for people in business, to the role of data in sustainability; from how to integrate and govern environmental, social and governance responsibilities to forms of business school engagement for sustainability; and of course, strategies for green transformations.

I was particularly struck by the way that Claus Meyer contextualized his own work in the state of the food business which he described as being characterized by greed, obesity and other recipes for ill-health, over-supply, and starvation among other things. So, Claus takes a big picture and identifies and develops his responsibilities in his bakeries, restaurants and philanthropic work in this light.

How should Deans of Business Schools regard ‘their business’?

On the one hand, they could refer to the market for business management education, demand and supply; vital assets; competitors and collaborators; the impact of and influence upon regulators. But what I get from Claus is the big picture thinking.

So should the Deans bring into their strategic thinking the circumstances from which their students come – and don’t come, and the state of the businesses that their graduates enter (the distributions, resource uses, the dominant values)?

Isn’t this what they need to know for understanding and developing their impact on sustainability?  Is this the logic of a stakeholder approach to sustainability?

OK, Jeremy this is just talk… but as Mette reminded us in one of her most significant papers, aspirational CSR talk may be an important resource for social change … and thus part of the walk [1]. So, my parting advice to Mette is to try and get Business School Deans to better understand and connect with their wider context in order to act for sustainability.


References

[1] L.T. Christensen, M. Morsing & O. Thyssen (2013). CSR as aspirational talk. Organization, 20(3), 372-393.


About the author

Jeremy Moon is Professor at Copenhagen Business School, Chair of Sustainability Governance Group and Director of CBS Sustainability. Jeremy has written widely about the rise, context, dynamics and impact of CSR.  He is particularly interested in corporations’ political roles and in the regulation of CSR and corporate sustainability.

Different pathways to sustainability standard adoption

How local norms may be able to help drive the spread of voluntary programs – the case of the RSPO in Japan.

By Hattaya Rungruengsaowapak, Caleb Gallemore & Kristjan Jespersen

There has been an explosion in voluntary programs targeting value chains’ negative social and environmental impacts (Green, 2013). Working across boundaries, however, is challenging, and requires bridging different business cultures and moral expectations. Tensions and consequential misunderstandings between members from different countries are common.

The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm oil (RSPO) is a good example. It has seen a five-fold jump in Japanese membership in just five years, going from under 40 members in 2016 to more than 200 in 2020. This has happened in the absence of meaningful governmental support or even consumer demand, making it a particularly interesting case.

Source: The RSPO (as of August 9th, 2020)

The RSPO was founded in 2004, led by WWF, Unilever, and some upstream players in the palm oil value chain. Its objective is to incentivize sustainable palm oil production using voluntary certification. Although oil palm is one of the most efficient oil-producing crops, its growing consumption has led smallholders and large agribusiness to convert tropical forests to plantations, causing habitat and biodiversity loss, greenhouse gas emissions, and wildfires.
While the RSPO welcomed its first Japanese members the year of its founding, it only recently saw memberships skyrocket, despite limited concern among Japanese consumers. These developments took place in three main phases.

Phase 1 – Testing the waters (2004 – 2011)

For nearly the first decade of the RSPO’s existence, Japanese membership growth was sluggish. Japanese companies that joined the RSPO early on mostly relied on international markets for a significant part of their business.

These companies included major trading houses like Mitsui & Co., Ltd, and consumer goods manufacturers like Kao. Multinational companies headquartered in the West, such as Unilever and Walmart, also implemented sustainable palm oil commitments in Japan, but these actions had little impact on their Japanese suppliers.

Some smaller Japanese companies also joined the RSPO in this phase, in response to some niche consumer demand. These niche actors, however, did not scale up demand across the country.  

Phase 2 – Setting the groundwork (2012 – 2016)

Between 2012 and 2016, a larger number of Japanese firms joined annually than in the previous period, though never more than ten in any given year. In 2012, when Tokyo became a host city candidate for the ultimately ill-fated 2020 summer Olympics, the RSPO began directing more attention towards the Japanese market.

A central goal was to convince the local Olympic Committee to include the RSPO in their official sourcing code. According to an informant, the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF) began to hold corporate sustainable palm oil workshops the same year. Other events helped boost RSPO recognition during this period. For example, in 2015, the Japanese government officially adopted and started to promote Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In the same year, the Consumer Goods Forum, a global network of manufacturers and retailers, issued its Sustainable Sourcing Guideline. T

The period closed with the largest sustainable palm oil event in Japan to date – the RSPO Japan Day 2016 – where RSPO advocates draw on these events and urged more than 350 attendants from major companies in Japan to become members.

Phase 3 – Takeoff (2017 – 2020)

By 2017, many companies using palm oil in their products were aware of the issues associated with oil palm production. Two powerful actors, however, were central in pushing firms from awareness to action. The first was the Tokyo Organising Committee for the Olympics Games (TOCOG), which officially included certified sustainable palm oil in the Games’ sourcing code. The other was AEON, the biggest retailer in Japan and a member of the Consumer Goods Forum, who vowed to procure 100% certified sustainable palm oil for more than 3,500 of its house-brand items by 2020.

These moves forced several suppliers to seek certified sustainable palm oil sources. Thankfully, RSPO advocates ongoing work had led to the creation of various programs to support Japanese firms’ RSPO membership.

The RSPO opened a Japan office in 2019, and at around the same time, the WWF started Japan Sustainable Palm Oil Network (JaSPON). With suppliers already prepared, some downstream firms found it more attractive to join the RSPO at this time. Competitors of existing RSPO members, in turn, started making sustainability commitments for fear of public criticism. 

Throughout the RSPO’s development in Japan, end-product consumers’ pressure has had a limited impact on firms’ decisions to join. The pressure to conform to sustainability standards created by the advocates targeting lead firms with vast supply networks, however, appears to have accelerated RSPO’s market growth. One possible explanation for this phenomenon is the Japanese norm of long-term relationships between firms with buyers-suppliers ties, which, in some cases, include cross-shareholdings between them. Such a group of firms is alternatively known as keiretsu.

Although keiretsu is not well defined, it is generally referred to as personal, capital, and business relationships in relation to business transactions (Yaginuma, 2014). Collective commitments commonly observed in firms within a keiretsu may have made lead firms more likely to support their suppliers’ efforts to get certified, rather than switching to other suppliers.

Even though RSPO memberships in Japan have increased rapidly, it is unclear whether this will translate into substantial increases in certified sustainable palm oil uptake. Many manufacturers’ suppliers are relatively small. They are often sensitive to any additional costs, and limited bargaining power with which to procure certified oil.

Moreover, since end consumer awareness continues to be low, businesses receive no additional remuneration for their sustainability investments, which may force them to cut costs elsewhere.    

These problems aside, Japan exemplifies an intriguing model of sustainable business practice adoption resulting from the local business norms. Thanks to the strong ties between Japanese firms, the RSPO was able to establish a foothold in the industry despite the lack of demand for sustainable palm oil from the civil society – a sharp contrast to patterns in the West. 


References

Green, J. F. (2013). Rethinking private authority: Agents and entrepreneurs in global environmental governance. Princeton University Press.

RSPO. (n.d.). Members. Retrieved 2020-08-09

Yaginuma, H. (2014). The Keiretsu Issue: A Theoretical Approach. Japanese Economic Studies.


About the authors

Kristjan Jespersen is an Assistant Professor at the Copenhagen Business School. He studies the growing development and management of Ecosystem Services in developing countries. Within the field, Kristjan focuses his attention on the institutional legitimacy of such initiatives and the overall compensation tools used to ensure compliance.

Hattaya Rungruengsaowapak is a fresh graduate from Business, Language and Culture at CBS. She has extensive experience in Japan, especially within supply chain and sustainability from a leading consumer goods manufacturer prior to her studies at CBS.

Caleb Gallemore is an Assistant Professor in the International Affairs Program at Lafayette College. He holds a Ph.D. in Geography and within his teaching, he focuses on southeast Asia, global land use, sustainability, research methods and geographic information science.


Photo by Nazarizal Mohammad on Unsplash

What does it mean to call someone a stakeholder?

By Matthew Archer

The word “stakeholder” is ubiquitous in sustainability discourse. We see it in corporate sustainability reports, policy documents, business plans, and sustainable development guidelines. Stakeholders are discussed in parliaments, in corporate boardrooms, at sustainability conferences, and in classrooms around the world.

The stakeholder concept was popularized with the 1984 publication of R. Edward Freeman’s Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach, where the stakeholder was defined as a person or group who are able to affect or are affected by an organization pursuing its goals. Although the term has been hotly debated ever since, it is clear that Freeman’s work has had a huge impact on management discourse, especially when it comes to social responsibility and sustainability.

In my own ethnographic research over the past few years among people I refer to as “sustainability professionals,” I’ve heard the word stakeholder mentioned countless times, in nearly every context, from venues like the COP21 negotiations in Paris to casual conversations with friends and colleagues at the pub.

Students in my classes use it fluently to refer to groups as distinct as shareholders, consumers, and factory workers. They’re able to classify these different stakeholders according to how important they are from the perspective of the company. Sometimes, the stakeholder concept can seem too expansive, with students questioning whether anyone is not a stakeholder.

But in my own research, I’ve found that although it is pretty widely accepted that most people are stakeholders in one form or another, there is a particular imaginary surrounding stakeholders. In a recent article, I found evidence for this by looking at the images that accompany mentions of the word stakeholder in sustainability reports and standards guidelines.

More often than not, these images depict workers in the Global South who are almost always people of color, and who are often women.

Similarly, when people use the word “stakeholder” in interviews, they are typically referring to people in producer countries, with the implication that these distant, marginalized stakeholders are the ones who stand to benefit the most from sustainability projects and, crucially, stand to lose the most if those projects are unsuccessful.

This led me to question the power dynamics that are inherent in the stakeholder concept. There’s a big literature in geography and anthropology on the power to categorize groups of people, drawing on decades of critical research on international development. More to the point, when companies talking about engaging with stakeholders in their corporate sustainability and corporate social responsibility initiatives, most of the time they’re actually treating the people we think of as stereotypical stakeholders as stakes, that is, what stands to be lost in a game of chance.

Given the power differences between people who can affect an organization and people who are affected by it, perhaps it’s time to come up with an alternative to the stakeholder concept.


About the author

Matthew Archer is Assistant Professor at Copenhagen Business School. He is an ethnographer and political ecologist interested in corporate sustainability and sustainable finance. Visit Matthew’s personal webpage.

By the same author:  Teaching (and doing) anthropology in a business school


Photo by Antonio Janeski on Unsplash

Tax havens, COVID-19 and sustainability

By Sara Jespersen

At CBS we will host a workshop and two public events (see below for sign up) on corporate tax and inequality next week 24th – 26th June 2020 – the COVID-19 crisis has underlined the pertinence of this topic in major ways.

Taxation, tax havens and corporate tax have been high on the agenda for a while. Since the outbreak of the global financial crisis of 2008 corporations seeking to minimize their tax payments have been under close watch from the media, civil society and politicians with a focus on ensuring that corporations pay their “fair share”. The OECD and the EU have gone to quite some length to try to stop tax-optimizing behavior through revising and modernizing existing rules and legislation. In collaboration with the IMF and the World Bank they have invested time and resources in strengthening tax systems, governance and improving domestic resource mobilization in low- and middle- income countries. This work is ongoing and corporate taxation is already high on the list of priorities for the world community. But then along came COVID-19.

Taxation is central in two ways when we reflect on the pandemic and what will follow. Firstly, governments have passed historic economic recovery packages to ensure that the private sector stays afloat and to avoid mass lay-offs during the lockdown period in 2020. The question is what can we expect in return? Secondly, the emerging discussion on the disruption caused to national economies should be thought into long-term solutions for sustainability including tax.

“Tax haven free” recovery packages

Poland and Denmark, followed by Italy, Belgium and France have attached an explicit conditionality to their COVID-19 state support that companies cannot be registered in tax havens.

In light of this clear conditionality, there has been a media storm in Denmark, when a journalistic investigation revealed that several companies that government support had an ownership structure that was associated with tax havens and with a consumer outcry on social media. This prompted one of the companies, a well-known bakery “Lagkagehuset”, to take out full-page advertisements in daily newspapers to counter the criticism and explain the company structure. The CEO also did a lengthy interview on the issue of the company’s ownership structure to a major daily newspaper. 

Two immediate takeaways can be drawn from this:

  1. It has revived the discussion about the usefulness of tax haven blacklists (see more on this by CBS professor Leonard Seabrooke in Danish).  Which countries should be on them, and what does it mean if you as a business (or individual) are associated with a tax-haven on such a list? One thing is clear, measures to push countries into greater cooperation will not in itself comprise a substitute for measures to make companies act responsibly.
  2. It has emphasized the importance of corporate governance including a reflected approach to responsible corporate tax practice. The fact that there are so-called tax havens out there warrants companies and individuals to decide how or if they want to be associated with these. If yes, companies must accept that they may be liable to critique and journalistic and even political inquiry into what that association means. It should come as no surprise that association with these jurisdictions may entail suspicion.

Tax havens are not the only concern in relation to companies’ environmental, social and governance (ESG) behavior in this pandemic. The financial times reported how NGOs and investors are challenging shareholder primacy as it leads to growing inequality. Corporate governance and ESG, including tax, is now more than ever one to watch for companies that wish to be part of a sustainable business community in the short-term and the long-term.

Opportunities in the long term

Recovery packages are short-term measures. However, in the long term,  the pandemic offers an opportunity that must not be missed in terms of taking a serious look at which direction our global society is heading.

While the pandemic, in theory, cannot tell the difference between the poor and the rich, it is clear that the existing inequality in our society is all made acutely visible during COVID-19. In the US more than 40 million have lost their jobs during the pandemic.  In Sierra Leone, there is allegedly just 1 available ventilator in the entire country (for a population of 7 million, where Denmark has more than 1000 ventilators for a population of 5.8 million).  As for the gendered impacts even for the better off, there are indications that women are less able to find time to prioritize research and publishing during the crisis than men are (). While big tech companies look to come out of this crisis more profitable and, possibly, powerful than ever.

These are just examples of how inequality is front and center in this crisis and how it offers an important opportunity to consider if the direction we are heading in is where we want to go.

With many countries having been in a complete]  lockdown and economic activity at a standstill, this presents a unique opportunity to truly rethink how well the existing economy has worked for our societies and planet. The city of Amsterdam in the Netherlands has seized the opportunity to embrace the concept of the doughnut economy and the OECD is arguing that it makes discussions about challenges of digitalization of the economy and a minimum level of tax for MNEs more pertinent.

Tax is the central tool for governments to raise revenue and engage in redistribution. However, it is much more than a technical tool in an administrative toolbox.

It is the modern social contract for individuals and businesses as highlighted by the discipline of fiscal sociology. Short term, long term, whichever way, you approach it tax should, and will, play a central role in the debate about where we want to go from here towards a more sustainable, and more equal, future.

It provides a key source of revenue to finance vital public services, it can act as an explicit redistributive tool central to fighting inequality, and if used wisely, it can incentivize the behavior of corporations and individuals including the transition to more sustainable practices. Some of these things will be discussed at CBS in June.

A timely workshop on corporate tax and inequality

At CBS we are hosting a timely interdisciplinary workshop as a collaboration between the department for Management, Society and Communication, CBS center for sustainability, and the Inequality platform on corporate tax and inequality. We are bringing together researchers from around the world to meet (virtually) and discuss different pieces of research emerging on this relationship. We have legal analysis, economic modelling, qualitative analysis of tax administration efforts, and sociological analysis of tax professionals and wider societal tendencies on the agenda.

Our keynote speaker Professor Reuven Avi-Yonah will give a (virtual) public lecture (SIGN UP HERE) on Thursday 25th of June 2020 at 14:15 CET. He will speak to the short, medium and long term revenue options in light of the pandemic including a chance for a Q & A. He is a renowned scholar and has published widely on international tax, history of the corporate form, and CSR and tax among other topics.

 The workshop concludes on June 26th 2020 with a (virtual) practitioner panel to discuss knowledge gaps (SIGN UP HERE) from the perspective of professionals of various disciplines. Bringing together professionals from media, NGOs, tax advisory services, tax administration and business. This is likely to be a lively debate with the aim of furthering the CBS tradition of engaging the private sector on what could be fruitful avenues for further research in this axis of relevance between tax and inequality.


About the author

Sara Jespersen is a PhD Fellow at Copenhagen Business School. Her research is on the emerging relationship between responsible business conduct and corporate tax planning of multinational enterprises. In a complex governance context, there are now signs of corporations’ self-regulation and the emergence of voluntary standards. Sara is interested in what this means for our understanding of corporations as political actors and the notion of political CSR.


Image by pickpik

I Am What I Pledge – The importance of value alignment and crowdfunder behavior

By Kristian Roed Nielsen

Together with my colleague Julia Binder we recently published a paper on the role of values in driving crowdfunding backer behavior. The study found that altruistically framed campaigns have a higher chance for funding as compared to campaigns that emphasize egoistic or environmental motives, but even more importantly, that message framing needs to be aligned with the personal values of the backers. As such, our study highlights important similarities between resource mobilization in social movements and in crowdfunding.

The growth of reward-based crowdfunding as an alternative source of innovative financing has recently triggered great enthusiasm for its potential to enable a greater diversity of entrepreneurs to access to important seed funds (Gerber and Hui, 2013; Sorenson et al., 2016). This enthusiasm is in part related to the fact that – as compared to other forms of innovation capital and indeed other models of crowdfunding, such as lending or equity-based – the consumer plays a central role as a financier of the reward-based innovation. Considering that consumers represent a different kind of investor (Assenova et al., 2016), they are also driven by a wider and distinct range of motivations as compared to traditional investors (Lehner, 2013).

Understanding this new kind of investor has thus been subject to increasing academic debates, especially regarding the success criteria of reward-based campaigns (Mollick, 2014).

However, empirical evidence to date has produced mixed results – while some studies suggest a social- or environmental value orientation of a given reward-based campaign to significantly increase its odds of receiving funding (Calic and Mosakowski, 2016; Lehner and Nicholls, 2014), other studies have found no such effect (Cholakova and Clarysse, 2015; Hörisch, 2015).

Thus, despite enthusiasm from a range of actors, it is unclear under which conditions reward-based crowdfunding campaigns are successful in receiving funding. In this respect, the role of message framing has received little interest, despite its potential for shedding light on the criteria for crowdfunding campaign success. Against this background, we sought to examine how founders’ framing of a reward-based crowdfunding message affect the mobilization of backers and what values are conveyed in successful crowdfunding efforts.

The study in a nutshell

The study draws on framing theory as utilized in the literature of social movement mobilization, which focuses on how messages attract audience attention and in turn plays a pivotal role in securing movement participation (Benford & Snow 2000). Considering that in reward-based crowdfunding entrepreneurs are equally concerned about mobilizing backers for their campaign, we investigate whether entrepreneurs’ framing affects backer’s attention and influences their interpretation and action towards the crowdfunding campaign.

Based on the theoretical literature on human values (Schwartz 1994), we operationalize these linguistic frames as egoistic, altruistic, and biospheric (Axelrod, 1994; Groot & Steg, 2008;  Stern, 2000). These three values respectively reflect considerations on “what is in it for me”, “what is in it for others”, and “what is in it for the environment” when purchasing a given product (de Groot and Steg, 2008). In order to observe causality between these three linguistic value frames and individual pledging behaviour the study employed an experiment which replicated an online crowdfunding platform to better resemble what individuals would see in the real world and thus providing us with what we hope are more external valid observations (Grégoire et al., 2019).

More specifically, we investigated how the framing of reward-based crowdfunding messages as either egoistic, altruistic, or biospheric affected the success of eight hypothetical projects seeking financing in return for the respective product. Especially this designing of a realistic experimental setting represented a huge hurdle, but also a necessary one.

We find that too often experiments lack the realism of what they are seeking to study which we believe is a real detriment to results they yield. We thus wanted to move outside not only the lab but also create a user experience that best captured what an actually crowdfunding platform looks like.

For researchers entering with minimal programming experience it was a steep, but really rewarding learning curve. If a professional programmer saw our work, they would likely have a meltdown over the messy coding, but it worked and inspired many new ideas. 

Fresh insights

The results provide fresh insights into an emerging debate relating to the potential of crowdfunding to support entrepreneurship.

Firstly, our findings show that while some consumers respond positively to campaigns emphasizing intrinsic benefits, an emphasis on such collective benefits cannot be seen as a silver bullet for crowdfunding success. Indeed, while we find that an emphasis on altruistic benefits leads to an overall higher willingness to support the campaign, we find no such effect in the case of products emphasizing the benefits for the environment, but rather that the attractiveness of a crowdfunding campaign is dependent on the alignment with the values of the respective target audience.

Secondly, when seeking to garner funding via a crowd, the importance of customer segmentation and a thorough understanding of these customers’ values and expectations remains the most relevant task before designing and launching the crowdfunding campaign.

Our results clearly show that the willingness to invest in a campaign largely depends on the alignment between backers’ values with the values transmitted in the campaign.

Finally, the findings provide implications for sustainable entrepreneurs, for whom crowdfunding has been emphasized to provide a relevant fundraising opportunity (Testa, Nielsen, et al. 2019).

On the one hand, the fact that crowdfunding is driven largely by consumers rather than professional investors does not in itself change consumer demands; demands which more often than not fail to correlate with sustainable behavior (Sheeran 2002; Webb & Sheeran 2006). While one may argue that the motivations of funders for pledging towards a campaign may be different from those of a professional investor, our results seem to confirm that consumers seek to satisfy their own values when deciding to invest in a crowdfunding campaign. On the other hand, this does not imply a lack of significant potential for sustainable entrepreneurs’ success in reward-based crowdfunding.

Considering the increasing concern for sustainability and because of our finding that value alignment has a particularly high potential in a crowdfunding context, sustainable campaigns focusing on a clearly delineated target group have a high likelihood to reach their aspired funding goal.


About the author

Kristian Roed Nielsen is Assistant Professor at the Department of Management, Society and Communication at Copenhagen Business School. His research strives to examine what, if any, potential role the “crowd” could have in driving, financing and enabling sustainable entrepreneurship and innovation. Kristian’s Twitter: @RoedNielsen


References

Assenova, V., Best, J., Cagney, M., Ellenoff, D., Karas, K., Moon, J., Neiss, S., Suber, R., Sorenson, O., 2016. The Present and Future of Crowdfunding. Calif. Manage. Rev. 58, 125–135.

Axelrod, L., 1994. Balancing Personal Needs with Environmental Preservation: Identifying the Values that Guide Decisions in Ecological Dilemmas. J. Soc. Issues 50, 85–104. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1994.tb02421.x

Benford, R.D. & Snow, D.A., 2000. Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment. Annual Review of Sociology, 26, pp.611–639. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/223459.

Calic, G., Mosakowski, E., 2016. Kicking Off Social Entrepreneurship: How A Sustainability Orientation Influences Crowdfunding Success. J. Manag. Stud. 53, 738–767. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12201

Cholakova, M., Clarysse, B., 2015. Does the Possibility to Make Equity Investments in Crowdfunding Projects Crowd Out Reward-based Investments? Entrep. Theory Pract. 39, 145–172.

de Groot, J.I.M., Steg, L., 2008. Value Orientations to Explain Beliefs Related to Environmental Significant Behavior: How to Measure Egoistic, Altruistic, and Biospheric Value Orientations. Environ. Behav. 40, 330–354. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013916506297831

Gerber, E.M., Hui, J., 2013. Crowdfunding : Motivations and Deterrents for Participation. ACM Trans. Comput. Interact. 20, 34–32. https://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2530540

Grégoire, D.A., Binder, J.K., Rauch, A., 2019. Navigating the validity tradeoffs of entrepreneurship research experiments: A systematic review and best-practice suggestions. J. Bus. Ventur. 34, 284–310. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusvent.2018.10.002

Hörisch, J., 2015. Crowdfunding for environmental ventures: an empirical analysis of the influence of environmental orientation on the success of crowdfunding initiatives. J. Clean. Prod. 107, 636 – 645. https://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2015.05.046

Lehner, O.M., 2013. Crowdfunding social ventures: a model and research agenda. Ventur. Cap. 15, 289–311. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691066.2013.782624

Lehner, O.M., Nicholls, A., 2014. Social finance and crowdfunding for social enterprises: A public-private case study providing legitimacy and leverage. Ventur. Cap. 16, 271–286.

Mollick, E., 2014. The dynamics of crowdfunding: An exploratory study. J. Bus. Ventur. 29, 1–16. https://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusvent.2013.06.005

Schwartz, S.H., 1994. Are There Universal Aspects in the Structure and Contents of Human Values? J. Soc. Issues 50, 19–45. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1994.tb01196.x

Sheeran, P., 2002. Intention—Behavior Relations: A Conceptual and Empirical Review. European Review of Social Psychology, 12(1), pp.1–36. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14792772143000003.

Sorenson, O., Assenova, V., Li, G.-C., Boada, J., Fleming, L., 2016. Expand innovation finance via crowdfunding. Science (80-. ). 354, 1526 LP – 1528.

Stern, P.C., 2000. New Environmental Theories: Toward a Coherent Theory of Environmentally Significant Behavior. J. Soc. Issues 56, 407–424. https://doi.org/10.1111/0022-4537.00175

Testa, S. et al., 2019. The role of crowdfunding in moving towards a sustainable society. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 141, pp.66–73. Available at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004016251831953X.

Webb, T.L. & Sheeran, P., 2006. Does changing behavioral intentions engender behavior change? A meta-analysis of  the experimental evidence. Psychological bulletin, 132(2), pp.249–268


Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash

Supplier perspectives on social responsibility in global value chains

By Peter Lund-Thomsen

Worldwide there is now a search for new ideas, business models, and innovations that can help us in rebounding from the global impact of COVID-19 and bring our planet and world onto a more sustainable future trajectory. One of the areas where this is evident is sustainability in global value chains where we have seen a global disruption of world trade in ways that have affected not only global brands but also suppliers and workers around the world. Some observers argue that this will result in a global backlash against attempts at making global value chains, for instance, the global garments and textile value chains, more sustainable. I.e. that COVID-19 will make brands and suppliers sacrifice long-term sustainability considerations at the expense of short-term business survival.

In my understanding,however, what these recent events demonstrate is not so much the need for new innovations and “thinking out of the box” but rather considering how the current organization of global value chains and thinking around sustainability have overlooked the importance of “supplier perspectives” on what social responsibility actually means in these chains. Amongst many practitioners, especially in the Nordic countries, there has been a tendency to assume that global brands’ adopting corporate codes of conduct and sustainability standards, asking value chain partners (i.e. suppliers) to implement these, and then auditing for compliance as well as helping suppliers to build capacity to enforce these guidelines would be sufficient.

The case of Bangladesh illustrates why this approach is insufficient. First, many brands have cancelled their orders with Bangladeshi garment suppliers, leaving local factories at the verge of bankruptcy, and hundreds of thousands, if not millions of workers at risk, potentially without any income to support themselves and their families. Second, even with orders that have been completed, some brands have refused to honor their contracts and either not paid for the goods received, substantially delayed payments, or asked for discounts on present or future orders from suppliers.

Globally, there has been condemnation of these “unfair” trading practices by both suppliers themselves (particularly in Bangladesh but also highlighted via social media) and also international labor advocacy organizations.

And third, the level of outrage is so strong that the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association has allegedly been considering placing a ban on particular brands so that they may not source garments from Bangladesh in the future as they have largely failed to live up to their “buyer” responsibilities towards suppliers and workers in Bangladesh.

To me, a key lesson learned from these events is that global brands, business associations, labor advocacy organizations, NGOs, researchers and students can no longer simply “overlook” supplier perspectives on social responsibility in global value chains.

The only realistic way forward is to take account of the concerns of these suppliers if global value chains are to be more resilient in the long run.

Many of these supplier concerns are already well-documented but tend to be either ignored or discarded by “global North stakeholders” in their policies, practices or discourses more broadly – for instance, in how they conceive and talk of sustainability in sustainability conferences around the world.

Just to recap some of the main points that we have learned from studies of supplier perspectives on social responsibility:

a) The factory manager dilemma – e.g., factory managers and owners – for instance, in the global garment industry – have had been asked for continuous price declines by many of their buyers while the same brands have asked for increased levels of social compliance at the same time.

b) The same dilemma arises when factory managers are asked to provide living wages around the year by their buyers when demand is seasonal and price competition is fierce in the global garment industry. For most suppliers having workers sitting around idle for part of the year is not a viable business option.

c) In addition, there is a general unwillingness amongst most (but not all brands) to co-finance – for instance, 50% – of the necessary social upgrading of factories in countries such as Bangladesh. Hence, brands tend to push “social responsibility” onto their suppliers rather than co-investing in and jointly bearing the costs of these improvements themselves.

d) Profits earned from selling goods sold to end consumers in the global North remain highly unequally shared amongst the (ironically called) value chain partners – often with suppliers winding up with 10-20 percent of the value of final retail price.

e) In addition to this, global North (read: Scandinavian) stakeholders including brands, government representatives, NGOs, students, and others often perceive “sustainability” in value chains as mainly relating to environmental and (to a lesser degree) social responsibility in the value chain. Hence, the general talk often seems to be about how suppliers should make environmental and social investments without considering the need for addressing existing inequalities – i.e. unequal distribution of value in these chains – and the business aspects of running supplier operations. In fact, for many suppliers in countries such as India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, sustainability is first and foremost related to “economic” or “financial” sustainability. Only when suppliers are profit-making can they afford to invest in social and environmental improvements. This is not exactly rocket-science but a point that often seems to be completely overlooked by Scandinavian “sustainability” advocates.

f) Finally, what is sometimes considered “social responsibility in global value chains” in the global North might be narrowly defined as the payment of minimum wages, overtime payment, social insurance, and the implementation of occupational health and safety measures in supplier factories. Of course, I am all for supplier factories implementing these measures. However, I also sympathize with many suppliers, NGOs and other stakeholders in the global South that point to other aspects of social responsibility that may be more contextualized.

For instance, in South Asia, many studies have pointed to factory managers helping to finance the education/school fees of the children of some of their workers. Financing the weddings of young workers or the weddings of the sons/daughters of their workers is another sign of social responsibility amongst many factory owners in South Asia.

From a Scandinavian perspective, this may not be related to “social responsibility”.

However, in the sub-continent, where your wedding day is often considered the most important day in your life, and very important for your family’s wider social standing in society, employers’ financial support may be seen a very valid act of practicing “social responsibility”.

Providing tea to your workers may also be considered an act of “social responsibility”. Again – from a Scandinavian perspective – this may not be considered a big act of social responsibility. However, then again, is it really that difficult to understand? How many of us in Scandinavia do not value it when our own employers provide us with free tea or coffee? It gives us the opportunity to socialize with our colleagues or take a much needed break between different work tasks. Why should it be any different in countries such as India and Pakistan where tea drinking could almost be considered a national sport?

Moreover, some factory managers in South Asia allow especially young mothers or women with even slightly older children the option of either working part-time (when the kids are in school or someone else is at home to take care of them) or engaging in home-working so that they may look after their kids while engaging in for instance (embroidery) whenever there is a free moment. Of course, I do recognize that home-working is also often associated with receiving very low wages and not having any social insurance.

However, during COVID 19, even in the Scandinavian context, homeworking has become an absolutely essential part of keeping private companies and public institutions afloat crisis under such compelling circumstances. It has also involved many challenges for families with young children who had to engage in home-based work (typically computer-based) and taking care of their children simultaneously.

Yet if homeworking is indeed not only allowed but also encouraged by most employers in Scandinavia, why it is that brands in the global North sometimes impose an outright ban on their suppliers outsourcing particular work tasks to “home-based locations”?

No wonder that many factory owners and managers in the global South believe that global brands practice double standards when it comes to their social responsibility requirements (i.e. ‘do as I say but not as I do’).

In conclusion, there seems to a great need in Scandinavia for raising our own levels of awareness about the commercial challenges faced by suppliers and acknowledge the myriad ways in which “social responsibility” may be thought of and practiced – of course, without throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Compliance with core labor standards remains a key concern, but it is not the only way of conceiving of supplier responsibility in global value chains.


About the author

Peter Lund-Thomsen is Professor at the Department of Management, Society and Communication at Copenhagen Business School. His research focuses on sustainable value chains, industrial clusters, and corporate social responsibility with a regional focus on South Asia.


More about Covid-19 pandemic on Business of Society blog:

Building A Better Planet: Toward a Sustainable Post-COVID-19 Society

Small, yet important – and still responsible. Reflections on SMEs and social responsibility in times of Covid-19

How the pandemic can reset cities and transform aspects of urban mobility

The Coronavirus Pandemic – and the Consequentiality of Metaphors

Sustainable Development, Interrupted?

The Political Economy of the Olympics – Misconceptions about Sustainability

Supply Chain Responsibilities in a Global Pandemic

A Green and Fair COVID-19 Recovery Plan

In Movement from Tanzania to Northern Italy to Denmark

How to make food systems more resilient: Try Behavioural Food Policies

Lobbying and the virus – three trends to take note of


Image by International Labour Organization ILO

The rise of social media bots – how do they work, and how can you spot them?

By Daniel Lundgaard

Bots and their impact on online conversations is rapidly becoming an important problem on social media. If we look at the conversation around the current Coronavirus pandemic, somewhere between 45% to 60% of the accounts on Twitter that promoted disinformation were identified as bots, in the anti-vaccine debate researchers have found that bots are used to “weaponize” online health communication and create discord, and in the climate change debate research suggests that about a quarter of all tweets are produced by bots.

These bots are used in a wide range of misinformation “strategies”. Based on findings from my own research and a review of current research on the topic, I have summarized what I perceive as the three main “strategies” where we know that bots have been used:

Amplifying certain opinions. The simplest strategy where bots have been used is in efforts to amplify a specific opinion, often by continuously re-tweeting the same tweet or link, or by only endorsing the shared posts of people with similar interests.

Flooding the discourse. Malicious actors often seek to increase confusion and challenge the current status quo e.g. the scientific consensus that climate change is man-made. In this strategy, bots are used to spread large volumes of information and start multiple conversations (often covering both sides of the debate), which makes it easier to question the current consensus. A similar tactic is as often seen in disinformation campaigns where large amounts of “fake news”-outlets create a new media ecosystem, and because of the increased volume of information, the voice of the validated outlets is “drowned”, which empowers the fake news outlets.

Linking issues to current tensions. Efforts to link debates to current tensions seek to polarize opinions and cause divide as seen within the vaccine debate where a debate was associated with current racial/ethnic divisions. Here bots are mainly used to either explicitly make the connection in their own tweets, or by commenting on content shared by others, suggesting the presence of a link to certain socioeconomic tensions.

With these strategies in mind identifying the users that in reality are bots seems like a crucial task. However, detecting and adequately handling these bots has proven to be a challenge for the major social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Nonetheless, after reviewing current tools made available for bot detection, current research on the topic and my own findings from an analysis of roughly 5 million tweets about climate change, I have identified a few tips that might help you to spot these bots – and potentially their impact on the conversation. For this list, I have left out bot-detection approaches that are based on reviewing patterns not normally visible to most users e.g. network features detection if the same group of users follow and re-tweet/like another group of users with similar language and message.

The user profile

Reviewing the user profile appears as one of the best ways for “normal” users to detect a bot. The most simple indicators could be a missing profile picture, however sophisticated bots might use stolen photos and here a quick “reverse image search” (right-clicking on the profile image and “search google for image”) might reveal something about the source of the image e.g. that it is taken from someone else. A generic (or poorly worded) profile description might also be an indicator, and in my own research I have found that reviewing the content of user profile descriptions is even better than reviewing the content of the tweets shared on a specific topic for predicting opinions.

Different or “stiff” language

The conversation on Twitter is often informal and people often use abbreviations or structure their sentences differently, which can be difficult to copy. As a result, bots might appear mechanical or rigid in its language – often returning to the same topic, share the same link over and over again, or returning to a topic that should have outlived the rather short life-cycle of some topics on Twitter.

Lack of humor

Granted, everyone misunderstands a joke sometimes and people can have trouble with understanding sarcasm. Because of this, understanding humor, especially sarcasm, also remains one of the major challenges for bots to both understand but also respond accordingly. This is particularly relevant on Twitter, where conversations may refer to shared understandings, inside jokes or memes used in a certain way within a community, which even sophisticated bots may have trouble understanding and adapting to.

Temporal behavior

Reviewing past activity, in particular with focus on patterns in temporal behavior might also be useful e.g. by spotting that a user seems to tweet at the same hour every day if it shares multiple tweets pr. Minute, or if the user immediately retweets or comments on other posts, which can be an indicator of an automated and pre-defined response.

It is important to acknowledge that not all bots are seeking to manipulate political conversations on social media. However, while some bots definitely are created for noble purposes, bots are increasingly becoming an important tool for various (potentially malicious) actors and their efforts to shape conversations on social media – especially Twitter. As a result, we, as a society needs to become better at detecting bots and limiting their power to shape the online debate, and I hope that by reading this blog I might have broadened your understanding of bots – and hopefully you have picked up a few tricks to spot potential bots appearing in your Twitter feed.


About the author

Daniel Lundgaard is a PhD Fellow at the Department of Management, Society and Communication at Copenhagen Business School. His research investigates how communication on social media (e.g. the use of emotions, certain forms of framing or linguistic features) shapes the ways we discuss and think about organizational and societal responsibilities.


Photo by ?? Claudio Schwarz | @purzlbaum on Unsplash

Fresh Air: An Impact Story

By Lara Anne Hale

What do fresh air, canaries, and research all have in common? Academics often humbly conduct and publish research, hoping but not knowing if it had any impact on society (we hope very strongly!). This becomes even more bewildering when it comes to the advent of research impact metrics, such as with the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) (UKRI, 2020). It is a rare and wonderful occasion in which one can not only bear witness to impact but actually physically touch it. As an industrial researcher with CBS and the VELUX Group, I am often moving between theory and practice, but the tale of an innovation process stands out. This impact story is the story of how research became related  — albeit several steps removed — to the development of an innovative product, AirBird®, co-created by GXN, the VELUX Group, and Leapcraft. Moreover, it is the story of inspiration in practice, a breath of fresh air in the academic realm.

The academic story starts with a group of nine researchers. The ‘Smart Buildings and Cities’ research group is composed of nine industrial PhDs and postdocs employed in diverse Danish organizations and universities, housed in the BLOXHUB Science Forum and supported by Realdania and the Danish Innovation Fund. Some of us are social scientists engaging with engineering (that would be me), some are architects engaging with computer science, and yet others are engineers conducting social research. I’ve never seen such a mad mess of transdisciplinarity, and it’s beautiful (and also very much guided by our Science Forum coordinator, Pernille Berg).

The innovation process parallels the fourth research case I have been building to better understand and theorize business model innovation for smart technology in the building industry. This case concerns indoor climate data-driven building renovations as a potential business model and involves collaboration among CBS and the VELUX Group (the research), Kokkedal Skole (the building), and Leapcraft (the technology). Fredensborg Kommune has allotted nearly 1 billion DKK (120 million euro) to the improvement of its schools in a program called ‘Fremtidens Folkeskoler’ (Primary Schools of the Future); and it is kicking off the program with an investment of over 35 million DKK (4 million euro) in renovations at Kokkedal Skole. Prior to renovations, we needed to answer the questions: How is the building being used now? What is the indoor climate like? How do teachers and students interact with space? And then we can compare the data post-renovation. This kind of research, as it turns out, is especially timely, given the Danish government’s commitment of 30 billion DKK for sustainable housing renovations.

Kokkedal Skole
Image by Lara Anne Hale

The Kokkedal Skole project is a fascinating one to discuss with others, given the visionary leadership of their principal Kirsten Birkving and excellent building management of their facilities manager Lars Høgh-Hansen. They have in fact been featured on CNN Business for bringing new technology into the classroom, namely Leapcraft’s AmbiNode sensors and SenseMaking tool, the latter having been developed by VELUX based on the Green Solutions House project. Two of the Science Forum group’s companies, GXN and the VELUX Group, started to take discussions at length about the emerging findings on health in buildings, the invisibility of indoor climate, and the need for a simple alert when the situation is dangerous. They posed the question, is it possible to make an indoor health equivalent of the canary in the coal mine, who would start tweeting to coal miners when in contact with dangerous air?

Early in 2019 these talks came to fruition when Realdania invited applications for seed funding to research group members interested in collaborative innovation. This led to the Smith Innovation-coordinated workshop “The Canary in the Goalmine” with the VELUX Group and GXN working on the goal of defining how the ‘canary’ would look like, and – based on the research at Kokkedal Skole and renovation challenges presented by the Student and Innovation House – how it would function. A year later, I am working with VELUX and Leapcraft to finalize the one-year monitoring report from Kokkedal Skole, and AirBird® is ready to hit the shelves. The concept is simple and beautiful, just like the bird: when the CO2 levels indicate unhealthy air, AirBird sings a bird song to let its users know they should bring in some fresh air; which TV2 Lorry featured at Kokkedal Skole on the 25th of May. The AirBird® has been ideated, designed and developed in co-creation between GXN, VELUX Group and Leapcraft.

Airbird introduction
Image by Lara Anne Hale

Although the development of AirBird® does not tell the story of sustainability dynamics within innovation ecosystems (Oskam et al., 2020), nor the story of smart technology-facilitated business models for health and well being (Laya et al., 2018) – two examples of academic work that resonate with my research – it does challenge the idea that business model innovation precedes product innovation. Nudging tools like AirBird® may stimulate awareness and behavioural changes that anticipate business opportunities for a healthy indoor climate. Further, serendipitous product innovations may serve as artifacts embodying value negotiation, the foundations of business model innovation.

But ultimately, the AirBird® story is attractive because it presents impact that is tangible. And whereas the physical product is the most tangible of all, this innovation has had other impacts as well: collaborative innovation experience among the organizations involved; encouragement within the Science Forum of the value of transdisciplinary research; and the need to face directly the tensions between the academic and practice worlds. For my part, it’s uncomfortably different from the impact implied in academic publications and absolutely refreshing — something fresh air, canaries, and research should all have in common.


References

Laya, A., Markendahl, J., & Lundberg, S. (2018). Network-centric business models for health, social care and wellbeing solutions in the internet of things. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 34(2), 103–116.

Oskam, I., Bossink, B., & de Man, A.-P. (2020). Valuing Value in Innovation Ecosystems: How Cross-Sector Actors Overcome Tensions in Collaborative Sustainable Business Model Development. Business & Society, 000765032090714.

Rafaeli, Anat, & Pratt, Michael G. (2006). Artifacts and Organizations: Beyond Mere Symbolism. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc,US.

UKRI (2020). REF Impact. Accessed 29 May 2020 from: https://re.ukri.org/research/ref-impact/


About the author

Lara Anne Hale – Ph.D., M.Sc., Assistant Professor, Industrial Postdoc Fellow with CBS and VELUX. Lara conducts transdisciplinary research on sustainability in the built environment, including aspects of digital transformations, circularity, user-centered design, and systems thinking. Her current project focuses on business model innovation for smart buildings in the BLOXHUB Science Forum ‘Smart Buildings & Cities’ research group, supported by the Danish Innovation Fund and Realdania.


Photo by Kinga Cichewicz on Unsplash

Building A Better Planet: Toward a Sustainable Post-COVID-19 Society

By Daniel C. Esty

Covid-19 has dominated policy thinking across the world for several months – highlighting our vulnerability to unexpected threats, the fundamental reality of global interdependence, the critical role of science and data, and the value of collaborative efforts in response to a common challenge. And when the short-term public health crisis abates, the middle-term focus will be on economic recovery. But we should think now about the longer term – and the need to build a sustainable society that steps up to another looming threat: the prospect of destabilizing climate change.  Thus, as we rebuild our economy, we must do so in a way that moves us toward a clean and renewable energy future as well as addressing other pressing sustainability issues including air and water pollution, waste and chemicals management, and our depletion of natural resources.

To help launch the conversation about the pathways to a sustainable future, I offer below 10 key elements to consider. These concepts build on the ideas laid out in the recently released book, A Better Planet: 40 Big Ideas for a Sustainable Future, that emerged from a multi-year research and policy initiative at Yale University, where I teach. For more information on the Yale Environmental Dialogue, please see the website.

1 ) End of externalities

A sustainable future requires that we commit to an end of externalities as the foundational principle for environmental policy.  This starting point would require that we implement the Polluter Pays Principle, which means that those who release air and water pollution or greenhouse gases would have to stop these harms or to pay for their pollution.  Likewise, any user of public natural resources – including water for irrigation, forests for timber, grasslands for grazing, or public lands for the extraction of oil, natural gas, or minerals – would be required to pay full price for the resources they take. 

To be clear, making companies pay for the harms they cause will expose some business models as fundamentally unsustainable and only profitable when externalities are not internalized.  These enterprises will have to remake their business strategies or go under.

2 ) Change in systems thinking

We must acknowledge that we live in a highly integrated world, as COVID-19 has so painfully made clear.  Complex human and ecological systems require moving beyond traditional siloes to systems thinking — and regulatory design that links energy, environmental, and economic policies.  More fundamentally, we must accept the fact that we will need to pursue multiple goals simultaneously and learn to do so in an integrated way that accepts the reality that our goals will sometimes be in tension — and thus need to be traded off and balanced.

3 ) Top-down targets & bottom-up implementation

We must recognize that policy frameworks and structures require both top-down targets and bottom-up implementation. This lesson has become plainly evident in the climate change context, where it is now clear that presidents and prime ministers do not control all the levers of society that must be pulled to deeply decarbonize our economy.

 To achieve a sustainable future, mayors, governors/premiers, and other subnational political leaders – who often control economic development, transportation systems, and other key points of policy leverage — must play a significant role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and building a more resilient society.

Likewise, business leaders – who also make day-to-day choices that profoundly shape the prospect for moving society onto a sustainable trajectory – must also be included in this conversation.  Fortunately, both the 2015 Paris Climate Change Agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) expressly acknowledge the need for broader engagement of exactly this kind.  

4 ) New economic model

New policy tools must replace the 20th Century command-and-control regulatory model with economic incentives and other market mechanisms.  While the government mandates of the past have allowed us to dramatically reduce pollution levels compared to five decades ago, further progress depends on price signals and a commitment to making emitters pay for the harm they cause.

5 ) New roles & various actors

Environmental progress must recognize new roles for various critical actors.  Specifically, in decades past, the business world was seen as the source of pollution problems. But today, most corporate leaders recognize the need to be good environmental stewards so as to maintain their company’s social license to operate. They recognize that old notions about the mission of corporations being centered on shareholder primary and the maximization of profits has given way to a stakeholder model in which businesses have responsibilities not only to shareholders, but also to their customers, suppliers, employees, and the communities in which they operate. 

Individuals are also advancing sustainability in new and important ways that go well beyond their long-recognized role as voters. Specifically, individuals today can make a difference as green consumers who make choices every day about which products to buy and which companies are selling sustainable goods and services. Likewise, a growing set of sustainability-minded investors are tracking environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance metrics to ensure that their portfolios align with their values – and they hold shares in companies that are showing the way toward deep decarbonization and sustainability more generally. 

And some impact investors are putting money directly into sustainability projects and enterprises with an expectation that their funds will make a difference in society as well as a financial return.

  Finally, all of us with a smartphone can serve as watchdogs — capturing and sharing evidence of environmental wrongdoing on social media.  We are also all positioned to offer comments and participate in public environmental debates in many places and ways that were not possible prior to the Internet era.  This expanded access should deepen public participation and improve the diversity of perspectives that get factored into policy decisions.

6 ) Sustainable markets

We need sustainable markets that incorporate new lessons from various emerging fields of science and other emerging academic disciplines. Industrial ecology, for instance, offers new methodologies for mapping the flows of energy and materials across the economy.  In this regard, as we rebuild business in the many sectors devastated by the Covid-19 pandemic, we should look sector-by-sector for opportunities to create closed loop production processes that generate zero waste.  Such a system would focus on water recapture and the reuse and recycling of other materials.

We might, in this spirit, shift away from plastic packaging that generates greenhouse gas emissions as it is produced and too often accumulates after use in the ocean – and move toward fiber-based materials that can be more easily recycled or composted.

7 ) New tools & Big Data

Policymakers have a set of new tools at their disposal that can be deployed in support of a sustainable future.  Big Data, in particular, has abundant applications that can help us to reduce environmental impacts – tracking emissions, identifying best practices in pollution control and natural resource management, and providing metrics that help us to identify policy leaders to emulate and laggards who should be spurred to do better.  And while 21st information and communications technologies have transformed how sports teams pick players, businesses market to their customers, and all of us make purchases, technological solutions have done rather little to reshape the environmental realm.  But recent advances in data analytics, genomics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning all show significant promise for having important environmental applications.

8 ) Ethical foundation

We must build an ethical foundation for 21st Century sustainability that captures the public’s evolving thinking about core values and fundamental principles. Most notably, the idea of environmental justice and concerns about equity and inequality make it clear that our policy programs must pay attention to who benefits from environmental commitments and who gets ignored.

Indeed, who pays for environmental inaction – including lead exposure from aging water pipes or asthma risk when urban air pollution is not abated – has become a fundamental question. 

As we seek to “build back better” after COVID-19, climate change equity issues need to be given a more prominent role – both the intergenerational burden that the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere threatens to leave for today’s young people and the reality that movement toward a clean energy future will dislocate some communities, industries, and demographic groups in ways that will require transition assistance.

9 ) New ways of communication

We need a new approach to environmental communications and a commitment to translate expert guidance and science to the public in a manner that makes sense to everyday citizens. Tony Leiserowitz and the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication have demonstrated, for example, that political leaders must learn to distill and effectively translate scientific concepts and results to the public.  And as Thomas Easley makes clear in his Better Planet essay “Hip Hop Sustainability,” we need new strategies that bring the climate change conversation to inner cities and other subsets of society in a way that engages those communities in their own language and on their own terms.

10 ) Innovation

Finally, a spirit of innovation must permeate the push toward a sustainable future.  To create an environmental policy framework that is lighter, faster, and more effective than our regulatory programs of the past, we must harness the entrepreneurial capacity and creativity that exists all across the world.  Innovation broadly-conceived has already brought us technology breakthroughs in wind, solar, tidal, wave, and fuel cell power. But we must seek innovation beyond the technology domain. We need to be equally committed to fresh thinking and new approaches to finance and investments in clean energy, government policies and incentives, public engagement strategies, and public-private partnerships. 

Such innovation can reduce the cost of creating a sustainable future and diminish the perceived tradeoff between environmental progress and economic prosperity.

Despite recent challenges, the promise of a more sustainable society seems ever closer, but still just over the horizon.  Progress thus depends on sustainability pioneers who are willing to run out front, innovate broadly, take on risks, accept failures (and redeploy resources quick when unsuccessful pathways are identified), and redouble their commitment to efforts that show promise.

This commentary builds on Dan Esty’s April 2020 virtual lecture at Copenhagen Business School and the University of Copenhagen.


About the author

Dan Esty is Hillhouse Professor of Environmental Law and Policy, Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and Yale Law School


More about Covid-19 pandemic on Business of Society blog:

Small, yet important – and still responsible. Reflections on SMEs and social responsibility in times of Covid-19

How the pandemic can reset cities and transform aspects of urban mobility

The Coronavirus Pandemic – and the Consequentiality of Metaphors

Sustainable Development, Interrupted?

The Political Economy of the Olympics – Misconceptions about Sustainability

Supply Chain Responsibilities in a Global Pandemic

A Green and Fair COVID-19 Recovery Plan

In Movement from Tanzania to Northern Italy to Denmark

How to make food systems more resilient: Try Behavioural Food Policies

Lobbying and the virus – three trends to take note of


Image by Free images

Small, yet important – and still responsible. Reflections on SMEs and social responsibility in times of Covid-19

By Søren Jeppesen

One thing seems to be clear by now – that we are all challenged by the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. This includes all enterprises, large as well as small firms. As states and individuals, also SMEs (Small and Medium-size Enterprises) need to figure out how to respond. SMEs constitute the vast majority of enterprises on the Globe, and their response to the current situation, including how they behave in terms of social responsibilities matter a lot. If jobs disappear, or wages are lowered and/or working conditions deteriorate, a large number of persons (employees) and families will be negatively affected. If environmental standards are lowered the nature and humans will be negatively affected.

The perception of what constitutes social responsibilities varies substantially across countries. As SMEs in different parts of the world face very different situations (see Spence et al. 2018), also in times of Covid-19, the responses will be very different. We already witness intense debates on what is the ‘appropriate way’ of reacting. Most SMEs have a less formalized way of operating compared to larger firms. While this is viewed as leading to being less socially responsible compared to large firms this type of organizing – not being so standardized – maybe be is an advantage in an unknown situation like the one that we are witnessing right now. Agility, creativity and ability to make a decision fast could be an advantage right now like the Danish small firms that have adjusted their production to include critical health products show.

However, the examples are probably the exceptions rather than the rule as only a smaller section of the SMEs typically can be characterized like this. The majority of the SMEs are operating in more traditional, standardized ways and have a more limited range of responses as things stand right now.

In our part of the world, governments have implemented numerous support schemes trying to assist the private sector, including SMEs, in various ways. The Danish SME has various public-funded support packages and a highly formalized labour market cushioned by a number of social benefit programs to factor into the considerations. Hence, we can insist that an important part of managing continues to be keeping an eye on working conditions and the environmental impact. In other parts of the world like the developing countries, governments have so far done less and given the much more informal nature of the economies, SMEs are much harder effected.

The Ugandan SME is faced with no economic assistance and a complete lockdown of the society leading to a dramatically reduced – if not totally halted – operation and turnover. In addition, no social benefits exist to assist employees who are losing their job. So, the overarching topic concerns the socio-economic dimensions of how many SMEs that survive while retaining a good number of the staff – or on the more pessimistic side – how many that go down leaving scores of people unemployed and without an income affecting individuals as well as tons of families.

What can we then expect in terms of social responsibilities in such a situation? Given that some developing country SMEs are characterized as having ‘family-like culture’, we would expect such enterprises to retain the employees (Tran and Jeppesen, 2016). Even though the SMEs retain the employees, owners and managers personally have to handle the insecurity that accompanies the situation as well as relating to the concerns among the employees.

The family-like type of organization could ensure that employees are kept and not fired. Still, we know that a number of SMEs pay little if any wages in times of limited production. Hence, having a job with no income does not make a difference right now.

Small enterprises in developing countries are also praised for their community engagement in taking up activities ensuring women (Langevang et al, 2015) or young people income. The localized response may assist in various ways of helping citizens in dire need. Religion and which church that you are a member of play a role. Some churches, as well as the wealthier members (and among these SME owners and managers), come forward to assist their congregation and the less well-off families in times of need. 

We need to wait for the answer to whether and to what extent Covid-19 will be marked by resilience and a protective and more caring (social) response by SMEs – or rather by the tough reality of downsizing and/or closing down with numerous dire consequences.


References

Langevang, T., Gough, K. V., Yankson, P. W., Owusu, G., & Osei, R. (2015). Bounded entrepreneurial vitality: The mixed embeddedness of female entrepreneurship. Economic Geography, 91(4), 449-473.

Spence, Laura J., Jedrzej George Frynas, Judy N. Muthuri, Jyoti Navaret, 2018. Research Handbook on Small Business Social Responsibility: Global Perspectives. Edward Elgar Publishing.

Tran, Angie Ngoc & Søren Jeppesen. 2016. SMEs in Their Own Right: The Views of Managers and Workers in Vietnamese Textiles, Garment, and Footwear Companies. Journal of Business Ethics, 137(3), 589-608


About the author

Søren Jeppesen is Associate Professor at the Department of Management, Society and Communication at Copenhagen Business School. His research concerns the development of firms in developing countries. He focuses on SMEs, CSR and driving forces (or lack of same) for strategies of SMEs in developing countries in engaging in CSR (or not engaging).


More about coronavirus pandemic on Business of Society blog:

How the pandemic can reset cities and transform aspects of urban mobility

The Coronavirus Pandemic – and the Consequentiality of Metaphors

Sustainable Development, Interrupted?

The Political Economy of the Olympics – Misconceptions about Sustainability

Supply Chain Responsibilities in a Global Pandemic

A Green and Fair COVID-19 Recovery Plan

In Movement from Tanzania to Northern Italy to Denmark

How to make food systems more resilient: Try Behavioural Food Policies

Lobbying and the virus – three trends to take note of


Image by US Army Africa

On the Ground: What CSR and sustainability standards fail to address

By Hannah Elliott

In the fall of 2019, there was a flurry of news stories in the British media about political events in western Kenya which, according to one article, threatened the future of the nation’s beloved cup of tea. In Kericho, the heart of Kenya’s tea-growing country, the local community are reclaiming vast tracts of land obtained under British colonialism for the large-scale cultivation of tea. Faced with a land shortage that hinders possibilities for sustainable development, local activists are challenging the extensive land acquisitions that took place under colonial rule, many of which constitute the premises of multinational agri-business today. CSR initiatives and the sustainability standards that are increasingly ubiquitous in Kenya’s tea industry fail to address or acknowledge a sustainability issue that is of major concern to local communities on the ground: land.

During the early 20th century, while trying to create an export economy in eastern Africa, the British government identified the highlands of Kericho in Kenya’s fertile Rift Valley as a place of high agricultural potential and gave out land to European settlers. The area was identified as an ideal place for growing tea, a commodity that was already thriving elsewhere in the British Empire. With the entry of two major companies engaged in tea production in India and Sri Lanka, further land allocations were made, providing the premises for the expansive tea plantations that dominate Kericho’s landscape today.  

Colonial laws enabled these land allocations: the British government could acquire land and relocate the ‘natives’ who were occupying and cultivating it. The Kipsigis community living in the Kericho area lost large amounts of land, only to be compensated with smaller areas of less agriculturally conducive land in designated ‘native reserves’. Others remained in their home areas but were rendered ‘squatters’ required to work for settlers in return for their continued occupation.

Many today struggle to make a living from diminishing farms in the former native reserve areas as family land is subdivided among children, while others remain landless or forced to purchase land at high prices. Land shortage poses a direct challenge to sustainable livelihoods in Kericho.

These grievances are what the Kericho County Governor seeks to address. Identifying as a victim of historical land injustices himself whose ancestral land lies within the vast tea plantation owned by the multinational giant Unilever, he advocates for reparations that acknowledge the forceful acquisition of his community’s land. This implicates multinational tea companies directly. For the Governor and Kipsigis community activists campaigning for justice, these companies are operating on stolen property that rightfully belongs to the community.

Tea plantations employ large numbers of locals in roles that range from tea plucking to top management and offer opportunities and bursaries for adult and child education. While much of the British media coverage of Kericho’s land politics, including an article in The Economist, has envisaged Zimbabwe-like evictions of British companies in Kenya, the Kericho Governor made clear when I met with him earlier this year that it is not in anybody’s interests for the tea companies to hand over the land and leave.

Rather, following recommendations made by Kenya’s National Land Commission, the Governor asks that tea companies apply to the county government for new land leases, following which the land can be resurveyed.  Undeclared acreage, he argues, should then be reverted back to the county government. In addition, the Governor seeks to increase land rent so that the county government is more adequately remunerated for the land.

This, along with demanding mesne profits from multinationals for the use of the land since 1902, is intended to enable more equitable redistribution of the wealth generated from large-scale tea production.

One Kipsigis community activist whom I met envisaged a new model of business: a continuation of plantations’ management and operations, but with the local community, the ‘rightful landowners’, as the major shareholders. This is not to say that all of these proposals are wholly feasible or realistic for tea companies, but to envisage other ways of doing business whereby local communities and authorities are rendered more equal partners.

This goes beyond CSR initiatives which, while valued in Kericho, can be seen as a continuation of colonial paternalism rather than rethinking the very premises of companies’ local engagement. It also goes beyond the certified sustainability standards provided by organisations such as the Rainforest Alliance and Fair Trade that seek to ensure economic, environmental and social sustainability in the tea supply chain yet are generic, driven more by the demands of distant buyers in Europe and North America than those of local communities on the ground.

Undoubtedly, community land claims in Kericho are entangled in local politics. The Kericho Governor’s campaigns are part of a populist political strategy that has seen him win two terms in office. Furthermore, judging by Kenya’s postcolonial history, there is no guarantee that relinquished land or funds would be equitably rolled out to the community should he succeed. Another caveat relates to major challenges facing the tea business in recent years with regard to profitability: at the time of my fieldwork earlier this year, the price of tea hit an all-time low.

The coronavirus pandemic will surely further threaten the industry. In this context, local political challenges of the kind we see in Kericho might push companies to reconsider their operations entirely.  

However, this shouldn’t preclude reimagining the terms of companies’ engagement, not only in Kenya but across Britain’s former settler economies. If large-scale agri-business is to face up to the challenges of sustainability in the places it operates, it must acknowledge the historical grievances attached to the ground beneath it and engage with local communities beyond the confines of CSR and sustainability standards.    


About the Author

Hannah Elliott is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at CBS’ Department of Management, Society and Communication. Her research on the SUSTEIN project critically examines the production of certified sustainable Kenyan tea.


Image by ©2010CIAT/NeilPalmer

How the pandemic can reset cities and transform aspects of urban mobility

By Isabel Froes

Cities are hard and complex systems. With their defined policies, grids and routes, they offer limited space for experimentation, with a low threshold for any type of interference to their regular flow.  To test and prototype [1] in the urban, besides dealing with regulatory procedures, require clear indications of the positive impact those tests might bring. Thus, any change in routine flows is disruptive and not necessarily welcomed by all.

Some of these difficulties have become explicit during the processes carried out by various cities in four EU funded neighbourhood projects, Cities-4-People, Sunrise, MUV and Metamorphosis [2]. These projects have brought together citizens and other key city stakeholders to identify and co-create mobility solutions and approaches to tackling local problems. Each project has had a distinct goal, but all are part of the CIVITAS initiative focusing on ‘sustainable neighbourhood mobility planning and have been running since 2017, with three of them to end in 2020 and another in 2021. In the case of the Cities-4-People project, running in the cities of Hamburg, Istanbul, Oxford, Trikala and Budapest, cities, citizens and transport authorities have worked closely together to co-create and implement solutions addressing congestion, bike parking, safe and new routes to reach public transportation, and more [3].

Primarily, one of the biggest difficulties in deploying urban prototypes deals with permissions, space sharing, closing parts of or an entire street, or pavement, changing traffic routes, etc.

Even when implementing aspects citizens see as valuable and beneficial, such as bike racks, paths, during construction, these processes tend to be perceived as a nuisance. Another aspect stems from the fact that, unless it is a whole new city or neighbourhood been planned, the city, as a canvas, is never blank. Therefore, cities are constantly bound to develop solutions, which are imposed over an existing and fixed grid with very little wiggle room. All true, until March 2020.

The pandemic, through lockdowns and other movement restrictions, has changed the flow of cities almost overnight. For the first time, since the widespread city development focusing on automobiles, cities have had a chance to look at their now empty public spaces and rethink their use and purposes. These changes have forced the neighbourhood projects into a sudden halt, as people’s engagement with urban spaces has been very limited. However, while physical workspaces, shops and many businesses closed their doors, with citizens mostly at home, cities have encountered an unprecedented opportunity to rethink their streets.

In two related mobility examples, Vilnius, Lithuanian capital, the city Mayor has opened up eighteen of the city’s public spaces, free of charge, to bars and restaurants, so they can run while keeping the required social distancing [4].

In Milan [5], over the summer, the city will engage in a large-scale urban prototype, deploying 35km of temporary biking lanes and enlarged pavement areas.

While the city slowly opens up, with most employees still working from home and not commuting as much, citizens, when going out, should have enough space to keep a safe distance, while also experimenting in environmental friendly modes, such as walking and biking.

When some of the neighbourhood projects, such as Cities-4-People, resume in a few months, their cities and citizens might have changed. However, instead of considering the data that has been collected in the projects prior to the lockdown as ‘outdated’ or no longer valid, these projects can consider repurposing this data, using it as a robust baseline to be compared with post lockdown. From a mobility perspective, this ‘new normal’ might prove itself a valuable mobility asset. As people return to their streets, they can experience these known spaces in new formats encountering novel mobility patterns, where people and businesses can repopulate streets differently, reconfiguring city flows.

Furthermore, some of these temporary changes might prove to be popular and become permanent, promoting not only better mobility, but also lower pollution and improved air quality [6], indirectly helping cities leapfrog into achieving some of their sustainable development goals (SDGs). The opportunity to reset busy urban centres is rare; however, as it has occurred and continues to run with the pandemic, more cities and citizens have the unique chance to engage and exploit their cities’ canvas in new ways to seize their days.


References

[1] Implementing a temporary solution

[2] https://civitas.eu/projects/research

[3] https://cities4people.eu/

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/28/lithuanian-capital-to-be-turned-into-vast-open-air-cafe-vilnius

[5] In Milan, the lockdown brought a city to an almost complete stand still, decreasing an endemic congestion problem by 30-75%, thus improving air quality. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/21/milan-seeks-to-prevent-post-crisis-return-of-traffic-pollution

[6] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/automotive-and-assembly/our-insights/the-impact-of-covid-19-on-future-mobility-solutions?cid=soc-app


About the Author

Isabel Fróes is a postdoc at MSC Department at Copenhagen Business School working in two EU projects (Cities-4-People and iPRODUCE) dealing with distinct aspects of urban services and sustainability. Her latest publications deal with urban planning and co-creation based on results from the Cities-4-People project. Isabel also has wide industry experience and has worked both as a user researcher and service design consultant for various companies in Denmark and internationally. For more detail please see her Linkedin profile  


More about coronavirus pandemic on Business of Society blog:

The Coronavirus Pandemic – and the Consequentiality of Metaphors

Sustainable Development, Interrupted?

The Political Economy of the Olympics – Misconceptions about Sustainability

Supply Chain Responsibilities in a Global Pandemic

A Green and Fair COVID-19 Recovery Plan

In Movement from Tanzania to Northern Italy to Denmark

How to make food systems more resilient: Try Behavioural Food Policies

Lobbying and the virus – three trends to take note of


Photo by ?? Claudio Schwarz | @purzlbaum on Unsplash

The problem with CSR: why companies need to listen to their activist employees

By Luda Svystunova and Verena Girschik

The current pandemic has exposed blatant social injustices and inequalities around the world, prompting businesses to face their societal impact. Before the crisis, however, a rising wave of employee activism had already started to call into question the extent to which companies had managed to meet their moral obligations. Employees at Wayfair, Microsoft, Google, Twitter and Amazon have protested against their employers’ stance on issues ranging from climate change to migration, pushing them to deliver on public commitments or refusing to contribute to morally dubious projects, such as Amazon’s facial recognition software that had potential to contribute to racial discrimination.

As the crisis has provided ample opportunities to reflect on and reconsider the role of business in society, we believe that this is the time to learn from employee activism – and to learn to embrace it as a force for change.

The problem with CSR

Virtually all companies today pursue a CSR agenda, strengthened by the global agreement around Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the growing power of corporate sustainability rankings, standardization of sustainability reporting and the proliferation of consultancies who offer support to companies pursuing a shared value approach to social responsibility. Aligning business and societal value creation, such approaches promise win-win solutions in addressing social ills. Yet it is the very promise of win-win solutions that undermines critical engagement with companies’ roles in creating or reproducing social ills.

First, CSR has become the corporate worlds’ dominant paradigm for change that is positive and comfortable. If CSR managers want to avoid eyerolls, especially from top managers and shareholders, they need to speak the language of profit and present a measurable business case for addressing social ills. By enabling companies to do well by doing and looking good, however, CSR may also cultivate complacency. This does not mean that CSR has failed to encourage companies to embrace more responsible business conduct. But it is a potent substitute for engaging with the many uncomfortable social problems as to which companies have hitherto failed to do the right thing.

Second, the triumph of CSR is symptomatic of and reproduces social inequalities. CSR is driven by privileged employees and managers often based in the corporate headquarters – members of the organizational elites. The voices of others in the company, as well as the people affected by corporate activities, are seldomly included. Indeed, Kaplan (2020) suggests that the business case alienates employees and does not deliver on promises to stakeholders. Misguided CSR initiatives can actually make things worse for those they aim to help. By limiting attention to win-win solutions, CSR has failed to pay attention to those who lose.

How can employee activism help?

Activist employees are those employees that care about and actively promote social justice in their company. With this, we call upon companies to stop viewing employee activists as antagonists or nuisance and instead invite activism in order to face problems head on. Specifically, we suggest that companies should consider the following:

1 ) Accept activist employees rather than “handle” their dissent.

Activist employees bring to the front the less comfortable social problems that a company creates, reproduces, or in other ways is complicit in. Commonly, companies manage dissent by firing those employees who speak out against corporate misdeeds. Activist employees’ voices may be uncomfortable, but if fired, they will certainly still be heard – if not by management, then certainly by the public.

2 ) Listen to dissenting voices and engage with uncomfortable truths.

Employee activists can help by shedding light onto just such areas where businesses may have missed the mark. Representing social movements inside the company, they generate awareness of problems it may have missed or not taken seriously and even contribute to solutions. Most importantly, the break with the complacency of corporate CSR practice and drive the more radical change that is so badly needed.

3 ) Confront privilege and listen to employee activists

Companies should be mindful of who gets to have a say in the issues that matter. It is easy to overlook issues voiced by activists on the ground – across the operations and especially in distant local offices. Yet they are often the ones with a first-hand understanding of social ills as well as externalities produced by the company.   

4 ) Tackle social injustices within.

Not all employee activism is driven by personal values and compassion for others: alongside staff walkouts for greener business at Google and Amazon, Google’s temporary workers and Amazon’s warehouse employees fight for fair labour conditions. In tackling social ills, companies should never overlook the struggles of their own employees.

CSR is still needed, but we can do even better. What we are proposing is inconvenient, disturbing, and uncomfortable, but it’s time for companies to get things right.


Our critique of CSR is inspired by the following contributions:

de Bakker, F. G., Matten, D., Spence, L. J., & Wickert, C. (2020). The elephant in the room: The nascent research agenda on corporations, social responsibility, and capitalismBusiness & Society, in press.

Feix, A., & Philippe, D. (2020). Unpacking the narrative decontestation of CSR: Aspiration for change or defense of the status quo?Business & Society59(1), 129-174.

Kaplan, S. (2020). Beyond the business case for social responsibilityAcademy of Management Discoveries, 6(1), 1-4. 

Khan, F. R., Munir, K. A., & Willmott, H. (2007). A dark side of institutional entrepreneurship: Soccer balls, child labour and postcolonial impoverishmentOrganization studies28(7), 1055-1077.

Schneider, A. (2019). Bound to Fail? Exploring the Systemic Pathologies of CSR and Their Implications for CSR Research. Business & Society, in press.


About the Authors

Luda Svystunova is a Lecturer in International Management at the Institute for International Management, Loughborough University London. Luda’s research examines multinational firms’ interactions with their non-market context through corporate social responsibility and corporate political activity, particularly in non-Western settings. She is also interested in the role individuals within and outside companies play in these interactions. Luda’s Twitter: @LudaSV

Verena Girschik is Assistant Professor of CSR, Communication, and Organization at the Department of Management, Society and Communication, Copenhagen Business School. Verena’s research focuses on the responsibilities of companies in the contexts of complex societal problems and humanitarian crises. Interested in relations between companies, governments, NGOs, and other societal actors, her research explores how companies negotiate their roles and responsibilities, how they perform them, and to what consequences. Verena’s Twitter: @verenaCPH


Image by GeekWire Photo / Monica Nickelsburg

Lobbying and the virus – three trends to take note of

By Dieter Zinnbauer

Writing about anything in relation to Covid-19 is rather hopeless. Any attempt to describe current developments has a half-time of 30 minutes. Any attempt to speculate what lies ahead drowns in the flood of near infinite plausible trajectories. And any and every attempt usually ends up with the hammer and nail problem, resulting in the author pushing his favorite pre-existing policy to ask  as an essential ingredient in the crisis response, much as the whole world looks like nails when you hold the proverbial hammer in your hand.

Nevertheless here a foolish attempt to jot down some small observations of how the Covid situation is currently influencing how businesses lobby government, or in jargon corporate political activity. In a nutshell: there are indications that there is more, that it is more conventional and that integrity in lobbying is more in demand than ever.  In detail:

1) A lot to win and a lot loose means a lot to do or: “Everybody is upside down. All the clients are upside down” (US lobbyist)

Lobbying is typically understood as anti-cyclical as it tends to experience an uptick in economic downturns. Yet this time is a difference in scale and a difference in kind. Covid-19 is an essential threat to a vast array of industries and companies that until a few weeks ago looked very solid. At the same time, the scale of financial support and transformational depth of regulatory responses that are being considered and dispersed are absolutely unprecedented in the post WW2 era.

Existential stakes convert into a sharp increase in lobbying. Recent data shows that lobbying spending in the US has climbed to near-record levels already and the centrepiece of legislation, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act is the second most lobbied upon a piece of legislation.

There are new clients – that also fuel the lobbying boom – three quarters of lobbying filings in the US that mention COVID issues are by new principals. And there is a flourishing new service line out there helping companies shape new rule-writing and expedite approval for their anti-corona products. Many are desperate, everyone is out to get a piece of the cake and as even the most adept watchdogs have a hard time with tracking all proposed rule-changes and handouts it may also be a good time to slip in this long-coveted, yet unrelated regulatory tweak in one’s own favour that otherwise might have not withstood public scrutiny.

2) Forward to the basics tools, tactics and incumbents.

It seems likely and there are indications that corporate political activity is for the time being concentrating on tried and tested tools and relations. First, the Covid-19 response is the hour of the executive as the first phases of the policy response are firmly driven by the executive in most countries around the world. Emergency powers are being invoked, far-reaching policies are hastily cobbled together in small committee, and implemented qua executive orders. Ex-ante legislative deliberation is compressed, public consultations are limited and judicial reviews are only slowly kicking into gear.  All this means that lobbying is currently heavily focused pragmatically on very tangible outcomes and the executive branch of government as for example, a top German lobbyist has described in a recent interview.

Expected budget cuts and trimmed client accounts for public relation agencies in the first-affected Asia-Pacific also suggest that more sophisticated upstream strategies for framing and influencing public debates in the longer run are being put on the backburner and efforts are shifting towards core government relations work. Add to this that social distancing measures and going virtual makes it difficult to cultivate new relationships. As a result, existing, networks and long-time friends who may have walked through the revolving door between public office and private practice carry the day dealing substantive incumbency advantages to the already well-connected and established players both in terms of in-house lobbying departments and hired firms.

3) An incipient debate about the fundamentals close to home – and high stakes for integrity

Financial distress and zero-sum dynamics in what are ultimately finite support programs demand maximum resolve when making one’s case to the government. Many more interests than usually have come to the fore to compete for the pie and some of these competitors can be expected to act very opportunistically. All this puts enormous stress on integrity in lobbying. But this comes at a time when the integrity of the corporate political activity is perhaps more important than ever. 

Policy-makers enter into uncharted territory with many of their interventions and stabilization efforts. Peak uncertainty means they need accurate information on the situation of different interests and stakeholder groups and how they may be affected by different policy options. Policy-makers need more of this information more urgently than ever. Extreme fragility means that the consequences of mis-judgments are substantive.

All this highlights how important the honest, proportionate, evidence-supported articulation of interests and concerns to government is at this moment in time. In the eye of the public business appears to be largely failing in this area. Less than 40% of respondents in a very recent 11-country survey – the spring update to the 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer –  perceived business to be a reliable source of useful and accurate information during the pandemic, a number that dropped to even more staggering lows of 24% and 15%  in France and Japan respectively.

Yet, the relevance of credibly upholding integrity in lobbying goes even deeper. The specter of special interests hijacking the Covid response looms large as a tremendous PR nightmare. Such a storyline is ready to combine with the bitter aftertaste of the last financial crisis response that many perceived to be undermined by strong industry lobbying. The prospects of a special deal for special interests could thus further inflame the very anti-business sentiments that are already on the rise: in the same survey as referenced above respondents put business CEOs last when thinking which types of professions and leaders do a good job in meeting the demands the pandemic puts on them, while only 38% thought business did a good job in putting people before profits.

Pushing public opinion that is already at the edge further into the negative territory through reckless corporate political activity looks like a bad idea even from a narrow tactical perspective. This is because another fallout from Covid is an emerging public debate about the basic bargain between business and the public and the increasing readiness to consider options for a fairer settlement that until recently seemed to have difficult to find acceptance in the mainstream.

The 11-country Edelman survey again captures some of these sentiments: a remarkable 64% of people agreed with this statement:

“This pandemic has made me realize how big the gap in this country is between the rich and the working class, and that something must be done to more fairly distribute our country’s wealth and prosperity”

Massive public financial support is a great lever for updating the social licence to operate for the corporate world. This is not a theoretical possibility but has already become a reality. Widely discussed provisions to bar companies that engage in overly aggressive tax planning or pay out dividends in times of crisis from benefiting from post-Covid support is one example. So is the observation that a debate about the legitimacy of share buy-backs that despite its policy relevance was more or less confined to the fringe of experts and specialized advocates all of a sudden features prominently in the policy mainstream. It has even prompted the European Commission to require a ban on share buybacks as a central condition when government prop up companies by acquiring equity ownership.

This public limelight for a seemingly arcane issue is well deserved considering that for example the top airlines in the US that are currently clamoring for public support are estimated to have spent 96% of their free cash flow during the last decade on share buybacks and built no meaningful reserves to weather a major crisis, a strategy termed by a banker from a top firm as “a staple arrow in the quiver of companies… to optimize how they drive the most value for their shareholders”. From a corporate lobbying view not particularly productive narratives to feed any more.

Many, including this author, view this as a much needed and welcome conversation about how to refresh the principal compact between business and society in view of sharing the benefits and costs from business activity fairly and within planetary boundaries. Business will not do itself a favor when flexing its lobbying muscle too hard for special treatment at this point in time when the public is increasingly prepared to doubt and revisit the basic tenets of this compact.

Responsible corporate activity, transparent, well-governed and aligned with purpose, planetary boundaries and broader regards for all stakeholders is not a nice add on for good times. It is essential to protect the public trust in functioning institutions, functioning crisis response and a functioning societal bargain with business. This is not the time to call in special favours and push a narrow agenda. This is the time to do act as a responsible corporate citizen on all fronts and particularly when it comes to government engagement.

Now there it is:  my policy agenda framed as essential in Covid times. The whole world looks like nails when you have a hammer in the hand.  But in this instance, of course, it is for real.


About the author

Dieter Zinnbauer is a Marie-Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at CBS’ Department of Management, Society and Communication. His CBS research focuses on business as political actor in the context of big data, populism and “corporate purpose fatigue”.

Twitter: @Dzinnbauer

Essays: https://medium.com/@Dzinnbauer

Working papers:  https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=1588618


More about coronavirus pandemic on Business of Society blog:

The Coronavirus Pandemic – and the Consequentiality of Metaphors

Sustainable Development, Interrupted?

The Political Economy of the Olympics – Misconceptions about Sustainability

Supply Chain Responsibilities in a Global Pandemic

A Green and Fair COVID-19 Recovery Plan

In Movement from Tanzania to Northern Italy to Denmark

How to make food systems more resilient: Try Behavioural Food Policies

Photo by Dieter Zinnbauer

How to make food systems more resilient: Try Behavioural Food Policies

By Lucia A. Reisch

The vision of healthy and sustainable food systems that facilitate appropriate food choices by individuals is gaining momentum in practice and in the marketplace. As the single strongest lever to optimize both human health and environmental sustainability, the food choices we make matter in multiple ways – for our bodies, the environment, and the economic and social fabric of societies. Acknowledging and actively harnessing co-benefits of “win-win diets” is a major focus of current food, farm, environmental, and health policy that aims to positively influence consumer behaviour. A behavioural turn in food policy that puts individuals and their choices at center stage holds promise for manifesting the vision of healthy and sustainable food systems.

As we collectively ponder lessons learned from the coronavirus pandemic, a key aspect will be to consider how to increase resilience of societies and economies in general and food systems in particular, to better endure a crisis in the future.

The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) defines resilience as ‘the ability to prevent disasters and crises as well as to anticipate, absorb, accommodate or recover from them in a timely, efficient and sustainable manner. This includes protecting, restoring and improving livelihood systems in the face of threats that impact agriculture, nutrition, food security and food safety.’ [1]

Food chains today are long and globalized, and retail systems are streamlined for efficiency with just-in-time inventories, all adding to the vulnerability of systems. While the basic food provision in Europe continued during the pandemic (not least due to the availability of local food chains), cracks appeared at the retail level with shortages of staples. Admittedly, many shortages were due to stockpiling by frightened people – a behavioural factor rather than a reflection of true supply shortages. One can speculate now that if the crisis were to continue, other dependencies (for instance, on mostly Eastern European farm workers for harvesting) will become obvious.

In a healthy and sustainable food system, the products that are grown, processed, and distributed are health-supporting, safe, environmentally and climate friendly; farmers and laborers work for fair wages under decent conditions; and on the demand side, equal and easy access to affordable, healthy, and sustainable diets as well as nutrition security are provided for today’s and future generations. This sounds like a utopia but it is our future.

The EAT Lancet Commission on Healthy Diets for Sustainable Food Systems recently defined a concrete healthy reference diet that, if applied, can be provided “for an anticipated world population of nearly 10 billion people by 2050 and still stay within a safe operating space on Earth” (Willett et al. 2019).

Balanced and sustainable food systems that stay within the planetary boundaries and provide a minimum level of safety, access, and equity are doubtlessly more resilient – i.e., more robust in times of shocks and crisis – than lean, efficiency-maximizing, far-flung global supply systems. The advantages and necessity of system resilience are likely to constitute one big learning from the pandemic.

Another big learning is that consumer-citizen behaviour is much more malleable and adaptive than many policymakers (and researchers) had thought. People are able and ready to quickly change deeply ingrained habits, adopt new practices (social distancing, home cooking), and adhere to new social norms (wearing masks, hand washing) if – important qualifier – the reasons seem (scientifically) sound, are limited to a bearable time span, and are well explained by a trustworthy government.

Some governments (Sweden, e.g.) rely on voluntary action and “nudging” alone; others (Germany, e.g.) combine harsh bans, intense risk communication, and behaviourally informed policies such as warnings, framing, priming, reminders, defaults, and boosts. We don’t know yet which strategies will work best, but it has already become clear that much can be achieved by using behavioural insights, calling on the responsibility of people, giving positive feedback and reminders, and harnessing the power of (dynamic) social norms and peer pressure.

In the words of the great Danny Kahneman: good policy needs to activate both types of people’s decision-making: the quick, intuitive, emotional “System 1” and the slow, cognitive, deliberate “System 2”.

It is not a new idea that insights into the biases and heuristics, the habits and motivations of consumers can be useful to design effective policies. This is the essence of the new field of Behavioural Public Policy that constitutes these days an International Association of Behavioural Public Policy. The evidence is increasing that a behavioural approach can indeed help design better food policies. What we call Behavioural Food Policy puts people’s needs, biases, and decisions at center stage, offering a specific behavioural lens to existing (hard and soft) policies that can make them more effective. It relies on governance processes that are based on empirical, often experimental testing, learning, and adapting. Public deliberation and participation in these processes help consumer-citizens understand and eventually approve of the policies. This potential of behavioural policies to shift habits and food demand is under-utilized but growing.

This approach is echoed by the global climate change community in the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) upcoming 6th Assessment Report. [2] The report identifies two major behavioural changes that substantially mitigate greenhouse gas emissions: avoiding food waste and dietary shifts to plant-based nutrition. As to the former, simple behaviour such as meal planning and creative use of leftovers can help reduce food waste on the individual level; retail can adjust its marketing, and regulators can improve the handling of expiration labels and best-before dates. Regarding the latter, reducing (mainly ruminant) meat consumption and substituting animal protein with field-grown protein are seen as major steps. A diet light in meat is better for one’s health, leads to greater animal welfare, helps reduce food-borne diseases and food crisis, and produces less greenhouse gas emissions. Because individual choices are the basis of any healthy and sustainable food system, understanding and influencing consumer behaviour is a promising route to achieving sustainability, resilience, and healthfulness of our food systems and society generally.


References

[1] http://www.fao.org/emergencies/how-we-work/resilience/en/.

[2] The author is a contributing author to this IPCC AR6 chapter.


About the author

Lucia A. Reisch is Professor of consumer behaviour and consumer policy at the Department of Management, Society and Communication (MSC) within the CBS Sustainability. Her research focuses on behavioural economics, behavioural public policy, sustainable consumption (in particular, energy, food and health, active mobility and fashion), intercultural consumer behaviour, consumers and digitization, as well as consumer policy.


More about coronavirus pandemic on Business of Society blog:

The Coronavirus Pandemic – and the Consequentiality of Metaphors

Sustainable Development, Interrupted?

The Political Economy of the Olympics – Misconceptions about Sustainability

Supply Chain Responsibilities in a Global Pandemic

A Green and Fair COVID-19 Recovery Plan

In Movement from Tanzania to Northern Italy to Denmark


Photo by Chad Stembridge on Unsplash

In Movement from Tanzania to Northern Italy to Denmark

By Lisa Ann Richey

This article is based on her previously written piece for the Centre for Business and Development Studies.

My first memory of the Corona virus, before we became politicized enough to refer to it as COVID-19, or the “new” Corona virus—or for some special politicians, the “Wuhan” virus—was in Tanzania. Enjoying the evening breeze from the Indian ocean in the public area of our workshop hotel, I sat with a couple of our research team members catching up on life via apps on the smartphone. I came across a small shitstorm on my social media about our Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen. Technically speaking, she is not ‘my’ Prime Minister as my citizenship application was denied last year on the grounds of having spent too much time living outside of the country in South Africa, Italy and the US during the past 20 years. The “Wuhan virus” bleach-your-lungs guy, is actually the current head of the nation where I vote.

Yet, our Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen was in the media adamantly refusing to issue a public apology for a Danish cartoon that had been published on January 27th by Jyllands-Posten, a second-rate, nationally distributed newspaper, infamous for publishing the 2005 “Muhammed cartoons” which led to international violence, boycotts and around 200 deaths. The latest cartoon was a drawing of the Chinese flag with its five gold stars replaced by five virions of Corona. China’s embassy accused the cartoonist of insulting China and demanded an apology. The Danish Prime Minister refused and her response is on record as saying ‘we have freedom of expression in Denmark – also to draw.

Most politicians and many Danes supported the cartoonist, attributing the outrage of many Chinese as ‘cultural difference.’ The newspaper editor defended that the publication was not ‘poking fun of the situation’ stating: ‘We cannot apologise for something we don’t think is wrong. We have no intention of being demeaning or to mock, nor do we think that the drawing does. As far as I can see, this here is about different forms of cultural understanding.’ When the Corona flag was published, 100 deaths from the virus had been documented in the Chinese city of Wuhan and ‘cultural’ understandings of right and wrong ways to portray the virus, to call its name, to recognize its symptoms, to document its death rates, to protect citizens within closed borders were just beginning.

But it was only January, and our international research team starting a five-year project on how people outside of the formal humanitarian sector respond to crises in Tanzania, had no idea the ways that this Coronavirus would come to affect us. We still don’t. We live quite specifically in Copenhagen, Dar es Salaam and London. But many of us are a bit of an Afropolitan/Cosmopolitan mish-mash by parentage— Chagga/Meru, British/Dane, American/Italian, Kenyan/Tanzanian and we have lived across various countries in Africa, Europe and Asia for work, studies, or by the accident of birth. We are all employed by the state in university jobs. For all of us, these are good jobs. We are comfortable. But, now, we are uncomfortable.

We are in different stages of our careers—from doctoral students to full professors—and these days, as the global pandemic settles over all of us in different and forcibly separate parts of the world, we feel differently the burdens of different responsibilities. One of our team wrote to me: ‘I work like hell while managing a family who is also sick and tired of being locked up… I’m trying to manage 200 staff members’ teaching, supervision and examination responsibilities, plus their externally funded research projects, their problems with spouses, kids and dogs… I want my life back…’

Another of us had to travel upcountry to Kilimanjaro to look after her ageing mother who lives alone on a farm. I imagine her weighing the risks of the transport, the confusing messages from the government about whether anyone should travel, or even leave their house, of whether the handful of cases that had been officially reported in Tanzania were exaggerated hyperbole or grossly under-reported with those of your own mother, and getting on the bus. I would have done the same.

But I am getting ahead of the story, back in January when we were planning how to study earthquakes and floods, refugee camps and their communities and perhaps locusts, we had no possible imagination of the new crisis that would consume us. We held our workshops, discussed the academic literature, planned the plans, drafted the MOUs, enjoyed our barbecue and good conversations and parted ways. Since January in Dar es Salaam, our team’s intellectual energy has become professional, intellectual, political and highly personal about whether to hoard supplies or wear medical masks, how much hand washing with which kind of water could be enough, how would people help each other when the most helpful thing they were told to do was to stay apart?

My flight went from Dar es Salaam to Istanbul. When I arrived in the crowded airport, something felt a little different to me, but I couldn’t quite figure it out. As I neared the gate for my connecting flight to Venice, I noticed that about half of the passengers were wearing medical masks. Thinking about our Danish Corona-flag incident, I remembered to check my cultural bias as I noticed the masks around me. Many appeared Asian and I know it is good hygiene to wear masks when in crowded public places, so I thought it mostly a sign of politeness. Yet, many were also Italians, headed on the plane with me. Not checking my cultural bias so effectively when considering a culture that I now also claim as my own, I remember thinking, ‘hysterical, over-reacting Italians.’


About the author

Lisa Ann Richey is a Professor in the Department of Management, Society and Communication at the Copenhagen Business School.


More about coronavirus pandemic:

The Coronavirus Pandemic – and the Consequentiality of Metaphors

Sustainable Development, Interrupted?

The Political Economy of the Olympics – Misconceptions about Sustainability

Supply Chain Responsibilities in a Global Pandemic

A Green and Fair COVID-19 Recovery Plan


Photo by Matt Seymour on Unsplash

A Green and Fair COVID-19 Recovery Plan

By Stefano Ponte

This article is based on his previously written piece for the Centre for Business and Development Studies.

The COVID-19 crisis has made evident the limitations of existing thinking, preparedness and policy in relation not only to health pandemics but also to the sustainability challenges we face, locally and globally. Contemporary capitalism, with its hyper-individualistic culture and just-in-time – instead of just-in-case – approach to infrastructure and essential equipment, is not geared towards solving global problems that require coordination, cooperation and solidarity. As some activists, scholars and medical personnel have stated recently, ‘We don’t need heroes if we have preparation’.

Clear examples that have emerged with particular force in the past few months include the political inability to coordinate emergency responses within the EU and the US, cut-throat competition among countries seeking to procure essential medical gear, and the realization that we have been undermining the working conditions for ‘essential workers’ for decades. Therefore, an expansive economic stimulus to restart the economy during/post-covid-19 cannot be based on the first-line response of capitalism – restoring production and consumption back to ‘usual’.

This is the time to expand and rethink our socio-economic models to stimulate a more sustainable approach to consumption – not limited to consuming more sustainable goods and services (such as organic milk, ecotourism holiday or FSC certified timber), but also on consuming less.

We need to rethink the current organization of the global economy, reform the national economic and political institutions that govern it and devise new forms of governance and collective action within states and across borders. Contemporary hyper-capitalism, rather than humanity per se, is the root cause of the global sustainability crisis and the spread of pandemics – and thus should be the focus of action.

To achieve this, we need a different kind of ‘green entrepreneurial state’ that de-couples sustainability from growth, and that does not intervene to bail out carbon-intensive industries tout court. Oil markets have tanked in recent weeks, and $0 (or even negative) oil prices are devaluing oil industry assets dramatically. A green and just recovery in the oil industry transition means focusing on helping workers first and foremost, rather than executives or shareholders. This could entail partial nationalization of assets to essentially shut the oil industry down in the mid-term and open the way for further investment in renewables, which would otherwise be dampened by competition from cheap oil.

Second, what we need is more community involvement in the economy, changes in labour law to make unionization easier, tax reforms to make municipal and cooperative forms of organization more attractive, corporate regulation to facilitate employee ownership, and stimuli to expand the radical and democratic ecological experiments that are already in place – such as the shared living communities that have been active in Denmark since the 1970s.

Third, important insights for a recovery plan can be offered by the idea of ‘just sustainability’, which incorporates ‘the need to ensure a better quality of life for all, now and into the future, in a just and equitable manner, whilst living within the limits of supporting ecosystems’. Therefore, a path towards recovery during-and-post COVID-19 needs to address inequality – as it drives competitive consumption and leads to lower levels of trust in societies, making public action (including under a pandemic) more difficult. Excluding companies from recovery funds which have made use of tax avoidance tools is one of the necessary steps. But broader and collective actions to stamp out tax heavens are needed more than ever.


About the author

Stefano Ponte is Professor of International Political Economy at Copenhagen Business School and Director of the Centre for Business and Development Studies. His latest book Business, power and sustainability in a world of global value chains was published by Zed Books in 2019.


More about coronavirus pandemic:

The Coronavirus Pandemic – and the Consequentiality of Metaphors

Sustainable Development, Interrupted?

The Political Economy of the Olympics – Misconceptions about Sustainability

Supply Chain Responsibilities in a Global Pandemic


Photo by Edwin Hooper on Unsplash

The Coronavirus Pandemic – and the Consequentiality of Metaphors

By Dennis Schoeneborn

Language is a reef of dead metaphors (Guy Deutscher)

We are in the midst of an unfolding crisis that humanity is struggling to understand. To make sense of the unknown, humans tend to rely on metaphors, analogies, or other rhetorical figures. What do metaphors do? They allow for giving meaning to a (rather unknown) target domain by projecting and transferring insights from a (presumably better known) source domain.

For instance, in the public discourse about the current Coronavirus pandemic, the sensemaking process includes analogies within the same domain (e.g., Trump stating at the beginning of the pandemic: “It’s just like a regular flu”; Bolsonaro maintaining for a long time that it’s just a “little flu”) –  or metaphors that tap into the source domain of natural disasters (e.g., the “tsunami” metaphor used by various medical professionals) or of human warfare (e.g., Trump’s more recent framing of coronavirus to be an “invisible enemy”; Macron’s insistence that “we’re at war”).

World leaders, journalists, social media influencers, epidemiologists and other contributors to the public debate can be presumed to mobilize such metaphors not only to foster sensemaking but ultimately also to steer citizens’ behavior.

For all that we know, metaphors tend to “have profound influences on how we conceptualize and act with respect to important societal issues”.

(Thibodeau & Boroditsky, 2011, p. 1)

Accordingly, it is worthwhile studying how and to what extent the use of different metaphors can inspire, influence and “organize” individual and collective behavior.

As the work by Joep Cornelissen reminds us, the fruitfulness of a metaphor depends on (1) its aptness (i.e. whether a metaphor ‘fits’ and it’s meaningful) as well as (2) its heuristic value (i.e. the extent to which a metaphor offers new insights into an unfamiliar domain; see Cornelissen, 2004).

However, aptness and heuristic value tend to be in a trade-off relation: While close proximity between source and target domain can help strengthen the aptness of a metaphor, it tends to diminish the metaphor’s heuristic value, at the same time. The latter problem also occurs when the metaphorical connection between two domain becomes so well-established (e.g., the link between epidemics and warfare) that the metaphor loses its ability to lend new meaning to the target domain (i.e. a term’s metaphorical quality “dies” so-to-speak; e.g., the term World Wide Web, where hardly anybody today would think of spider webs). In contrast, metaphors can be kept vivid and alive via the power of dissimilarity: the greater the contextual distance between two domains, the better the chance of a metaphor to be insightful.

This may be one of the reasons why novel and unusual combinations of metaphors, such as Tomas Pueyo’s notion of “The Hammer and the Dance” (while being aptly chosen in that case, as well) may have better prospects to lend new meaning to the pandemic and thus inspire new and desirable modes of behavior.

Taken together, the current crisis situation is also a crisis of collective imagination and sensemaking. Hence, in these turbulent and worrisome times it is more important than ever that contributors to the public debate think twice before mobilizing metaphorical imaginations – and to consider not only their aptness, heuristic value, or “retweetability” but also their potential (and sometimes unintended) consequences for individual, collective, and organizational behavior. Ultimately, it is not only the “brute fact” (Searle) of the pandemic that can severely harm us – but also the meanings that are ascribed to it (e.g., via metaphors) and that can materialize in very concrete actions.

For instance, individuals and collectives are likely to act less careful if they believe the Coronavirus to be “just like a flu” – and more careful if they grasp the virus to have chameleon-like features that make it hard to detect (e.g. recent evidence that the virus can also surface in damages to the heart and brain).

To conclude, the current pandemic serves as painful evidence for the importance of theories that highlight the constitutive role of communication for phenomena of orga­nization and organizing. In other words, communication in forms of metaphors, narratives, or other rhetorical means, especially if voiced by opinion leaders, tends to be not just “cheap talk” but can be highly consequential (as also powerfully shown by recent studies on “Narrative Economics” by Nobel Prize winner Robert Shiller).


About the author

Dennis Schoeneborn is Professor of Organization, Communication, and CSR at Copenhagen Business School, and Visiting Professor of Organization Studies at Leuphana University of Lüneburg. He serves as head coordinator of the Standing Working Group “Organization as Communication” at the European Group of Organizational Studies (EGOS). He furthermore serves as Associate Editor of the journal Business and Society.


More about coronavirus pandemic:

Sustainable Development, Interrupted?

The Political Economy of the Olympics – Misconceptions about Sustainability

Supply Chain Responsibilities in a Global Pandemic


Illustration by Dan Page

Supply Chain Responsibilities in a Global Pandemic

By Jette Steen Knudsen, Erin Leitheiser, Shaidur Rahman & Jeremy Moon

What is the responsibility of Western retailers to the workers who make their garments as the coronavirus forces factories to shut down?

Shopping malls are closed, gatherings are banned, thousands of employees have been furloughed, and movement outside of one’s home is discouraged if not outright illegal.  This has meant bad news for apparel brands and retailers as nervous customers cease buying. In the U.S., for example, retail sales in March were down almost 9% compared to in February.  Those brands and retailers which have built their businesses on a fast fashion model – predicated on the continuous churn of high volumes of cheap clothes – face unprecedented challenges and questions about responsibilities in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Retailers have responded in different ways.  As they have had to shut down their stores many have stated that they will not pay rent. For example, German sportswear producer Adidas stated (March 26 200, Reuters) that

“Almost all over the world there is no normal business anymore. The shops are closed. Even a healthy company like Adidas cannot stand this for long”.

Adidas was one of a string of retailers in Germany that said they wouldn’t be paying their landlords while their stores are closed as part of efforts to stem the coronavirus spread. Adidas said it would need credit even after staff cut their working hours, executives waived part of their pay and the company stopped share buybacks. Adidas’ decision was met with an uproar in Germany eventually forcing the company to formally apologize and to report that it planned to suspend a planned 1 billion euro ($1.09 billion) share buyback in an effort conserve cash after closing its retail outlets in Europe and North America. Adidas also said it would pay rent.

In Denmark, Anders Holck Poulsen, the owner of the clothing company Bestseller and Denmark’s wealthiest man, also announced that the company would not pay rent for its stores. Bestseller (parent company for brands like Vera Moda, Jack & Jones, Pieces, and Name It, among others) later reversed the decision following a public outcry and the CEO went on national television to apologize. Bestseller subsequently laid off 750 employees and sought financial support from the government.  This decision was met sharp with sharp criticism because over the last five years Mr. Holck Poulsen has paid DKK 7.6 billion (more than $ 1 billion) in dividends to his private holding company Heartland.

Not all companies have responded this way. Patagonia, for example, has promised that all of its employees will continue to receive their regular pay during store closures.

However, with many large brands scaling back their social responsibility in the Western part of the world, what kind of responsibility can we reasonably expect from Western retailers in places such as Bangladesh?

Bangladesh is heavily dependent on apparel production. Apparel comprises more than 80% of the country’s total export revenue and the sector employs more than 4 million workers, most of them women.  However, in recent weeks many Western brands have cancelled their orders from Bangladesh, and it is estimated that more than 2 million workers have lost their jobs.  H&M is the largest buyer of garments from Bangladesh and has reluctantly agreed to take and pay for the shipments of goods already manufactured as well as those that are still being produced. Inditex, PVH and Marks and Spencer have also agreed to pay suppliers for orders that are already produced but not all companies have done so. Primark, for example, has cancelled orders, and virtually all buyers have pulled orders that have not yet gone into production.  At the end of March 2020 orders for more than $1,5 billion had been cancelled, and Bangladesh reported -19% year-on-year export volume for the month.

What is the responsibility of large brands like Bestseller or H&M for their supplier factories in Bangladesh? Western brands have a long tradition for stating their commitment to CSR in global supply chains, including elaborate Codes of Conduct for social and environmental performance in supplier factories. Bangladesh has staked its claim as the low-cost producer of garments, and its costs and production capacities cannot be easily matched elsewhere in the world. The model of fast fashion needs Bangladesh, and Bangladesh, in turn, needs fast fashion. 

Now that crisis reigns upon all of us in the form of a global health pandemic, it is the most vulnerable of workers who have been left in the lurch, be it the retails associates who stock shelves or the stitchers who sew together T-shirts.  As buyers cancel orders, few recognize the perilous position that these workers are left in. For those working on the factory floor in Bangladesh, more than 2 million have been furloughed, many without pay, despite a governmental scheme intended to address these issues.  The meagre wages of garment factory workers have not allowed for savings that could support them in such times, and the prospect of long-term closures – or at least, no orders to fill and therefore no paid work – means almost certain disaster for them and their families. 

Garment workers in Bangladesh have risen up in protest, stating that

“…we don’t have any choice.  We are starving.  If we stay at home, we may save ourselves from the virus.  But who will save us from starvation?”

(13 April 2020, The Guardian).

While some brands, like Primark, have set up charitable funding pools to help support workers, the money has yet to make it to their pockets, and the “charitable” framing of this funding on behalf of brands speaks volumes about what they see as their responsibilities.  Yet, when the crisis passes and shopping malls re-open, brands will again be reliant upon these workers to satisfy their demand for an endless supply of cheap garments. 

Given that cheap labor is a fundamental need for fast fashion companies to survive, shouldn’t brands likewise ensure the survival of those on which it depends? 


This is the first in a series of blogs which will further explore the responsibility of the Bangladesh government, factories, Western governments and civil society organizations for dealing with COVID-19 in places like Bangladesh.  


About the authors

Jette Steen Knudsen is Professor of Policy and International Business at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and holds the Shelby Collum Davis Chair in Sustainability.  She is also a Velux Fellow at Copenhagen Business School where she is part of the Regulation of International Supply Chains (RISC) project

Erin Leitheiser is an Assistant Professor at Copenhagen Business School and Project Manager of the Regulation of International Supply Chains (RISC) project

Shaidur Rahman is Professor of Sociology at BRAC University where he is part of the Regulation of International Supply Chains (RISC) project

Jeremy Moon is Professor of Sustainability Governance and Director of the Sustainability Centre at Copenhagen Business School.  He is the Project Coordinator of the Regulation of International Supply Chains (RISC) project.

Photo by ILO Asia-Pacific

The Political Economy of the Olympics – Misconceptions about Sustainability

By Faith Hatani

In the midst of the global coronavirus crisis, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Japanese government finally decided last month to postpone the Tokyo 2020 Olympics until next year. The general public across the world may have different views on the Olympics – positive and negative, or simply indifference. But with regard to the Tokyo Games, there is a fair reason for not just postponing them but reconsidering their relevance and preferably cancelling them altogether. The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has underscored the long-standing controversies surrounding the Tokyo Olympics, and it is indeed sustainability that is at stake.

Economic problems in the host country

A tag line that Tokyo, the host city of the 2020 Olympics, has been using is “Recovery Olympics” for a sustainable future. The “recovery” is primarily referring to the recovery from the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, and the ensuing nuclear disaster in Fukushima, a city in northern Japan. When Tokyo was successful in its bid to host the Games, it estimated that the market effect of the Olympics and Paralympics would be more than JPY 32 trillion in total, which would be a huge boost to Japan’s shrinking economy. Clinging on to this rather optimistic figure, the IOC and the host government were reluctant to make any change to the original schedule in spite of the coronavirus pandemic, and their attitude was criticised as “wildly irresponsible” (Boykoff, 2020).

Besides the cost-benefit analysis of the Tokyo Games, it should be noted that, as of March 2020, nine years after the Fukushima disaster, approximately 48,000 people were still living in evacuation zones in Japan. Despite this, a huge amount of money has been spent on constructing new facilities for the Olympics, rather than aiming to reconstruct “sustainable cities and communities” (Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11) in the disaster-hit northern city. Meanwhile, the Tokyo Olympics has been the most over-budgeted Games ever, because of Tokyo’s lax policy.

Postponing the Olympics will entail an extended preparation/maintenance period for another year amid uncertainty, which is likely to impose an additional tax burden on citizens. It is highly questionable whether the host government has appropriately prioritised key issues and allocated resources accordingly.

Environmental issues: Value chains in the global sports industry 

The Olympics is big business, involving not only elite athletes, but also a large number of stakeholders such as sponsors, media, providers of various products, and spectators. A mass of people moves across borders and within the host country, consuming a great number of goods in just a few weeks. The huge amount of greenhouse gases and waste that each Olympic Games generates has been the subject of continuing international debate. These are also the problem areas addressed by SDGs 12 and 13.

On the other hand, the United Nations recognises that sport can be an enabler of sustainable development (UN General Assembly, 2018). If the host is committed to the SDGs, and stakeholders and resource-rich companies/countries collaborate to implement environmentally friendly technologies and practices, the Olympics could be a showcase of new ideas to facilitate sustainability. In this regard, the Organising Committee of the Tokyo Games has promoted several sustainability concepts and plans. Nevertheless, a group of non-governmental organisations has raised a question concerning Tokyo’s approach (Heineken, 2019). They reported that a huge new national stadium for the 2020 Games was built by cutting down trees in Indonesia and Malaysia, thereby damaging these countries’ efforts to preserve their rainforests (SDG 15).

When it comes to a mega sporting event such as the Olympics, we tend to, somewhat naively, pay attention to the downstream, in which big brands, celebrities, impressive new technologies and goods to consume are all visible, and we are often ignorant of what is happening in the upstream.

If the upstream of the whole value chain is neglected and sustainability is used (or misused) as just a fancy concept, while economic actors act irresponsibly, the SDGs will never materialise.

Health concerns: Summer heat as usual, and now Covid-19

Since Tokyo was selected as the host city for the 2020 Olympics, persistent health concerns have been raised. One of the almost inevitable problems in Tokyo is, in fact, a hot summer, which Weather Atlas describes as “oppressive humidity and extremely high temperatures”. Indeed, many people actually suffer illness each year due to the summer heat in Japan; in 2019 alone, more than 70,000 people were admitted to hospital due to hyperthermia.

Although Tokyo insists that the Olympic venues will be closely monitored with adequate safety measures, it is unclear how this can be guaranteed, not just for the athletes but also for the volunteers and spectators in the different locations.

Now, a new and bigger concern certainly involves Covid-19. To date (as of mid-April 2020), the number of confirmed cases in Japan has been significantly lower than the other G7 nations as well as neighbouring Asian countries. However, medical experts and other countries are sceptical, questioning whether Japan may be overly restricting coronavirus testing in order to maintain its safe image for the sake of the Olympics. Of course, the slow testing could be due to other factors such as the limited availability of testing kits, which has also been a problem for other countries. Nonetheless, the root cause of the concern is the slow response of the authorities in taking the necessary action, because this would trigger an explosion of infection cases as we have witnessed in other countries.

Although Tokyo eventually declared a state of emergency on 7 April, this was a few weeks later than the lockdowns enforced by many major countries, and two months after a coronavirus outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship anchored offshore in Yokohama, just 30 km from Tokyo. Tokyo’s lenient approach casts doubt on its capability of dealing with communicable diseases when a rapid response is crucial (SDG 3). 

The point is not to abolish all future Olympic Games as this global sporting event can be an important platform for athletes, and potentially a contributor to peace (SDG 16), or at least a symbol of it. However, the Tokyo Olympics is missing the meaning behind sustainability in many ways. Furthermore, amongst other factors, it is also ill-timed. The world is now facing a serious challenge on a global scale.

One clear message that the coronavirus pandemic has taught us is that we may be vulnerable wherever we are – even in a wealthy country – and that we all have a responsibility to strive for sustainability.

In this context, financial resources should be invested in essential products and vaccine research to tackle Covid-19, and human resources should be allocated to immediate needs to sustain local societies. In short, get the priorities right. Then, strong global partnerships and cooperation (SDG 17) will hopefully facilitate our efforts and achieve a more meaningful positive outcome.


About the author

Faith Hatani is Associate Professor at the Department of International Economics, Government and Business at Copenhagen Business School. Her research interests reside in the role of international business in sustainable economic development, focusing on responsible management of value chains and institutional constraints in different industries and countries.


References

Boykoff, J. (2020) Cancel. The. Olympics. The New York Times.

Heineken, H. (2019) Olympic timber scandal. The Understory.

UN General Assembly (2018) Sport for development and peace

Photo by hitsujiotoko_xx

Read more about sustainability and Covid-19:

Sustainable Development, Interrupted?


Sustainable Development, Interrupted?

By Steen Vallentin

The coronavirus and responses to the pandemic are right now defining human existence inside and outside of organizations. All societal attention and communication are centred on the virus, its day-to-day consequences and possible future repercussions for the people, the economy – and the planet.

Indeed, we are living through a gargantuan social experiment, and these can turn out to be the defining weeks and months of the new decade. Social distancing. Lockdown of public institutions and private businesses. Closing of national borders. No travelling, no tourism. All live entertainment (sports, music, culture) suspended. Places for social gatherings (restaurants, cafés, bars) closed (except for takeaway). Until further notice. The mind boggles.   

The closing down of open societies is blocking the blood flow of large parts of the economy, spelling potential disaster for many businesses and cultural institutions – in spite of large relief packages. Meanwhile, waters are clearing and air pollution is going down due to the drop in industrial production. There is an ominous air about these climatic improvements, though. They seem more like a morbid dress rehearsal for life on earth after human civilization than a silver lining.

Is it the end of the world as we know it? Certainly, we can expect – at least in the privileged global north – that life will soon return to something much more normal than the current ‘show responsibility by staying as far away as you can from other people’. In Denmark, the gradual reopening of society is already underway.

However, the question remains whether we will look at each other and on human interaction (particularly in large social gatherings) in the same way as we did before. Will the awareness of ‘the others’ close to us as potential carriers of disease somehow stay with us.     

Certainly, the comparisons with war are fitting. Who would have thought that anything except a worldwide war could affect all people’s social lives and the workings of government and business so rapidly and profoundly?

The pandemic constitutes a crisis of public health and health systems of unforeseen magnitude. The noun ‘crisis’ derives etymologically from the Greek krinein (Latin: krisis), which means ‘turning point of a disease’. This point was made repeatedly in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008-9: a crisis constitutes a turning point and thus an opportunity for new things to happen, for things to be different and perhaps better than they were. As the saying goes: ‘never let a good crisis go to waste’.

After sickness, there is newfound health. A crisis is not supposed to persist. However, recent years have taught us new lessons. Crisis has to understood in the plural, as crises, there are many of them (climate crisis, refugee crisis, trust crisis etc.), they are systemic and interconnected and they do not seem to go away.

Thus, we live in an age of perpetual or recurrent crises. We can imagine another side to where we are now, a new and more social normal, but it is becoming more and more difficult to imagine a future without some profound element of crisis.

Speaking of the interconnectedness of crises, what impact will the pandemic have on sustainable development and the green agenda? Will the public health crisis, its resultant need for emergency relief and its immediate and longer-term negative impacts on the economy take the wind out of the sails of green transition for a while? Making us waste precious time.

Or will this crisis and the efforts needed to get the economic wheels turning again turn out to be the greatest of opportunities to invest in green infrastructure and the solutions needed to create a more sustainable future? At this time, it is anyone’s (more or less qualified) guess. Not least because the answer depends on actions not yet taken by government and business leaders. Both narratives are out there.

The pandemic obviously lends itself to many interpretations. Among them faith-based apocalyptic visions of the end of times. Others see potential in this for putting an end to capitalism, as we have known it. Certainly, market-based solutions are taking a backseat to government intervention in our current predicament. It appears that in times of profound crisis we have to rely on big government (federal, local) and political leadership to take care of the common good and sort things out.

Time will tell whether or how the pandemic and all that comes with it will change people’s view of the market economy and of the need for government intervention in the market economy – not to mention people’s proclivities to consume, travel, engage with (many) others in the experience economy etc.

The more moderate take is that we need a regulated market economy and that the current crisis shows the limitations of cost/benefit analysis and the neoliberal urge to subject all things to marketization and economization. In light of the human suffering and the deaths caused by the coronavirus and facing health systems and heroic health professionals in distress, the cost/benefit mindset has come up short. This calls for immediate action and full commitment – even if the odd economist may question the utility of such a course of action.

We should take this lesson with us into the broader realm of sustainable development. Market thinking will not suffice.


About the author

Steen Vallentin is Director of the CBS Sustainability Centre and Associate Professor in the Department of Management, Society and Communication at Copenhagen Business School. His research is centred on CSR (corporate social responsibility) and sustainable development in a broad sense.

Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash

Normalizing Sustainability

By John Robinson, University of Toronto

We often hear the argument that, given the urgency of climate change and sustainability concerns,  significant changes to individual behaviours and lifestyles are required. This has led to a wide array of public education and climate literacy campaigns aimed at changing such behaviours. In this blog, I will argue that some fairly strong research findings suggest that such campaigns are of limited value in influencing behaviour change, and moreover that focusing on changes in individual behaviours may be distracting us from much more significant possible steps.

There are many models of behaviour change in the literature, and of the relationships among values, attitudes, intentions and behaviours. It is probably fair to say that many of the most influential conceptualizations of behaviour change assume that most individual behaviours are the result of some form of conscious decision-making about desirable outcomes based in turn on some assessment of the consequences of different courses of action. [1]

On this view, people act in environmentally irresponsible ways because they lack the information they need to make better decisions. Such an ‘information deficit’ model leads in turn to what we might call a persuasive communication approach to stimulating behavior change, which assumes that providing more information as to those consequences, through information provision, educational programs, and science and climate change literacy campaigns, will lead to better and more environmentally responsible decision-making [2].

Unfortunately, the relevant research on the relationship between information and behaviour shows that persuasive communication approaches based on an information deficit model are not only ineffective in changing behaviours in the desired direction [3], but may in fact have perverse consequences.

Studies of the relationship between knowledge and attitudes have found that increased science literacy does not lead people to become more concerned about climate change, but on the contrary, actually increases polarization on this issue[4]. It seems that educating people on the science of climate change, or other sustainability problems, will not lead them to change their views on the problem itself, but instead may further reinforce their prior position.

In fact there is evidence from many fields of study, going back multiple decades, that information is only weakly connected to behaviour change. Studies of the effectiveness of energy efficiency programs [5], research in health promotion[6], or community-based social marketing[7], over many decades have all reached similar findings. So widespread are these findings that it can be said, in the words of my colleague David Maggs that:

The best evidence that information does not change behaviour is that we have decades of evidence in multiple fields that it does not do so, yet we continue to create and implement pubic education campaigns intended to change individual behaviour.

While this is bad enough, the problem gets worse.

It turns out that it is not clear that changing individual consumption behaviour is the right goal anyway. A number of studies have shown that there is no significant difference in either the carbon or ecological footprint of individual who cares deeply about environmental issues and behave accordingly, and those who do not care at all and do not behave in environmentally responsible ways [8]. The reason is that the ecological and carbon footprints of individuals are determined much more by their income than by the degree to which they choose more environmentally appropriate behaviours such as recycling or buying sustainable products.

So we seem to be in a depressing circumstance: information and literacy programs won’t change behaviour; moreover, it wouldn’t much matter, in term of overall environmental impact, if they did.

But rather than ignoring this evidence and intensifying our efforts to educate people into sustainability, or else throwing up our hands and retreating into apathy, perhaps a more fruitful approach is to reframe the original questions and ask whether a different approach altogether might be useful, on both these questions.

With regard to information provision, instead of a persuasive communication approach, it might be more useful to take what we might call an emergent dialogue approach [9]. Instead of assuming that we know the right answers and we have to get those answers into the heads of our audience, perhaps we need to listen as much as we speak, and to find two-way approaches to dialogue in order to co-create narratives with citizens that describe our circumstances in ways that are more faithful to the disparate views and values of different groups and that thereby offer the possibility of finding common ground on controversial societal problems.

The goal switches from a focus on changing behaviours to a focus on trying to create shared narratives, in order to better inform collective decision-making processes, and to foster social mobilization in support of policy change.

With regard to individual behaviour change, perhaps we need to rethink our ideas about change itself. As long as sustainability requires change, then it is fragile because human activities and practices will often snap back to prior unsustainable normals. Instead, we need to normalize sustainable practices, so that they become the default, not the required change [10]. In this connection, it might be useful to move from a focus on conscious individual behaviour and pay more attention to more collective processes of activity. There has been an upsurge of work on social practice theory approaches to human activity, which suggests that much of that activity is unconscious and collective, connected to social processes and relationships, and social and cultural norms [11]. Can a focus on collective social practices lead us towards processes of normalization of sustainability?

Following this line of thought, it is not about encouraging behaviour change instead of technological change, but of exploring how the overall socio-technical system itself, including powerful social norms, influences and is influenced by individual choices and actions, including political demands or support for changes in collective decisions. Perhaps we need to try to create ‘virtuous cascades’ 12 of positive normative change and identify leverage points that will allow us to foster and encourage more sustainable outcomes. Trying to convince people to change their lifestyles in the absence of change in the overall system will be ineffective and may even work against larger system change.


About the author

John Robinson is a Professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto.  He is also an Adjunct Professor at Copenhagen Business School. His research focuses on the intersection of climate change mitigation, adaptation and sustainability; the use of visualization, modelling and citizen engagement to explore sustainable futures; sustainable buildings and urban design; the role of the university in contributing to sustainability; creating partnerships for sustainability with non-academic partners; the history and philosophy of sustainability; and, generally, the intersection of sustainability, social and technological change, ways of thinking, and community engagement processes. 

References

[1] E.g. see Ajzen, I. (1991). The theory of planned behavior. Organizational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes, 50(2), 179-211

[2] Masud, M.M., Al-Amin, A.Q., Junsheng, H., Ahmed, F., Yahaya, S.R., Akhtar, R., & Banna, H. (2016). Climate change issue and theory of planned behaviour: relationship by empirical evidence. Journal of Cleaner Production, 113, 613-623. See the discussion in Kollmuss, A., & Agyeman, J. (2002). Mind the Gap: Why Do People Act Environmentally and What are the Barriers to Pro-Environmental Behaviour? Environmental Education Research, 8(3): 239-260.

[3] See, for example, Kollmuss & Agyeman, op. cit.; Sheeran, P., & Webb, T.L. (2016). The Intention-Behaviour Gap. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 10(9), 503-518; Ungar, S. (1994). Apples and oranges: probing the attitude-behaviour relationship for the environment. Canadian Review of Sociology, 31(3); Steg, L., Perlaviciute, G., & van der Werff, E. (2015). Understanding the human dimensions of a sustainable energy transition. Frontiers in Psychology, 6; Owens, S. 2000. `Engaging the public’: information and deliberation in environmental policy, Environment and Planning A, 32, pages 1141-1148; Shove, E. 2010. Beyond the ABC: climate change policy and theories of social change, Environment and Planning A, 42, 1273-1285. 

[4] Kahan et al, (2012) The polarizing impact of science literacy and numeracy on perceived climate change risks, Nature Climate Change, 2(10), pp.732-735; Drummond, C., & Fischhoff, B. (2017). Individuals with greater science literacy and education have more polarized beliefs on controversial science topics, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(36), 9587-9592.

[5] Stern, P. C. 1986. “Blind spots in policy analysis: What economics doesn’t say about energy use.” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 5(2), 200-227; Hirst, E. (1990). Progress and Potential in Evaluating Energy Efficiency Programs. Evaluation Review, 14(2), 192–205; Robinson. J. (1991). “The proof of the pudding: Making energy efficiency work.” Energy Policy, 19(7), 631-645; Abrahamse, W., Steg, L., Vlek, C., & Rothengatter, T. (2005). A review of intervention studies aimed at household energy conservation. Journal of environmental psychology, 25(3), 273-291.

[6] Green, L. W., & Kreuter, M. W. (1993). Health promotion planning: An educational and ecological approach. McGraw-Hill

[7] McKenzie-Mohr, D. (2011). Fostering sustainable behavior: An introduction to community-based social marketing. New society publishers.

[8] Csutora, M., 2012. One more awareness gap? The behaviour–impact gap problem.  Journal of Consumer Policy, 35(1), pp.145-163; Tabi, A., (2013). Does pro-environmental behavior affect carbon emissions. Energy Policy, 63, pp.972-981; Moser, S., & Kleinhückelkotten, S. (2018). Good intents, but low impacts: diverging importance of motivational and socioeconomic determinants explaining pro-environmental behavior, energy use, and carbon footprint. Environment and Behavior, 50(6), 626-656.

[9] Robinson, J. (2004) “Squaring the Circle: Some thoughts on the idea of sustainable development”, Ecological Economics, 48(4): 369-384; Antle, A. N., & Robinson, J. (2011). Procedural Rhetoric Meets Emergent Dialogue: Interdisciplinary perspectives on persuasion and behavior change in serious games for sustainability; Bendor, R., Lyons, S. H., & Robinson, J. (2012). What’s there not to ‘like’? sustainability deliberations on facebook. JeDEM-eJournal of eDemocracy and Open Government4(1), 67-88; Maggs, D. and Robinson, J. (2016) “Recalibrating the Anthropocene: Sustainability in an Imaginary World”, Environmental Philosophy, 13(2), 175-194; Robinson, J. and Cole, R. (2015) Theoretical underpinnings of regenerative sustainability, Building Research & Information, 43(2), 133-143; Westerhoff, L. and Robinson, J. (2013) “’Practicing’ narratives: exploring the meaning and materiality of climate change”, Proceedings of Transformation in a Changing Climate, June 19-21, 2013.

[10] John Robinson, “Normalizing Sustainability: from behavior change to metamorphosis”, Keynote Presentation at IST2019: Accelerating sustainability transitions: Building visions, unlocking pathways, navigating conflicts, Ottawa, Jun 25 2019

[11] Gram-Hanssen, K. & Georg S. 2017. Energy performance gaps: promises, people, practices, Building Research and Information 46(1), 1-9; Strengers, Y., & Maller, C. (Eds.). (2014). Social practices, intervention and sustainability: Beyond behaviour change. Routledge; Shove, E., Pantzar, M., & Watson, M. (2012). The Dynamics of Social Practice. London, UK: SAGE Publications; Hargreaves, T. (2011). Practice-ing behaviour change: Applying social practice theory to pro-environmental behaviour change. Journal of consumer culture, 11(1), 79-99; Reckwitz, A. (2002). Toward a theory of social practices: A development in culturalist theorizing. European journal of social theory, 5(2), 243-263.

[12] Homer-Dixon, T. Coronavirus will change the world. It might also lead to a better future. The Globe and Mail, Mar 5, 2020  https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-coronavirus-is-a-collective-problem-that-requires-global/

Photo by Francesco Gallarotti on Unsplash

Sustainable Consumer Behavior: Go Big or Go Home?

By Laura Krumm

In recent years, news on issues such as climate change, environmental degradation and plastic pollution was almost inescapable. At least in Europe, newspapers reported on environmental topics regularly, political discussions often revolved around greenhouse gas emissions or environmental policy, and sustainability content creators gained large numbers of followers on social media with tips on package-free grocery shopping and vegan recipes. Additionally, with Fridays for Future, environmental issues inspired one of the largest youth movements to date. It is fair to say that almost everyone is talking about the environmental issues we are currently facing.

The role of consumption

With almost everyone talking about environmental issues, most have understood that our consumption behavior in the industrialized world is a major cause of environmental problems. After all, the issue of climate change is an issue of consumption. Almost three-quarters of greenhouse gas emissions originate from household consumption (1). A change in consumption behavior, therefore, is deemed necessary to have a chance of mitigating climate change.

Even though environmental beliefs and values are increasing, consumers often do not follow through and translate their attitudes into environmental behavior. Many scholars are concerned with this phenomenon, often termed attitude-behavior gap or value-action gap (2, 3). This gap is frequently calculated by subtracting the market share of sustainable goods, e.g., organic produce, from the percentage of consumers having an intention to buy those products. The estimated size of the gap ranges mostly around the 30% mark (4, 5).

If consumers acted according to their attitudes, the market share of sustainable products would, therefore, increase by 30 %, which would certainly have a substantial environmental impact. Is it, however, enough to focus on closing the attitude-behavior gap? Unfortunately, no.

How sustainable are we really?

Behaviors commonly considered as sustainable, such as bringing our own reusable shopping bag instead of using the plastic bags provided by the store, might not have the big environmental influence we think they have. Bilharz and Schmitt have termed such actions as the “peanuts of sustainable consumption” (6). Often, consumers that identify themselves as “green” have similar ecological footprints to consumers who do not identify themselves as “green” (6, 7).

A green self-image, although associated with higher rates of some environmental behaviors, is therefore often misleading.

This can be problematic. If consumers with high attitudes towards sustainable consumption overestimate their own positive impact and already perceive themselves as sustainable after performing relatively low-impact sustainable behaviors, such as stopping the water while brushing their teeth or using a reusable tote bag for shopping, the motivation for bigger steps might be reduced. While these small behaviors are important actions and first steps in the right direction, they are only that: first steps. To mitigate climate change and solve other environmental issues, more drastic measures will be necessary.

Focus on high-impact behaviors instead of low-hanging fruits

Some researchers, therefore, suggest to reduce the focus on the intent-based view of sustainable behavior (e.g., environmental attitudes or motivations) and rather take a more impact-based perspective (8). In that case, the actual environmental effects of certain behaviors and actions are assessed in the form of, e.g., emitted greenhouse gases or ecological footprint calculations. An impact ranking of sustainable behaviors can then give insightful information, which behaviors to give priority.

A recent study found, e.g., that a change towards a vegan diet has the potential to mitigate up to 14% of European carbon emissions, whereas a change towards exclusively purchasing organic food has the potential to mitigate 2% (9). While this certainly does not mean that organic food products are not important and we should stop buying them, a focus on them will not suffice to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions significantly.

This change in perspective is not only important for consumers themselves, but also for companies, research and policy. While, e.g., an EU-wide ban of single-use plastic or company initiatives to eliminate plastic bags in some supermarkets have a considerable positive impact on the problem of plastic pollution, it is by far not enough.

Even though the probable consequences of climate change are well known and already start to become apparent, countries and governments still fail to adopt effective measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (10).

An enhanced focus on high-impact behaviors and actions can help political institutions, research organizations and consumer education strategies achieve their sustainability goals. While it is certainly necessary to address small and easily implementable changes, they should not distract us from tackling the big consumption challenges (11).


About the author

Laura Krumm is a PhD fellow at the Department of Management, Society and Communication and part of the Consumer & Behavioural Insights Group at CBS Sustainability. Her research interests lie in the fields of sustainable consumption behaviour and policy.

References

(1) Hertwich, E.G. and Peters, G.P., 2009 – Carbon Footprint of Nations: A Global, Trade-Linked Analysis, in: Environmental Science and Technology, 43(16), 6414-6420.

(2) Kollmuss, A. and Agyeman, J., 2002 – Mind the Gap: Why Do People Act Environmentally and What are the Barriers to Pro-Environmental Behavior?, in: Environmental Education Research, 8(3), 239-260.

(3) Huddart Kennedy, E., Beckley, T.M., McFarlane, B.L. and Nadeau, S., 2009 – Why We Don’t “Walk the Talk”: Understanding the Environmental Values/Behaviour Gap in Canada, in: Human Ecology Review, 16(2), 151-160.

(4) Carrington, M.J., Neville, B.A. and Whitwell, G.J., 2010 – Why Ethical Consumers Don’t Walk Their Talk: Towards a Framework for Understanding the Gap Between the Ethical Purchase Intentions and Actual Buying Behaviour of Ethically Minded Consumers, in: Journal of Business Ethics, 97(1), 139-158.

(5) Young, W., Hwang, K., McDonald, S. and Oates C.J., 2010 – Sustainable Consumption: Green Consumer Behaviour when Purchasing Products, in: Sustainable Development, 18(1), 20-31.

(6) Bilharz, M. and Schmitt, K., 2011 – Going Big with Big Matters, in: GAIA, 20(4), 232-235.

(7) Gatersleben, B., Steg, L. and Vlek C., 2002 – Measurement and Determinants of Environmentally Significant Consumer Behavior, in: Environment and Behavior, 34(3), 335-362.

(8) Moser, S. and Kleinhückelkotten, S., 2018 – Good Intents, but Low Impacts: Diverging Importance of Motivational and Socioeconomic Determinants Explaining Pro-Environmental Behavior, Energy Use, and Carbon Footprint

(9) Vita, G., Lundström, J.R., Hertwich, E.G., Quist, J., Ivanova, D., Stadler, K. and Wood, R.,  2019 – The Environmental Impact of Green Consumption and Sufficiency Lifestyles Scenarios in Europe: Connecting Local Sustainability Visions to Global Consequences, in: Ecological Economics, 164, 106322.

(10) UN Environment Programme, 2019 – Emissions Gap Report

(11) Centre for Behavior & the Environment, 2018 – Climate Change Needs Behavior Change: Making the Case For Behavioral Solutions to Reduce Global Warming


Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Ensuring effective collaboration in cross-sector partnerships: three valuable lessons for partnership managers

By Leona Henry

Cross-sector partnerships (CSPs) have become a popular form of collaboration to address various sustainability matters, including plastic pollution, fair labor conditions or sustainable forestry. In CSPs, actors from different sectors bundle their resources to address such issues more efficiently than they would do on an individual basis. Most CSPs include a mix of NGOs, governmental organizations and firms.

Managing CSPs

Oftentimes, CSPs are managed by a single actor or a group of designated actors who are in charge of the partnership’s overall coordination. One of the major challenges for CSP managers is to accommodate the wide variety of ideas and interests that collide in such partnerships, while at the same time ensuring swift decision-making and operational progress.

Three valuable lessons for CSP managers

Based on insights from my latest research project, here are some counterintuitive, yet insightful lessons for CSP managers who find themselves in the position of navigating this challenge:

1. Not every task in the partnership has to be completed collectively

While we tend to believe that CSPs are all about doing everything together at all times, sometimes overall levels if collaboration might suffer by following this recipe only. At times, it can be very effective to have one actor group engage in a particular task that matches their expertise while letting others work on a different issue. Separating actor groups momentarily and where applicable avoids time-consuming conflicts and negotiations, which in turn ensures that things actually get done in the long run.

2. It is legitimate and effective to emphasize individual benefits at times

While the collective effort is what ultimately counts in CSPs, at times it can be worthwhile to also highlight the individual benefits actors may gain from participating in the collaboration. Doing so helps actors remind them of why they are part of the partnership in the first place and makes visible synergies that might not be related to the overall goal directly, but nevertheless ensure its achievement.

3. Late joiners should be welcomed with open arms but integrated carefully

A final thought that often prevails in the CSP context, is the idea that all actors have to be involved from the very beginning to ensure a successful partnership outcome. The opposite is actually true: Late joiners can be extremely valuable as they see the partnership from a fresh perspective which can lead to beneficial insights.

However, for these late joiners to be valuable to the entire partnership, and not be seen as the actors that “sneak in” at the very end, they need to be integrated carefully through a customized onboarding process and doable tasks that can be completed right away. If late joiners are not able to start contributing right away, their value is easily lost.

As CSPs are a promising means of addressing sustainability issues, I hope that these insights are worthwhile to managers in such partnerships.


About the author

Leona Henry is an Assistant Professor of Organisation Studies at Tilburg University (the Netherlands). Her research focuses on multi-stakeholder collaboration around sustainability and the practical relevance of research. This blog post is based on a joint research project with Andreas Rasche (Copenhagen Business School) and Guido Möllering (Reinhard-Mohn-Institute for Management, University Witten/ Herdecke)

Image by Creative Commons Zero – CC0

Just announced: And the world’s worst company is …. Really?

Why naming a hardly known German company as the world’s most controversial company inadvertently makes a lot of sense

By Dieter Zinnbauer

Business bashing is a popular spectator sport in some quarters – sometimes justified, sometimes not. So there is certainly no shortage of strong contenders for the most controversial company contest. Who would be your pick for the 2019 shortlist? Perhaps one of the companies that led millions of people into opioid addiction? The biggest carbon dioxide emitter? Or someone from the big tech side that as many believe has ushered in a new, toxic era of surveillance capitalism?

Picking the unlucky winner is as difficult as it is subjective.  But as is always the case these days big data and AI are riding to the rescue. They are claimed to power an evidence-infused attempt by a boutique ESG consultancy to identify the most controversial company in the world. According to the inevitable marketing pitch, a secret-sauce algorithm churns through a proprietary database of millions of new and old media mentions for more than 140,00 companies to bring science to the art of naming and shaming and to reveal the 2019 most controversial company in the world.

And as just announced last week, the winner is:

Tuev Sued!

?

Tuev Sued?

If you are not a German car owner (the company is best known there for carrying out the obligatory and feared periodic car inspections) or an expert in technical certification issues you may have never come across this name before.

Tuev Sued is one of the big players in the global certification-of-everything business. Born as the Duev (“Dampfkesselueberwachsungsverein” – steam boiler inspection association) in 1800 to bring technical oversight to the issue of exploding steam boilers during the industrial revolution, the Tuev Sued (and its brother) Tuev Nord have grown into multinational enterprises that provide technical audits and certification services for an ever-growing number of products, processes and service across industries and across the world.

Arguably the main reason why Tue Sued was picked as the most controversial company (besides a weighing in favor of novel entries that guarantees sustainable newsworthiness to an annual ranking now in its 10th edition) is that it is implicated in the infamous 2019 Brumadinhu dam disaster in Brazil. A collapse of a dam erected by a mining company unleashed a toxic mudflow on the downstream communities that killed more than 250 people. Tuev Sued had carried out technical inspections of the dam and allegedly assessed it as safe. The case is still in court, no conclusive verdicts have been reached.

So is it fair to put the spotlight so fully on a comparatively small technical certification outfit, rather than say the big mining company that built and ran the dam?

Irrespective of what one thinks about the merits of this choice,  the case highlights what I would submit is one of the most fundamental and unresolved drivers of corporate irresponsibility: the persistent challenge to make all kinds of certification and assurance processes that are so essential to functioning markets and economies work as intended.

From the never-ending string of accounting and auditing scandals to the crucial role of rating agencies in the 2007+ financial crisis to emerging examples of greenwashing in the carbon market certification business, there as common thread: certification and assurance often fail to provide the independent, effective vetting that it is supposed to deliver.

Issues involved include:

  • the under-resourcing of the inspection process as neither principal nor agent have strong interests in overly strict and deep inspections,
  • pitching certification as loss leaders to open the door for upselling into other lucrative consulting services;
  • borderline rubberstamping of certifications to secure repeat business and avoid being viewed as difficult in the industry and thus putting off other potential clients.

Strengthening liability, setting more stringent standards for the standards watchdogs, tightening compliance measures and building public reputational pressure go some way to rework incentives towards more credible certifications.

But at the end of the day they are more ameliorative than tackling the root problem:

As long as certification services are selected by and directly paid for by the very clients that are meant to be certified, assured, rated or audited and as long as certification is strictly a for-profit business there are fundamental conflicts of interests at the root of these services that put their efficacy and independence at risk.

Ideas of how to rewire these markets and business models abound yet so far the problem of thin political markets seems to hold: both certifiers and certified have strong interests to preserve the status quo and formidable lobbying power to advocate for this, while the dull technical nature of the issues at stake and the dispersed group of beneficiaries from alternative solutions prevent a forceful, concerted push for better arrangements.

Yet there is hope that this fundamental conflict of interest issue will gain more prominence in the policy and public debates very soon. The emerging transformational push to de-carbonize businesses and economies relies in part heavily on carbon credits, carbon offsets and other green-impact instruments whose efficacy and the very reason for existence relies on proper certification and assurance.

 How to move beyond and away from issuer-directly-pays certification services will have to be an important part of the policy designs in the making.

Tuev Sued is a symptom of the problem – it is the systemic issue at the root of the case that justifies putting it into the spotlight – although it is unclear of the secret-sauce algorithm at work had this in mind when making the selection. 

Let’s hope that in twenty years’ time the idea of a rating agency, a dam examiner, a medical device inspector or a carbon credit certifier being selected by and paid directly by the people they are supposed to pass an independent judgment on appears as strange as the notion that a pharmaceutical company would be able to choose between different agencies to get its drugs approved and directly funds large parts of their budgets.


About the author

Dr. Dieter Zinnbauer is a Marie-Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at CBS’ Department of Management, Society and Communication. His CBS researches focus on business as political actor in the context of big data, populism and “corporate purpose fatigue”.

Twitter: @Dzinnbauer

Essays: https://medium.com/@Dzinnbauer

Working papers:  https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=1588618

Photo by Icons8 Team on Unsplash

Responsible Tax in Multinational Enterprises – Why?

By Peter Koerver Schmidt

The tax practices of multinational enterprises (MNEs) attract massive interest in these years from the general media, policymakers as well as academia. This public interest is positive, as the subject is both interesting and important. At times, however, the debate can be polarized and rather futile.

Two quotes exemplify the wide spectrum of opinions quite well. On the one side of the spectrum, the more traditional opinion which in the words of NYU Professor David Rosenbloom can be expressed like this: “Taxes are a cost, like any other cost. There is nothing magical or special about taxes as a cost, except that they are subject to adjustment by government action.”[i] And on the other side of the spectrum, UK MP Margaret Hodge’s statement concerning Google’s tax planning set-up “We’re not accusing you of being illegal, we are accusing you of being immoral.”[ii]

Tax is and should be regulated by law

Currently, the zeitgeist strongly seems to favor the latter opinion, and it is often argued that MNEs face a moral or ethical obligation not to engage deliberately in strategic tax behavior solely designed to minimize tax payments. In other words, MNEs should act responsibly and refrain from aggressive tax planning.[iii]

Even though such statements are understandable and well intentioned, it is worth bearing in mind that taxation traditionally – and for good reasons – is an area densely regulated by law.

Generally speaking, the legal order (rule of law) creates stability and foreseeability and acts as an obstacle to power holders of society. This is also important within the area of taxation, as taxes are not voluntary and since taxation is a complex balancing act that needs to be carried out in a transparent democratic order. Moreover, equal and objective treatment of taxpayers presupposes a legal standard, as social/ethical norms are too vague to provide adequate guidance. Finally, yet importantly, procedural justice requires that taxpayers – including MNEs – have access to independent judicial review, in order to give the taxpayers a proper chance to explain themselves and to appeal.[iv]

Reputational risks and shareholders of flesh and bone

Does this mean that everything should just remain as it (perhaps) used to be?

In my opinion, the answer is no. Accordingly, policymakers should cooperate on a global and regional level (as they are already doing at the level of the OECD/G20 and the EU), in order to improve the current international tax regime and reduce the possibilities for applying aggressive tax planning strategies. Moreover, well-managed MNE’s should take account of the fact that the wider public expects them to act responsibly and to refrain from aggressive tax planning.

The reason why MNE’s should acknowledge the growing public distaste for aggressive tax planning strategies is in my view two fold, and does not rest on an inherent social/ethical obligation to so.

Instead, the first argument is based on the fact that responsible tax behavior by an MNE can mitigate a number of corporate risks and that corporate tax planning must be balanced against the potential costs of triggering reputational damage.[v] The second argument is that the management in MNEs should focus on maximizing shareholder welfare, not shareholder value.[vi]

In other words, it should be taken into account that shareholders at the end of the day are ordinary people of flesh and bone that are not only concerned about maximizing profits but also have social/ethical concerns. Accordingly, even though MNEs do not have an inherent social/ethical obligation to stay away from aggressive tax planning behavior there may anyway be good reasons to do so.

Currently, there are strong signs that MNEs have become more prone to critically re-consider their tax planning behavior. More and more MNE’s thus prepare and disclose tax policies/strategies that among other things define the framework for their tax planning behavior. In my view, this appetite for implementing policies on responsible tax is both sensible and laudable.


References

[i] H.D. Rosenbloom, Where’s the Pony? Reflections on the Making of International Tax Policy, 63 Bulletin for International Taxation 11, p. 535-542 (2009).

[ii] Public Accounts Committee Chairman Margaret Hodge. Quote from The Telegraph, November 2012: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/tax/9673358/Starbucks-Amazon-and-Google-accused-of-being-immoral.html.

[iii] P. Schmidt & K. Buhmann, Taxation, General Anti-Avoidance Rules and Corporate Social Responsibility in Fair Taxation & Corporate Social Responsibility, p. 227-260 (K. Elgaard et al. eds., Ex Tuto 2019).

[iv] R.P. Österman, Perspectives on Corporate Taxation from a Sustainable Business Perspective in Challenges, in Managing Sustainable Business pp. 371-397 (S. Arvidsson ed., Springer 2018).

[v] A. van Eijsden, The Relationship between Corporate Responsibility and Tax: Unknown and Unloved, 22 EC Tax Review 1, p. 56-61 (2013). See also R. Knuutinen, Corporate Social Responsibility, Taxation and Aggressive Tax Planning, Nordic Tax Journal 1, p. 36-75 (2014).

[vi] O. Hart & L. Zingales, Companies Should Maximize Shareholder Welfare Not Market Value, Journal of Law, Finance, and Accounting 2, p, 247-274 (2017).


About the author

Peter Koerver Schmidt, PhD, is Professor with special responsibilities in tax law at Copenhagen Business School and Academic Advisor at CORIT Advisory. His research mainly focuses upon international (corporate) tax law, and it has been published in Danish, Nordic and international journals and anthologies. In addition, he has authored and co-authored a number of books, including a dissertation on Danish CFC legislation from an international and comparative perspective.

Photo by 401(K) 2012 available on Flickr.

Lead where others follow

By Sim de la Torre

One of the most exciting and influential areas of business today, Governance & Sustainability has also become a must-have skillset for business leaders looking to stay on top of their game. An MBA level certificate in Governance and Sustainability from CBS will enable you to take your organisation to the next level.

Providing sustainable directions

There’s little doubt that today’s business environment is evolving at a striking rate. And the increased focus on sustainability from the perspective of risk management, compliance and governance can often leave business leaders searching for clarity when they should be providing direction. These are strategically critical elements – some might say preconditions – of business today and they are defining the debates that are being held in boardrooms across the globe.

Andreas Rasche, Professor of Business in Society and CBS Associate Dean, explains more about this cutting-edge Concentration.

“To date, a lot of the conversation has been focussed on either the CSR or philanthropic agenda, but ours is based on the modern understanding of sustainability and how to govern; how to set agenda; and how to include cutting edge thinking and action across the sustainability field.”

Sustainable finance is one example of where managers are being challenged in this arena. How do you integrate wider social and environmental concerns – or responsibilities –  into your financial decision making? This is one of the Concentration’s key topics and MBA students will learn to balance the needs of society with the needs of their organisation.

Sustainability toolset

“Meanwhile,” says Professor Rasche, “another trend that we cover is corporate governance and risk management, which is all about steering an organisation and equipping you with the tools to make intelligent and reasoned recommendations to the board. The course will enable you to plot a path for the company from a business mindset while weaving in sustainability. And of course, we also help you to identity and exploit the opportunities that your organisation will face as a result of this agenda.”

Across the globe, the corporate governance debate is happening at the highest level of business and the leaders of today and tomorrow need to know how to have these conversations and how to steer their organisations effectively.

Be where the focus is

Other aspects covered by the course include circularity, which is particularly relevant to modern leadership, as well as risk management which often appeals to practitioner students. Says Professor Rasche,

“These mindsets can have a huge influence on an organisation and again, we’ll give you the tools you need to not just understand the conversation, but to make a valued input and be part of the debate. The things you learn today on this course will equip you for tomorrow. If you want to really know more, come and join us. Be where the focus is.”

In April 2020, you can start your CBS Executive MBA with a Concentration in Governance & Sustainability.  


About the author

Sim de la Torre is a former journalist turned freelance writer working with the CBS MBA programmes.

Photo by Ian Stauffer on Unsplash

AI: A new culprit in missing the sustainability mark?

Lara Anne Hale

Artificial intelligence (AI) is championed as being the future driver of business: everything from human resources to surgery is supposed to become perfectly effective. But what if AI actually becomes a culprit blocking the way forward for sustainability?

Bias in AI

An example, to get us started:

Bob and Joe are colleagues. They are work friends, and they share many of the same worldviews – as well as biases. They are jointly programming the algorithm for machine learning that will train an AI to behave as they expect it should. In a number of ways that are difficult to detangle: Bob and Joe’s Biases → Machine Learning → AI.

In a recent article in The New York Times, AI professionals explored how to push back against social bias, as it “can be reflected and amplified by artificial intelligence in dangerous ways, whether it be in deciding who gets a bank loan or who gets surveilled.” As Ola Russakovsky points out in the article, there are all kinds of bias in AI because it reflects the way our world already is.  I’m here to point to one of those different kinds of bias – more specifically, institutional bias.

AI for Sustainable Building

In my day-to-day research, I’m regularly confronted with one such institutional bias in the building industry: cost savings and energy efficiency are more important than human well being. This long standing bias persists, despite whole cities filled with buildings that are harmful to health, hardly last beyond 25 years, and still do not achieve the desired energy performance. In trying the avoid dealing with lovely but complicated human beings, the building industry gets in the way of sustainable building.

After all, it’s only human. Or is it? There is increasing pressure for AI to be integrated into systems for both building construction and facilities management, though both applications perpetuate the bias for economic and energy efficiencies. Not surprisingly, this is what AI is meant for: to do what we already do, but better. So how can we innovate AI that does something that we don’t already do – for example, to consider more comprehensive sustainability?

Urban Tech and Co-Innovation

Yet, society is not fixed, and there are inspiring efforts to continuously innovate our industrial systems by bringing together established businesses and startups for problem solving. One well known example of this is the BMW Startup Garage in Germany. Last year, we saw the advent of such a program for the built environment here in Copenhagen, called Urban Tech, which will run three cycles from 2019 through 2021.

In the process of working with the 2019 VELUX Group – Foobot team on innovating AI for better indoor air quality, I was surprised to find that same institutional bias reflected from Foobot. The implications were that instead of training the AI to respond to people, their health and their needs – as academic and industrial research have indicated is critical for sustainable building – they focused the AI on energy efficiency. But ultimately, I found this to be an exercise of optimism.

Co-innovation gave us the opportunity to unhatch hidden elements of AI bias and to work together to figure out the next steps forward for bringing digitization and sustainability together in the built environment.

Sustainability Training for AI

Although there are calls to remove AI bias and to set up regulatory mechanisms to control for it, I wonder if either of these are feasible (a pondering shared in this WIRED Magazine article). AI is, after all, what we make of it. Though we cannot do what is not feasible, we can ponder what is desirable. In line with the voluntary integration of sustainability into corporate reporting, as well as building standards, what if we integrated sustainability considerations into frameworks for training AI?

Well, an android can dream…

Join and discuss these and related AI topics at the Reshaping Work’s AI@Work Conference in Amsterdam 5-6 March 2020. Lara will be presenting her work on “Faster horses: Collaborative AI innovation between incumbents and startups.”


About the author

Lara Anne Hale, Ph.D., M.Sc., Assistant Professor, Industrial Postdoc Fellow with CBS and VELUX. Lara conducts transdisciplinary research on sustainability in the built environment, including aspects of digital transformations, circularity, user-centered design, and systems thinking. Her current project focuses on business model innovation for smart buildings in the BLOXHUB Science Forum ‘Smart Buildings & Cities’ research group, supported by the Danish Innovation Fund and Realdania.


Read more by the same author

The Academic Smarts in the Smart City

Researchers in BLOXHUB seeking to improve indoor climate

Can Your Green Building Rub Off On You?

Need an SDG Solution? Hack it.

If at first you don’t succeed, build, build again


Photo by Franck V. on Unsplash.

Helpful hypocrisy? The ‘ironic turn’ in corporate talk about sustainable development

By Sarah Glozer and Mette Morsing

Do you feel uneasy to think that companies use a humorous tone in their communications about grave challenges such as climate change, pollution and inequality? We suggest the notion of helpful hypocrisy to coin this new ironic turn in recent corporate communications.

Ironic campaigns

We have ourselves been intrigued by this new ‘ironic turn’ in corporate communications. Large international fashion brands such as Patagonia, Benetton and Diesel have recently challenged conventional informational approaches to marketing communication about sustainability, choosing instead to incorporate a humorous (or more precisely, an ironic) edge to their visual representations as they address issues of climate change.

Such campaigns are ironic because they bring a twist of message incongruity and ‘double talk’, where they show a world within which ambiguity, incongruity and contradictions are real and leaving it to consumers what to make of it. This stands in sharp contrast to conventional prescriptions in marketing communications where the idea of ‘one message’, or what we refer to as ‘single talk’, prevails with the purpose of targeting consumers effectively. In our recently published paper, we suggest the term ‘helpful hypocrisy’ as a way of coining the ironic turn.

On the one hand, these new ironic messages show consumers the dire consequences of pollution, climate change, flooding and deforestation (i.e. implications of consumption) and on the other hand, they simultaneously carry strong aesthetic appeals to enjoy life and consume more, comforting consumers that ‘life goes on’ and hedonistic lifestyles will continue. In new ‘twisting’ advertising campaigns, companies blend these two narratives in complex, ironic visualization.

Such double talk is often deemed hypocrisy and greenwashing in research as well as in practice. And while we agree with such assessment, our analysis shows that there is also something else going on.

Double talk

We point to how such double talk may also provoke critical reflection and surprise through displaying inconsistencies between ‘talk’ and ‘talk,’ and hereby engage its audiences as more than passive recipients. In a cosmopolitan context, where people like to think that they are able and capable of critically reflect on their own lives and make their own decisions, preaching and moralizing communications about ‘good behavior’ is becoming increasingly less effective.

Youth is particularly opposing being told what to do. And even in spite of the severe consequences of continued consumption, a certain ‘climate change fatigue’ has entered the market. Consumers know that they should buy less and more sustainable products, but they are resistant to messages that give them feelings of guilt and shame.

In such a world, we suggest, one way to gain traction is to engage audiences in ironic and humorous communications in which the receiver is him- and herself activated to interpret incongruous ambiguous messages.

Helpful hypocrisy

Analyzing Diesel’s Global Warming Ready campaign, we find how the technique of irony is particularly outspoken as beautiful people in beautiful clothes are inserted into out-of-place environments, juxtaposing them if you will, by the dire implications of climate change, in a way which makes the whole scenery appear absurd.

In our analysis, we develop an analytical model that positions irony and double talk vis a vis conventional marketing campaigns.

We point to how the blend of climate change and luxury consumption is an ambiguous affair, and we show how incongruity is present across four levels of Diesel’s use of irony: fantasy versus reality (framing), survival versus destruction (signifying), utopia versus dystopia (symbolizing) and political activism versus consumer society (ideologizing).

Without moralizing or telling consumers what to do, or even restraining from telling consumers how good the corporate sustainable activities are, Diesel exposes the ambiguities of society and sustainability by using humor.

Now, we are not fooling ourselves. Diesel is a company with an ambition of selling more products. And where satire is a technique that intends to improve humanity by critiquing its ‘follies and foibles’, companies are generally known to have less noble ambitions.

But we argue – with Swedish sociologist Nils Brunsson – that “hypocrisy appears to be exactly what we demand of modern organizations: if we expose organizations to conflicting demands and norms, and expect that they should respond to them, then we must also expect hypocrisy” (1993: 8-9).

We propose that irony may be considered a means of ‘helpful hypocrisy’ in which the public is exposed to the contradictions and vices of society with the purpose of changing people’s opinion and create betterment of society.


References

Brunsson, N. (1989). The Organization of Hypocrisy: Talk, Decisions and Actions in Organizations. Wiley.

Glozer, S. and Morsing, M. (2019). Helpful hypocrisy? Investigating ‘double-talk’ and irony in CSR marketing communications, Journal of Business Research


About the authors

Sarah Glozer is Associate Professor of Marketing and Society in the School of Management at the University of Bath, UK. She is also Deputy Director of the Centre for Business, Organisations and Society (CBOS). Her research focuses on corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication, digital marketing and ethical markets/consumption.

Mette Morsing is Professor and Mistra Chair of Sustainable Markets at Stockholm School of Economics (Sweden) and Professor of Corporate Social Responsibility at Copenhagen Business School (Denmark). Her research concerns how organizations govern and are governed in the context of sustainability. She is particularly interested in how communication, identity and image dynamics work in this regard.


The image is one of the eight images displayed in Glozer & Morsing (2019) from the Diesel Global Warming Ready campaign: New York City submerged in water

Fake news and the future of the truth

By Jan Michael Bauer

At least since the last U.S. elections in 2016, the issue of “fake news” is frequently debated in the public and the news. The strategic and targeted distribution of misinformation to undermine political opponents peaked in the conspiracy theory termed “Pizzagate”.

Originated from leaked emails, the story suggested that the former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton along with other high-level Democrats ran a child trafficking out of a pizzeria in Washington[1]. Despite these absurd claims and the lack of any credible evidence, the owner received multiple death threats and the restaurant was attacked with an assault rifle[2]. Luckily, nobody was injured.

The hunger for likes

Though admittingly an extreme case, this is only one example of many fake news stories shared on social media and often echoed among equal minded users. Even though multiple psychological studies emphasize the human tendency to believe information that supports prior beliefs, it remains astonishing that even the most outlandish fakes find their believers and are frequently shared. This phenomenon fueled by the hunger of many users for likes and reach of their posts, which seems to be extended with more extreme content.

These dynamics have given prominence to the recent focus on “fake news” but looking at the latest technological developments the future might even hold dire prospects.

Modern computer software, like Photoshop©, allows for realistic manipulations of images since many years. While some faked photos have famously traveled through the internet, I would argue that people have developed a healthy and critical attitude towards digital images as people can no longer trust their own eyes. Increasing processing power and novel algorithms start to enable trained users to not only alter photos, but also voice recordings and video material [3]. While not yet perfect, with enough training data these technologies are able to rearrange and even create new audio and video material that is hard to distinguish from the original.

Thinking a few years ahead, it is not hard to imagine that these methods become better and better, and fakes will ultimately be indistinguishable from real footage.

This will allow the creation of fake content about individuals using their own voice and presented by a realistic video of the person without their knowledge. While this will certainly trigger a cat and mouse game between people creating fake material and others trying to identify the fake through digital forensics, it will always be easier to create a fake than detecting one. Hence, one might hope that people develop a similar skepticism towards videos and voice recordings than most have towards images. In any case, the line between what is real and what is fake will inevitably become blurrier as technology increases.

Type 2 error

Currently, the discussion about fake news focuses on the spread of what is literally fake news, the spreading of information that is not true – like Pizzagate. Borrowing from the language and ideas of statistics, people believing the Pizzagate conspiracy make what is called a Type 1 error: they believe a story to be true, even though there is nothing to it.

I, however, would like to focus attention on the second type of error that has so far received less attention. A Type 2 error occurs if someone does not believe a story, even though it is actually true. In other words, declaring something fake news, even though it is real. There are a few recent cases that highlight this problem.

For instance, in 2015 a real video of the former Greek Minister of Finance Yanis Varoufakis surfaced where he showed “Germany the middle finger”. However, in the name of satire, a German comedian wrongly claimed to have created the video by showing a fake video of the Minister only raising a clenched fist and declared it to be the original before his team added the raised middle finger digitally [4]. This “Varoufake” controversy circulated the media until an official clarification stating that the video with a raised middle finger is actually real footage. Resolving the confusion took several days. A long time for the current speed of information on social media.

A more recent example stems from Prince Andrew involved in a sex scandal [5]. Confronted with the accusation of an inappropriate relationship with, at the time, underaged Virginia Giuffre, he claimed to not remember ever meeting her and responded to a photo showing him with his arms around her that there is no way to prove the authenticity of this image and suggested that it could have been faked.

Fakes affecting social media and public opinion

While fakes might ultimately be identified by experts in the famous cases or the court, it is unlikely that social media and public opinion will not be affected by this issue. The mere possibility of fake images, audio, or video evidence might undermine the credibility of real incriminating evidence and help perpetrators spread doubt about the authenticity of evidence against them.

In 2012, a shaky video surfaced where republican candidate Mitt Romney declared 47% of the nation as government-dependent and his job would not be to “worry about these people”. In 2016, a hot microphone recorded Donald Trump before leaving a bus bragging about sexual assault. In the latter case, Trump on numerous occasions suggested that the audio might be a fake,[6] creating doubt at least among some voters, and ultimately won the election.

An increase in such “Type 2 fake news” issues might be even more problematic than the currently discussed Type 1 problems.

If the public can no longer trust any of their senses to separate truth from fake due to technological progress, the democratic process is certainly in danger. And if at some point even experts struggle to clearly identify the authenticity of the evidence, the issue might even spread into our courts and the legal system.

When teaching my students about the different error types in statistics, the lecture generally concludes with the lesson that the probability of making either of the errors is connected. Being more skeptical reduces Type 1 errors but increases the probability of making the 2nd types.

Despite this link, it is ex ante not clear which errors cause more harm and we should be careful that our current emphasis on “fake news” focusing on type 1 error not inadvertently creates too much skepticism which will leave us with many more type 2 errors. “Pizzagate” is the former, climate change denial is the latter.


References

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/12/10/business/media/pizzagate.html

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/business/media/comet-ping-pong-pizza-shooting-fake-news-consequences.html?action=click&contentCollection=Business&region=Footer&module=WhatsNext&version=WhatsNext&contentID=WhatsNext&moduleDetail=undefined&pgtype=Multimedia

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ54GDm1eL0

[4] https://www.euronews.com/2015/03/19/varoufake-when-satire-acts-as-media-watchdog

[5] https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/11/26/cal-forensics-expert-casts-doubt-on-prince-andrews-claim-sex-slave-photo-was-faked/

[6] https://observer.com/2018/09/trump-still-wants-you-to-think-the-access-hollywood-tape-is-fake/


About the author

Jan Bauer is Associate Professor at Copenhagen Business School and part of the Consumer & Behavioural Insights Group at CBS Sustainability. His research interests are in the fields of sustainability, consumer behavior and decision-making.


Last year, the Seminar on Fake News – Digital Transformation Platform took place at Copenhagen Business School. The organizers highlighted: The problem of Fake News and other problematic online content is one of our times’ most pressing challenges — it is widely believed to have played a major role in the election of Trump and the current situation with Brexit.

Read more by the same author

Are you choosing what you really want?

Behavioural change in the work environment: a first review on MSC’s sustainable food policy

A Story of Poison, Pork and Consumer Protection

Photo by Christian Gertenbach on Unsplash

Why consultations on large projects should matter to citizens as well as companies

By Karin Buhmann, Sanne Vammen Larsen and Anna-Sofie Hurup Skjervedal. This article is based on their previously written piece for the Centre for Business and Development Studies.

Insights into the concerns or needs of communities or individuals who may be affected by planned or proposed private or public energy projects or infrastructure projects is important for those who will eventually decide whether the project will be approved to make an informed decision. Such insights can be gained through consultations carried out as part of assessments of the environmental or societal impacts of projects.

This begs the question: what is a good process for stakeholder engagement of local communities and citizens in impact assessment processes? This is a global issue that in recent years has come to be high on the agenda in countries from the Arctic to the Global South.

Consultations as part of impact assessments

Consultations allowing for stakeholder involvement in impact assessments are common in regard to private projects concerning the establishment of mines, windfarms, sun-power farms and dams for hydro-power. The same applies to public infrastructure projects such as airports, roads and ports, which are often necessary for the transport of the products to be gained from private projects.

Societal impacts of projects are typically assessed through social impact assessment (SIA), environmental impact assessment (EIR), or human rights impact assessment (HRIA), or combined approaches such as ESIA or ESHRIA. All aim at identifying and preventing or mitigating adverse impacts and advance positive impacts, of planned projects or extension of existing ones. It is customary and often mandatory for the impact assessment to involve local stakeholders who are or may become affected by the project.

This typically takes place through consultations, which may take a variety of forms to enable public participation in the identification of the impacts of the planned activities. Consultations are organized by authorities or the organization having applied for a permit to engage in the new activity. In addition to environmental impacts, impact assessments often include the project’s effects on a range of broader societal issues, such as health and safety in the local areas, employment, local business and sources of income generation, etc.

The Nordics and many other countries have introduced mandatory consultations of local communities. Some international development banks, e.g. the World Bank, have made certain loans conditional on impact assessments.

Uncertainty about consultations

Despite the great significance of consultations for stakeholder involvement, there is often uncertainty with local communities and other groups of affected stakeholders in regard to what exactly a consultation is, what it entails and what to expect of the process. Moreover, even when consultations have taken place it is not infrequent that affected communities are unhappy with the process or the extent to which authorities take their concerns or needs into account.

For example, Sami groups living in the High North have complained to authorities in Norway and Sweden because they are concerned that windfarms disrupt the grazing areas of their reindeer and, as a consequence, the traditional way of life of the Sami. Authorities and business enterprises can also be unsure about what constitutes the proper process or ‘best practice’ for consultations with affected stakeholder.

Photo: Reindeer at Kvalsund, Norway/ K. Buhmann, 2019

What is a consultation?

Consultations on project activities are carried out to provide an informed foundation for decisions to be made. In providing access to participation in decision-making on activities that will affect one’s life at the everyday level, consultations contribute to a form of very direct democracy and can be argued to be part of the human right to public participation.

Consultations provide citizens with an opportunity to ask questions and express their views on a project. But as is the case for other democratic processes, one does not have a claim to seeing one’s views winning out. This is an important aspect for the appreciation of what to expect of a consultation; how to engage in a consultation process; and the information that authorities, companies and consultants must or should provide when conducting consultations.

It is not infrequent that consultations are conducted by a company involved in the project. A good consultation process marked by sincere dialogue and appreciation of local concerns can build understanding and acceptance of the final design of the project. A process that does not live up to local stakeholders’ expectations of influence can lead to the opposite result.

Accordingly, it is important for involved companies as well as authorities to ensure that stakeholders are given the information necessary to understand and assess how the project may affect them, what their rights are and what they can expect of the consultation process.

Local stakeholders’ expectations and understandings

Our investigations have demonstrated that it is not infrequent for actually or potentially affected stakeholders in a local community to be uncertainty of what a consultation entails or what to expect of the process and result. Others have shown that frustration results when authorities do not seem to take views made during a consultation into consideration in their decisions.

During meetings in northern Scandinavia in June 2019, we met with several inhabitants in Sápmi, who expressed frustration with consultation processes. Sápmi is the cultural region traditionally inhabited by the Sami people, an indigenous people who traditionally live from reindeer herding and fishing. Grazing areas on which the Sami’s reindeer depend are adversely affected by the establishment of windmills and mines.

Sami communities are involved and asked for their views through consultations, but they also see authorities granting permits to put up windfarms and new mines on contravention of the contesting views and concerns presented by the Sami during consultations. Authorities in Norway have granted permission to open a new copper mine in Northern Norway despite the opposing views submitted by the Sami Parliament (Sametinget). The motivation to engage actively in future consultations easily gets reduced, even with those who are aware that a consultation does not equal a claim to one’s views to be granted when central authorities are seen to make decisions affronting local democracy.

Some of our other meetings have shown that when English is a working language or the common ’lingua franca’ in an area that does not have English as its main language, mistranslations may occur and lead to misunderstandings about the process and objectives. For example, the Danish term for consultation, ‘høring’, often gets translated into English as ‘hearing’. This may give unintended associations to the conflict-oriented type of ‘hearing’ that takes place in courtrooms and it’s objective of determinations leading to a winner and a looser, thereby disrupting the understanding of the consultation’s objectives of dialogue and developing workable solutions. Our fieldwork in Greenland and elsewhere offers several examples of this mistranslation.

Consultations and the corporate ’social license to operate’

Consultations can contribute to risks of adverse impacts being identified and addressed before they develop into actual problems because consultations offer opportunities for local stakeholders, including those who are actually or potentially directly affected by the proposed project or project idea to express their concerns.

Because of this consultations not only matter to the longer-term well-being of the local community, but also to relations to the organization that is behind the project giving rise to the consultation.

For example, a consultation concerning a proposed mine matters not only for local stakeholders who are concerned with the mine’s impact on grazing areas or the quality of water, but also for the perception of the company that wants to carry out the project, and for trust in authorities who will be granting the permit or prescribe changes and conditions.

Authorities often delegate the task to conduct a consultation to the company that applies for an exploration or exploitation permit. One the one hand, this may strengthen the consultation process because the company conducting the process knows the project very well and is able to reply to questions of a technical character. On the other hand, participation in the consultation and trust in the process may suffer if local stakeholders, who are worried about contamination or other harmful effects, suspect that the consultation may be influenced by the company’s interests.

‘Fox in the henhouse’

Allowing the company that applies for a permit for the project to conduct the consultation can appear like letting the fox into the hen house.

However, if performed well, the company will obtain a better appreciation of the project’s impacts and will be able to make relevant adaptions. Likewise, authorities often lack both the necessary technical knowledge and other resources to conduct consultations. Companies lack knowledge, for example in regard to local issues are expected to purchase relevant expertise through consultant advice. The company thereby invests in establishing the necessary informed knowledge foundations for the permit to be granted by authorities.

When companies are given the responsibility to conduct consultations that may affect the decisions to be made by authorities, it is important that they carry out a correct and good consultation process that allows local stakeholders to participate at times suitable to them. If a consultation takes place during normal working hours many local stakeholders may decide to stay away because participating would mean a loss of income.

Likewise, participation may be limited if the consultation takes place in a location that requires long transport. Consultations conducted in another language than the local one reduces the opportunity for local stakeholders to engage in a dialogue. Unless technical or health-related issues are explained in a manner that matches the prerequisites of local stakeholders, risks arise that they will not obtain an adequate understanding of the impacts of the project. This will increase risks of misunderstandings and that relevant questions remain unasked, or that relevant concerns are not voiced.

Photo: Sheepfarm in Qassiarsuk, Narsaq area /K. Buhmann 2018

During field workshops in Southern Greenland in August 2018, we were given insights into a diversity of local experience of consultation processes and expectations. The point of departure for our meetings was a proposed mine in Kuannersuit (Kvanefjeld) by the town Narsaq. Greenland’s eight largest towns, Narsaq has a population of around 1,500 and is placed in an area with extensive sheep grazing and tourism based around ruins of the Norse settlers. The mine will produce diverse minerals and rare earth elements, with uranium as a by-product due to high uranium contents at this specific site.

Consultations have been conducted by the company. We met with several sheep-farmers and actors in the emergent tourism sector who expressed concern whether uranium dust from the mine would harm their business, income and human and animal health in the area. Several individuals were frustrated with the process of the consultation, such as meetings taking place at locations or times of the day or year that made it difficult for the sheep farmers to travel to the meetings and take part in them. Moreover, as the Sami noted above, several people in the Narsaq area were basically concerned that the authorities do not seem to take the concerns voiced into account. Several questioned whether the process is accordance with the ideals of a democratic society.

Ups and downs of consultations

When consultations work well they can contribute to a sense of common or including decision-making. Research shows that this underscores the acceptance of the resulting activity, related to what is sometimes referred to as the legitimacy of the activity.

When consultations do not work well they can have the opposite effect and undermine trust, not just in the specific project but also in the company or companies involved. This relates to what is sometimes referred to as the ‘social licence to operate’. The term ’social licence to operate’ relates to the risk of loss, that a company (or companies) run as a result of local protest or opposition to a project for which they have applied for a legal licence.

Even if a company has obtained a legal licence, for example, to undertake the exploration of minerals, local opposition may be present. There are indications that a weak social licence to operate is on the rise in Greenland, thereby affecting the local legitimacy of projects like the Kuannersuit mine in Narsaq (Bowles and MacPhail, 2019).

Greenland is a country based on the rule of law with strong institutions and regulation and traditionally a relatively high level of trust in authorities and their decisions. Observations that in such a society and despite formal requirements, there is lack of trust in consultations and arms-length between authorities and companies conducting the consultations, and that concerns voiced by local stakeholders during consultations are taken seriously and acted upon are severe indications that formal procedures are not sufficient for a good consultation process. Accordingly, it is important to understand what constitutes a good consultation process from the perspective of the individual stakeholder, even if there is still no claim to having one’s way in regard to the final decision.

References

Bowles, P & MacPhail, F (2019) Coming to the Surface: The Social Licence to Mine in Greenland. Paper submitted for international seminar ‘Problems and Perspectives of social responsibility in natural resources exploration, exploitation, and management’, Pskov State University, Pskov (Russia) 23-25 October 2019 (on file with lead author).

About the authors

Karin Buhmann is Professor at Copenhagen Business School, where she is charged with the emergent field of Business and Human Rights. Her research interests include what makes stakeholder engagement meaningful from the perspective of so-called affected stakeholders, such as communities, and the implications for companies and public organisations carrying out impact assessments.

Sanne Vammen Larsen is an expert in the field of environmental planning and impact assessment, with a focus on integration of climate change in Impact Assessment, local processes and social impacts, and dealing with risk and uncertainty. She is employed as an associate professor at The Danish Centre for Environmental Assessment at Aalborg University, Denmark.

Anna-Sofie Skjervedal is PhD from Ilisimatusarfik – the University of Greenland and Aalborg University, and special consultant in public participation within the Municipality of Sermersooq, Nuuk, Greenland. Anna-Sofie specializes in public participation within impact assessment processes in relation to extractive industry development in Greenland with a focus on meaningful youth engagement.

Photo by davide ragusa on Unsplash

Female entrepreneurs & reward-based crowdfunding: Offline inequality and online equality?

By Kristian Roed Nielsen

Traditional sources of entrepreneurial finance tend to favor men, while female entrepreneurs are often bypassed. Thielst, G.H. (2019), for example, found that Danish investors tend to be more skeptical towards female entrepreneurs and place higher demands on them for details, numbers, and forecasts. However, with the emergence of reward-based crowdfunding we are witnessing an outcome contrary to this offline gender inequality, that women are systematically more successful than men (Gorbatai & Nelson 2015, p.1). Let us explore why.

Reward-based crowdfunding – how does it work?

Reward-based crowdfunding is an increasingly common source of finance for a diversity of entrepreneurs and creative projects, where individuals invest a pre-defined amount of money with the expectation that if successfully funded, they will receive a tangible (but non-financial) reward often in the form of a product or service.

In reward-based crowdfunding hitting ones funding target is thus of critical importance as the campaign, as otherwise the pre-invested (or pledged) money would be returned to the backers.

Reward-based crowdfunding, like other forms of crowdfunding, is thus dependent on the successful interaction between a number of actors including the central organizing platform, a number of content providing campaigns, and a large diverse group of funders/backers.

(Nielsen 2018)

The growth of reward-based crowdfunding has moved it beyond a niche phenomenon exemplified by the fact that in the past decade it has resulted in more than $10 billion in pledges from over 75 million backers (Blaseg et al. 2020) and has thus rightly captured researcher attention.

Female founders and reward-based crowdfunding

A diversity of studies into the antecedents of success in a reward-based crowdfunding context have all observed similar results – that women are significantly more likely to achieve their funding goals as compared to men (see Gorbatai & Nelson 2015; Marom et al. 2016; Greenberg & Mollick 2016; Nielsen 2019). Some of the reasons we have uncovered thus fare include differences in funding goals, communication styles, and activist female backers.

Both my recent research into crowdfunding in Denmark (Nielsen 2019) and the work by Marom et al. (2016) find that women tend to ask for less and thus also subsequently raise less through successful campaigns as compared to men.

For example, in a Danish context women had an average funding goal of 23.746,00 DKK as compared to men who set it at 27.960,00 DKK. Men therefore also experienced, when successful, more financial support earning on average 6.000,00 DKK more than women.

However, these differences in funding goals also mean the women are significantly more likely to actually hitting their funding goal and thus actually being financed. Women’s financial expectations of what they can raise through crowdfunding thus seem better aligned with reality. However, these differences in funding goals only account for parts of the overall picture.

In addition, Gorbatai & Nelson (2015) found that the communication style of women on crowdfunding platforms trended towards more inclusive and emotional language which in turn is positively associated with funding success. They thus propose that “the institution of crowdfunding may reduce gender inequalities in the fundraising arena by benefitting the communication style of women.” (Ibid, p.1).

Finally, both Marom et al. (2016) and Greenberg & Mollick (2016) found that female backers showed a significant preference for supporting women-led projects. Moreover, Greenberg & Mollick (2016) suggest results from “activist choice homophily” where “women are more inclined to fund women entrepreneurs because of perceived shared structural barriers that come from a mutual social identity.” (Leitch et al. 2018, p.110). They find this trend especially strong in industries in which they are least represented (e.g. technology industry).

Reward-based crowdfunding favors female founders

Thus, unlike many other forms of financing (Sorenson et al. 2016), women appear to benefit from reward-based crowdfunding for the noted reasons: communication style, activist female backers and not least financial expectations that are better aligned with crowdfunding as a financing tool.

However, as with all other research, these initial findings are not universal nor have many of them been validated by follow-up studies and the results are therefore far from conclusive. Nonetheless, we can with a certain degree say that reward-based crowdfunding contrary offline source of innovation finance systematically favors female founders.


About the author

Kristian Roed Nielsen is Assistant Professor at Copenhagen Business School and visiting researcher at Mistra Center for Sustainable Markets at Stockholm School of Economics. His research focuses on consumer behaviour, crowdfunding, sustainable consumption & innovation and user innovation. He strives to examine what, if any, potential role the “crowd” could have in driving, financing and enabling sustainable entrepreneurship and innovation. Seeking to uncover what role the consumer could have in enabling and financing sustainable innovation.

More about crowdfunding

Reward-based Crowdfunding for Sustainable Entrepreneurs: A Practitioner’s Guide

Crowdfunding for Sustainability: Creating a platform for sustainable ideas

The Winners and Losers of Reward-based Crowdfunding

Photo by Authority Dental

SDG 17 check in: cross-sector partnerships from the beneficiary perspective?

By Anne Vestergaard, Luisa Murphy, Mette Morsing and Thilde Langevang

Have you ever wondered how SDG 17 is, in fact, delivering on its promise? Does it sometimes cross your mind to what extent cross-sector partnerships are benefitting all parties involved, including those people whose livelihood they are intended to assist and advance? Some years ago, we set out to explore the effectiveness of North-South cross-sector partnerships with a particular focus on providing novel knowledge to understand better the partnerships from the vantage point of its beneficiaries. Some of our main findings have just been published.

Understanding the value of cross-sector partnerships

In research as in practice, there are high hopes for cross-partnerships as the new global governance mechanism. Cross-sector partnerships are presented as particularly well-suited to solve some of the world’s most critical global challenges such as poverty, climate change, and inequality. No one organization, business or institution can do it alone.

It is better to address wicked problems together. It does indeed sound plausible: the more perspectives, the more knowledge, the more resources, the better. However, as we experience the emergence of a great number of cross-sector partnerships, we also see an increasing concern expressed from research and practice about the effectiveness of these partnerships.

Do they really deliver better and more than a government or a business or an NGO could alone? Are they really providing better conditions for the world’s poor? Are cross-sector partnerships more efficient in addressing fundamental problems of inequality?

So far, we have only very little research to substantiate such claims. A large part of current research has so far emphasized the advantages for the (typically North-based) business partner to partake, leaving us with a certain Northern and corporate bias in understanding the value of cross-sector partnerships.

Study of the ‘Best in class cross-sector partnership’

Our study explored what was by the Danish embassy to Ghana assessed as the ‘best in class cross-sector partnership’ involving Ghanaian and Danish actors. Over three years, we visited the cross-sector partnership several times, observed and interviewed the young single mother employees, as well as the Northern business and the Southern NGO partners.

At first glimpse, the ten-year-old partnership looked promising. A number of young mothers had been employed over the years. It was prestigious and competitive to get a job with the partnership. It had its own physical building within the NGO where the women were sitting at a table assembling the jewelry in the designed styles, talking, working and laughing.

When interviewed, the NGO manager or one of their two supervisors were initially present. English conversation was difficult for them. We heard the same kind of appreciation of the partnership as we had heard from their leaders. It was not until next time we arrived that we started to see a potentially problematic pattern arise.

This time, we interviewed the young mothers in their home territory in their villages, where the managers were not present. Also, we had a local translator, so the conversations took place in the women’s local language.  All this is just to remind ourselves, how difficult it is to get access to ‘good data’ in such circumstances.

Competence without agency

At this second glance, we found that the cross-sector partnership resulted in what we term ‘competence without agency’ for the beneficiaries. The partnership was found to provide new resources and knowledge to the young single mothers but failed to generate the conditions for these to be transformed into significant changes in their lives.

Only the most capable young women, the ‘viable poor’ were offered a job, excluding the poorest young single mothers in the villages. Women had to travel far to work in the NGO, leaving their children behind in the village and preventing traditional practices of sharing work with family and wider community.

The partnership drew on old craftsmanship from the region which was modified to fit Northern standards – all decided and directed by the Northern entrepreneur, leaving the young mothers with the task of adapting and imitating rather than innovating.

On top of that, income for the young mothers was unstable due to fluctuations in European demand for the product produced, making it impossible for the women to plan ahead and to improve support for their children’s schoolwork.

These were just some of the unexpected, invisible and unpronounced outcomes of the cross-sector partnership which occurred as the entrepreneur and the NGO leaders were focusing on making the partnership work and the Northern government initially supporting the project was happy to see some business result from the collaboration.

SDG 17 through cross-sector partnerships

While the main novel research findings from this study do not deliver an immediately positive tale of ‘how to do partnerships in a few easy steps’, it points importantly to how the whole idea of expecting cross-sector partnerships to work as development agents and to create sustainable development, must take into consideration how to empower those people who the cross-sector partnership is intended to benefit in the long-term.

This implies that instead of assuming that the young single mothers engaged in this cross-sector partnership would inevitably be better off working for the prestigious partnership by having an (infrequent) income, a careful inquiry should be engaged into how the project could potentially empower these young women (and their children) in non-financial ways and in the long-term perspective (fx. education, professional training, health provision, etc).

We argue that when considering the potential of cross-sector partnerships, it is crucial that outcomes are not conflated with impact, that it is acknowledged that resources, be they money or skills, do not necessarily transform the lives of the poor and marginalized.

This research calls for organizations, businesses and governments partaking in SDG 17 through cross-sector partnerships to engage in much more, and deeper consideration for the beneficiaries if they want to provide something more meaningful than the usual ‘North benefitting from inexpensive labor in the South’.

Factbox designed by Maja Michalewska

References:

Vestergaard, A., Murphy, L., Morsing, M., and Langevang, T. (2019). Capitalism’s new development agents: A critical analysis of North-South CSR partnerships. Business & Society


About the authors

Anne Vestergaard is Associate Professor at Center for Corporate Social Responsibility at Copenhagen Business School. Her research revolves around mainstream discourses of morality with a particular interest in how processes of institutional, technological and semiotic mediation contribute to them.

Luisa Murphy is a PhD Fellow in corporate sustainability at Copenhagen Business School. Her research examines multi-stakeholder initiatives, anti-corruption and human rights.

Mette Morsing is Chair of Sustainable Markets and Executive Director of Misum at Stockholm School of Economics and Professor of CSR and Organization Theory at CBS. Her research focuses on how identity is governed in the interplay of internal and external stakeholders, in particular in the context of CSR and sustainability.

Thilde Langevang is Associate Professor at Centre for Business and Development Studies at Copenhagen Business School. Her research interests are in the area of entrepreneurship and development studies with a particular focus on youth, women, and creative industries in Africa.

Photo by Amy Humphries on Unsplash

Better than nothing but still “exSASBerating”!

By Dieter Zinnbauer.

Why a powerful push by the world’s top asset manager towards more sustainability reporting still falls pretty short.

Great news

BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager promises to leverage its weight and voting power for more consistent and comprehensive corporate reporting on sustainability. And this includes corporate lobbying.

Good news

The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) standard that BlackRock backs also includes a reporting dimension on what it calls “Management of the Legal & Regulatory Environment”. According to the SASB this category “addresses a company’s approach to engaging with regulators in cases where conflicting corporate and public interests may have the potential for long-term adverse direct or indirect environmental and social impacts.” 

Now, this sounds quite promising.

It really seems to recognize the urgent imperative for business to align corporate political activity with its social and environmental responsibility and to assure all stakeholders in your reporting that this is the case.

Or to take a plain language and not entirely hypothetical example: as a responsible corporate citizen show everyone that you are not a hypocrite and that you do not lobby against improved fuel efficiency standards while at the same time celebrating your green credentials by supporting smart transport initiatives.

As the SASB further elaborates on this reporting dimension, the category addresses among other “a company’s level of reliance upon regulatory policy…  actions to influence industry policy (such as through lobbying) … [and ] it may relate to the alignment of management and investor views of regulatory engagement and compliance at large”[1]. And the related accounting metric mandates a “discussion of corporate positions related to government regulations and/or policy proposals that address environmental and social factors affecting the industry.”

One could be a stickler and criticize that this is not comprehensive and specific enough, as it, for example, does not require to disclose how much money is spent on specific lobbying issues or what other of the growing repertoire of corporate influencing and communication strategies beyond lobbying are deployed to shape the public policy debate on these issues.

But let’s be pragmatic, the fact that the world’s largest asset manager has chosen to explicitly demand reporting on lobbying from the many companies it invests in and also threatens openly to vote against boards of companies that do not play along is a great step forward.

But then the really not so good news

The SASB only requires companies to report on corporate political activity in sectors where this category is judged to be material. And quite startlingly corporate political activity is only viewed as material for some segments of the oil & gas sector, biofuels, and chemicals. That’s it.

How can this be? No mention of air freight & logistics, airlines, marine transportation or the car industry  – sectors in which many (but not all) companies are out in force to lobby against green taxes and/or higher resource efficiency standards, thus delaying much-needed investments in future-proof technologies and creating a regulatory backlog that all but exacerbates the material risks of stranded assets and failing business models further down the road.

How about construction materials or the steel industry whose future trajectories in energy efficiency or recycling and the rules and regulations that will apply are material to global sustainability and corporate success alike?

How about the meat, poultry and dairy sector? I have not researched their lobbying activities but would imagine that they are very much engaged around evolving rules for methane emissions as one of the most potent climate gasses in a world of growing appetite for meat. No need for investors to know how corporate strategy, public policy engagement and sustainability dynamics line up?

Or how about coal and electricity & power generation? Are these sectors viewed as a lost cause where corporate political action will simply be assumed to be misaligned with societal sustainability goals and thus not worthwhile accounting for? Does this do justice to and incentivize responsible corporate political engagement where it is perhaps more material and needed more than in many other areas?

These are just some examples with regard to climate change. Corporate political engagement is plausibly a material issues for many other sectors as well, for example when thinking about social aspects of sustainability, e.g. how platform economies craft business models and lobby on the rules that apply to gig work, how big tech seeks to shape privacy rules that are closely linked to their advertising-based business models…

Corporate political activity is a highly cross-cutting material issue. Expecting corporate reporting on it is urgent and most welcome. Yet, limiting this push to only five of overall more than seventy business sectors is more than unfortunate. Trailblazing trustees of our savings and investments and the reporting standards that they promote must and can do better.

About the author

Dr. Dieter Zinnbauer is a Marie-Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at CBS’ Department of Management, Society and Communication. His CBS researches focus on business as political actor in the context of big data, populism and “corporate purpose fatigue”.

Twitter: @Dzinnbauer

Essays: https://medium.com/@Dzinnbauer

Working papers:  https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=1588618


References:

[1] Annotations as extracted from SASB materiality map https://materiality.sasb.org/

Photo by Guido Jansen on Unsplash

We can’t better the world at once. So let’s do it together!

By Julia Köhler

Sustainability – a concept that accompanies us every day: whether it is sustainable consumption, sustainable nutrition, sustainable traveling or sustainable management. What does sustainability actually mean and does it only serve as a means to an end?

Meet oikos Copenhagen

A big topic that concerns a student organization. Founded in 1987 in St. Gallen, oikos has ever since grown into an international student initiative with 50 local “chapters”, as we call it, on almost every continent in the world. With the underlying idea of ​​integrating sustainability as one of the core topics in economics and business, this initiative has now been running for more than 30 years.

With its 48 active members, oikos Copenhagen is one of the largest chapters and contributes to the sustainability discussion at the Copenhagen Business School since 2012. By bringing students of different backgrounds together, the six projects are looking at the topic from various perspectives and are aiming at more sustainability in business and management education.

Image by oikos Copenhagen
Image by oikos Copenhagen

The triple bottom line is at the center of our values. Future leaders should be empowered to take change into their own hands. Integrity is a central component of organizational DNA: members stand behind the core values ​​and actively develop them further. For this, our members are in a constant dialogue with each other and deal critically with the topic.

We see ourselves as representatives of the sustainability movement and each fulfills the role of a moderator in discussions with social environments.

That’s the way it should be. On the way there, oikos regularly encounters hurdles. Not only in management issues but especially on a personal, cultural and financial level. Our core values ​​reflect a way of thinking that is becoming more and more recognized but is still not adequately represented and acknowledged by our educational system. Is it even possible to combine sustainability and business at all or is a system change required first?

What if you can make a change?  

I started my time at oikos in 2018 as the Project Manager of oikos Impact, one of the six projects of the Copenhagen chapter. The project objective is to improve sustainability on the CBS campus.

Our team was negatively surprised that a university in one of the sustainable Nordic countries does not recycle.

In May 2019, we launched a pilot project with two recycling stations on campus. Recently, the campus management decided to launch recycling stations inspired by oikos Copenhagen at every canteen.

A very central project of our organization – Curricular Transformation – deals with the integration of sustainability topics in the curricula of all degree programs. oikos Copenhagen does not intend to create separate study programs exclusively on the subject of sustainability.

We see sustainability as a relevant topic just like accounting, taxation, innovation, strategy and entrepreneurship.

Our team is in touch with the Dean of Education and would appreciate supporting departments, course coordinators and professors in the shift to a greener curriculum.

oikos Career reflects the typical cycle of a student preparing for a career in the sustainability scene. Initially, students are accompanied by the content design of the curriculum vitae. Afterwards, networking event participants have the opportunity to meet potentially attractive employers. With the Career Fair, we optimally made it easier for some students to enter sustainable businesses.

Social Pioneers offers companies, mostly start-ups but also established smaller companies, a platform to teach students that it is possible to profitably combine entrepreneurship and sustainability. Students gain insights into the day-to-day work of companies, find out which obstacles founders have encountered on their way and can clean up the assumption that one cannot be profitable in running a responsible business.

Image by oikos Copenhagen

As one of our most established projects, the annual GreenWeek marks a week in which the CBS campus and teaching activities are focused exclusively on sustainability. Here we invite guest speakers, representatives of sustainable companies, experts, researchers, and generally interested people to discuss the topic together and to seek mutual exchange. In addition to lectures, keynotes, and panel discussions, we offer workshops on the topic. This year’s GreenWeek will take place from the 10th to the 12th of March 2020.

The oikos Case Competition is a project that connects students with different backgrounds to an interdisciplinary collaboration. Students from across the Copenhagen area: from the Danish Technical University (DTU), Copenhagen University (KU) and the Copenhagen Business School (CBS) work together with companies and/or public institutions on sustainability issues. Our past cooperation partners include Accenture, the city of Copenhagen and IBM.

Let’s make a change, altogether…but how?

Since June 2019, I am sitting on the board of oikos Copenhagen with five other members and as the president and head of project management, I am leading the organization.

When requesting more support from decision-makers I often get asked about the competitive advantage the university could expect from oikos’ work. oikos Copenhagen stands for values ​​that are hard to ‘sell’ as a business case.

The general opinion about sustainability is an important cultural barrier for oikos Copenhagen, as it is still considered an annoying side issue for ‘hippie’ students. The challenge is to build and maintain an exchange of ideas and communication about the relevance of the topic. I believe that business schools are an extreme example of this.

Meanwhile, several other organizations are being founded around the topic of sustainability and it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep track of the various initiatives. Questions like: ‘Who works on which topic?’, ‘How can we collaborate on solving the problem most efficiently?’ and ‘How do we communicate that we are working on something?’ pop up.

Another problem is the lacking overlap with other disciplines outside economics. Currently, our members are mainly CBS students. Although we offer room for students from other universities to be oikos members and to participate in the oikos Case Competition, this is not enough to recruit active members from other universities.

In my opinion, this interdisciplinarity is extremely relevant in all sustainability issues. In addition, it would help us to break away from the typical business thinking so present at CBS and to look at the challenge from several perspectives.

To achieve an effective transition towards a greener Copenhagen Business School, including a sustainable campus and direct as well as indirect education in sustainability for every CBS student, we want to be the bridge to bring all actors together to work on a solution.

For more information about oikos Copenhagen, visit our website at www.oikos-copenhagen.org

Facebook https://www.facebook.com/oikosCopenhagen/

Instagram https://www.instagram.com/oikoscopenhagen/

LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/oikos-copenhagen.

You are also very welcome to contact me personally via e-mail: president@copenhagen.oikos-international.org.

About the author

Julia Köhler is the President of oikos Copenhagen and a student in the management of innovation and business development at Copenhagen Business School.

Teaching (and doing) anthropology in a business school

By Matthew Archer

For a while now, the discipline of anthropology has studied relatively marginalized or dispossessed people and communities, often in developing countries or poor parts of developed countries. What this means is that anthropologists are often critical of powerful organizations like governments, banks, and multinational corporations.

For the past year, I have tried to integrate these critical perspectives into my teaching at Copenhagen Business School. Although CBS is not a typical business school in the sense that it is not primarily an MBA-granting institution, many of my students are pursuing careers in finance and consulting that are typical of business school graduates.

Challenging business students

For young professionals who have been trained in both their classes and their internships to simplify and synthesize difficult concepts, it can come as a bit of a shock to be asked to read an essay about climate change adaptation in Guyana or vanilla bean farming in Madagascar, and unpack the theories and methods to think about how they relate to questions of corporate sustainability and sustainable finance.

But while this may be challenging, I’ve found that students often find it exceedingly valuable.

One of the hardest things to deal with as a young professional is often the tension between personal, ethical values and the pressures a company puts on you to increase profits.

The critical theories that anthropologists use to make sense of the world help students make sense of their work, especially those who are planning to go into sustainability-related careers. Understanding the way humans have navigated the relationship between nature and culture across time and space turns out to be a key piece to the puzzle of how the financial system or tech companies mediate that relationship in more familiar contexts.

Critical thinking

Just as important, it helps them learn to critically reflect on their choices as consumers, investors, citizens, and the numerous other social roles they inhabit, roles that tend to evolve fairly dramatically over time (for example, after they graduate, after they get their first promotion, after they’ve started families, etc.). This kind of reflection is key to building a more just and sustainable society.

Thinking about the role of emotions in determining who has access to clean water in Bangladesh, for example, might seem far removed from concerns here in Denmark about pension funds and money laundering, but as we’ve learned in my classes over the past few semesters, emotions like hope and anxiety play a big role in the way financial resources are distributed and accessed.

Anthropological theories and methods might seem far removed from the quantitative approach to management that defines contemporary sustainability. But to understand the role of businesses in society, the study of societies has to be taken at least as seriously as the study of business, and anthropology is a fruitful way of introducing this perspective in business schools.

About the author

Matthew Archer is Assistant Professor at Copenhagen Business School. He is an ethnographer and political ecologist interested in corporate sustainability and sustainable finance. Visit Matthew’s personal webpage.

By the same author: Sustainability’s Infrastructure

Photo by José Martín Ramírez C on Unsplash

When business is not as usual – why companies should engage with humanitarian crises

By Verena Girschik and Jasper Hotho

As evidenced in places such as Syria and Yemen, humanitarian crises are becoming ever more complex (OCHA, 2017a). In response, international and humanitarian organizations increasingly call upon the private sector to help alleviate human suffering. As we describe in our recent article (Hotho & Girschik, 2019), many companies have answered this call. In the past, the role of companies in humanitarian crises tended to be limited to financial or in-kind donations. Today, more and more companies seek a direct role in the delivery of humanitarian action, often through collaborative partnerships with humanitarian organizations. 

Why invest in business-humanitarian collaboration?

Companies that engage in humanitarian initiatives often do so for philanthropic reasons. However, these companies may fail to appreciate that engagement in humanitarian initiatives can also provide them with longer-term strategic advantages (OCHA 2017b). 

To begin with, business-humanitarian collaboration likely has reputational and motivational benefits. Contributions to humanitarian relief efforts send positive signals to external stakeholders, including customers and governments, as well as internal employees. 

However, companies may also benefit in more tangible ways.

First, engaging directly in the delivery of humanitarian assistance can provide firms with the opportunity to learn about new countries and markets. For example, MasterCard’s payment solutions for humanitarian crisis situations allow the company to contribute to a good cause while developing a more detailed understanding of under-explored areas that may at a later stage become potential markets.

In addition, humanitarian engagement provides opportunities for relationship building with international organizations, governments, and local communities. Such connections can enhance a firms’ competitiveness as they may unlock or facilitate interesting market opportunities down the line.

Humanitarian crisis contexts also provide companies with opportunities to develop new skills and competencies or strengthen existing ones. For example, by participating in the Logistics Emergency Team—a business alliance providing UN agencies with vital logistical support—companies such as A.P. Møller-Mærsk have the opportunity to push their logistical capabilities while providing life-saving support during complex emergencies.

Business-humanitarian partnerships must address three fundamental challenges

Notwithstanding the potential of business-humanitarian partnerships, the extreme conditions of humanitarian crises renders such collaboration especially complicated and risky. Humanitarian assistance is often delivered to vulnerable populations in politically complex and volatile contexts. As a result, partners face three fundamental challenges that they need to be prepared to address if they are to leverage the potential of their collaboration.

1.     Securing ethical engagement

The first challenge is to ensure that private-sector involvement is ethically sound and aligned with the humanitarian principles of humanity, impartiality, neutrality, and independence. Companies and their humanitarian partners need to uphold these principles in spite of commercial interests and practical constraints.

2.     Realizing effective engagement

Collaborations between humanitarian organizations and companies are complex to navigate. Partners need to find ways to build mutual understanding and trust and create a favorable climate for mutual problem-solving. In addition, both sides may need to adjust processes and operations in order to align capabilities and enable effective collaboration.

3.     Sustaining business-humanitarian partnerships

Companies and their humanitarian partners often struggle to demonstrate measurable benefits from their collaborations. Companies need to sustain internal support for such partnerships even when there is no immediate business case. In addition, humanitarian organizations need to engage companies in the right place at the right time; namely, where humanitarian needs are greatest.

Addressing these three challenges is neither quick nor easy. It is through strong mutual commitments and innovative responses that business-humanitarian partnerships can leverage their potential and deliver humanitarian assistance ethically, effectively, and sustainably.

References:

Hotho, J., & Girschik, V. (2019). Corporate engagement in humanitarian action: Concepts, challenges, and areas for international business researchcritical perspectives on international business15(2/3), 201-218.

OCHA (2017a). Annual Report 2017

OCHA (2017b). The Business Case: A Study of Private Sector Engagement in Humanitarian Action

About the authors

Verena Girschik is Assistant Professor of CSR, Communication, and Organization at the Department of Management, Society and Communication, Copenhagen Business School. Verena’s research focuses on the responsibilities of companies in the contexts of complex societal problems and humanitarian crises. Interested in relations between companies, governments, NGOs, and other societal actors, her research explores how companies negotiate their roles and responsibilities, how they perform them, and to what consequences. Verena’s Twitter: @verenaCPH)

Jasper Hotho is Associate Professor at the Department of International Economics, Government and Business at Copenhagen Business School, and Senior Editor for the top-tier academic journal Organization Studies. Jasper’s research focuses on the opportunities and challenges that arise from private-sector involvement in the delivery of humanitarian assistance.

Image by  Colourbox.dk

When is a banking scandal a corporate social responsibility scandal?

By Jeremy Moon

I arrived in Australia to discuss and research corporate social responsibility (CSR) with colleagues at RMIT University and the University of Melbourne to see the papers covered in … a banking scandal.

The Westpac Bank product ‘Litepay’, designed to enable customers to transfer small amounts of money overseas, is alleged to have enabled money-laundering on 23 million occasions. It is alleged that 12 customers used this service to transfer $500,000 to child exploitation criminals in the Philippines.

There is the usual background that senior management was aware of the failures but did nothing.  There is the usual foreground that the bank’s leadership made light of the problems, and was strangely slow to accept responsibility.  So far so depressingly familiar.

I also noticed Johannes Leak’s cartoon published in The Australian newspaper (27.XI.2019). OK, it is a caricature with the CSR consisting of activities that seem trivial and causes that, notwithstanding their social significance, are adjacent to the legality and ethics of Westpac’s main business!

But caricature is part of the cartoonist’s craft and it highlights the main message: the way that Westpac went about its business appeared untouched by the department ostensibly standing for its social responsibility. 

So what lies behind this contradiction? 

CSR professionals may well be educated, trained and experienced in other society-related issues.  But as the cartoon suggests they were unable to address some key social impacts of the bank’s business models.  This may be no accident.  It may well suit corporate leadership to have a CSR department to focus on ‘the worthy causes’ and to distract from the business of money-making.  So whilst the CSR staff engage in legitimation activities, the main CSR message (i.e. to serve societal good) is disconnected from conducting the core business. 

So we need to construe CSR as something more pervasive and robust such that it addresses the core business in all its complexity and technicality.  This may mean corporations re-thinking how their products are evaluated, who is around the table at strategy meetings, who leaders listen to, who they collaborate with, what sort of qualifications and capabilities are expected of senior managers and board members.

One positive

One positive in the Westpac story is that the triggers of social sanction operated.  Whistleblowers within Westpac (who advised the media), governmental leaders (who expressed grave disquiet and suspended Westpac from a public policy initiative), and major investors (who threatened exit), brought immense pressure on Westpac’s leadership for more proportionate responses. 

This is a belated success for the main message of CSR: that business needs to be responsible, and that failure here will be very costly. 

Sadly, it comes at a price that investors and customers may have to share. The bank needs to ensure that it has sufficient and appropriate CSR capacity to build the message into the practices of business as usual.


About the author

Jeremy Moon – Director of CBS Sustainability, professor of Sustainability Governance at Copenhagen Business School and BOS blog editor. Jeremy has written widely about the rise, context, dynamics and impact of CSR.  He is particularly interested in corporations’ political roles and in the regulation of CSR and corporate sustainability.

By the same author: Wonder Tech and the Institution of Gender

Cartoon’s author

Johannes Leak

Football and the Meaning(lessness) of Management Concepts

By Esben Rahbek Gjerdrum Pedersen

Romanticized management concepts often seem to fall short in capturing actual management practices in today’s corporate world. Experiences from other types of organisations may help deepen the understanding of the concepts and the phenomena they are trying to portray.

Romanticized concepts

The management literature is full of concepts, which indicate passion, engagement and community. Internally, terms like corporate culture, values, karma, spirituality, passion and even love and religion express a deep symbiosis between the individual and the organization. Externally, corporate communication is soaked in references to sustainability, citizenship, social responsibility, and community engagement.

If we are to believe the “About Us” sections, corporations today are more about benevolence than business.

There is a problem though.

What happens if you compare the rosy picture of business with harsh business realities? One illustrative example is the talk about management commitment. How does it go along with the fact that the average tenure of CEOs is steadily decreasing? And how do you combine talks about commitment with the recurrent discussions about bonus schemes? It seems like an awful waste of money to approve exorbitant compensation packages to CEOs if they were driven solely by an inner sense of duty and dedication to the job.

What all these management concepts have in common is that they try to give business personality, heart, spirit, and soul.

However, if we are interested in concepts like commitment, passion, and loyalty, today’s corporate world is perhaps not always the right place to look. Probably more than ever before, these concepts seem more meaningful in private life and collectives rooted in the local community.

Like community football…

As part of a survey among Danish football clubs (supported by a UEFA research grant), I asked club representatives a simple, open question: – What is the main reason to be engaged in the club? A few quotations are found at the bottom of the text and well illustrate some of the differences between the corporate world and community sport.  A few examples:

  • Stickiness. Commitment means being in it for the long haul. It is not unusual that volunteers are members of football clubs for 20, 30, and 40 years. When managers drift from one company to another, it serves as proof that they are committed to their career. Not the organisation.
  • Obligation. The quotations from the survey indicate that commitment to community sport is often linked to an obligation to support the local community and paying back for own experiences as active players.
  • Community. In community sport, commitment has roots. You are committed to something: – the sport, the people, the club, and the community. It is probably no coincidence that local club names usually refer to a city or a region, whereas the corporate names are mostly faceless abstractions referring neither to activity nor geography.

The real motives

The point is not that club volunteers are all saints dedicated to the greater good of society. Most volunteers probably start off with instrumental motives when they become engaged in club life; either because they play themselves and/or have children in the club. However, for some volunteers club life gradually becomes part of one’s identity and network.

The question remains, however, why the management literature seems so eager to wrap business in romantic rhetoric about commitment, loyalty, authenticity etc. when these concepts often seem to reflect what has been lost rather than what can be found in today’s corporate world. Of course, part of the management vocabulary can be passed off as organizational bullshit, but even the disregard of truth may reveal some truths about our society.

Maybe the abundance of romantic management concepts reflects a dream about relationships in a market characterized by transactions.

A seek for passion in a highly professionalized work life. Longing for a community when people have all become individuals. Whatever the reason, a researcher should restrict the use of concepts to organisations where they have not yet become emptied of meaning.

Like community football…

Table 1: Respondents about the main reasons for being active members of the football club (Translation from Danish)
”Make a difference in my local community and support my interest in grassroot football. Jeg am a club person and believe voluntary work should be a ”citizen duty” (…)”
”After a whole life as active in the club, also as trainer and board member, it was natural to continue (…) and give something back. I think it is fun to work with kids and people, who also give me a lot I can use in the work life”.  
 ”I like the social life in the club and want to help others in getting the same experience”.
”I have played football from when I was a kid and had wonderful experiences that I like to hand over to the youth”
”Because I love football and like to give something back for all the years when I was more on the field than outside. Moreover, it is important that somebody do something in the associations in our community”. 
”Because my kids play in the club and because I think you should make an effort in the associations in the city. And not least because I like to be part of making a difference in the local associations.
– ”Have been an active football player all my youth, where I met engaged trainers and leaders. So it is probably to give something back”
”Help our city in having a place where children, young and elderly can play football under good conditions”
”Funny, I have asked myself the same question:-) I have been an active player from when I was 8-9 years old, to league player, to old boys – so it is simply paid back time for all the experiences (…) to all the people who made it possible.” 
”Always been involved in football. Somebody helped me when I was playing myself. Think that you have to give something back.”
”Payback to the club which has given me a lot of good experiences. My contribution to Danish associations – the voluntary brigade!”
– ”Lifestyle after more than 30 years of voluntary work. Help young athletes to get a good future. This has been my goal throughout the years and has given me a lot of good experiences”

”Voluntary work helps in creating a well-functioning local community. For children, it is important to promote active living. And it is also developing you personally. Unity and identity”
– ”For many years, I had children in the club and therefore I am involved in the work. I have enjoyed playing football and would like to give others the same experience. ”
”As a child, I experienced a lot of good things. Now when I have the opportunities, I feel obliged to give something back.” ”Have always been a volunteer in community sport and for more than 50 years. Nice to see things grow and do something good for a lot of people. Not least the social element of the club.  And you get to know a lot of people and build some friendships for life”. 
”Have been involved in football for 45 years. Good friends and good network. Be part of making a difference on a voluntary basis”.
– ”For 20 years, I have played football in the same club. To have a good club I also have to take responsibility”
– ”The community and the joy of working with other people who love football”.”Football has always meant a lot to me and I think you have an obligation to contribute to the continuation of football. Every community needs a football club. Everyone should have an opportunity to do team sport which can also be a great foundation for your future life.”

Learn more about our research on football and CSR here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/16184742.2018.1546754


About the Author

Esben Rahbek Gjerdrum Pedersen is Professor at the Department of Intercultural Communication and Management at Copenhagen Business School. He researches CSR, Corporate Sustainability, Non-financial Performance Measurement, Supply Chain Management and Process Management.

By the same author: The Business (and Politics) of Business Cases

Photo by Click and Boo on Unsplash

How SDGs help us see buildings through a different lens

By Ingrid Reumert

Despite a lot of focus on climate change recently, the impact of one ‘hidden climate’ on people’s lives often goes unnoticed – the indoor climate. And the indoor climates in the buildings that we normally feel most comfortable in – our homes – are much worse than we are aware of.

Safe and sound at home?

Our homes are traditionally seen as places where we recharge our batteries. They are where we seek shelter and refuge from the hustle and bustle that we often experience in our everyday lives when away from them. As we wind down at the end of a busy day in the comfort of our homes, we take it for granted that we can relax, knowing that our health is not at risk when inside.

However, there’s increasing evidence that although we might arrive home safe and sound, the time we spend at home might not be safe and sound after all.

As ‘safe as houses’?

The saying ‘it’s safe as houses’, which is used to describe things as being completely safe, cannot be used about many homes in Europe. We know from our Healthy Homes Barometers, an annual research-based report designed to take stock of Europe’s buildings, that one out of six Europeans lives in unhealthy homes. For children in Europe, it’s worse, with one out of three being exposed to health risks in their homes. And the health risks are not just isolated to our homes. The same also goes for the environments inside buildings where we work and learn.

Furthermore, we know that people spend 90 percent of their time indoors, where the air can be up to five times more polluted than outside. The potential risks to people’s health and wider society are not insignificant, with poor indoor climates directly leading to conditions such as asthma or allergies, due to dampness and mould.

Ongoing dialogue and modified solutions

For years we have been using such well-documented research to engage in dialogues with legislators, housing professionals, building owners and industry representatives to push for steps to make buildings healthier. In recent years, we have also modified our solutions, which bring daylight and fresh air through roofs, to be more automated and also compatible with digital technologies and the internet of things, and thereby make creating healthy indoor climates hassle-free.

Using SDGs to push harder for healthier indoor climates

At VELUX Group, it is our strong belief that if indoor climates are not good for our health, then we’ll see problems for individuals and for society. Now, with the help of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, we have an extra toolbox to support our efforts to address this.

We believe that by embracing this common global language of SDGs, we can leverage our efforts to make buildings healthier.

More specifically, we use three SDG goals to help people see the world through a different lens and to reveal the possible negative effects on their health from the ‘hidden climate’ – the indoor climate. We do this by showing how good indoor climates and healthy buildings can safeguard good health and well-being (SDG 3) and also how this can contribute to more sustainable cities and communities (SDG 11), with the help of partnerships for the goals (SDG 17).

Revealing what’s right under our noses for a more sustainable future

With much of the current climate change and sustainability focus on natural renewable energy sources or companies’ steps to reduce their carbon footprints, the climates inside our homes and other buildings, and their potential negative effects on our health and well-being continue to be ignored. That’s why the VELUX Group will persist with research and activities to boost indoor climate awareness and continually improve our products, to address what’s right under our noses but often overlooked – the indoor or hidden climate. By improving indoor climates to help make buildings healthier, we are confident that we will contribute to a more sustainable future.

About the Author

Ingrid Reumert – VP, Global Stakeholder Communications & Sustainability at VELUX Group

Photo by Timothy Buck on Unsplash

Further reading: Researchers in BLOXHUB seeking to improve indoor climate

Consumers fall for food products with nutrition claims – what about you?

By Meike Janssen

In a recent study, colleagues from the University of Kassel, Germany and me discovered that consumers fall for food products with nutrition claims on the package front.

Nutrition claims?

Nutrition claims are short claims highlighting a particular beneficial nutritional property, e.g. fat-free, high protein, or rich in vitamin C. In the study, we sent consumers shopping in a laboratory supermarket with real products on the shelf. The interesting fact: Consumers could choose between three orange juices with identical nutritional profiles; only that one orange juice carried the nutrition claim rich in vitamin C. And this was the orange juice most consumers bought, even though the other two orange juices contained the same amount of vitamin C (for details about the experiment, which claims were tested, and how the claims rotated across the brands, see the end of this post).

Interestingly, all types of consumers fell for the orange juice with the nutrition claim: consumers seeking for healthy products as well as consumers not caring about healthy products; consumers who knew a lot about nutrition as well as those who knew relatively little about nutrition.

Source: Johann Steinhauser; Meike Janssen; Ulrich Hamm (2019)

You might wonder: Is it allowed to prominently highlight, on the package front, an ingredient that is typically included in all products of a certain type? For vitamin C in 100% orange juice, the answer is yes.

The good and bad news

The good news is: EU law stipulates the conditions under which nutrition claims are allowed. So nutrition claims can generally be considered trustworthy. The bad news is: A nutrition claim does not mean the product is overall healthy. A nutrition claim only refers to a single ingredient.

>>For instance, it is allowed to label candy containing high amounts of sugar as fat-free. If you ask me, that is a problematic issue. <<

Are consumers stupid or irrational?

How come consumers can be ‘manipulated’ so easily, by simply highlighting one beneficial ingredient that is, in fact, in all 100% orange juices? Is it because consumers are stupid and know little about vitamin C in orange juice? No, that would not explain why even consumers with a high nutrition knowledge fell for the product with the nutrition claim. Then is it because consumers behave irrationally when they do grocery shopping? Again, the answer is no.

Squirrel_photos on Pixabay

Consumers look for simple heuristics when choosing between similar food products. When grocery shopping, we are confronted with a lot of information. Since most of us do not want to spend hours in the supermarket comparing several products and reading all information on product packages, we use ‘cues’ that help us navigate through the information jungle.

Every consumer has his/her own cues that he/she uses, often subconsciously. These cues simplify our choice tasks and allow us to make quick decisions. And the important thing is: in the end, we are usually quite happy with our product choice. Most of us walk out of the supermarket and do not worry about whether we really made the best possible choice. So in that sense, relying on simple choice heuristics and using cues like ingredients, brand and price makes perfect sense for us, at least when we do grocery shopping. There is nothing irrational about it.

Take-home message: Better check nutritional information

Whether or not you want to use nutrition claims as one of ‘your cues’ when choosing food, remains your own decision. Just bear in mind the following: Only because one brand highlights that the product contains a beneficial ingredient, does not mean other similar products do not have the same benefits. And only because a product carries a nutrition claim, does not mean the product is healthy – it might contain high amounts of other unhealthy ingredients.

If you are really interested in buying a nutritious product, better check the nutritional information on the back of the package and compare several products. You might find a product with better nutritional properties without a nutrition claim on the front.

Details about the experiment

The study participants were recruited in the pedestrian area in the city of Kassel, Germany. The 156 participants went shopping in a laboratory supermarket. They could choose between three orange juices, each of which labelled with a claim:

  • taste claim ‘simply delicious’,
  • health claim ‘Vitamin C contributes to the normal function of the immune system’, or
  • nutrition claim ‘rich in vitamin C’.

To make the purchase simulation as realistic as possible, existing brands and products were offered on the shelf. We only added the claims. The products were from other German speaking countries (Austria and Switzerland) so that the participants were not familiar with them. We wanted to rule out strong brand effects. Across the sample, the three claims rotated among the three brands.

The study results are published in two journal articles:


About the Author

Meike Janssen is Associate Professor for Sustainable Consumption and Behavioural Studies, CBS Sustainability, Copenhagen Business School

Photo by Joshua Rawson-Harris on Unsplash

Further reading: Let Me Lend You a Hand: How Behavioural Economics Can Restore Trust in Science

Regulating 300,000 Years – Nuclear Waste, Sustainability and the Need to Talk to the Distant Future

By Andreas Rasche

Whenever we think about regulating sustainability problems, we usually think about the here and now or at least about the not too distant future. Even with regard to climate change, which clearly is a problem for future generations, regulators have a time horizon of not more than 30 or 40 years. The Paris Accord is a case in point – it sets targets for 2050. Also, the European Union’s climate strategy sets goals until 2050. But, what happens if regulators need to think about a very distant future?

Consider the example of nuclear waste. The challenge is not only to find a secure location to store the byproducts of burning uranium. The challenge is also, and maybe most of all, to prevent future generations to disturb the deep underground storage facilities, be it intentional or not. This requires “talking to” distant future generations. Chlorine-36 (one of the byproducts) has a half-life of approximately 300,000 years. Compare this to the roughly 40,000 years that the behavioral homo sapiens is supposed to be around – i.e. human beings which engaged in the development of language and early forms of religion – and you get an idea about the scope and scale of the underlying challenge.

Deep underground storage is, at least as of now, the only option to deal with nuclear waste. In the 1980s, some governments considered the idea of simply firing nuclear waste into space. This idea was rejected due to security concerns. Right now, there are few final repository sites for nuclear waste, such as the US-based Waste Isolation Plant in New Mexico.

>>How do we secure these sites from future human intervention? What is needed is a way to communicate with future generations. <<

By definition, the future is unknown and we do not know whether future generations may try to dig at the sites where nuclear waste is disposed. There are many reasons why such underground storage sites could be interesting for future generations, ranging from pure curiosity to a danger that they misread/misinterpret warning signs or other artifacts. What will be a symbol of danger in, say, 150,000 years from now? How does memory survive?

Governments around the world have developed different approaches to talk to the future. One possible US solution includes giant granite markers that are supposed to prevent human intervention (see picture). The US Department of Energy writes:

“Regulations require that waste disposal sites use markers and other controls to indicate dangers and locations of waste.”

One problem with these giant markers is exactly that they are giant and that they are supposed to signal fear and danger. What, however, if signals of fear and danger incite curiosity? The US facility will not be closed until 2050, so there is still time to decide otherwise.

Source: US Department of Energy (Concept: Mike Brill, Drawing: Safdar Abidi, Image courtesy of BOSTI)

If a written message were to be attached to any warning markers, how would such a message look like? One current proposal is to use the message (see below) which is then to be translated into every written UN language. Although there is no consensus on the content and nature of the message among members of the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA), it is clear that such a message needs to be developed.

“This place is a message… and part of a system of messages …pay attention to it! 
Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. 
This place is not a place of honor … no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here. 
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger. 
The danger is in a particular location… it increases towards a center… the center of danger is here… of a particular size and shape, and below us. 
The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours. 
The danger is to the body, and it can kill. 
The form of the danger is an emanation of energy. 
The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.”

Trauth, K.M., Hora, S.C., & Guzowski, R.V. Expert judgment on markers to deter inadvertent human intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. United States. doi:10.2172/10117359, pp. F49-F50

Alternative?

An alternative solution would be to adopt a more evolutionary approach. Such an approach would not put the message into granite (or other materials). Rather, it would create “an enduring culture around the nuclear waste depositories.” (Financial Times, 14 July 2016) Keeping the memory alive, then, would be an accomplishment that is passed from generation to generation (e.g., via stories, exhibitions, songs, art). As language and symbols change over time, this evolutionary approach would adapt the message to the contextual particularities that evolve in the future. Such a community-based approach would then rely on locals, who live around a waste storage site, to warn others.

There are pros and cons for both approaches and it is uncertain what regulators will do. However, what this example shows is that thinking about regulating actions in the distant future requires drawing on insights from multiple disciplines, ranging from linguistics to nuclear scientists and anthropologists.

Does all of this have something to do with sustainability? Just think about a world in which we cannot securely seal nuclear waste…

About the Author

Andreas Rasche is Professor of Business in Society at CBS and Associate Dean for the CBS Full-Time MBA Program. He is also Visiting Professor at Stockholm School of Economics. More at: www.arasche.com.

By the same author:

Why Corporate Sustainability is Bullshit (And Why This is a Good Thing)

The Ethical Blindness of Corporate Sustainability

Photo by Ra Dragon on Unsplash

Towards a Realization of Sustainability Ambitions?

By Lars Thøger Christensen

Governments are increasingly being sued by citizens and NGOs for not living up to their sustainability ambitions.

Recently, for example, three German farmers along with Greenpeace arraigned Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government for failing to achieve its ambition to reduce Germany’s CO2 emission by 40 percent in 2020, as measured from 1990. Already last year, the government acknowledged that it would not be able to meet its goal. It expects to achieve a 32 percent reduction. The consequences for the farmers, the complainants argue, are dire in terms of long periods of drought and other extreme weather conditions that threaten to destroy their livelihood.

In other parts of the world – including USA, Peru, Colombia and Fiji – similar cases and complaints are arising. It is difficult not to sympathize with these complaints and their underlying concern for our shared planet.

>>It was therefore remarkable that the administrative court in Berlin rejected what was the first climate complaint against the German government.<<

The complainants, the court argued, have no basis for demanding a specific set of actions from the government whose climate protection program 2020 was described as a “political aspiration”. According to German media, the judge said that society needs to respect the executive power’s discretion and room for maneuvering. Understandably, this ruling has spawned lots of criticism.

Governments are currently not legally required to live up to their sustainability aspirations.

This case calls on us to discuss what it takes to make sure that sustainability aspirations are actually being fulfilled by governments as well as by corporations. First, however, we need to consider whether a different decision by the German court – a decision that backed the claims by the farmers and Greenpeace – would have ensured a faster and more certain goal fulfillment. In a short-term perspective, that is quite likely. Although such ruling probably would have been appealed, it would at the same time have applied immense pressure on the government to launch more intense climate initiatives here and now. The more wide-ranging effects of such ruling, however, might not have been in the interest of the sustainability agenda. 

What happens if governments and corporations are legally forced to walk their talk?

Without exonerating empty sustainability talk and lack of sufficient climate initiatives, it is important to acknowledge that governmental and corporate aspirations serve multiple functions in changing and improving existing practices. While sustainability aspirations may be used to impress and seduce voters and consumers, something that is often the case, they are simultaneously likely to shape expectations and mobilize stakeholders to apply pressure for action.

Here, the level of optimal pressure is crucial. If governments and corporations know that unfulfilled promises and aspirations will be met with damaging court cases that support their complainants, they will be less likely to announce ambitious goals, and more inclined to articulate ideals that they already, or almost already, live up to. In such cases, changes may happen slower than society may desire.

>>Conversely, lack of stakeholder pressure is likely to result in “aspirational inflation” or overbidding, thereby reducing the performative power of aspirational talk to instigate changes.<<

Under which conditions should we expect governments and corporations to live up to their own aspirations?

Obviously, the aspirations in question need to engage with salient social, political or environmental issues in order to attract external attention and interest. Most sustainability aspirations are likely to fulfill that criterion. 

At the same time, aspirations need to be bold and challenging in order to mobilize conflicting opinions and critical comments.

Without visionary idea(l)s and without critical attention and interest from stakeholders, aspirations are likely to be soon forgotten or perhaps ignored. Lofty organizational aspirations define a collective horizon of excellence that empowers stakeholders – internal as well as external – to expect and demand better practices. To ensure that the aspirations are taken seriously by all parties, they simultaneously need to be announced in public media of high status. Public announcement communicates the formal status of the ambitions to external audiences but simultaneously signals their authority and truth-value to organizational members. Hereby, they have the potential to stimulate both internal and external involvement and activism. Without such conditions, the German climate protection program 2020 might not even have reached 32 percent of CO2 reduction.

Aspirations need to be visionary, bold and public to mobilize pressure for action.

Obviously, the emphasis on consistency between words and action is important in forcing organizations to take their own words seriously. At the same time, such emphasis might breed a growing fear of criticism – a fear that can lead organizations to restrain their announcement of ambitions in the hope of escaping public attention and scrutiny. This risk is important to keep in mind when deciding how to apply pressure on governments and organizations to honor their own words.

Suggestions for further readings:

Christensen, L.T., Morsing, M., & Thyssen, O. (2013). CSR as aspirational talk. Organization, 20(3), 372-393.

Font, X., Elgammal, I., & Lamond, I. (2017). Greenhushing: the deliberate under communicating of sustainability practices by tourism businesses. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 25(7), 1007-1023.

Girschik, V. (2018). Shared responsibility for societal problems: The role of internal activists in reframing corporate responsibility, Business & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/0007650318789867

Haack, P., Schoeneborn. D., & Wickert, C. (2012). Talking the talk, moral entrapment, creeping commitment? Exploring narrative dynamics in corporate responsibility standardization. Organization Studies, 33(5-6), 815-845.

Kim, E-H., & Lyon, T. P. (2014). Greenwash vs. brownwash: Exaggeration and undue modesty in corporate sustainability disclosure. Organization Science, 26(3), 705-723.

About the Author

Lars Thøger Christensen is Professor of Communication and Organization at the Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

Photo by Ahmed Bibi on Unsplash

How sustainable is ecotourism?

Written by Erin Leitheiser, this article is based on her previously written piece for the Centre for Business and Development Studies.

Tourism is a key driver of development, particularly in areas with rich environmental or cultural resources.  The United Nations declared 2017 as the year of Sustainable Tourism for Development, but how sustainable is ecotourism? 

Setting off on a once-in-a-lifetime adventure on safari in East Africa for our summer holidays, my husband and I wanted to be as sustainable as possible.  We carbon offset our flights, worked directly with locally owned and operated “eco-tour” providers, and engaged in both social and environmental eco-friendly activities. Yet, several moments throughout our trip made me question how eco-friendly and sustainable such travel really is or can be. 

To start, what is “ecotourism”?  The terms ecotourism, responsible travel, sustainable tourism, ethical tourism, green travel and more have arisen as of late to describe smaller-scale, lower-impact tourism that is qualitatively different from mass commercial tour operations.  The term “ecotourism” has many definitions, most of which embody the key notions of supporting and experiencing local environments, wildlife and communities and while minimizing negative impacts.  Activities may be environmental, like through small-scale tours of natural environments, or social or community-based – like our visit to a local women’s education and empowerment sewing collective in Rwanda.  Tourism represents a major and increasing share of GDP in many developing countries.  Indeed, such natural and cultural resources are increasingly being commodified and therefore used as justification for sustainability.  According to one popular eco-travel blog,

Elephants are worth 76 times more alive than dead. When you consider the revenue from wildlife photography tours, luxury safari camps, and other ecotourism offerings, a single Elephant is worth $1.3 million over the course of its lifetime!” 

But – how sustainable are such ventures?  While I have numerous examples from my two weeks of travels, anecdotes from each country I visited caused me to question how ecofriendly or sustainable these activities really are:

  • When nature disagrees with what is “eco-friendly”: chimpanzee tracking in Uganda (tourism=8% of GDP).  After purchasing the proper permits (which help fund conservation activities), tourists are paired with a well-trained guide to track habituated chimp groups in the forest and are allowed to spend “at most an hour” with them once they’re found.  Kibale Forest National Park states that “By going for chimpanzee tracking, you directly contribute to the conservation efforts.”  My group got lucky and found one group of chimps within about 15 minutes, including a few on the ground which our guide had us follow through the forest.  While I was happy to hang back and enjoy them at a distance, my guide – a fun but bossy, older sister type whom usually got her way – insisted that I get closer, at one point directing me ever closer a chimp lying on the ground.  So, closer I went, even while in my head I was thinking “I’m too close!”  In an instant, the chimp jumped up, clapped and yelled angrily, and picked up a large branch which he threw at me javelin-style!  I jumped back and he moved away.  I felt so conflicted, as this seemed to me a striking example of how nature (i.e. the chimp) didn’t agree with how “eco-friendly” the activity was. When I pushed back on other insistencies by our guide to get closer to the chimps, she rationalized that “If you don’t get close and get some good pictures, when you get home, you might not think it was worth it.” 

Photo by Erin Leitheiser

Seemingly, our chimp tracking experience had a strong undercurrent of value-for-money, realized via pictures.

  • Wild animals may not be so wild: safari in Tanzania (tourism=12% of GDP).  Departing a visitor’s center in Serengeti National Park in our safari vehicle, we – along with around two dozen other vehicles with tourists on safari – encountered a pride of lions out on a morning hunt.  Large 4×4 vehicles lined the roadside, yet the lions seemed completely unperturbed by our presence, assessing the vehicles as non-threatening and navigating deftly between them.  A couple of lions even used the vehicles (including mine) to hide between while they stalked their prey!   This was striking to me, calling into question how “wild” these wild animals really are if they’re so used to human activity and presence that they have grown to utilize such intrusions for their own ends.  Indeed, the vast numbers of vehicles in the parks and conservations areas seemed overwhelming at times, demonstrating clearly that the notions I had of “wild” animals and preserves as devoid of humans were romanticized at best or nearly inaccurate at worst.

Photo by Erin Leitheiser

  • Prioritizing tourists over locals: fast highways in Rwanda (tourism=15% of GDP).  The country of Rwanda was striking to me for its cleanliness, orderliness, and structure.  For example, the streets were clean (much cleaner than Copenhagen), motorbike taxis are safe and highly-regulated, the economy is booming, and the country has gradually begun to overcome its legacy of genocide to build a business-friendly, women-friendly, corruption-free future.  One of the key developments has been infrastructure, including building fast highways linking major tourist destinations.  While the speed at which we could travel was an undeniable benefit for us, I was constantly worried about the vast numbers of people (and in particular, children) walking, playing, and lounging by the roadside.  The multitude of fast-moving vehicles posed clear safety issues to locals.  Seemingly, the cultural and historical importance of roads in connecting communities and commerce had shaped both the orientation of villages (which stretched along the road, rather than deeper back or behind them) as well as how people interacted with them (as a place for playing, socializing, trading and the like).  While such infrastructure improvements undoubtedly help communities transport and receive goods, foster tourism and the like, the stark replacement seemingly upended community and local norms and practices. 

Sustainable tourism represents an important and apt opportunity to help contribute to sustainable and responsible development, particularly as opposed to antithetical activities popular throughout Africa such as trophy hunting (particularly “canned hunting”) and (irresponsible) mass tourism.  Yet, throughout my travels I was struck by how many compromises (in my view) were being made for sustainability, be it the through taming of wildlife, prioritization of economic development at the expense of local customs, or many other examples.  Others have expressed concerns too.  Harvard hosts an International Sustainable Tourism Initiative, the Global Sustainable Tourism Council has set criteria and performance indicators around sustainable tourism, and an organization called the Travel Foundation has arisen to help bridge tourism with “greater benefits for people and the environment”.

Eco-tourism is undoubtedly a more responsible and sustainable option that many other tourism choices.  But, let us not overly romanticize positive impacts of such travel, nor grow complacent over the trade-offs, compromises, and potentially negative impacts that it may have.

Is it a right policy to focus on SDGs during Economic Slowdown?

By Anirudh Agrawal and Ashish Tyagi

Economic problems of India were not addressed either in the 2019 electoral debates or in the recent annual budget. Markets are showing a deep imbalance between demand and supply, leading to a significant rise in loan defaults, banking crises and job losses.

MSME has not shown a tendency to grow or create jobs along expected lines despite a nationwide program of targeted lending. Indiscriminate lending in the past has increased Non-Performing Assets (NPAs) in the banking sector. The industry is still adjusting to the new GST regulations while the real estate sector has still not recovered from the demonetization shock. On top of all this, pollution is at an all-time high and climate change is manifesting itself in the form of droughts and floods in different parts of the country.

In such a slowdown, a knee-jerk policy reaction is to spur investment and growth through any means possible, including reversals on climate and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Quite recently, the government allowed 100 percent FDI in the coal mining sector to spur a revival.

But in this article, we argue that a renewed focus on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) presents an opportunity to revive the economy, create a new wave of jobs and potentially increase the competitiveness of Indian economy vis-à-vis the SDG laggards. The discussion that follows is in the context of India but is equally relevant for the rest of the developing world.

NPA crisis and an opportunity towards SDG oriented portfolio

The main reason for a steep rise in credit default rate is that while industries expanded capacity over time, domestic and global demand has slowed down considerably, stranding the new assets. The lack of market demand causes firms to default on loans. This increases the stress on the banks, which consequently, stall the liberal credit lines to firms, further weakening the economy.

One of the significant factors causing the NPA crisis in India is the MSME loan portfolio. MSME is the backbone of any economy. In developing countries, MSME account for 90 percent of job creation and economic activities. Over time, through hard work, market and government support, these MSME entrepreneurs are able to grow, engage in employment creation, disruptive innovation and ultimately become unicorns, which are nascent businesses with high market valuation and growth potential.

>>>However, despite the important role in job creation and liberal credit lines, MSME entrepreneurs in developing countries generally remain poorly skilled, lack proper business support, access to markets and are many times bullied by bigger firms. In the end, a great deal of capital channelled to MSME is not converted into higher value. <<<

To transform the MSME sector, government and other business-sector actors must treat MSME as students who need to learn and adopt skills related to competitive management, sustainability, marketing and financial reporting so that competitiveness and sustainability become inherent within the firm. MSME entrepreneurs can aspire globally through exposure from government-sponsored programs to attend MSME events in Denmark (for their dairy and animal industry), Germany (manufacturing), Italy (leather and fashion). They can learn more about international market trends and technologies where the bottom lines are firmly grounded on SDG compliance.

Unlike bigger players which are slow, suffer from legacy issues; MSME is flexible enough to embed elements of sustainability and SDGs in their supply chains and value creation processes.

To survive and grow in a world with increasing climate change regulations, better cooperation is required between public institutions, banks and MSME entrepreneurs to work hard in sync, learn new practices and standards. Long-term growth requires MSME to make sustainability and SDG compliance inherent in the business plan, business model, management structure and type of service and product offered.

>>> Indian banks must actively focus on new industries creating products with lower environmental footprints. <<<

For example, instead of providing loans to typical plastic manufacturing SMEs, they must provide loans to entrepreneurs setting up green-materials factories, alternative plastic (biodegradable) factories, bio-diesel, or EV vehicle factories, which are environmentally efficient, follow international standards and are helping the nation achieve its Paris Agreement targets. The growth of competitive, innovative and greater SDG compliant MSME would make Indian economy stronger and mitigate job crises.

SDG focused Real-Estate Sector Regulation

Another cause of NPA crises in India is the rising real-estate inventory. Real estate sector was one of the largest employers during the 2004-2016 boom years of India (which is also true for most of the developing world). The assumption among investors during that period was that the real-estate will continue to grow and their investments will remain secure and ensure above-market returns. However, in the boom period, real-estate prices far exceeded their value, causing market failure in the current economic downturn.

But during economic downturns, it is relatively easier for politicians to make difficult decisions (as the public mandate is easier) and enforce innovative policies.

To address the issue of real estate inventory, the government must introduce regulations in the real estate market with quality controls, sustainability measures, green building codes, controls on the number of floors constructed, the green area within the apartment, restrictions on distance from the essential public services like a train station, police station, college, hospital, schools.

The regulations must forcefully move the industry towards significant sustainability goals (like those in Western Europe) with higher compliance on long-term sustainability, energy efficiency, and reliability. In addition to explicit sustainability actions like certification, greenified surroundings; firms and the government must focus on developing the real-estate sector, which is firmly embedded in a social, cultural and artistic milieu. Research has shown that housing where the communities have active social and cultural interaction tends to have higher value and lower crime.

Specific SDG driven controls would decrease the supply, increase the quality offered, and would significantly increase the value of the real-estate sector. If the buyers feel that their real-estate investments have greater value for a more extended period, the buyers and sellers will invest in the sale and purchase of the real estate, which would relieve the banks from possible NPA risks. The increased transactions in the real estate market would generate liquidity in the market that would further spurn growth. This suggestion on regulating the market stands in contrast to current appeals for liberalizing the real-estate sector. The liberalization of the real-sector has led to a rise in indiscriminate investment, increased half-built and abandoned sites which are causing a rise in water pollution, dust pollution and even dengue.

Pollution and Climate Change

Extreme climatic events and increased pollution are related to externalities that are threatening the sustainability of the Indian economy. The winter smog around the national capital Delhi significantly reduces the productivity of the city while putting residents under severe health risks. Lengthening of summer and unpredictability of monsoon is increasing water stress, as well as floods, which is putting households under stress and decreasing the overall national productivity.

To address these challenges, research-based and region-specific adaptation and mitigation investments will enable different regions to transform towards climate-resilient economic societies.

The government must invest in energy-efficient, global standard-compliant power plants to reduce smog around North India.

In addition, the government and private sector must invest significant capital in solar panel production, the infrastructure of EV automobiles, greener-sustainable materials, circular economy and responsible consumption. The green climate fund (GCF) has a specific mandate for adaptation finance for climate resilient agriculture and flood resilient infrastructure. The GCF is an interesting and evolving repository of knowledge which should help governments in designing and implementing climate mitigation and adaptation policies and investments.

Businesses around these emerging technologies are most likely to generate the next wave of job growth in the manufacturing sector.

In conclusion

Economic downturns are stressful times, but it is also said that “never let a crisis go to waste”. The downturns offer opportunities to re-write innovative policies as the public mandate is stronger for a change. India must use its current economic downturn as an opportunity to re-write public policies by incorporating elements of SDGs at each level of conception and decision and transform towards a greener, climate-sensitive and sustainable space. Sustainability at each level is the new competitive advantage and the emerging nations must capitalize it.

About the authors

Anirudh Agrawal is a doctoral fellow at CBS. His research interests are MSME finance, impact investing, social entrepreneurship and organizational 4.0. He is a chief strategy officer at Tvarit AI GmbH focusing on sustainable AI driven IT solutions and a visiting professor at Flame University India and formerly Assistant Professor at Jindal Global University.

Ashish Tyagi is currently a post-doctoral fellow and lecturer at Frankfurt School of Finance & Management. He completed his PhD from Penn State University. His research interests are environmental economics, climate change policies and sustainable transformation.

Photo by Sudha G Tilak

Business + purpose = big trouble. But wait, here is one surprising point of agreement

By Dieter Zinnbauer.

Reactions to the recent statement by the Business Roundtable that recognizes a regard for stakeholders rather than a narrow focus on shareholders as a pillar of corporate purpose have been swift, strong and predictably diverse.

They run the entire gamut from enthusiastic embrace (a landmark shift towards a new form of capitalism) to sarcastic dismissal (the usual PR stunt to parry bad press and imminent regulation). Adding to this cacophony is the fact that the frontlines in this longstanding debate do not closely align with political or disciplinary dispositions but criss-cross ideological and scholarly camps.

Some corporate governance experts see just another blatant power grab of unaccountable CEOs, while others believe to witness a much-overdue assertion of responsible corporate leadership and holistic thinking in a complex world. Similarly, stark disagreements run through the advocacy community: some sense an opening for a constructive conversation, while others reject the statements as a distraction and cul-de-sac on the path towards building the economic governance that we really need for a sustainable and inclusive future.

So all has been said and we are left with the usual trenches and irreconcilable viewpoints?

Maybe. But wait – amidst all the quarrels and soliloquies here is one astoundingly consensual point that lots of commentators from very different backgrounds have been making:

>> if companies are serious about good corporate conduct strengthening transparency, responsibility and accountability of their lobbying and other corporate political activity is an essential piece of the puzzle. <<

Consider as illustrative examples these five quotes from influential commentators/organisations:

A corporate governance expert in favour of more, not less shareholder influence:

If the top executives were serious about improving the way their companies are run, what about a commitment to reduce their lobbying and making it more transparent?

Luigi Zingales in Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2019

A non-profit group working closely with progressive corporations:

the statement skirts the issue of the private sector’s role in our societies… Poll after poll shows that the public is deeply upset about the role lobbying plays in Washington… The critiques of capitalism which are being heard across the political spectrum are a natural consequence of the sense by many that the system is deeply unfair and manipulated to benefit the few. This statement does little to address that, and to the degree it is intended to respond to the public challenge to capitalism, it is unlikely to succeed.”

Business for Social Responsibility, website, August 22, 2019

An eminent economist and former senior US government official / chief economist of the World Bank:

“What obligation are roundtable companies now under not to subvert American democracy with campaign contributions or extensive lobbying operations?

Larry Summers in Washington Post, September 2, 2019

An environmental NGO proposes the following as one of “three crucial additions” to move the BRT statement from rhetoric to meaningful action:

“Using corporate brands and political influence to support systemic changes that ensure equitable opportunities for all. This means lobbying for climate-positive legislation and increasing corporate transparency; driving change to move trade associations from lowest common denominator to highest common factor”

World Resources Institute, website, August 22, 2019

 Finally, the assessment of an eminent commentator on business and economics

Members of the Business Roundtable and their peers have tough questions to ask themselves…. They must, not least, consider their activities in the public arena. What are they doing to ensure better laws governing the structure of the corporation… a fair and effective tax system, … and a democracy responsive to the wishes of a broad majority?”

Martin Wolf in Financial Times, September 18, 2019

Perhaps it is just me and a very selective reading of the flood of reactions – as I am just embarking on a European Union-funded research project on corporate political activity and non-market strategy. But I cannot help thinking that this time is perhaps really a bit different. A bewilderingly diverse bunch of opinions from very different backgrounds and perspective appear to hone in on a very specific point of convergence with remarkable regularity: The road towards good and perhaps even better corporate conduct will have to lead through more accountable, transparent and responsible exercise of corporate political activity – irrespective of the model of the corporation and its role in society you subscribe to. Such an unexpected, cross-cutting agreement bodes well for a broad coalition of change and actual shifts in norms, policies and practice.

Back at the Business Roundtable.

The position on corporate political activity has already shown signs of evolving. In 2013 it’s then-president still campaigned on an unrelenting stance that corporations do not and should not even support disclosure of corporate lobbying activities. By 2016 it had begun to acknowledge that the board should assume an oversight role of political activities within the firm and also have the say on disclosure. Still, a long way to go for developing a substantive and meaningful position on responsible corporate political activity attuned to the times. But it will be very exciting to track how this conversation that is so central to any notion of corporate purpose and the role of business in society evolves, both at the Business Roundtable and in the business community more broadly.


About the author

Dr. Dieter Zinnbauer is a Marie-Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at CBS’ Department of Management, Society and Communication. His CBS researches focus on business as political actor in the context of big data, populism and “corporate purpose fatigue”.

Twitter: @Dzinnbauer

Essays: https://medium.com/@Dzinnbauer

Working papers:  https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=1588618

Photo by Octavian Rosca on Unsplash

Social Enterprises = Sharing Economy Organizations?

By Johanna Mair, Nikolas Rathert and Georg Reischauer.

Sharing Economy Organizations

Uber, Airbnb, and Lyft are frequently cited and popular examples of new organizational forms operating in the sharing economy, which is growing at a stunning pace. One way to make sense of the sharing economy is to conceive it as a web of markets in which individuals use diverse forms of compensation to transact the redistribution of and access to resources (Mair & Reischauer, 2017).

These transactions are mediated by a digital platform run by an organization that focuses on the governance of these transactions (Reischauer & Mair, 2018a, b). Besides the focus on platform-enabled business models, the sharing economy has also spurred discussions about the implications of the sharing economy for society. Many commentators have argued that the sharing economy can become key in making modern societies more environmentally sustainable (Frenken & Schor, 2017) and inclusive (Etter, Fieseler, & Whelan, forthcoming). This debate parallels the debates on another important organizational form, social enterprises (Mair & Rathert, 2019).

Social Enterprises

Social enterprises encompass a diverse set of legal and organizational forms that use market means to effect social change (Mair & Marti, 2006). They address a range of social problems on different scales, including local communities and countries, and target societal groups that usually remain outside the reach of both commercial markets and state-run welfare schemes (Mair, Wolf, & Seelos, 2016). Social enterprises use a variety of commercial activities, including the selling of products and services, and include beneficiaries in various stages of the value creation chain (Mair & Martí, 2006; Mair, Battilana, & Cardenas, 2012). As this discussion suggests, social enterprises might have much in common with sharing economy organizations.

Social Enterprises = Sharing Economy Organizations?

Social enterprises and sharing economy organizations are both alternative forms of organizing that have developed to overcome the deficiencies of contemporary capitalism (Mair & Rathert, 2019). But what are the similarities and differences of these forms, especially with respect to dimensions that have been identified as relevant for both forms, community (Fitzmaurice et al., forthcoming; Venkataraman, Vermeulen, Raaijmakers, & Mair, 2016) and growth (Mair & Reischauer, 2017; Seelos & Mair, 2017)?
We shed light on this question with a comparative analysis of a sample of German social enterprises and sharing economy organizations, which we surveyed in 2015/2016 (social enterprises) and 2018 (sharing economy organizations). This sample encompasses 108 social enterprises and 233 sharing economy organizations that can be meaningfully compared along several indicators, including age and profit orientation. These organizations span a variety of activity fields (e.g., health care and education in the case of social enterprises, or mobility and accommodation in the case of the sharing economy).

Social Enterprises ≠ Sharing Economy!

Our analysis provides first insights that social enterprises and sharing economy organizations are, in fact, quite different animals when it comes to community and growth.
Asking both about the role of community for improving existing products, the community seems more relevant for social enterprises (Figure 1). In fact, on a 7-point scale, social enterprises’ score is over 6 on average, compared to 3.9 for sharing economy organizations. This difference remains significant after controlling for age, profit orientation, and activity field.

Figure 1: Role of Community for Product Improvement

There are also differences when asking about the role of community for entering new markets. As shown in Figure 2, sharing economy organizations use the community for this purpose to a slightly greater extent (using a yes/no variable whether or not they use the community for this purpose, with the difference being statistically significant). At the same time, the salience of the community for this purpose appears as overall lower than for product improvement.

Figure 2: Role of Community for New Market Entry

There are notable differences when it comes to growth orientation. While 79% of the surveyed social enterprises have a strong growth orientation, this is only true for 36% of sharing economy organizations. When we regress growth orientation on profit orientation and fields of activity, we find that the lack of growth orientation appears to be driven by membership in the field of room sharing, while the fields of mobility, development and housing, and health appear to be associated with a greater growth orientation.


Besides, not all growth challenges are the same (figure 3). Our analysis suggests some that some growth challenges are specific to sharing economy organizations and social enterprises, respectively. Social enterprises are more worried about three aspects: preserving program quality, securing capital, and managing growth internally. Sharing economy organizations, in contrast, care more about fidelity to the mission and managing growth internally. When accounting for profit orientation, we find that those who are profit-oriented worry about securing capital, while those that are not worried about fidelity to the mission as they grow.

Figure 3: Growth Challenges

Our analysis further identifies the variation concerning geographical growth (Figure 4). Sharing economy organizations are not looking to change their geographical scope. At most, some are considering changing from a local orientation to a regional orientation. Social enterprises are more ambitious here, often looking to scale their model to a national scale or even beyond.

Figure 4: Aspirations for Geographical Growth

Embracing Alternative Organizational Forms

Our comparison of sharing economy organizations and social enterprises for the role of community and growth indicates that alternative forms of economic organizing differ in various ways. We take this as a positive sign that also reflects a societal ability to nurture and institutionalize alternative forms of organizing that can potentially overcome well-known deficiencies of capitalism. Future research will tell how these two forms will develop, create impact, and contribute to a more sustainable society.

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Grant Number 01UT1408C) and the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (Grant Agreement 613500).


About the authors

Johanna Mair is Professor of Organization, Strategy and Leadership at the Hertie School of Governance, Germany. She is also the Co-director of the Global Innovation for Impact at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society and the Academic Editor of the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Nikolas Rathert is Assistant Professor for Organization Studies at Tilburg University.

Georg Reischauer is a postdoctoral research associate at Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU) and at Johannes Kepler University Linz (JKU).

References

Etter, M., Fieseler, C., Whelan, G. forthcoming. Sharing Economy, Sharing Responsibility Corporate Social Responsibility in the Digital Age. Journal of Business Ethics, doi: 10.1007/s10551-019-04212-w.
Fitzmaurice, C. J., Ladegaard, I., Attwood-Charles, W., Cansoy, M., Carfagna, L. B., Schor, J. B., & Wengronowitz, R. forthcoming. Domesticating the market: moral exchange and the sharing economy. Socio-Economic Review, doi: 10.1093/ser/mwy003.
Frenken, K., & Schor, J. 2017. Putting the sharing economy into perspective. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 23: 3-10.
Mair, J., Battilana, J., & Cardenas, J. 2012. Organizing for Society: A Typology of Social Entrepreneuring Models. Journal of Business Ethics, 111(3): 353-373.
Mair, J., & Martí, I. 2006. Social entrepreneurship research: A source of explanation, prediction, and delight. Journal of World Business, 41(1): 36-44.
Mair, J., & Rathert, N. 2019. Alternative organizing with social purpose: Revisiting institutional analysis of market-based activity. Socio-Economic Review, doi: 10.1093/ser/mwz031.
Mair, J., & Reischauer, G. 2017. Capturing the dynamics of the sharing economy: Institutional research on the plural forms and practices of sharing economy organizations. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 125: 11-20.
Mair, J., Wolf, M., & Seelos, C. 2016. Scaffolding: A process of transforming patterns of inequality in small-scale societies. Academy of Management Journal, 59(6): 2021-2044.
Reischauer, G., & Mair, J. 2018a. How organizations strategically govern online communities: Lessons from the sharing economy. Academy of Management Discoveries, 4(3): 220-247.
Reischauer, G., & Mair, J. 2018b. Platform organizing in the new digital economy: Revisiting online communities and strategic responses. Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 57: 113-135.
Seelos, C., & Mair, J. 2017. Innovation and scaling for impact: How effective social enterprises do it. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Venkataraman, H., Vermeulen, P., Raaijmakers, A., & Mair, J. 2016. Market meets community: Institutional logics as strategic resources for development work. Organization Studies, 37(5): 709-733.

Photo

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

Crowdfunding as a cooperative movement – The present and future of crowdfunding in Denmark

By Kristian Roed Nielsen.

How does crowdfunding look like in Denmark and where is it heading? Drawing on empirical data from two well-known reward-based crowdfunding platforms (Kickstarter and IndieGoGo), I try to give a quick overview of the two most famous examples of crowdfunding in Denmark. After which I will give my predictions for where the Danish crowdfunding sector will head and how the emergence of lending-based platforms like Coop Crowdfunding could help take crowdfunding into mainstream in Denmark. Doing so by tapping into our cooperative movement roots by allowing customers to decide, through their loans, what we will eat in the future.

The bank, they don’t understand shit now, especially not in my business.

An entrepreneur’s view on banks (Junge & Bech, 2019)

Trust in banks is for many good reasons at an all-time low as consequence of a series of damning money-laundering scandals, the facilitations of offshore tax havens for the super-rich (i.e. Panama Papers), and not least the lingering resentments from the 2007 financial crisis. Despite these and other indictments, the sector as whole has seemed remarkably unaffected, perhaps because despite our moral reservations they hold a near monopoly on the purse strings not least when seeking a loan for an entrepreneurial endeavor. Or at least they used to.

The emergence of crowdfunding as an alternative source of finance for entrepreneurs is increasingly challenging the banks near monopoly as entrepreneurs now are increasingly engaging consumers and citizens directly for financial support. Citizens have thus become increasingly common enablers of product and service innovation in their own right (Belleflamme et al. 2014) and the global value of funds raised through crowdfunding have already hit US$ 32 billion in 2017 with continued strong growth expected (Statista 2018).

In Danish context, where loans for SMEs remains restrictive (Nielsen 2019), crowdfunding nonetheless remains a uncommon practice and is generally outside the awareness of many entrepreneurs and consumers (Junge & Bech 2019). This is arguably somewhat surprising given the historic strength of cooperatives in Denmark that were driven forth in part due to strong consumer engagement in businesses. The question then is what is the current state of crowdfunding in Denmark? Drawing on empirical data from respectively Kickstarter and IndieGoGo – the two arguably best known examples of crowdfunding – I have sought to provide you with a quick overview of reward-based crowdfunding in Denmark. After which I will give my predictions for where the Danish crowdfunding sector will head.

Crowdfunding in Denmark: A Quick Overview

Reward-based crowdfunding emerged as means to finance creative endeavors, which is also apparent when we look into which campaign categories that are most popular amongst Danish founders (i.e. Film, Fashion and Music).

Figure 1: Number of Projects by Category (2015-2018).

Among these projects, about 22 pct. succeed in meeting their funding goal, while 78 pct. fail to hit their target[1]. However as is illustrated in the Figure 2 these rates vary significantly depending on for example the project category. For example, the project category ‘Art’ is nearly a 50/50 proposition, but campaign categories like ‘Animals’ have a 100-pct. failure rate.

Figure 2: Average success rates by project category (2015-2018).

Finally, as illustrated in Figure 3 and 4 respectively success rates are strongly affected by geographic location and the regional distribution of crowdfunding resources thus remains strongly tied to the major cities. For example, Copenhagen alone accounts for 50 percent of resources garnered via reward-based crowdfunding. To see why please read my other recent blog post on this topic. So, while certain municipalities outside the major cities have high success rates one should not assume that they have many successful campaigns. In fact, the two municipalities (Vallekilde and Morud) with a 100-pct. success rate have only one campaign per respective municipality.

Figure 3: Success rates by municipality.

Figure 4: Distribution of crowdfunding resources by city.

Future of crowdfunding in Denmark

Crowdfunding in Denmark remains a rare source of income for entrepreneurs and is generally challenged by a lack of awareness from both entrepreneurs and citizens. This lack of awareness furthermore results in a lack of trust in this new form of financing. However, while reward-based crowdfunding remains niche and tailored to specific entrepreneurial endeavors that can offer tangible perks for their supporters, the emergence of other crowdfunding models provides an arguable basis for a strong competitor to the banks. For example, lending-based models, exemplified by Lendino and Coop Crowdfunding, provide entrepreneurs with an access to loans from their customers (and others) that are often cheaper then what banks are willing to offer (Junge & Bech 2019). The lenders on the other hand, who face little incentive to keep their saving in a fixed interest account at a negligible interest level, are increasingly incentivized to look for alternatives like these lending-based models especially as many loans are guaranteed.

I therefore believe that especially Coop Crowdfunding’s focus on driving new and more sustainable business models within the food sector represents, as they say themselves, a return to a type of cooperative movement 2.0 that is well-placed in Danish context. Coop Crowdfunding provides a platform for entrepreneurs to find engaged citizens who want to drive new and more sustainable food practices and are willing to put their money where their mouth is by offering cheaper loans as compared to the banks. In a country with high levels of trust and in context of an engaging story were consumers themselves can decide what we will eat in the future, I believe Coop Crowdfunding model could signal an opportunity for crowdfunding and not least green growth in Denmark.


Footnote

[1] It is important to bear in mind that there are some significant differences between the two platforms analyzed. While Kickstarter is an “all-or-nothing” platform, which means that the creator of the campaign only keeps the money if (s)he hits their funding goal IndieGoGo is primarily a “keep-it-all” platform, where the creator of the campaign can choose to keep the money if (s)he thinks that they can provide the promised service or product for the money raised. This translates into significantly different “success rates” for respectively IndieGoGo and Kickstarter if hitting the creators funding mark is definition of this. Whereas on Kickstarter 46,4 pct. of Danish campaigns hit their funding goals only 5 pct. do so on IndieGoGo.

References

Belleflamme, P., Lambert, T. & Schwienbacher, A., 2014. Crowdfunding: Tapping the right crowd. Journal of Business Venturing, 29(5), pp.585–609. Available at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0883902613000694.

Junge, I.C. & Bech, L.L., 2019. Choosing Crowdfunding: A study of why entrepreneurs choose to engage in crowdfunding and how the choice of crowdfunding model and purpose change throughout the startup life cycle. Copenhagen Business School.

Nielsen, B., 2019. 10 år efter finanskrisen: Mange små virksomheder får stadig et nej i banken. Jyllands-Posten. Available at: https://finans.dk/erhverv/ECE11308747/10-aar-efter-finanskrisen-mange-smaa-virksomheder-faar-stadig-et-nej-i-banken/?ctxref=ext.

Statista, 2018. Crowdfunding – Statistics & Facts. Statista. Available at: https://www.statista.com/topics/1283/crowdfunding/ [Accessed April 24, 2018].


About the author

Kristian is Assistant Professor at the Department of Management, Society and Communication and Visiting Researcher at Mistra Center for Sustainable Markets – Stockholm School of Economics. His research explores the potential role that “the crowd” could play in enabling sustainable entrepreneurship and innovation. Follow him on Twitter @RoedNielsen.

By the same author


Photo

Photo by Rob Curran on Unsplash.

Are we trying to solve climate change, or are we merely playing the “blame game” on social media with the future of the Earth at stake?

By Daniel Lundgaard.

The climate change debate is something that is on the minds of most people these days. The most recent elections in Denmark have been dubbed “climate-elections”, and we have recently seen massive demonstrations throughout the city of Copenhagen, and all around the world. These demonstrations take place both offline and on social media, where the #FridaysForFuture-movement recently has had a central role in inspiring engagement, especially among the younger generation.

The central role of social media as a platform cultivating a pursuit for social change is not something new. Recently #Metoo became a viral phenomenon with millions of people contributing worldwide, and a few years back we saw the rise of the Black Lives Matter-movement – as well as the Arab spring.

Civil society is associated with responsibilities for contributing to solving the problem rather than “playing the blame game”

However, while it is widely acknowledged that social media is used to discuss societal issues, there is so far little knowledge about how these discussions associate global issues such as climate change with the question of responsibility. Based on an analysis of around 3 million “climate change”-tweets – tweets mentioning either “climate change” in the text, use the #Climatechange-hashtag or share a link containing “climate change” in the headline, I dove in to the climate change debate on Twitter, and explored how the issue of responsibility was discussed. I was in particular curious about how the question of responsibility was framed, and how this question was associated with various actors. As I emerged from the data, three trends could be identified:

1. The issue of causing climate change is associated with the fossil fuel industry

Tweets referring to the issue of causing climate change are to a large extent explicitly referring to the fossil fuel industry, oil companies or similar, arguing that “the fossil fuel companies are responsible for causing climate change”. An argument emphasizing society’s responsibility also appeared, although not in the way that I would have assumed. The attempts to frame climate change as something caused by society was raised, but quickly dismissed, and instead used to emphasize the role of the fossil fuel industry, e.g. by linking to a report on how just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions, while stating “please keep this in mind if you feel personally responsible for climate change”.

2. Responsibilities for remedial activities is associated with society as a whole

Despite corporations being “blamed” for causing climate change, a lack of trust in these actors’ ability to change their ways was expressed in the tweets. Interestingly, one of the primary ways of framing the issue of solving the problem was that while corporations can be blamed for causing the problem, and we (civil society) should not feel personally responsible for what has happened until now, it was emphasized that we need to stop pointing the finger at corporations. We need to stop blaming the fossil industry for what has transpired, and instead re-think our way of living, and consider the daily choices we make e.g. “Swap your car or plane ride for a bus or train” or “stop eating meat”. Thus, civil society is associated with responsibilities for contributing to solving the problem rather than “playing the blame game”.

3. The debate is highly politicized

Finally, while corporations are blamed for causing the problem, and consumer behavior is emphasized in terms of solving the problem, the politicization of the debate permeates these trends. In relation to both trends, I found multiple references to political actors, emphasizing their contribution to the problem. This was often identified in tweets referred to the issue of climate denialism, but also in relation to how politicians haven’t sufficiently regulated the oil industry or that politicians in some cases even protect the fossil fuel industry – often related to discussions about money. Interestingly, while the politicization permeates the debate, the tweets discussing the role of political actors also emphasized the responsibility of civil society. An example of this is the argument that civil society have voted for these individuals, and that we need to consider our actions, and consider who we vote for in the future.

What can we learn?

Reviewing the way that climate change is discussed on social media, there is a general agreement that politicians and – in particular the fossil fuel industry – is to blame for what has happened. However, as the debate unfolds, there is a highly valuable argument in that playing the “blame-game” doesn’t solve any problems, and instead we, as a global society, need to think about our ways of living, and consider how we can be part of the solution.


About the author

Daniel Lundgaard is a PhD Fellow embedded in the Governing Responsible Business research environment and part of CBS Sustainability at Copenhagen Business School. His research is mainly focused on how communication on social media shapes the ways we think about organizational responsibilities, and how responsibilities become associated with emerging issues, as millions of citizens, politicians, NGOs and corporations engage in highly fluid debates.

By the same author:


Image

Photo by Con Karampelas on Unsplash

More CEOs Sacked For Ethical Failure Than For Poor Financial Performance

According to a recent study, for the first time more CEOs have been dismissed for ethical lapses than for poor financial performance (in 2018). What is the lesson? I think that we overvalue compliance and undervalue the effects of a corporate culture on sustainable business decisions…

By Andreas Rasche.

Just a few days ago, Strategy& (the consulting arm of PwC) released its annual CEO Success study, which analyzed CEO behavior in the world’s largest 2,500 companies (defined by market cap). From a sustainability and SDG perspective, some of the results are rather sobering, though not entirely surprising: for instance only 4.9% of all incoming CEOs were female.

However, the results discussing why CEOs are forced out of companies are interesting. For the first time since this survey analyzed the reasons for forced CEO departure (which is since 2007), more CEOs had to leave their job due to ethical lapses and misconduct (39%) than due to poor financial performance (35%) or conflicts with the Board (13%). Ethical lapses, here, includes all sort of misconduct, such as failed management around environmental disasters, fraud and bribery, insider trading, and also sexual indiscretions.

What is interesting is the trend. Even during the financial crisis in 2008, only 10% of CEOs were sacked for misconduct, as the Washington Post reports. So, what impacts the rise in CEO departures due to misconduct? I think some of it can be explained by changing general expectations vis-à-vis top executives and shifts in societal awareness regarding specific topics (e.g. think of the #MeToo movement). Increasingly, Boards adopt a zero-tolerance policy on misconduct, also because they know that regulators and investors are less forgiving.

However, there is another key lesson to take away from these results: well-developed compliance systems by themselves are not enough. Companies still focus too much on what they can steer and measure (i.e. compliance), while forgetting about what often is considered hard(er) to manage and measure (i.e. integrity). But, compliance is by definition reactive and it can quickly lead to moral mediocrity. Traditional compliance programs neglect that prevention and detection, two key pillars of any compliance system, only work when the mindset of people change with them.

Changing the minds of people cannot be easily pushed into some sort of management technique or concept. Putting emphasis on integrity means to learn to listen more carefully. Managers love to talk, few of them are good listeners. Those who learn to listen understand and appreciate the stories that circulate in organizations; stories that make up a good bit of what we commonly refer to as “corporate culture”.

CEOs may be better advised to carefully analyze which stories, jokes, anecdotes, and gossip make up the organizations they are leading. In the end, this tells them more about whether their job is at risk due to “ethical lapses” than solely focusing of the metrics produced by compliance systems…


About the author

Andreas Rasche is Professor of Business in Society at Copenhagen Business School and Director of CBS’s World-Class Research Environment Governing Responsible Business (GRB). He is Visiting Professor at the Stockholm School of Economics. Andreas can be reached at: ar.msc@cbs.dk and @RascheAndreas. More at his personal homepage.

By the same author


Image

Photo by Andrej Lišakov on Unsplash.

Global yet green? How governance influences upgrading opportunities

By Valentina De Marchi.

The fragmentation of production and integration of trade creates important opportunities for firms and territories, especially if located in emerging economies, to grow and learn. Yet not all the global relationships are conducive of economic, social or environmental upgrading.

Upgrading in Global Value Chains

As a result of globalization, value chains are increasingly fragmented and have spread worldwide – a new era of international competition that is reshaping global production and trade and changing the organization of industries has emerged. The Global Value Chain (GVC) framework is particularly useful in understanding global dynamics because it relates the nature of relationships between firms (governance) to the possibilities for firms to move toward higher value-added activities in order to increase the benefits of participations in GVCs (upgrading)[i]. Two main insights can be gained from the extensive literature that, taking especially the POV of emerging countries’ firms and regions, discussed on upgrading:

  1. participating in GVCs represents an important learning opportunity, to acquire crucial knowledge about global markets, advanced processes and global standards;
  2. this opportunity is not always taking place.

When does upgrading take place?

Two major reasons might explain why upgrading does not always occur – and indeed downgrading might even take place. First, learning from the global buyers and lead firms is an opportunity better gained by firms that have the capacity to absorb, master and adapt knowledge that global firms potentially can transfer to them, i.e. have invested in R&D and in the capabilities of their employees, and do interact with local industry associations, universities, research centers to improve innovation capabilities[ii]. Second, that specific path of upgrading and the extent firms can benefit (learn) from GVC participation is heavily influenced by the governance structure that characterize the GVC the firms belong too.

Governance and environmental, social and economic upgrading

A recent quantitative analysis[iii] provides empirical evidence to suggest that a ‘hands-on’ relationship with the key customers (i.e. a relational or captive governance) are conducive of economic upgrading opportunities, yet interesting differences exist if fine-graining to consider product, process or functional upgrading. As far as social upgrading is considered – i.e. the improvement of workers’ rights and work life quality – this is the case also if considering the supplier side of the global network. Interestingly enough, environmental upgrading, instead, is taking place just in the case of relational governance with customers – i.e. in power balanced relationships – and captive with suppliers – i.e. when companies are dependent of few suppliers.

Entering a GVC poses many challenges, but it does represent an opportunity to learn from lead firms and to upgrade. However, every country, community, or company should consider what influence the successful exploitation of the efforts towards economic, social and environmental upgrading has.

About the Author

Valentina De Marchi is Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics and Management ‘Marco Fanno’ at the University of Padova, Italy, and Governing Responsible Business Research Environment (GRB) research fellow at Copenhagen Business School. Interested in circular economy and industry 4.0s and environmental upgrading in GVCs. Valentina has a website and twitter presence.

By the same Author


References

[i] Gereffi G, Fernandez-Stark K (2016) Global Value Chain analysis: a primer. https://gvcc.duke.edu/cggclisting/global-value-chain-analysis-a-primer-2nd-edition/

[ii] De Marchi V, Giuliani E, Rabellotti R (2017) Do Global Value Chains Offer Developing Countries Learning and Innovation Opportunities? Eur. J. Dev. Res. 1–19 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321695039_Do_Global_Value_Chains_Offer_Developing_Countries_Learning_and_Innovation_Opportunities

[iii] Golini R, De Marchi V, Boffelli A, Kalchschmidt M (2018) Which governance structures drive economic, environmental, and social upgrading? A quantitative analysis in the assembly industries. Int J Prod Econ 203:13–23. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpe.2018.05.021


Image

Photo by Andrew Buchanan on Unsplash.

Thinking outside the box on corporate tax practice

By Sara Jespersen.

Multinational corporate tax payments – a persistent conundrum.

Corporate tax practice of multinational corporations (MNC) have been the topic of intense debate in the media and among policy makers in recent years. Most recently the news broke that Amazon would pay zero tax on their more than 11 billion profit in 2018. The OECD have coordinated a large project on the topic and involved countries around the world in discussing attempted solutions to the issue of “base erosion and profit shifting” which is the technical term for states finding it challenging to tax the profits of MNCs.

Not only policy makers and media have taken an interest in the topic. NGOs have played a large part in agenda setting and mobilizing citizens’ concern in the topic of MNCs tax payments. Last year an interesting book was published on the topic of “The “new” politics of Tax Justice” edited by Richard Eccleston and Ainsley Elbra.

However, the issue is far from resolved. A few weeks ago, at a seminar here at Copenhagen Business School renowned tax law scholar Rita De la Feria confirmed that when it comes to MNCs and the creation of economic value – we simply do not know where it actually takes place geographically. Which under the current rules and norms for international taxation makes it very difficult to ensure an appropriate taxation of MNCs corporate profit as this is closely linked to economic value creation. At the same time, research tells us that MNCs are increasing responsible for the global profits (see table F3 in the Appendix tables here). This is a challenge for policy makers, but highlights the relevance and importance of tax research.

Still much to gain from rethinking corporate tax as a social and institutional practice

Maybe we can learn something from rethinking the boundaries of the topic? Move it beyond a technical/legal debate about the formulas and boundaries of corporate accounting practices to identify economic value on paper. Lynne Oats already reconceived “tax as a social and institutional practice” building on the work done in the related field of accounting challenging its mere technical nature. Further interesting work in this vein can be mentioned the book “the new fiscal sociology” edited by Isaac William Martin highlighting the importance of context for the tax phenomenon. Much more is to be learned about notably the role of corporate taxation in relation to business in society, the fiscal contract between business and the state, and the institutions and social structures that embed the economic activities of MNCs. For example how the notion of corporate social responsibility relates to corporate tax practice.

A recent integrative review by Whait, Christ, Ortas and Burritt (2018) of the literature on CSR and tax aggressiveness find that little research approach the topic from a historical, theoretical or qualitative approach. Further very little research exist on the MNCs that do not consider themselves particularly “aggressive” in their tax affairs, but rather would perceive themselves as responsible. Fortunately, there appear to be developments in practice that indicate that we also have more material available to engage in this type of research.

Developments in practice

Just in the past year, three interesting developments are worth mentioning that express how corporations, the media and policy makers approach the topic of corporate tax practice from different angles:

In 2018 a grouping of MNCs developed and endorsed the B-team’s “Principles for responsible tax”. The B-team is “is a not-for-profit initiative formed by a global group of business leaders to catalyse a better way of doing business, for the wellbeing of people and the planet”. The founding and endorsing companies count just over ten at the moment, but with a call for further business to join the conversation and sign up to the principles. This appears as an example of multinational corporations expressing their willingness to appear more responsible and linking their tax practices to issue of ensuring stable and sustainable societies.

In Denmark, a survey of Danish top 100 companies’ performance on tax governance published for the second year released this month . Findings show only relatively small progress in the picture overall and more than half score zero points on the rating that this journal has developed for the purpose. The fact that the survey publishes the second year in a row is interesting in itself. It appears as a part of the increasing interest from a variety of stakeholders in the topic of corporate tax governance. It indicates a more mainstream interest in the topic from a corporate governance perspective. Corporate tax is traditionally viewed as a cost to be minimized. However, this survey and the demonstration that there is movement in the practice related to tax governance gives relevance to conceiving corporate tax as a social and institutional practice. Group Tax Directors are experiencing increased interest in their work and area of responsibility and this translates into new practices and ways of communicating corporate tax policy.

On the international front, the OECD public consultation on the topic of tax morale closed this month. What was particularly interesting from the OECD’s presentation of the topic at a conference in January this year is that they find that we know very little about business tax morale. How important it is in what situations. We know more about individuals’ tax morale. For example, that it appears to be higher in countries that tax more. Findings from OECD’s consultation will be interesting to follow. I for one will be looking out for how the OECD, as primarily a forum for policy makers, will make use of this input.

A promising research agenda:

Investigating the emerging relationship between corporate tax practice and CSR holds much potential for learning more about MNCs and their relation to society. It might not solve the conundrum of how to ensure their effective and fair taxation at first sight, but being open to conceiving corporate tax as a social and institutional practice might deliver valuable insights and move us towards a more sustainable relationship between business and society.


About the author

Sara Jespersen is a PhD fellow at Copenhagen Business School. Her research is on the emerging relationship between responsible business conduct and corporate tax planning of multinational enterprises. In a complex governance context there are now signs of corporations’ self-regulation and the emergence of voluntary standards. She is interested in what this means for our understanding of corporations as political actors and the notion of political CSR.

Articles by the same author


Photo

Photo by TJ Dragotta on Unsplash.

Who cares about sustainable fashion?

By Erin Leitheiser.

Can ever-higher rates of consumption ever truly be sustainable?  Consideration of up-and-coming consumers will be key to making progress in the sustainability of the fashion industry.

Each year in May, Copenhagen hosts the Copenhagen Fashion Summit, which brings together fashion industry leaders to consider the environmental and social sustainability issues rife within the industry.  While this year’s event promises discussions on important supply-side issues like materials and design, circularity, supply chains, wages, and the like, there seems to be precious little time dedicated to demand-side issues, principally the role of consumers.  As such, this post offers a review of some key facts and trends that foreshadow the landscape of the future of (sustainable) fashion, and in particular, the role of consumers.

First, some key facts about the scale of the fashion industry and its impacts:

  • Greenhouse gas emissions from the textile industry account for 8% of all carbon emissions globally, more than those emitted by all international flights and maritime shipping combined (Quantis, 2018). 
  • The top 20 companies in the clothing industry, mostly in the luxury segment, account for 97% of its economic profit (McKinsey, 2019).
  • Clothing sales have more than doubled in just the last 20 years (Ellen McCarther Foundation, 2017), and apparel consumption is projected to rise an additional 63% by 2020 (Global Fashion Agenda, 2017). 
  • Despite growing efforts to collect and recycle old textiles, less than 1% of materials used in clothing is recycled (Ellen MacCarthur Foundation, 2017). 
  • Companies – particularly luxury companies – often prioritize brand image over sustainability.  For example, Burberry found itself embroiled in scandal after it chose to burn US$37 million in excess stock last year, rather than discount or donate it.

While many of these issues skew toward supply-side, consumers’ habits play a key role in the vast excesses of the fashion industry.  Consumption rates seem to grow ever-higher.

  • Nearly half of young female consumers buy clothing at least monthly (Farsang et al, 2015).
  • An article of clothing in a woman’s closet is worn a mere 7 times on average before being discarded (Barnardo’s, 2015)
  • In the past year, a quarter of Australians (24%) have thrown away an item of clothing after wearing it only once, and 1 in 6 have binned 3 items or more after a single wear (YouGov, 2017). 
  • A third of UK women consider a garment “old” after wearing it 3 times or less (Barnardo’s, 2015).
  • 38% of Millennials have bought at least half of the clothes they own within the past year (YouGov, 2017). 
  • In China, clothing utilization (that is, the number of time a garment is worn before being discarded) has fallen by over 70% in the last 15 years (Ellen MacCarthur Foundation, 2017).  At the same time, Greater China is projected to overtake the U.S. in 2019 as the largest fashion market in the world (McKinsey 2019).

The consumer landscape is changing rapidly when it comes to “sustainable” fashion, so much so that fashion firm executives identified consumer behaviors that force industry to “self-disrupt” as the #1 trend for 2019 (McKinsey, 2019).  Key consumer trends underscore the significance, scale and potential of consumers in the quest for (more) sustainable fashion.  Younger consumers – Millennials (born 1980-2000) and Gen Zers (born 2000-now) – are largely responsible for pushing companies to become more sustainable.

  • 94% of Gen Zers believe that companies should address social and environmental issues (Cone, 2017). 
  • Gen Z alone will account for 40 percent of global consumers by 2020. (McKinsey, 2019)
  • 90% of Millennials would boycott or otherwise refuse to buy from a company that is doing harm (Cone, 2017)
  • Consumers want to support brands that are doing good in the world, with 66 percent willing to pay more for sustainable goods (McKinsey, 2019).

As younger generations increase their buying power – and couple it with ethical evaluations – companies will need to become even more responsive to and diligent about addressing sustainability issues.  Yet, high consumption rates threaten to curtail gains made from sustainability advances, like textile recycling.  In addition to more sustainable production practices – and subsequent ethical purchasing – consumption must decrease if the perils of the industry are to be addressed.

“Younger consumers are seriously concerned with social and environmental causes, which many regard as being the defining issues of our time. They increasingly back their beliefs with their shopping habits, favouring brands that are aligned with their values and avoiding those that don’t.”

McKinsey, 2019: p. 45

I am often asked what one can do as an individual to be more sustainable when it comes to fashion.  My answer is in two main parts.  First, buy fewer, better quality items and wear them for longer.  Classic, good quality pieces will wear better and last longer.  Even if they cost a bit more at purchase their extended life makes them a more affordable option in the long run.  Second, re-think how you care for your clothes.  Washing them less, at lower temperatures, and hanging them to dry will all result in gains for both your energy bill, as well as the environment, estimated at a 3% carbon reduction (WRAP, 2017).  Some proponents even argue that you never need to wash your jeans!  (though this might be a bit extreme for some)

There is no silver bullet to solving the unsustainability of the fashion industry.  But one thing does seem clear: advances and changes must come from all sides if progress is to be made.  As the Copenhagen Fashion Summit kicks off this week , please keep in mind the importance and role of everyone involved in the production, sale, and disuse of fashion, as well as the very premise that the industry is based on: consumption.


About the author

Erin Leitheiser is a postdoctoral researcher in Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability at Copenhagen Business School. Her research interests revolve around the changing role and expectations of business in society. Prior to pursuing her PhD, she worked as a CSR manager in a U.S. Fortune-50 company, as well as a public policy consultant with a focus on convening and facilitating of multi-stakeholder initiatives. She is supported by the Velux Foundation and is on Twitter as @erinleit.

References

Barnardo’s. (2015). One worn, thrice shy – British women’s wardrobe habits exposed!.  Retrieved from https://www.barnardos.org.uk/news/Once-worn-thrice-shy-8211-British-women8217s-wardrobe-habits-exposed/press_releases.htm

Cone. (2017) “Gen Z CSR study: How to Speak Z”. http://www.conecomm. com/2017-cone-gen-z-csr-study-pdf

Ellen MaCarthur Foundation. (2017). A new textiles economy: redesigning fashion’s future. 1–150. Retrieved from https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/publications/a-new-textiles-economy-redesigning-fashions-future

Environmental Audit Committee, House of Commons. (2017). Fixing Fashion: clothing consumption and sustainability.

Farsang, A., Gwozdz, W., Mueller, T., Reisch, L. A., & Netter, S. (2015). Survey Results on Fashion Consumption and Sustainability Among Young Consumers in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, the UK and the US in 2014. Borås: Mistra Future Fashion.

Global Fashion Agenda. (2017). Pulse of the fashion Industry. Retrieved from https://www.copenhagenfashionsummit.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Pulse-of-the-Fashion-Industry_2017.pdf

McKinsey & Company. (2019). The State of Fashion 2019.

Quantis. (2018). Measuring Fashion.

WRAP. (2017). Valuing Our Clothes: the cost of UK fashion. Retrieved from http://www.wrap.org.uk/sites/files/wrap/valuing-our-clothes-the-cost-of-uk-fashion_WRAP.pdf

By the same author

The Government of Business Responsibility

Role Reversal: When Business Safeguards the Public Good


Photo: Courtesy of Copenhagen Fashion Summit 2018.

Let Me Lend You a Hand: How Behavioural Economics Can Restore Trust in Science

By Noah Peters.

Society’s declining trust in science in general and economics in particular is a much debated topic. Martin Wolf’s recent commentary for the Institute of New Economic Thinking (INET) is only one way of addressing the conundrum. This blog post draws on two prominent contentions underpinning the obscure notion of distrust in economics. Firstly, economists (allegedly) live in their ivory towers surrounded by mathematical formulas no outsider would even vaguely understand. Secondly, they are accused of not being able to adequately forecast crises, let alone fend them off.

One increasingly influential sub-discipline in economics tries to overhaul these stereotypes. Stemming from psychology, behavioural economics shows that humans are multi-faceted, empathetic and guided by values and social surroundings. For readers not familiar with economics, this finding might not be a major surprise. But it goes against the grain of long-standing economic traditions emphasising people’s pursuit of profit maximisation. Acknowledging people’s genuine driving forces and behavioural patterns counteracts the first contention I presented earlier: economists’ penchant for technical abstractions of human action.

Moreover, behavioural economics and behaviourally informed policy interventions address everyday problems – retirement savings, administrative procedures or identifying the healthiest product on a supermarket shelf. Behavioural policy interventions aim at improving the lives of ordinary people. Economic and financial crises unequivocally affect the lives of everyone, from investment bankers to bakers. But loosening people’s daily constraints is as important and contributes to the bigger picture. This is what behavioural policy does.

Consequently, those interventions and their economic foundations are relatable. I argue that this relatedness to the real world is pivotal in regaining societal trust and convincing citizens of the value that economic theory can add.

While this demand is not new and maybe trivial, it is worth stressing over and over again. And especially behavioural economics got the message. Unsurprisingly, key topics for policy-makers are sustainability and public health. Behavioural interventions address these challenges from an individual-level, demand-side perspective. By inquiring how people really judge and decide (using experiments and investigating people’s motivations), the overarching challenges of the 21st century can be traced to the consumer level. This way, we can elucidate how every single person can make a difference. Today’s urgencies become vivid and tangible.

A couple of examples in the domain of food choice shall underpin this connection of behavioural economic theory and everyday applications. A supermarket, for example, constitutes the perfect playground for behavioural scientists. Traffic-light labels indicating how healthy a certain product is draw on the plain fact that simplifications can enhance people’s decisions. Likewise, plate size can affect how much people eat. Restaurant menu design could steer which option customers choose. One additional strategy are default options, e.g. vegetarian snacks automatically ordered for meetings if not otherwise changed for non-vegetarian alternatives. This feature is informed by the fact that people prefer the status-quo and are sometimes too lazy to make simple changes.

This list is not exhaustive, and the interventions presented above are widely discussed in academia and rather trivial. Thus, every serious scholar would automatically defend the originality of her ideas. Others would go even further and completely demonise any form of real-world application.

I contend, however, that the frivolous essence of many behavioural interventions explains their efficacy and acclaim. Psychological underpinnings inform policy interventions in a way that relates to people’s everyday lives thereby addressing the questions of our time.

But it’s not entirely rosy for behavioural economics either. Critics contend that consumers – citizens (!) – are manipulated and deprived of their own capacity to judge. There are compelling reasons why this notion is short-sighted, though. Thus, behavioural scientists must establish guidelines ensuring their legitimate intentions and communicate their toolbox transparently. And of course: mathematics and technical tools are invaluable instruments for the empirical sciences; they are the very departure point to extrapolate the world we live in.

The combination of scientific rigour, tangible applications, and sincere motivations can help restore societal trust. Scientists who are successful in applying and communicating this trinity, can evade the curse of post-truth sentiments and latent hostility to experts.

About the Author

Noah is a visiting research assistant to the Department of Management, Society and Communication (MSC). He studies sociology, politics and economics at Zeppelin University, Germany. In his research he focuses on behavioural economics and policy applications, as well as economic and urban sociology. Partaking in an exchange programme between Copenhagen Business School and Zeppelin University, Noah supports current research at MSC’s Consumer and Behavioral Insights Group (CBIG). Connect on LinkedIn or ResearchGate if you are so inclined.


Photo by Neil Thomas on Unsplash

Temporal Dimensions of Hypocrisy

By Lars Thøger Christensen.

Hypocrisy is a serious charge for social actors, especially organizations and politicians, whose profession depends on perceptions of sincerity and credibility. To call someone a hypocrite is to challenge his or her moral integrity and to indicate that the object of the accusation cannot be trusted. In spite of their seriousness, however, hypocrisy charges are frequent occurrences in public debate. Whereas the notion of hypocrisy used to refer specifically to the practice of engaging in the very same immoral behavior for which one castigates other actors, today it is likely to be mobilized whenever gaps, imbalances or disparities between one set of activities and another can be observed and claimed. Hypocrisy, in other words, has become an expansive arena.

Hypocrisy charges have become dissociated from moral preaching and refer today more broadly to perceived inconsistencies between talk and action.

For organizations, such inconsistencies are countless. This is especially the case when their talk concerns complex activities that extend far beyond the immediate present and involve dimensions of the organization’s past and future. Organizations, for example, are often accused by stakeholders for inconsistencies between their current ideals and their former practices. Similarly, stakeholders frequently reject future-oriented goals with reference to present-day activities. Since hypocrisy charges can be damaging to one’s reputation, however, organizations are likely to counter such challenges by reasserting some sort of consistency between their past, present and future. While such endeavours tend to attract criticism, they are quite common practices in contemporary organizations.

Influenced by an expanded understanding of hypocrisy, many organizations are engaged in practices of consistency management.

Instead of admitting the existence of inconsistencies, disjunctures or dilemmas among different dimensions of their practices, organizations engage in “communicative acrobatics” in order to navigate in the unruly waters of their past, their present and their future. Examples of such acrobatics are aspiration, deferment, evasion and re-narration.

Aspiration denotes organizational ambitions camouflaged as accurate self-descriptions. While aspirations might come across as more credible if they were presented as future-oriented goals, the combined desire to improve the organization’s reputational standing and motivate internal audiences towards better practices implies that such self-descriptions tend to be formulated as if they reflect already existing practices.

Deferment refers to delays, extensions or suspensions of organizational action towards better futures. While such delays may be accepted in some contexts, they are likely to be met with suspicion when they involve responsible or sustainable practices. Organizations that find themselves behind schedule or not yet able to evidence the results of their initiatives, must therefore engage vigorously in justifications.

Evasion describes organizational attempts to bypass, neglect or otherwise distance themselves from dubious or irresponsible decisions and behaviors of their past. Since the past is frequently evoked by critics to dismiss the credibility of current organizational goals and visions and to support charges of hypocrisy, it is crucial for many organizations to stress that what used to be common practice has been terminated long time ago.

Re-narration refers to attempts by organizations to mobilize and reedit their past in self-flattery ways. As a particular practice aimed at retroactively editing the past in the interest of the present and the future, re-narration involves selecting and rearranging specific events and symbols of the past into an idealized picture that can be used as a resource to guide and justify current practices and future goals.

These are just a few examples of organizational attempts to bypass hypocrisy charges in the shape of inconsistencies or tensions between their past, their present and their future. Interestingly, such attempts tend to reproduce hypocrisy in new forms – forms, which are just as likely to attract attention and criticism. As such, hypocrisy has potential to do something to organizations and society over time.

The combination of hypocrisy and stakeholder criticism has performative potential.

Many aspirations, for example, are hypocritical because they exaggerate organizational abilities and accomplishments. At the same time, they have performative potential to the extent that they mobilize employees and NGOs to demand better practices. Also, aspirations may inspire similar aspirations among competitors such that they become self-fulfilling prophecies. Similarly, while deferment practices may relieve the organization from immediate pressure to do exactly as they say, they simultaneously indicate that organizations are sensitive to their social standing and hold on to their future-directed ideals and goals.

Such sensitivity might be used by stakeholders to demand further explanations and updated timeframes. By holding on to long-term-ideals and goals, even when they are difficult to implement in full, organizations seem to acknowledge what is right and what they ought to do. Similarly, even if evasion may be a tempting way out for organizations when facing negative publicity about their past, such practice indicates that organizational actors are aware that certain practices no longer are acceptable.
Finally, the fact that many corporations seek to re-narrate their past indicates some awareness that change is called for and that organizational endeavors are being vigilantly observed by others.

Without hypocrisy, organizations may relieve themselves from pressures to become better.

None of this is to suggest that hypocrisy automatically generates better practices. Rather, it is a call to investigate further how hypocrisy in the shape of inconsistencies can be mobilized to perform in the interest of society.


Suggestions for further readings

Brunsson, N. (2003). Organized hypocrisy. In B. Czarniawska & G. Sevón G. (Eds), The Northern lights – organization theory in Scandinavia (pp. 201-222). Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School Press.

Cho, C. H., Laine, M., Roberts, R. W., & Rodrigue, M. (2015). Organized hypocrisy, organizational façades, and sustainability reporting. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 40, 78-94.

Christensen, L.T., Morsing, M., & Thyssen, O. (2013). CSR as aspirational talk. Organization, 20(3), 372-393.

Haack, P., Schoeneborn. D., & Wickert, C. (2012). Talking the talk, moral entrapment, creeping commitment? Exploring narrative dynamics in corporate responsibility standardization. Organization Studies, 33(5-6), 815-845.

About the Author

Lars Thøger Christensen is Professor of Communication and Organization at the Copenhagen Business School, Denmark.

By the same author: License to Critique: Inoculating Standards against Closure.


Photo by Pierre Bamin on Unsplash.

“We’re just geeks”: Do emergent disciplinary identities among business students affect their sense of personal responsibility?

By Maribel Blasco.

Georg*: I don’t think people from Maths are like that [selfish] because it’s another environment. We treat each other kindly. We are not like these types that want to be in front and want to be the best, and want to be in the top.

Fransisca*: We are more down to earth, just because we are geeks and people don’t show up in suits and small briefcases.

Mette*: I think we are much more down to earth than other study programs at CBS. And I think the environment at Maths makes us more responsible in some way and that we are not like “I just have to reach the top no matter what.”

(Quotes from group interview with undergraduate business and math students).
*Names changed.

Business schools invest a great deal of effort in forging a sense of shared identity among students from different subject specializations. Freshers’ weeks, introduction events, team-building exercises, and invited speakers are just a few examples of initiatives designed to strengthen students’ sense of belonging to a particular professional group.

But what if this is backfiring? Although belief in the positive features of one’s own group is known to support teamwork and cooperation, among other benefits, we also know that it can have a dark side in the form of responsibility disavowal, prejudice and discrimination towards groups perceived as outsiders. These dynamics beset firms and other organizations, where sub-groups can be a major source of conflict, and where silo thinking – unwillingness to collaborate or sometimes even communicate with other groups in the same organization – has been found to erode responsibilities and foster a culture of promoting one’s own group rather than the organization as a whole. Recent financial scandals have also revealed how such groupthink can lead people to deny personal responsibility for wrongdoing.

In this research, I show how students’ emergent professional identities can work against their sense of personal responsibility by providing rationalizations for moral buck-passing. The data consist of group interviews involving students from fifteen undergraduate business programmes. Among the most intriguing findings that emerged were three logics that students used in talking about responsibility.

Logics of Responsibility Talk

The first logic was the notion that the intrinsic nature of certain disciplines, notably numbers-oriented subjects like maths and economics, obviated the need for a responsibility focus. The second logic was that students generally felt that their own disciplinary specialization was ‘more responsible’ than others’. The third logic was that almost all students appeared convinced that decisions about responsibility were an individual matter – but they mostly regarded irresponsibility as something that other people or groups got up to.
So even though most insisted that responsibility was ultimately up to the individual, that individual was seldom itself.

“Missing from most students’ accounts was a critical appraisal of their own fallibility.”

All three logics provide rationales for disavowing personal responsibility. Missing from most students’ accounts was a critical appraisal of their own fallibility, that of their discipline, or that of their disciplinary in-group, in regard to the potential for irresponsibility. Only a few questioned their ability to resist temptation if placed in a morally dubious situation.
Particularly worrisome was that business students across all specializations regarded so-called ‘harder’ subjects, notably maths and economics, variously as neutral, objective, technical, theoretical or basic subjects that were not ‘about’ responsibility. Students tended to accept the models and theories taught in those subjects pretty much unequivocally, arguing that since these were ‘used by major institutions’ they must be responsible in and of themselves.

Separation Thesis

This kind of thinking reflects what scholars have referred to as the ‘separation thesis’, i.e. the notion that business decisions have no moral content and moral decisions have no business content (Harris & Freeman, 2008; Freeman, 1994; Wicks, 1996). This idea that facts can be separated from values is, according to some scholars, ‘ingrained in all that we do in business schools’, and leads to the notion that business theories can be morally neutral ‘while surreptitiously encapsulating certain ethical values and assertions’ (Harris & Freeman 2008: 543; Freeman, 1994: 412; Ghoshal, 2005).

Alongside this, many students, notably those from numbers-oriented specializations, associated responsibility with so-called ‘softer’, ‘discussion’ subjects like organizational studies and corporate social responsibility, and displayed a disdain for these that is also mirrored in the business world where ‘financial and market strategists who have been conditioned to respect only “hard” and quantifiable “facts” ‘with “hard” data to support them’ find it easy to dismiss human factors as ‘“soft” or “mushy” issues’ (Cartwright & Cooper 1995: 35).

Learnings

As management educators, what can we learn from this study? First, the findings open up for a debate about how to educate for subject-specific forms of responsibility without fostering a ‘silo mentality’ that may serve to disavow personal responsibility.

To address this, first, we might explore ways to render disciplinary boundaries more porous by explicitly and critically discussing, with students, their disciplinary mental models and the beliefs, identifications and behaviors they foster. Second, initiatives that encourage cross-disciplinary collaboration should be encouraged. Finally, we need to raise students’ awareness of the limits of their individual agency, and of their own fallibility when confronted with the appeal of solidarity, when it comes to responsibility decisions. In sum: we must find ways to teach students to take personal responsibility even in situations when they do not consider that it is theirs to take.

The Author

Maribel Blasco, Associate Professor, Department of Management, Society & Communication, Copenhagen Business School. Research area: Management learning and education.


References

Cartwright, S., & Cooper, C. L. (1995). Organizational marriage:“hard” versus “soft” issues?. Personnel Review, 24(3), 32-42.

Freeman, R. E. (1994). The politics of stakeholder theory: Some future directions. Business ethics quarterly, 409-421.

Harris, J. D., & Freeman, R. E. (2008). The impossibility of the separation thesis: A response to Joakim Sandberg. Business Ethics Quarterly, 18(4), 541-548.

Ghoshal, S. (2005). Bad management theories are destroying good management practices. Academy of Management learning & education, 4(1), 75-91.

Wicks, A. C. (1996). Overcoming the separation thesis: the need for a reconsideration of business and society research. Business & Society, 35(1), 89-118.


Photo by Alex Chambers on Unsplash.

Conquer the Lock-In: How Food Companies can act on their Political Responsibility towards Children

By Levinia Scotti and Thomas Eichenberg.

The overconsumption of sugar, especially among children, and its long-term health risks re-gained public awareness with the introduction of the British soda tax in 2018. What can we learn for 2019?

Food and beverage manufacturers and retailers produce, advertise and sell their products to millions of people every day. We therefore consider them political actors (see for a similar argument, Whelan 2017) with a responsibility to respect the Human Rights of Children to a healthy diet (OHCHR 1999).

By using sugar as a proxy for the healthiness of children’s dietary patterns, we sought to learn more about the capabilities of food companies to act in favour of children’s long-term health. Children’s health does not only affect themselves and their families, but also implies important economic spill-over effects (e.g., Brownwell et al. 2009, Belli et al. 2005, Heckman 2006).

The Case

In order to better understand existing corporate efforts, we conducted a number of interviews with representatives of Danish and German retailers as well as international food and beverage manufactures. Additionally, we analysed their annual and sustainability reports of the last five years.

Glopan, 2016.

For our analysis, we assumed that individual food choices are contingent on the social and environmental factors that constitute the food system. Dietary patterns and food systems can thereby be seen as a two-way street (GloPan 2016) in as much as consumption choices are being shaped and shape (future) food system configurations. The innovation challenge in improving children’s dietary quality is thus systemic. (See also the Global Nutrition Report 2018 for more on malnutrition).

Corporate Challenge: ‘Sense-Making’, and the Quasi-Objectivity of Materiality

Across our data, our informants emphasized 15 distinctive patterns as ‘enablers of’ and ‘barriers to’ business efforts to effectively address children’s sugar consumption. These perceived enablers and barriers can, broadly speaking, be broken down into two ‘corporate mind-sets’ that crucially affect successes in reducing children’s sugar intake. The common pattern among organizational enablers went along the lines of “The organization itself can and must drive change!”, which we associate with a proactive corporate mindset. The reasoning of the perceived organizational barriers, however, tended to be more like “The organization must foremost account for external demands!”, which we describe as a reactive mindset.

Own illustration (1), 2018.

Drawing on the literature on sense-making (Weick 1995) in general, and the notion of “ethical blindness as the result of a sense-making process based on interactions between framing and context factors” (Palazzo et al. 2012: 328) in particular, we suggest that a mere concentration on the second, rather reactive mind-set, mirrors a perceived ‘lock-in’ within external pressures that can be conceived of as a sense-making process that risks to entail a blindness to the ethical dimension (Palazzo, et al. 2012: 324) of organizational priority-setting (i.e. values).

Example: Corporate materiality assessments are one area in which this blindness becomes performative. Although materiality may refer to different things, the outcome of a materiality assessment is often regarded as tangible. We tend to forget, however, that materiality is nothing absolute or objective. Rather, it is constructed on the basis of (often) taken-for-granted organizational processes and priorities. The design of a materiality assessment itself and the definition of materiality as such has thus an enormous influence on the interpretation of the outcomes (Eccles & Krzus 2014). The question that needs to receive more attention is: Which stakeholders’ interests and needs are ‘worthy’ of prioritization beyond their impact on pre-existing strategic targets?

At this point, the case of sugar reduction in children’s food can be transferred to other industries and future investments of resources. The bottom line is, values are performative.

What is valued, gets measured, gets done

Rather unsurprisingly, our findings suggest the following relationship: The success of corporate efforts to reduce children’s sugar consumption is contingent on whether or not child malnutrition is a corporate priority prior to the assessment of environmental influences.

That leads us to question the almost sacred status of the “outside-in” perspective, which has become somewhat of a gold-standard in corporate sustainability management.

Instead of conducting yet another stakeholder engagement workshop, it may actually be more enlightening to scrutinize from the ‘inside-out’ who decides what is (most) valuable to the organization.

This will require strong leadership among executive decision-makers since the implications of corporate strategies cannot be merely delegated to external stakeholders.

Own illustration (2), 2018.

Our research shows that a reactive approach risks to foster an organizational “lock-in” and thus tighten barriers to innovations that make a real difference for children’s diet and health. The challenge food and beverage manufacturers and retailers thus face is to avoid this ‘lock-in’ within the preferences, values and beliefs of their environment (such as ‘the persistent consumer demand for sugar products’). This, in turn, implies the need for original corporate values and a mission that is informed, but not determined by their environment, and inspires organizational decision-makers to proactively meet and anticipate social and environmental challenges.

Start with Values

The key-take away from our research is that the future evolution of internal processes within food and beverage retail and manufacturing industry need to be driven by an organizational (social) innovation mind-set (see, e.g. Osburg & Schmidpeter 2013), as well as internally recognized and lived values and priorities (see especially Breuer’s & Lüdeke-Freund’s work on ‘values-based’ innovation management).

Very concretely, a starting point for (more) proactively addressing Children’s Right to a healthy diet could be to ask:

  • How can we strategically contribute to a healthier food environment for children, considering the direct and indirect “touch points” we have with children?
  • How can we effectively drive the individual and organizational recognition of children’s nutritional health, within and beyond organizational risk management, as a material issue?
  • Are our global corporate knowledge management practices aligned with the goal of respecting and supporting Children’s Right to a healthy diet?
  • How can we initiate or contribute to collaborations with other stakeholders to reduce children’s sugar consumption

Active Corporate Support for the Children’s Rights and Business Principles

In light of our research, it became clear that against the background of the respect and support framework of the UN, it is not sufficient for corporations to interpret the “respect” for Children’s Rights in terms of ‘doing no harm’. The Children’s Rights and Business Principles define respect as “avoiding any infringement of the Human Rights of others, including children, and addressing any adverse Human Rights impact with which the business is involved” (CRBPs 2012: 5).
The aim of “doing no harm” is insufficient in so far as it implies the existence of a cause-effect relation, which corporations can directly steer. Children’s sugar consumption is, however, influenced by the overall configuration of their food environment. Therefore, there is no such direct cause-effect relation, rendering a mere commitment to do “no-harm” insufficient (see e.g., Schrempf 2014 on the social connection approach to corporate responsibility in the case of the food industry). Rather, food and beverage manufacturers and retailers need to actively support the Child Right to a healthy diet by anchoring positive contributions to social health at the core of their corporate values and operations.

On a more general level, our research demonstrates that an alignment of current food systems with public health objectives is to a large extent contingent on corporations’ capability to innovate and act upon corporate values that put the active support of healthy food systems at the centre of their business practice, i.e. their innovation, marketing and sales activities.

The Authors

Thomas is based in Copenhagen and graduated from CBS in 2018. He studied economics, business administration and philosophy. He enjoys addressing dilemmas and ambiguities of social, economic and business transformation processes. Feel free to connect with Thomas on Linkedin.

Levinia recently graduated from CBS with a MSc in Business Administration & Philosophy. She is passionate about identifying and driving innovative organisational strategies that effectively address the systemic nature of local and global sustainability challenges across value chains. Learn more about what Levinia is up to on Twitter and feel free to be in touch on Linkedin. 


References

Breuer, H. & Lüdeke-Freund, F. (2017): Values-based innovation management – Innovating by what we care about. London: Palgrave.

CRBPs (2012): ‘Children’s Rights and Business Principles’, Save the Children, UNGC & UNICEF. Accessible online.

Eccles, R. G. & Krzus, M. P. (2014): The Integrated Reporting Movement: Meaning, Momentum, Motives, and Materiality. ISBN: 978-1-118-64698-4.

GloPan (2016): ‘Food systems and diets: Facing the challenges of the 21st century’, London, UK.

HLPE (2014): ‘Food losses and waste in the context of sustainable food systems – A report by the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition of the Committee on
World Food Security. Rome.

HLPE (2017): ‘Nutrition and Food Systems – A report by The High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition of the Committee on World Food Security, Rome.

OHCHR (1999): CESCR General Comment No. 12: The Right to Adequate Food (Art. 11) Adopted at the Twentieth Session of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, on 12 May 1999 (Contained in Document E/C.12/1999/5), accessible online.

Osburg, T. & Schmidpeter, R. (2013): Social Innovation –Solutions for a Sustainable Future’, Berlin: Springer.

Palazzo, G. et al. (2012): ‘Ethical Blindness‘, Journal of Bussines Ethics, 109: 323–338. DOI 10.1007/s10551-011-1130-4.

Schrempf, J. (2014): ‘A social connection approach to Corporate Responsibility: The Case of The Fast Food Industry and Obesity’, Business & Society, 53(2), 300–332.

Whelan, G. (2017): ‘Political CSR: The Corporation as Political Actor’, in: Rasche, A., Morsing, M., Moon, J. (eds): Corporate Social Responsibility – Strategy, Communication, Governance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Weick, K. E. (1995): Sensemaking in organizations. Thousand Oaks: Sage.


Photo by Food Photographer | Jennifer Pallian on Unsplash.

The year of corporate acting—does business need a new approach to palm oil?

By Amanda Williams, Steve Kennedy and Gail Whiteman.

2018 went down as the ‘year of corporate caring’ about the palm oil controversy. A banned TV advertisement promoting a Palm Oil free Christmas by the UK supermarket Iceland went viral on social media with over 5 million views in merely a couple of weeks. Shortly after, on the south bank in London, Iceland responded to the ban with a displaced Orangutan hanging from a Christmas tree surprising tourists and drawing attention to the loss of biodiversity due to the clearing of virgin rainforests. Debates about palm oil in Malaysia and Indonesia are far from new. But recent events are surely stirring up the conversation and attention to the issue is at an all time high.

Proponents are reacting to the complete ban of palm oil with statistics on the efficiency yields from the fruit of oil palm trees and claim boycotting palm oil would simply shift demand to other types of vegetable oil to meet demand. Palm oil has climbed the charts in popularity because it is cheap, versatile and efficient. While others argue that despite the efficiency benefits of the crop, new approaches are needed to tackle this pressing humanitarian and environmental issue.

Business and Palm Oil

CEOs of multi-national corporations that depend on palm oil and tropical timber in their supply chains are well aware of their impacts and the consequences of deforestation. Outgoing Unilever CEO Paul Polman already stated back in 2015:

“We are seeing the effect of climate change in our own business. Shipping routes cancelled because of hurricanes in the Philippines. Factories closing because of extreme cold weather in the United States. Distribution networks in disarray because of floods in the UK. Reduced productivity on our tea plantations in Kenya because of weather changes linked to deforestation of the Mau forest. We estimate that geo-political and climate related factors cost Unilever currently up to €300 million a year.”

Many companies are working hard to address the issue. The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, established in 2004, brings together palm oil producers, traders, consumer goods manufacturers, retailers and NGOs to improve environmental and social criteria for the certification of sustainable palm oil. The roundtable boasts that 13.20 million tons of palm oil is RSPO certified, amounting to 19% of the global volume. Palm oil certification is expensive for farmers to obtain and has yet to solve issues of deforestation or poverty.

Yet, ambitious corporate targets are not translating into concrete results on the ground.

Beyond certification, companies are setting ambitious targets. Unilever’s touchstone Sustainable Living Plan aims to become carbon positive by 2030 and halt deforestation by 2020. And Nestle is ‘striving for zero’ environmental impact including emissions and deforestation. Yet, ambitious corporate targets are not translating into concrete results on the ground. Recent reports demonstrate that emissions and deforestation rates are still rising. In advance of 2020, at the Consumer Good Forum, brands admitted that reaching zero deforestation targets by the end of the decade is unlikely. The head of sustainability and procurement at Mars, Barry Parkin, is calling for strategies that go beyond certification that consider “new theories of change.”

Current efforts aren’t cutting it

Despite these ambitious efforts, the situation in Malaysia and Indonesia remains bleak and deforestation continues at alarming rates. In Borneo, only 43 percent of its original lowland rainforests remained by 2015. Lowland rainforests are optimal for palm oil production plants but are also home to many rare species. The consequences of deforestation extend beyond biodiversity loss to land degradation, droughts and forest fires, which interact to further increase emissions.

Even if companies successfully meet ambitious zero deforestation targets, halting deforestation may prevent further increases in emissions, but is unlikely to restore societal and environmental resilience to future shocks. If certification and deforestation targets are not the solution, then what is?

Lessons for business

How can business leaders approach palm oil production differently? Based on our latest article, we offer several suggestions:

  1. Focus on a different scale. Firm-centric approaches, such as mitigation and adaptation to the effects of climate change, may keep companies afloat in the meantime, but are unlikely to offer a long-term solution. Mitigation and adaptation aim to enhance firm performance and respond to the effects of the problem, but do little to consider the eco-systems on which the companies depend. Complex interactions in local societies and ecosystems go unnoticed and leave companies vulnerable to future disturbances. New approaches should consider how to develop healthy ecosystems that can continue to provide services for the local community and companies for decades to come.
  2. Look closer. When considering the intricacies of ecosystems, managers can monitor slow variables and feedbacks. Slow variables such as the amount of soil organic matter, insect populations or the level of rainfall can control how an ecosystem functions. Managers can identify the slow variables that govern how ecosystems behave and what levels of these variables puts the ecosystem at danger. Feedbacks offer managers warning signals that changes are occurring and allow to detect when ecosystems may be at risk. Managers can seek to tighten their recognition and action to feedback loops in order to minimize time delays and improve chances of avoiding ecosystem collapse.
  3. Manage ecosystem diversity and redundancy. Moderate levels of diversity and redundancy allow ecosystems to thrive. When a disturbance strikes, response diversity allows ecosystems to react in numerous ways. Redundancy provides substitute functions when elements that preform similar functions fail. When diversity and redundancy are compromised, ecosystems become brittle and vulnerable to even small disturbances. Firms can move beyond halting deforestation by actively building viable business models for land restoration. For example, effective cropping system diversification can lead to landscape restoration, increased economic viability and enhanced ecosystem resilience.

As companies such as Mars are calling for an overhaul in corporate efforts to tackle deforestation, we hope these lessons offer some inspiration.


Authors

Amanda Williams is a Senior Researcher at ETH Zurich in the Sustainability and Technology Group. She recently completed her PhD from Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. Currently, she is a part of Copenhagen Business School’s Governing Responsible Business (GRB) World Class Research Environment Fellowship program. With Steve Kennedy (Rotterdam School of Management) and Gail Whiteman (Lancaster University) she wrote this blog post and an article on cross-scale perspective for studies of organizational resilience (see below).

Citation:

Williams, A., Whiteman, G., & Kennedy, S. (2019). Cross-Scale Systemic Resilience: Implications for Organization Studies. Business & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/0007650319825870

By the same author

In November 2018, Amanda Williams has written an article about Corporate contributions to United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Find it right here.


Photo by Marufish on flickr.

Youth Perspective to the Sustainability Agenda

By Charlotte Piller, Luna Stæhr Andersen and Mikkel Mezer Morgensen.

If not now, when?

As the days get shorter and the year slowly draws to a close, it’s time to reflect on 2018. This last year, has seen endless headlines of shocking and fatal natural disasters around the world; From Tsunamis, hurricanes, rapidly spreading forest fires to severe drought and horrifying floods are only a few of the hardly bearable events that confronted us this year.

The last year has clearly shown us that numerous climate disasters with countless deaths, devastated countries and millions of climate refugees, demand strong action for the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals with its 169 targets – and if not now, when? And if not the young, then who?

If not us, then who?

Charlotte Piller (Copenhagen Business School).

We are representatives from Sustainability Influencers, an initiative which wants to inspire students to challenge the status quo – our current economic and societal system of linear economy and lack of effective resource management appropriate to the challenges we face. We are a movement initiated by Student and Innovation House and CBS PRME, consisting of various students from universities around Denmark. We aim to engage students across different educational backgrounds to increase commitment towards the SDGs. We are convinced that in order to achieve the UN SDGs, we need to mobilise, engage and empower fellow students to create change. Among other things, we organise for instance events such as a SDG festival, a sustainable Start Up challenge, a SDG bar through which we aspire to simultaneously create awareness, involve actively and empower our participants to inspire others.

We, the young generation, want to lead the way to a more sustainable future. Fortunately, UN SDGs provide us with a framework and a common language to push for sustainable development, foster needed innovation, social inclusion and green economic growth.


Luna Stæhr Andersen (Copenhagen University).

Why should it be us?

Growing up in an age of climate change, we question how the issue is currently dealt with and believe that one of our main tasks is to drive the green transition of our society; since this can never happen by the actions of just a few, a youth movement for sustainable development is crucial. Besides the fact that we are impatient and enthusiastic, the answer to how we can help transform our world, may be found in understanding the way we perceive, interpret and ultimately act today. There is a basic change going on with the young people of the world, which re-defines fundamental concepts of freedom, power and identity to community.

In contrast to the previous generation’s understanding of freedom as autonomy and exclusivity, we feel free when being part of a community with access to others in our network. Freedom therefore means inclusivity to us. We also have a different perception of power. While others believed in top-down power, we are convinced of the power of the many – of our community. Moreover, we are seeing a change in the way younger generations’ identity is intertwined with their community. As we begin to see climate change impacting our communities, and understanding that there’s nowhere to escape, we begin to realize that we’re part of a world community. Nothing is a zero-sum game, with just a few winners. And so, we are beginning to strongly empathize with our fellow humans around the planet.

Mikkel Beyer Morgensen (Aalborg University).

These changes in the understanding of freedom, power and identity that we are seeing is the basis upon we are acting and gives us hope that we can help support the needed transformation of our societies and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals not only for Denmark, but for everyone.

Seize the opportunity and be like Greta!

Every change starts with a vision and people who fearlessly fight for it by inspiring, mobilizing and engaging others to drive this change – in each of their communities. In these communities the share of influence by us, the millennials, who by definition are restless seeking of the meaning in life is becoming bigger. We are looking for the opportunities to do fulfilling and useful work and at the same time has a positive impact on the world. An opportunity to change life for the better.

Dear young generation, open your eyes and look around, you are surrounded by opportunities! Seize them professionally or personally, but in any case, as world citizens, drive inspiration.

We need more people like 15-year-old Greta Thunbergs, a strong-headed and exemplary girl, who skips school every Friday in order to draw attention to climate change in the streets of Stockholm, and fewer American billionaires researching new planets to populate instead of fighting for our planet – our home. Do not just recklessly give it up, but rather be like Greta: foster change and make for different headlines in the future.


Authors

  • Charlotte Piller – graduate student at CBS in Organizational Innovation and Entrepreneurship
  • Luna Stæhr Andersen – graduate student at KU in Agriculture Economics
  • Mikkel Beyer Mogensen – graduate student at Aalborg University in Applied Philosophy and Business Administration

We Need To Pay More Attention To Business Associations

By José Carlos Marques.

Despite their key role in both national and international affairs, business associations remain strangely absent from academic discourse, teaching and research on corporate responsibility and sustainability. We clearly need to pay more attention to business associations.

The prominence of business associations

Business associations play an important role in promoting corporate responsibility and sustainability. One need to look no further than the events of recent weeks for evidence of their prominence and influence. At the UN summit in Katowice, Poland, national institutional investor associations – representing some of the planet’s largest asset managers, pension funds, and insurers – sent a clear message to the world’s governments: we need to end fossil fuel subsidies and introduce substantial carbon taxes if we want to avoid both environmental and financial calamity [i].

Recent headlines also point to how business associations may work to inhibit progress. Just before the UN summit began welcoming delegates, a number of fossil fuel trade associations, led by the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, were busy lobbying the U.S. government. Their objective? Ensure that the U.S. Senate and Congress kill any hopes of reviving the federal tax credit for electric vehicles (EVs). That’s the same EV credit that helped Tesla grow its market share in the U.S. and is similar to programs that boosted EV usage in numerous other countries [ii]. While the credit program is a tiny fraction of what the fossil fuel industry receives in subsidies, it represents an obvious threat [iii].

Ensure that the U.S. Senate and Congress kill any hopes of reviving the federal tax credit for electric vehicles.

These are just some of the more visible examples of the considerable influence exercised by business associations. Countless other business associations lobby governments, develop self-regulatory programs and engage in a variety of activities that both advance and impede progress on a variety of key social and environmental issues including human rights, labor rights, climate change and inequality. Some have become highly prominent and visible in international circles – take the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the World Business Council on Sustainable Development (WBCSD).

What is a business association?

Business associations are membership organizations composed of, funded, and governed, by firms with shared interests. They represent and defend the interests of their organizational members to outside parties and frequently offer services to their membership base (Schmitter & Streeck, 1999; Lanzalaco, 2008; Barnett, 2013). Associative action is distinct from other forms of business collective action such as alliances, business groups, networks and multi-stakeholder initiatives. It is also one of the most common forms of inter-organizational business activity. There are thousands in the U.S. alone. Every industry and sub-industry has one or several associations and most companies are members of one or several associations – a trade or industry association, a chamber of commerce, an employers’ association, a sustainability coalition, a lobby group, an economic club, etc.

The peril and promise of business associations

As the examples in the introduction illustrate, collective action via business associations can serve multiple ends. In some cases, they operate as special interest groups and rent-seekers whose narrow, self-serving objectives benefit only the industries or coalitions they represent… or even a small subset of member firms within the association. As such, business associations may stall or undermine sustainability efforts and capture regulators and legislators. In these cases, they are detrimental to society and must be countered and contained by markets, governments and social movements (“peril”).

In other cases, their interests are aligned with broader social goals, and as such, they serve as powerful, well-resourced advocates for mobilization and pro-social change. Under certain conditions, business associations may also exert normative pressure upon its membership, mediate member interests, and operate as effective self-regulatory institutions, resulting in beneficial social outcomes (“promise”).

The need for more research

The idea that companies who compete in the economic sphere can also collaborate to address social and environmental concerns has taken hold in both academic and practitioner circles. However, scholarship from various disciplines suggests that achieving the institutional conditions conducive to beneficial social outcomes is difficult and that more research on business associations, and the broader topic of collaboration amongst competitors, is required. Depending on the theoretical grounding and audience, the phenomenon is being addressed under a variety of labels: trade associations, green clubs, meta-organizations, pre-collaborative collaboration, coopetition and self-regulation. Clearly, there is a strong need and there are growing opportunities to address the prominence, peril and promise of business associations.


[i] Carrington, D. (2018, Dec 10). Tackle climate or face financial crash, say world’s biggest investors: UN summit urged to end all coal burning and introduce substantial taxes on emissions. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/dec/10/tackle-climate-or-face-financial-crash-say-worlds-biggest-investors?CMP=share_btn_tw

[ii] Lambert, F. (2018, Nov20). Oil companies officially ask Republicans to kill effort to extend electric vehicle tax credit. electrek. Retrieved from https://electrek.co/2018/11/20/oil-companies-republicans-kill-electric-vehicle-tax-credit/

[iii] Nuccitelli, D. (2018, Jul 30). America spends over $20bn per year on fossil fuel subsidies. Abolish them. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/jul/30/america-spends-over-20bn-per-year-on-fossil-fuel-subsidies-abolish-them


The Author

José Carlos Marques is Assistant Professor, Strategy, Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability, at the Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa, and Visiting Research Fellow (Governing Responsible Business) at the Copenhagen Business School. His research program, at the intersection of strategic management, sustainability and transnational governance, examines the drivers and organizational strategies of inter-organizational coalitions that address social and environmental challenges – these include business associations, multi-stakeholder initiatives and business-state interactions. His work has been published in MIT Sloan Management Review, Organization Studies, Journal of Business Ethics and Journal of World Business.
contact: jc.marques@telfer.uottawa.ca
twitter: @jcmarqz

Bibliography

  • Aldrich, H. E. (2017). Trade Associations Matter as Units of Selection, as Actors Within Comparative and Historical Institutional Frameworks, and as Potential Impediments to Societal Wide Collective Action. Journal of Management Inquiry, 27(1), pp.21-25.
  • Barnett, M. L. (2013). One Voice, But Whose Voice? Exploring What Drives Trade Association Activity. Business & Society, 52(2), 213-244.
  • Buchanan, S. and Marques, J.C. 2017. How Home Country Industry Associations Influence MNE International CSR Practices: Evidence from the Canadian Mining Industry. Journal of World Business, 53(1): 63-74.
  • DiVito, L., & Sharma, G. (2016). Collaborating with Competitors to Advance Sustainability: A Guide for Managers. Network for Business Sustainability (NBS). London, ON. Retrieved from https://nbs.net/p/guide-collaborating-with-competitors-to-advance-sustai-a95dc170-b857-49f4-82ba-42033c09b6cc
  • Grayson, D., & Nelson, J. (2013). Corporate responsibility coalitions: The past, present, and future of alliances for sustainable capitalism. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press.
  • Lanzalaco, L. (2008). Business Interest Associations. In G. G. Jones & J. Zeitlin (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Business History (pp. 293-318). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Marques, J. C. (2017). Industry Business Associations: Self-Interested or Socially Conscious? Journal of Business Ethics, 143(4), 733-751.
  • Nidumolu, R., Ellison, J., Whalen, J., & Billman, E. (2014, April). The Collaboration Imperative. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2014/04/the-collaboration-imperative-2
  • Potoski, M., & Prakash, A. (Eds.). (2009). Voluntary Programs: A Club Theory Perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Rajwani, T., Lawton, T., & Phillips, N. (2015). The “Voice of Industry”: Why Management Researchers Should Pay More Attention to Trade Associations. Strategic Organization, 13(3), pp.224-232.
  • Schmitter, P. C., & Streeck, W. (1999). The Organization of Business Interests: Studying the Associative Action of Business in Advanced Industrial Societies – MPIfG Discussion Paper 99/1. Cologne, Germany: Max-Planck-Institut.

Photo by Sebastian Bednarek on Unsplash.

The CBS Sustainability (re-) Launch

This is blog post one of two throwbacks providing key insights from the speakers.


By Oliver Laier.

On Monday, December 3rd, a new centre was officially launched at Copenhagen Business School’s Management, Society & Communications department (MSC), located in Dalgas Have.

A crowded lobby in Dalgas Have, when the participants got their name tags. With fruit and coffee, the guests had a chance to chat and mingle, before the event began.

CBS Sustainability

New? Not quite. From 2002-2018, there was cbsCSR, a centre for Corporate Social Responsibility; and for five years starting 2011, the Business in Society (BiS) Sustainability Platform. Insofar the launch was more the rebirth of the phoenix than something completely new. The “masses of success” from the two mentioned formats are now continued and expanded in a new suit that acknowledges the plethora of themes and issues under Sustainability, which have long gone beyond merely corporate aspects.

Steen Vallentin, giving the first speech at the CBS Sustainability Launch.

Research and teaching will of course remain the core features of the centre. But CBS Sustainability is also a  platform. In this function, it is going to focus on outreach and inreach also, as Steen Vallentin (lecturer and director of the centre, see photo) explained in his opening talk to the event.

CBS Sustainabilitiy’s focus areas:

  • Corporate social responsibility
  • Government and governance of responsible business
  • Behavioural public policy
  • Sustainable consumption
  • Sustainable development
  • Social innovation/ entrepreneurship
  • Corporate communication
  • Business and human rights

The new centre is precisely about research beyond corporate social responsibility, and rather about working with a broader sustainability agenda. It is about defining both solutions and problems, and to find critical and constructive approaches. CBS Sustainability will be focal point for resources at CBS and outside, but at the same time platform for dialogue, connection and coordination in the diversified field which now ranges from governance across behavioural science to human rights.

Being sustainable, or becoming less unsustainable?


Henrik Schramm Rasmussen from Danish Industy (aka. Dansk Industri or simply: DI) joined as a speaker from the business world. Representing DI, he had an unmistakable notion of the sustainability theme and the global goals in particular: the UN SDGs as business driver. They bare the capacity to offer a growth strategy including market opportunities, drive innovation and are therefore linked to economic growth.

Henrik Schramm Rasmussen from Danish Industry (DI).

The global development goals are per definition common, since we share the planet; and although they are not exactly written in business lingo, they are clearly formulated, underpinned by specific targets and come with a network offering advice and inspiration.

Companies should engage for several reasons Henrik claims: firms can harvest new market opportunities, attract workforce, brand and license themselves to operate in sustainable business. Needless to say, this is no walk in the park, neither for small, nor for large or established companies. DI has therefore launched a page (in Danish), introducing the goals to firms and explaining how they can strengthen a company by providing guidance and exemplary cases. With member companies covering the most diverse fields, from architecture, over production, to consumer goods to event management (yes, I refer to Roskilde Festival!), there is already a rich collection of inspiring cases.

There is a shift going on among the businesses: from rather passive, preventive and risk reducing compliance, to active and courageous creation of business opportunities and development. The new way involves customers and partners, R&D, sales and communication, but of course also risk. However, ambitious goals can also foster innovation and competitive power – and this is what to aim for.

Henrik’s key take-aways:

  • SDGs are about innovation and new business models.
  • Sustainability must be owned by top leadership, not compliance managers!
  • It’s about innovation, sale and a rethinking of companies’ purpose.
  • Sustainability starts with a bold mission statement about the company’s contribution to a sustainable world.

Current issues in Business and Human Rights: report from the 2018 Annual Forum in Geneva

By Karin Buhmann.

‘Building on what works’ was the key topic for the annual Forum on Business and Human Rights that took place in Geneva on 26. to 28. November. With more than 2000 participants, the Forum has become the world’s largest gathering of practitioners, academics, civil society, governments and just about anyone else with an interest in the field of business and human rights. The sessions were streamed online, making the Forum accessible also for those not able to attend in person in Geneva.

Now in its seventh year, the Forum is organized by the United Nations (UN) as a multi-stakeholder event to take stock of and advance the implementation of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), and to discuss other issues related to this fast-evolving field. The UNGPs build on three ‘pillars’:

  1. The state duty to protect human rights against infringements caused by companies;
  2. the corporate responsibility to respect human rights; and
  3. enhanced access to remedy for victims of business-related human rights infringements.

Each year’s Forum has a special topic, and the Forum is organized to seek to involve relevant stakeholders in bringing relevant issues, dilemmas, challenges and opportunities to the foreground. It is intended to help building knowledge of how companies, governments, civil society and others can help advance business respect for human rights.

Prior to the 2018 topic, for example, the 2017 Forum addressed the issue of ‘access to remedy’, and previous Forums have addressed, for example, leadership and leverage in regard to human rights in the global economy. Some topics are recurrent at the Forums, such as the role of institutional investors, and the implementation and effectiveness of human rights due diligence.

’What works’ and how human rights impact on the economies of companies

In line with the ‘What works’ topic, this year’s Forum featured a special ’snapshot’ track. Here, a large number of individual companies and managers took turns to share their experience on their work to advance the corporate respect for human rights in their own organisations, in their value chains, and with stakeholders. Other tracks featured, for example, the connection between climate change and business responsibilities for human rights; and debates on the human rights implications of the tech-industry, ICT and artificial intelligence. Reflecting other debates during the past year, human rights issues highlighted in the ICT and AI contexts included risks to privacy, the freedoms of communication and information, free and fair elections, and jobs. Increasing attention is also paid to human rights and sports, for example in regard to mega-sporting events and related construction projects, such as those for the 2022 FIFA football world cup in Qatar.

Not surprising, from an academic perspective one might sometimes wish for a broader discussion that could engage more with the strategies adopted and help challenge managers to further deepen their efforts to respect human rights. However, the ‘snapshot’ presentations along with the many other sessions jointly did confirm the extensive and important implications of human rights for many core business activities and areas: the Forum’s tracks and debates confirmed that human rights issues are increasingly significant in relation to business communication, due diligence and risk management, human resources and labour, supply chain management, finance, public procurement, non-financial reporting and beyond.

For example, the expansion on mandatory non-financial reporting in the EU and elsewhere that has taken place in recent years is strongly connected to and related to the development of the risk-based due diligence approach that is at the core of the UNGP. However, there is a persistent risk that regulators’ emphasis on formal disclosure after an activity takes place, results in too limited focus on preventing harm before or during an activity.

Academic networking

Aiming to benefit from the presence of a large number of individuals from regions around the world, several academic events take place at the Forum or, particularly, back-to-back with it. Advancing teaching and research on business and human rights was the topic of a half-day meeting at the University of Geneva, featuring a multi-disciplinary group of scholars and universities from many countries.

Organised by the CBS-hosted BHRights Intiative for Interdisciplinary Research and Teaching on Business and Human Rights (BHRights), a global research workshop gathered 25 scholars presenting their research on various topics of business and human rights. The presentations covered a range of very diverse topics, such as for example what national institutional factors condition business respect or dis-respect for human rights, corporate reporting on business and human rights in various countries, dilemmas around socially responsible green transitions, the rights of nomadic Sami reindeer herders, and the prospective international treaty on business and human rights.

UN Forum 2018 – Roundtable: Academic Networks in Conversation with Stakeholders (KB).

For the first time, the Forum organisers decided to include a specific session for various academic networks on business and human rights. Jointly organized by some of these networks, the session prioritized interaction with stakeholders from business, civil society and other organisations to stimulate mutual collaboration and understanding of the connections between theory and practice of business and human rights.

The 2019 Forum is currently scheduled to take place in late November 2019. Registration is expected to open in mid-2019.

The Author

Karin Buhmann is professor at Copenhagen Business School where she is charged with special responsibilities in business and human rights. Appointed by the Danish Minister of Commerce upon nomination by Danish Civil Society, she is also a member of the Danish National Contact Point to the OECD set up under the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises. Professor Buhmann was a member of the Danish delegation to the 2018 UN Forum.

Why Corporate Sustainability is Bullshit (And Why This is a Good Thing)

By Andreas Rasche.

Corporate sustainability is full of statements, terms, and concepts that are empty, unclarifiable and vague. Instead of rejecting such vagueness altogether, we should embrace it. Bullshit can be productive.

Consider the following statement:

“The concept of shared value can be defined as policies and operating practices that enhance the competitiveness of a company while simultaneously advancing the economic and social conditions in the communities in which it operates. Shared value creation focuses on identifying and expanding the connections between societal and economic progress.”

The sentence is taken from Michael Porter’s and Mark Kramer’s well-known article Creating Shared Value (2011, p. 66).

Now, consider this statement:

“The concept of strategic CSR can be defined as policies and operating practices that enhance the competitiveness of a company while simultaneously advancing the economic and social conditions in the communities in which it operates. Strategic CSR focuses on identifying and expanding the connections between societal and economic progress.”

You are right, I replaced “shared value” with “strategic CSR”. What is interesting is that both statements sound equally plausible. I consider such statements to reflect bullshit, and I am using the term not in a disrespectful sense. I refer to bullshit, because I think we need to be precise.

What is Bullshit?

In 1986, Princeton Professor Harry Frankfurt published a little essay titled On Bullshit in the Raritan Review, which was later published as a book (2005). Frankfurt’s argument was this: While the liar is aware of the truth, but seeks to avoid it, the bullshitter does not care much about the truth. As Frankfurt writes:

“It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth – this indifference to how things really are – that I regard as the essence of bullshit.”

(2005, p. 33)

The bullshitter deceives others about his enterprise. He does not want others to know that he is not interested in the truth. And, of course, we are all thinking about current US President Donald Trump here. He not only is a notorious liar (The Washington Post has counted more than 5.000 false or misleading statements so far), but also a skilled bullshitter.

“Unclarifiable Unclarity

Frankfurt defines bullshit with regard to the bullshitter. This is helpful, but it may also be problematic for a variety of reasons (e.g. an assumed intentionality). Others have, therefore, expanded this debate. Cohen (2012), for instance, looks at the bullshit itself rather than the bullshitter. He sees bullshit as statements that are characterized by an “unclarifiable unclarity” (p. 105) – i.e. statements that are vague, airy, and hard to render unobscure. He suggests that when it is possible that key terms within a statement can be exchanged without altering its plausibility, at least a sufficient condition for the existence of bullshit is met.

Corporate Sustainability as Bullshit

Corporate sustainability (and related discourses such as CSR, ESG etc.) are full of bullshit. Actually, the very fact that it is still unclear whether relevant practices are labelled “CSR” or “sustainability” (and that both labels are often used interchangeably), shows that there is a lot of unclarifiable unclarity.

Within corporate sustainability there are at least two sources of bullshit.

First, academics and management gurus produce a lot of it. Recently, André Spicer has offered a sharp and entertaining analysis of such kind of bullshit in his book Business Bullshit (though mostly without reference to corporate sustainability). The mere fact that concepts like “shared value” and “strategic CSR” are exchangeable without any loss of plausibility shows that the discourse is “full of it” (on the lack of distinction between CSV and strategic CSR see also Andrew Crane and colleagues 2014, p. 134). Also, a lot of emphasis has been placed on “transforming business models” in discussions around corporate sustainability. But, the very term “business model” faces a certain emptiness and means different things to different people. I have seen many different interpretations of what a “business model” could be or should be. These are just two examples, but the list is long… just think about “materiality” or “transformative leadership”.

Second, corporations are also in the business of bullshit production. Especially the communication of sustainability aspirations is often based on bullshit. Consider Carlsberg’s recent Towards Zero campaign. One pillar of the campaign is to reduce irresponsible drinking to ZERO. Of course, this is not only an ambitious goal, but a nearly impossible one (also because the company’s control over peoples’ level of responsible drinking is limited). Understood in this way, this broad claim is bullshit in the Cohenian sense – there is unclarifiable unclarity involved. But, most people know that the statement should not be taken at face value; it is supposed to raise awareness and signal a high level of ambition. And this is exactly what can make corporate sustainability as bullshit a productive (and maybe even inevitable) enterprise.

Why We Need Bullshit

Bullshit is a two-edged sword. It certainly comes with a number of problems (and Spicer’s book, which I mentioned above, discusses some of these complications). Also, too much of it, can be dangerous, because it may obscure important pillars of meaning construction.

But, corporate sustainability as bullshit can also be productive. Ambitious statements, like the one by Carlsberg above, have a certain necessary emptiness. The resulting ambiguity can motivate employees and hence change corporate practices, especially as the statement was publicly communicated, which, again, increases the likelihood that others will hold the company accountable (on this see also Christensen et al.’s discussion of Aspirational Talk, 2013). In other words, corporate sustainability as bullshit may spur self-fulfilling prophecies.

“Bullshit sells.”

The same can be said about concepts like “Creating Shared Value” (CSV) or “Strategic CSR”. Their meaning is vague and it is certainly difficult to make them less obscure. Bullshit is built into these concepts, and usually this is a deliberate choice of those people who create and diffuse them. Considering the enormous success of concepts like CSV, we could even say: Bullshit sells! Why? Because the ambiguity that surrounds the concept makes it attractive to a large audience. Firms can bend the concept in ways that fit their specific needs.

So, what is the bottom line? I would say it like this: Let us be clear about when corporate sustainability is moving towards bullshit. Let us also understand the productive nature of such bullshit. But, let us also be aware that “too much of it” can be a major problem for the future of sustainable business practices, both in theory and in practice.


Author

Andreas Rasche is Professor of Business in Society at Copenhagen Business School and Director of CBS’s World-Class Research Environment “Governing Responsible Business”. He is Visiting Professor at the Stockholm School of Economics. Andreas can be reached at: ar.msc@cbs.dk and @RascheAndreas. More at his personal homepage.

References

  • Christensen, L. T., Morsing, M., & Thyssen, O. (2013). CSR as aspirational talk. Organization, 20(3), 372–393.
  • Cohen, G. A. (2012). Complete Bullshit. In M. Otuska (Ed.), Finding Oneself in the Other (pp. 94–114). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
  • Crane, A., Palazzo, G., Spence, L. J., & Matten, D. (2014). Contesting the Value of “Creating Shared Value”. California Management Review, 56(2), 130–153.
  • Frankfurt, H. (2005). On Bullshit. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
  • Porter, M. E., & Kramer, M. R. (2011). Creating Shared Value. Harvard Business Review, 89(1/2), 62–77.

Photo by Bryan Minear on Unsplash.

The Academic Smarts in the Smart City

By Lara Anne Hale.

Smart Cities 101

Last week I had the pleasure of being one of eight students to join the University of Aalborg course “Smart Cities – Technologies and Institutions” led by Professor Anders Henten and Associate Professor Reza Tadayoni. I applied for this course in May 2018, and then promptly forgot about it again. I can’t even find any remnants of a confirmation in my mailbox; and I’m only able to figure out when I had actually applied because of a Facebook chat that took place around it.

Yet, when the acceptance pinged into the mail lineup a few weeks ago, I made sure to cancel all previous obligations to open up the time for this three-day course. This is because – although it may not be obvious – there is a shortage of educational opportunities concerning what a smart city is, who is involved, how they are working to put the pieces together, when we can realistically transition, and why this even makes sense to pursue.

There are a number of reasons for this, not least of all because most of the projects bringing forth the Internet of Things (IoT) that smart cities are founded on, are detailed somewhere between (occasionally accessible) engineering papers, such as [1], and the (overly simplified) ‘government-slash-consultancy’ reports, such as [2] and [3]. Which, while comforting to know governments are investing in this kind of research, also create discomfort over who might have the language and knowledge with which to discuss, or even influence, smart cities development.

This brings me to one of the other major reasons for the lack of academic representation: smart cities involve such a conglomeration of disciplines, skills, languages, and theories that it would seem almost impossible to embody its understandings in one scholar. And it could be seen in our group: the teachers were from political economics and engineering; and the students represented organizational studies (myself), civil engineering, architecture, IT, anthropology, and more. It reminded me of a course I took in my bachelor studies “Bioethics of the 21st Century”, requiring both a Professor of Microbiology and a Professor of Philosophy and constituted of seemingly disparate discourses merging in the reality of our bioethics challenges.

From Science Fiction to Society

At that time, anyone who believed that bioethics was unnecessary needed only to look at the mass abuse of antibiotics or the explorations into stem-cell research. And anyone who now believes that the smart city is a feature of the future had better take a look around at the present. Just consider the kind of political affiliation conclusions (otherwise known as “profiling”) that can be extrapolated from Twitter data [4]. Even WIRED Magazine recently released an article detailing how governments are bringing together the sophistication of interconnectivity and the maturation of artificial intelligence (AI). This, paired with the overly optimistic intentions for social media and the willful blindness of the West’s superpowers, could result in a new-found political war over the control of not just data, but also the city- (even nation- or internation-) wide imposition of government, industrial, and freedom controls [5]. As they call it, the “AI Cold War”.

More on the day-to-day practical side of things, the devices primed to share data to the bigger cloud for smart city processing start making themselves cozy on our shelves, sockets, and even wrists. Postscapes, an organization specializing in organizational efficiency and waste reduction through IoT and machine-learning technologies, identifies the top 2018 IoT devices as centering around convenience (e.g. smart locks, smart home hubs) and energy savings (e.g. smart thermostats, smart lights) [6]. Embedded in the banality of these literal black boxes are the governance and democratic implications set forth in the aforementioned articles; but it is the nature of technology to develop towards ease-of-use, and eventually, invisibility. Yet, where there is change, there is also opportunity.

Organizational Smarts

Certainly, building organizations are keenly aware that digitization and smart buildings are no longer a negligible aspect of the business. Rather, there is the question of how they should engage with these changes, and most importantly, how this novel connection with end-users (through the little black boxes) might change (or – more cautiously – improve) the way they do business.
One of the most prominent ways such a consideration is voiced is in the terminology of nudging, referring to a “relatively subtle policy shift that encourages people to make decisions that are in their broad self-interest” [7]; the catch being that in a smart city, it is not the policy that does the encouraging, but the technology, be it technological infrastructure, application design, or signals from devices.

For example, simply communicating electricity consumption compared to one’s neighbours changes people’s use of electricity (for better, or for worse) [8]. And so, building organizations have embarked upon a journey to apply understandings of how people behave, how smart buildings can connect with behaviour, and how it makes good business sense to digitize buildings; but they cannot do it alone. Half of the organizational smarts are about the business ecosystems and partnerships being formed in order to bring smart spaces to reality.

And despite having my hands full examining this scale of organizational work, it’s been enlightening to go from the organizational perspective on the building level (as I research about smart buildings and healthy indoor climate) to the city level. Previously I would have thought of this as being more relevant for those working with mobility or utilities; but after this course I better understand that the playing field for intention, business, and power in the communication technologies and protocols that enable smart cities (and also smart buildings) is much broader and nuanced than I had previously understood. Just learning about the communication technology forms was enough to blow this little biologist-environmentalist-organizational-sociologist’s mind. Even knowing their names and relative differences [9], I’m still not sure how this will meet expectations of a better world.

The 5Gs and 5Ds of Smart

One thing is for sure, standards matter, and standards will be made. Before this course, I had never even heard of 5G, and yet the European Commission identifies it as “the most critical building block of our digital society in the next decade” [10]. The Commission has been polishing the EU standards for 5G since 2016 [11] and has earmarked €700 million in funding, with initial rollouts planned for 2018 and followed by another, broader wave in 2020.

The concept of 5G extends well beyond an acceleration of mobile service into a virtual “stacking” of data incoming from the other communication technology forms (such as WiFi and LPWAN) in order to create a synergetic cloud-network, from which it would (hypothetically) be possible to analyze and improve upon the city system (otherwise known as us, our lives, and our environment). From what I understand, the most part of such an analysis is planned to be done by AI.

Okay, so the little black boxes track and communicate our data over these various communication systems, which are compiled into the 5G cloud, where AI interprets the Big Data into meaningful action, executed again, by the little black boxes. No wonder experts are writing articles about an eminent AI Cold War. Luckily “privacy” is not the last word in the sentence. Rather, researchers are working hard to outline what types of privacy can be protected in the various angles of the smart city. Already in 2013, Martínez-Ballesté et al. identified the 5D (five dimensions) of smart city privacy as: identity privacy, query privacy, location privacy, footprint privacy, and owner privacy [12].


The 5 dimensions of smart city privacy:

identity, query, location, footprint and owner privacy.

Martínez-Ballesté et al.

These authors also point to the necessity for further security efforts within digital infrastructures and the transportation of data; a finger which has trouble settling its point due to the vast number of parties involved in bringing smart cities to life. Which one of these organizations is responsible for guaranteeing security? And is this a public or a private organizational responsibility?

Academic Smarts

No, those were not rhetorical questions. They were academic ones. And in discussing the 5G and the 5D, I’m reminded of another 5D. During the 6th Active House Symposium workshop “Digital Design Meets Digital Use: Active House principles in BIM and smart buildings” that I co-organized with PhD fellow Federica Brunone, Federica highlighted that Building Information Modeling (BIM) technology enables planning for the built environment beyond the Height, Width, and Depth; that the 5D adds Time and Sustainability. I suppose that the latter of these five, Sustainability, is the one that we are still struggling to incorporate into the standardized practices of life.


Building Information Modeling technology enables planning for another 5D:

Height, Width, Depth, Time and Sustainability.


Although I’ve been told during my research that Sustainability was the past, and Smart is the future, I have to question if that conclusion is not a dismissal driven by the challenges that Sustainability poses to Smart. How can we be smart without being sustainable? And better yet, if we can study, research, teach, practice, policy-make, and live in a sustainable way, won’t that pave the way for smart cities? Those were not academic questions. I think you know the answer.

References

  1. Maha Saadeh, Azzam Sleit, Khair Eddin Sabri, and Wesam Almobaideen. (2018). Hierarchical architecture and protocol for mobile object authentication in the context of IoT smart cities, Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 121: 1-19.
  2. Danish Ministry of Housing, Urban and Rural Affairs. (2015). Tomorrow’s Cities are Digital and Human – Smart City methods: from ideas to action. Anders Nørskov, Kristoffer Nilaus Olsen, Lukas Beraki, and CEDI (Eds.). The Ministry of Housing, Urban and Rural Affairs, Denmark 2015. ISBN: 978-87-7134-136-2. Accessed 18 November 2018 from: https://erhvervsstyrelsen.dk/sites/default/files/smart_city_2015_english_0.pdf
  3. Doody, L., Walt, N., Dimireva, I., and Nørskov, A. (2016). Growing Smart Cities in Denmark: Digital Technology for Urban Improvement and National Prosperity. Arup and CEDI, Denmark 2016. Accessed 18 November 2018 from: http://um.dk/da/nyheder-fra-udenrigsministeriet/newsdisplaypage/~/media/UM/Markedsinformation%20Publications/Growing_Smart_Cities_in_Denmark.pdf
  4. Mathias, C., Storey, S., and Hooper, A. (2016). We the Tweeple. Huffington Post, 19 October 2016. Accessed 18 November 2018 from: http://data.huffingtonpost.com/2016/we-the-tweeple
  5. Thompson, N. and Bremmer, I. (2018). The AI Cold War that Threatens Us All. WIRED Magazine, 23 October 2018. Accessed 18 November 2018 from: https://www.wired.com/story/ai-cold-war-china-could-doom-us-all/
  6. Postscapes. (2018). IoT Devices and Products. Retrieved 18 November 2018 from: https://www.postscapes.com/internet-of-things-award/winners/
  7. Chu, B. (2017). What is ‘nudge theory’ and why should we care? Explaining Richard Thaler’s Nobel economics prize-winning concept: How subtle policy shifts can be in everyone’s best interest. Independent, 9 October 2017. Accessed 18 November 2018 from: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/nudge-theory-richard-thaler-meaning-explanation-what-is-it-nobel-economics-prize-winner-2017-a7990461.html
  8. Holmes, B. (2018). Nudging grows up (and now has a government job). Knowable Magazine, 1 February 2018. Accessed 18 November 2018 from: https://www.knowablemagazine.org/article/society/2018/nudging-grows-and-now-has-government-job
  9. Ledger, D. (2016). Making sense of the myriad of IoT standards and protocols. Medium Corportation, 10 June 2016. Accessed 18 November 2018 from: https://medium.com/@dledge/making-sense-of-the-myriad-of-iot-standards-and-protocols-88dc4792ba1f
  10. The European Commission. (2018). Digital Single Market: Towards 5G. Accessed 18 November 2018 from: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/towards-5g
  11. The European Commission. (2018). Digital Single Market: Research and Standards. Accessed 18 November 2018 from: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/research-standards
  12. Martínez-Ballesté, A., Pérez-Martínez, P.A., and Solanas, A. (2013). The Pursuit of Citizens’ Privacy: A Privacy-Aware Smart City Is Possible. IEEE Communications Magazine, June 2013. Accessed 18 November 2018 from: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6525606/

Author

Lara Anne Hale is an industrial postdoc fellow with VELUX and Copenhagen Business School’s Governing Responsible Business World Class Research Environment. The 3-year project is part of Realdania’s Smart Buildings & Cities cluster within BLOXHUB’s Science Forum. It builds upon her PhD work on experimental standards for sustainable building to look at the business model innovation process in organizations’ adaptation to the smart building business. Follow her on Twitter.


Photo by Kristian Egelund on Unsplash.

Fake news and what it means for discussions about CSR-related issues

By Daniel Lundgaard.

There is a saying on online forums that

“About 78% of all statistics shared online are made up to prove a point – including this one.”

This has become particularly relevant lately, where we have seen many discussions about fake news. And while it is often discussed in relation to politics, in particular during political elections, there has been little attention on the impact of fake news in discussions about CSR-related issues. As such, this blog elaborates on the rise of fake news and explores how fake news might have grave implications for CSR-discussions.

What is “fake news”?

The increasing relevance of fake news can, in part, be attributed to the rise of a networked society. Here, mass communication technologies and the rise of the post-truthera has created new circumstances where

“objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”

(Oxford Dictionaries.)

Fake news is often compared to disinformation, which is described as

“intentional falsehoods spread as news stories or simulated documentary formats to advance political goals.”

(Bennett & Livingston, 2018)

This, along with an increased distrust in news outlets ability to disseminate objective information, has caused more and more people to turn to social media as their primary source of information. This is especially seen with the younger generation, as they grow up in a world defined by more racial, ethnic and political diversity than ever, and consequently distrust news outlets ability to disseminate information from a single “objective” point of view (Marchi, 2012).

As a result, the younger generation often prefer information that they know to be subjective, e.g. from opinionated talk shows or shared by friends. This has created a more polarized news landscape, where people often seek out information from social media contexts and news outlets that confirm their views, which means that it has become possible to live a life where you can almost completely avoid serendipitous encounters with conflicting views that forces you to rethink your opinion.

What are the implications for CSR-related discussions?

This development towards a preference for information confirming current beliefs combined with a fundamental distrust in objective information is particularly relevant for discussions about CSR-related issues. The main issue is that a defining part of disinformation, is that it is described as intentional, which suggests a serious concern, seeing how social media has amplified the impact of intentionally misleading statements. Consequently, we have seen that some organizations, in an attempt to pursue economic and sometimes illegitimate goals, exploit this distrust in information and diminished impact of objective facts to polarize opinions and derail discussions about important issues such as climate change.

As a result, the increased awareness of disinformation has created a context where companies, instead of adopting more socially responsible practices, attempt to question the legitimacy of the research and the groups trying to prove the ramifications of neglecting these issues e.g. that climate change is a real and serious issue. This is especially seen with the rise of astroturfing organizations – a term derived from ‘AstroTurf’, a brand of a synthetic grass often used on football fields – which describes the practice of masking the sponsors of a message to make it appear as something that originates and is supported by grassroots participants. The goal with astroturfing is to ensure that a message or an idea (e.g. fake news) appear as something that emerges through legitimate processes, often with the intent to cause confusion and distrust in legitimate information. Companies thereby attempt to derail CSR discussions, as seen for example when ExxonMobil allegedly created and funded a think tank to appear independent and legitimate, but with the sole purpose of challenging the consensus around climate change as a serious issue and a result of human action.

What are the implications – and what can be done?

This does however present us with a bit a paradox, as increasing awareness about the use of disinformation and shedding light on the existence of astroturfing organizations is not only a positive thing. The challenge is that while questioning the legitimacy of research or news shared by friends is positive, increased awareness about the existence of astroturfing organizations might spark a distrust in the legitimacy of “real” grassroots movements.

Increased awareness thus not only affects the illegitimate ones, but potentially also undermines and questions all forms of grassroots movements, thereby eroding the very foundation that some of the movements fighting for CSR are built on. Consequently, the key is balance. You need to be critical about what you read online, but the increased awareness about fake news should not discourage you from pursuing collaborative goals, after all

“The main idea underlying collaborative projects is that the joint effort of many actors leads to a better outcome than any actor could achieve individually”

(Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010)

Therefore we need to be aware of the destructive power of disinformation, but also understand that not all ideas and opinions are the product of hidden political agendas – some are and it is crucial to be able to identify those – but some are still trying to make the world a better and more sustainable place.

Literature

  • Bennett, W. L., & Livingston, S. (2018). The disinformation order: Disruptive communication and the decline of democratic institutions. European Journal of Communication, 33(2), 122–139.
  • Kaplan, A. M., & Haenlein, M. (2010). Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media. Business Horizons, 53(1), 59–68.
  • Marchi, R. (2012). With Facebook, blogs, and fake news, teens reject journalistic “objectivity.” Journal of Communication Inquiry, 36(3), 246–262.

Author

Daniel Lundgaard is a PhD Fellow embedded in the Governing Responsible Business research environment and part of CBS Sustainability. His research is mainly focused on the impact of the digital transformation, in particular, the influential dynamics that shape the communicative constitution of public opinion as citizens, politicians, NGOs and corporations engage in a highly fluid negotiation of meaning between millions of actors. Daniel is currently focusing on the influential dynamics shaping this communicative constitution within the field of sustainability and responsible business, in particular, how interactions on social media shape the sustainability agenda and thereby the production of governance for responsible business.


Photo by Elijah O’Donnell on Unsplash

Green – a special shade of innovation.

By Valentina De Marchi.

How can firms change for sustainability?

As political and societal pressures increase, and more and growing evidence supports a business case for sustainability, an increasing share of firms is considering how to change their activities to reduce environmental impacts. However, going green does not entail the innovation process firms are used to.

Changing for green

The way firms might reduce their environmental footprint is by changing their products and/or the activities needed to realize them, that is, to innovate. Such innovation might regard the type of inputs used.

For example, in the context of apparel, substituting traditional cotton or synthetic fibers with new ones like bamboo and eucalyptus, that require less water and pesticides to be produced. Or the features of the product – designed for easy disassembly and recycleability. Also, they might regard the process – i.e. investing in machines and process layout that might allow reusing waste from their own activities within the production cycle, or more efficient use of resources. Or, more often, both of them, as a holistic approach to the reduction of impacts on environment might require a profound transformation of several aspect of the firm’s production activities at once [1].

A peculiar shade of innovation

Innovation is not a novel aspect for firms – the intensification of international competition has made it the key mantra for companies in most industries in the recent years. But innovating for environmental sustainability entails peculiar challenges [2, 5].
Environmental innovations are, on average, more complex than other (non-green) innovations.

  • They are characterized by a higher degree of novelty – still representing a technological frontier for which many firms are still inexperienced. They often require resources and skills distant from the traditional knowledge base of the industry.
  • They are associated by a higher degree of uncertainty and risks – as there are not yet widely accepted standards, either in terms of specific technological solutions or measures for evaluating the environmental performance of products and processes.
  • They require a systemic approach, as the possibility of a firm to realize a green product is strictly depending on the green performance of the suppliers of raw materials of components or on the clients that are going to use it.
  • Finally, they entail a credence character, as the environmental feature of a product or process, i.e. being realized via a low polluting process, is often a hidden attribute that cannot be disentangled even after the purchase.

Planning for green innovation

Considering for such special character of environmental or green innovations, effectively developing them requires a peculiar process, too. In particular, empirical studies converge in suggesting that a key aspect regards the importance to rely on knowledge and competences coming from external partners.

In order to introduce new products or processes that reduce emissions and wasteful use of resources, firms need to cooperate with external partners more than with respect to other innovations. This is especially the case of cooperation with suppliers, to ensure the supply of inputs or components with the needed eco-friendly features – that might not be readily available on the market – to close the production cycles and to enhance ‘recycleability’. And of cooperation with ‘knowledge providers’, being private design studios or environmental consultants (including non-profit actors such as NGOs), or public institutions such as research centers or universities [2, 3].

Interestingly, the importance of cooperation increases for the most intense green innovators, those who introduce changes that reduce several environmental impacts, such as: reduction of air, water, soil pollution, increased energy or material efficiency, improved after-use recycling of products, and others. Indeed, they are more likely to cooperate with a higher number of external partners, being also more often foreign partners [4].

However, such an open approach to innovation does not replace the internal innovation effort of the firm: investing in an internal research and development (R&D) office and in the skills and competences of the firms’ remains a key driver to ensure the effective development and introduction of a green innovations [5].

A call for a new approach toward innovation and sustainability

Willingness to reduce its own impact on the environment is not enough. To become effectively green, firms need to carefully plan their innovation activities toward this goal. The approach to innovation developed during the firm’s experience might not be enough to take up this challenge: opening up to external partners needs to be an essential complement to an internal investment to environmentally upgrade.

How to identify the correct partners to enter this new field, so as to govern the collaboration both with private and with public or not-for-profit organizations and mix it with internal, private effort might be challenging. But it is an essential step toward a lower impact production system. United we stand, divided we fall far from reaching sustainability goals.

References

[1] Network for Business sustainability (2012), “Literature Review: innovating for sustainability”, December
[2] De Marchi V. (2012), “Environmental innovation and R&D cooperation: Empirical evidence from Spanish manufacturing firms“, Research Policy, 41(3), 614–623
[3] Roscoe, S., Cousins, P. D., & Lamming, R. C. (2016). “Developing eco-innovations: A three-stage typology of supply networks”. Journal of Cleaner Production, 112, 1948-1959.
[4] De Marchi V., Grandinetti R. (2013) “Knowledge strategies for environmental innovations: the case of Italian manufacturing firms“, Journal of Knowledge Management, 17(4): 569-582
[5] Cainelli G., De Marchi V., Grandinetti R. (2015) “Does the development of environmental innovation require different resources? Evidence from Spanish manufacturing firms”, Journal of Cleaner Production, 94: 211‑220.


The Author

Valentina De Marchi is Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics and Management ‘Marco Fanno’ at the University of Padova, Italy, and Governing Responsible Business Research Environment (GRB) research fellow at Copenhagen Business School. She is interested in the study of the peculiarity of environmental innovations and on the greening of firms embedded in Global Value Chains.
Website: www.valentinademarchi.it
Twitter: @dema_val


Photo by Edgar Castrejon on Unsplash.


Three Ways to Integrate Sustainability in Business Schools

By Jeremy Moon and Rieneke Slager.

Bring sustainability into the business school mainstream by aligning with schools’ existing practices: technical, political, and cultural.

Sustainable business has been taught and researched in business schools for decades. For nearly as long, proponents have warned about barriers to genuine integration of sustainability in business schools.

Sustainability Centres in Business Schools

In a recent article, we and our co-authors Sareh Pouryousefi and Ethan Schoolman looked at the role of sustainability centres in achieving this fit. Our analysis drew on a survey of directors of sustainability centres and interviews with ten of these centre directors. We found that leading sustainability centres seek to achieve three types of fit between their own practices and those of their business schools, in order to promote integration.

The types of fit are:

  • Technical. Centres achieve technical fit — i.e. alignment with existing organisational structures- by ensuring that sustainability topics are taught in a mix of core and elective programmes in different disciplines.
  • Political. Centres achieve strong political fit by aligning with the interests of school leaders in order to develop sustainability practices as a brand for the school.
  • Cultural. Centres achieve cultural fit — i.e. alignment with the cultural values of the wider organisation — somewhat counterintuitively. They do it by not defining terms such as ‘sustainability’ or setting fixed boundaries around their work; instead, they interpret research themes loosely to include colleagues with related research interests.

A centre may pursue one kind of fit, but because these types of fit are highly interrelated, actions in one area (technical, cultural, political) will affect the others.

On the one hand, they can positively reinforce each other towards better integration. The existence of cultural and technical fit will encourage collaboration. The presence of cultural and political fit will boost legitimacy. Political and technical fit will strengthen resources devoted to sustainability.

The challenge of fit

Centres that manage to achieve higher levels of fit across domains feel more secure about the long-term prospects of their centre. None of the centre representatives we spoke to felt that they had a complete alignment in all three areas of fit. But centres saw benefits when they had a good degree of fit in two or more areas, or were working towards fit in multiple areas. In these cases, directors felt that their centres’ purpose transcended the individuals associated with them, guarding them against future political headwinds, such as lack of interest from senior management.

Barriers to fit remain even at leading schools. This is because sustainability centres usually present some challenge to assumptions of others at business schools — often including Deans.
Our research shows that lack of fit in one domain may also impact the other domains. For example, a centre might have a high level of political fit through support from the Dean, but low cultural fit because it tightly defines sustainability in contrast with wider business school values. That centre may also struggle to achieve high levels of technical fit.

These elements are important even for sustainability centres that purposefully avoid integration with those wider business school practices which they deem wholly antithetical to sustainability. These centres can still attend to issues of political, technical and cultural fit as they choose strategies for carrying out their teaching, research, and engagement activities.

The Authors

Rieneke Slager is Assistant Professor at the University of Groningen.
Jeremy Moon is Velux Professor of Corporate Responsibility at Copenhagen Business School.

Full article

Slager, R., Pouryousefi, S., Moon, J., & Schoolman, E. 2018. Sustainability centres and fit: How centres work to integrate sustainability within business schools. Journal of Business Ethics. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-018-3965-4


Thanks

This article is a courtesy of the Network for Business Sustainability, ‘a network of over 6000 researchers and managers who are committed to advancing sustainable business’. Read more about who they are and what they do here.


Pic by discosour on flickr.

Sustainability’s Infrastructure

Ethnographies of the global value chain of certified tea (SUSTEIN)

By Hannah Elliott, Martin Skrydstrup and Matthew Archer.

Why SUSTEIN?

Currently, the world’s tea industry is on a race with time to source tea sustainably before 2020. But what is “sustainable tea” and how do we know if tea is sustainable or not? This project entitled SUSTEIN (SUStainable TEa INfrastructure) will focus on this question by way of looking at localized translations of transnational sustainability standards in Kenya, United Arab Emirates and corporate headquarters in Europe. We aim to advance our understanding of the global value chain of certified tea.

3 Research lines

The theoretical objective is to venture beyond the notion of global value chain by reinterpreting sustainable supply chain management through the concept of infrastructure, a notion anthropologists and other social scientists have deployed in recent years to emphasize the political and temporal aspects of networks such as transnational supply chains. We hope that this concept will allow us to better comprehend how sustainable certification schemes manifest in global value chains.
SUSTEIN consists of three sub projects, which each address a core question posed by the project:

  • How does certification shape agrarian production in the form of cultivation and factory processing, and vice versa? Who benefits from which sustainability standards? (Line A)
  • How does certification influence the valuation of tea, assessed in terms of taste, grade and price? How is the value of certification performed and capitalized? (Line B)
  • How do corporate professionals and independent auditors distinguish between “sustainable/unsustainable”? What lines of evidence are recognized? (Line C)

Each of these questions will be answered by the corresponding research line:

tea plantation
Tea plantage in Kericho; one of SUSTEIN’s field sites.

Research line A

explores agrarian questions, enquiring into the ways contemporary drives towards sustainability shape and are shaped by modes of tea production in Kenya. The research focuses on the institution of the tea plantation and its associated factories and outgrower farms, all key components of the infrastructure of sustainable tea. The tea plantation has been described as having a “dual character” (Besky 2008: 1); it has its roots in British colonialism while being contemporarily positioned in international markets for certified sustainable commodities. This research line enquires into what ‘sustainability’ comes to mean and materialise within this apparently contradictory setting. How do contemporary measures seeking to ensure sustainable tea production, such as certified standards, affect the way tea is produced in the context of the plantation? And to what extent do longer-standing modes of plantation production endure through the present, in turn shaping contemporary sustainability ideologies and practices? The research line addresses these questions through ethnographic inquiry. The researcher will spend time with the people working on tea plantations and in factories certified by different certification bodies and on the farms of outgrowers contracted to supply the companies owning plantations with supplementary sustainable tea. Through interviews and participant observation, the ethnographer will enquire into the social, political and ethical worlds surrounding sustainable tea production in contemporary Kenya.

Research line B

will follow through on the plantation and factory sites to the auction sites in Mombasa and Dubai. Ethnographic fieldwork will be conducted in the Jebel Ali Free Zone in Dubai with no tax regulations, no strict labor laws nor import/export duties, making it the perfect infrastructural hub to blend and pack tea according to corporate logic. Likely as an outcome of this, the Dubai Tea Trading Centre has since its establishment in 2005 risen to re-export 60% of the world’s tea production. These volumes are predominantly traded on virtual platforms.
In contrast, the Mombasa Tea Auction holds two weekly auctions under the auspices of the East African Tea Trade Association (EATTA), which conforms to national regulations (Tea Act of Kenya & Tea Board of Kenya). Recently, this auction site voted “against the mouse and for the hammer,” maintaining the tradition of the Dutch auction style vs. virtual trading. The ethnography for this research line will move between these two sites, following tea blenders who purchase in Mombasa vs. Dubai and investigating tea expertise and technologies as it pertains to the valuation of certified tea.

Research line C

builds on these ethnographies of production and exchange to try and understand the relationship between corporations and standards/certification regimes. There is a tension between these groups of actors whereby standards organizations such as the Rainforest Alliance and Fairtrade International need to appear independent in order for their certifications to remain credible while at the same time remaining sensitive to the financial obligations of for-profit corporations in order to promote “buy-in.”
This research line will draw on interviews with people working in these organizations and participant observation at sites where they interact, including industry conferences and trade fairs. These are the sites where sustainability is negotiated as both a concept and as a set of practices. With that in mind, interview questions will focus on, among other things, the extent to which specific agricultural and trading practices are integrated into broader definitions of sustainability and their manifestation in different certification regimes, the challenges of maintaining a critical distance between certifiers and corporations, and the way standards govern markets and, crucially, vice versa.

The grant

SUSTEIN is made possible by the Sapere Aude Starting Grant (meaning “dare to know”), awarded by the Danish Council for Independent Research (DFF). The Sapere Aude program “is aimed at younger, very talented researchers, who at the time of the application deadline and within the last eight years have obtained their PhD”. The Sapere Aude program targets “top researchers who intend to gather a group of researchers, in order to carry out a research project at a high, international level.”

Reference

Besky, S. (2008) ‘Can a plantation be fair? Paradoxes and possibilities in Fair Trade Darjeeling tea certification’. Anthropology of Work, XXIX: 1, pp. 1-9.


Hannah Elliott is a post-doc in the Department of Management, Society, and Communication at Copenhagen Business School, having recently finished her PhD at the University of Copenhagen. She is responsible for research line A.

Martin Skrydstrup is an associate professor in the Department of Management, Society, and Communication at Copenhagen Business School and is the principal investigator of SUSTEIN. He is also responsible for research line B.

Matthew Archer is an assistant professor in the Department of Management, Society, and Communication at Copenhagen Business School and is responsible for research line C. He recently completed his PhD in environmental studies at Yale University and is interested in corporate sustainability and sustainable finance.


Closing remarks

In a year we hope to update BOS readers about how far we are with answering our research questions. In the meantime, we invite you to swing by our offices at Dalgas Have for a cup of tea.
The SUSTEIN project runs from 1 July 2018 to 30 June 2020.
For further information about the project, please contact the principal investigator, Martin Skrydstrup, at msk.msc@cbs.dk.

The BUSINESS Model is Dead: Long Live the Organizational Value Model!

By Oliver Laasch.

An ApPeaRange!

Business models are logics of value proposition (Pr), creation (Cr), exchange (Ex) and capture (Ca). When closely looking at sustainability business models, it becomes clear that these ‘value functions’ are not only shaped by a commercial logic, but also by one of sustainability. Many of sustainability business models include further logics of social welfare (e.g. social enterprises), and government (e.g. private-public partnerships) (Laasch, 2018b). If a homogeneous commercial business model was an orange, these business models are more like a heterogeneous mixture between an apple, a pear and that orange, an ApPeaRange! Their value logics are not homogeneously commercial, but heterogeneous mixtures.

Strange Fruit Everywhere

Heterogeneous value logics like the one of sustainability business models are widespread. Imagine you peel an orange and find an apple inside:

Over half of the FTSE100 corporations have integrated a responsibility logic into their business model descriptions (Laasch & Pinkse, 2018). Many large businesses, such as LEGO, as well as SMEs are family-run, integrating their commercial logic with a family logic (Laasch & Conaway, 2015). We may also think of the Chinese semi-conductor producer Goodark blending commercial logic with a spiritual logic of Confucianism; the German car supplier Allsafe with its humanistic logic of freedom and responsibility; or the Brownie bakery Greyston with its commercial value logic firmly wrapped around a social welfare logic (Laasch et al., 2018). Once opening our eyes to the variety of ‘values’, of normative orientations and purposes businesses are oriented towards (Randles & Laasch, 2016), the perceived number of companies adhering to a purely commercial value logic shrinks considerably. While the purely commercial business model might not be entirely dead, it sure shouldn’t be considered the norm. And then there are entirely non-commercial organizations with value logics.

Comparing APPLE and Oranges: Yes!

Isn’t comparing a commercial organization, for instance, Apple and noncommercial organizations, let’s say a church, like comparing Apple and oranges? Yes, cheap pun intended:

“…a commercial business like Apple. With a customer value proposition (Pr) of high quality and high-end design, it depends on highest-standard production processes (Cr) and on the ability to maintain high margins (Ca).”

Laasch, 2018b: 165.

It appears we have found a purely commercial value logic, one that deserves the name BUSINESS model. Can we analyze a non-business organization, for instance a church, the same way?

“…shaped by an institutional logic of religion. It may pursue a value proposition of spiritual salvation (Pr), by helping believers to live according to religious values through the provision of religious services from marriages and funerals to humanitarian aid (Cr), and exchange value in a global network of churches (Ex).”

Laasch, 2018b: 165.

It appears non-business organizations, while not having a BUSINESS model per se, do have an organizational value model of value proposition, creation, exchange and capture. Freeing the organizational value logic from its commercial business origins enables us to take a fresh look at any kind of organization: Churches, universities, NGOs, governments, your favorite sports club, you name it! Organizational value logics lend themselves to study, design, and improve all kinds of organizations.

How to Farm Strange Fruits?

It has been argued that one of the main challenges of our times is to create companies and other organizations shaped by alternative logics, be it the one of sustainability, or of social welfare. We have seen that many organizations already have heterogeneous value logics. How to change the ones that don’t? Three interrelated manifestations of organizational value logics together form an organizational value model:

  • Cognition: An organizational value logic manifests in organizational members’ cognitive structures, their mental models and related decision making.
  • Activities: Value logics manifest in the logic of action of the activity systems through which an organization’s value model is enacted.
  • Artefacts: Value logics materialize in physical form, as texts, or images, such as a business model description in the annual report, factory layouts, or products.

Changing an organization’s value logic can start in any of its manifestations. For instance, as a corporate responsibility strategy circulated through a multinational retailer, the document’s responsibility logic was translated into peoples’ mental models, new activities and structures (Laasch, 2016, 2018a). In the companies Goodark, Allsafe, and Greyston mentioned above, new practices centered on a humanistic value logic (Laasch et al., 2018; Laasch, Dierksmeier, & Pirson, 2015) changed the networks of practices’ enacting their business models (Boons, Laasch, & Dierksmeier, 2018; Laasch et al., 2015). The emerging field of business model sociology provides further insight into such change processes (Laasch, 2018c).

Oliver Laasch is an Assistant Professor of Strategy at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China, founder of the Centre for Responsible Management Education and a visiting professor at the University of Tübingen’s Global Ethic Institute. Currently, he is a part of Copenhagen Business School’s Governing Responsible Business (GRB) World Class Research Environment Fellowship program.


References and Materials

If you enjoy strange fruits, have a look at the ‘apples and oranges’ audioslides with a more ‘academic’ presentation.

  • Boons, F., Laasch, O., & Dierksmeier, C. 2018. Assembling organizational practices: The evolving humanistic business model of Allsafe, 6th Asian SME Conference. Tokyo.
  • Laasch, O. 2016. Business model change through embedding corporate responsibility-sustainability? Logics, devices, actor networks. University of Manchester, Manchester.
  • Laasch, O. 2018a. An actor-network perspective on business models: How ‘Being Responsible’ led to incremental, but pervasive change. Long Range Planning, [DOI 10.16/j.lrp.2018.04.002].
  • Laasch, O. 2018b. Beyond the purely commercial business model: Organizational value logics and the heterogeneity of sustainability business models. Long Range Planning, 51(1): 158-183.
  • Laasch, O. 2018c. Business model sociology: Exploring alternative lenses (not only) for the study of alternative business models. CRME Working Papers, 4(4).
  • Laasch, O., & Conaway, R. 2015. Principles of responsible management: Glocal sustainability, responsibility, ethics. Mason: Cengage.
  • Laasch, O., Dierksmeier, C., Livne-Tarandach, R., Pirson, M., Fu, P., & Qu, Q. 2018. Humanistic management performativity ‘in the wild’: The role of performative bundles of practices, 32nd Annual Australian & New Zealand Academy of Management (ANZAM) Conference. Auckland.
  • Laasch, O., Dierksmeier, C., & Pirson, M. 2015. Reality proves possibility: Developing humanistic business models from paradigmatic practice. Paper presented at the Academy of Management Annual Convention, Vancouver.
  • Laasch, O., & Pinkse, J. 2018. How the leopards got their spots: A typology of corporate responsibility business models, 3rd Annual Conference on New Business Models. Sofia.
  • Randles, S., & Laasch, O. 2016. Theorising the normative business model (NBM). Organization & Environment, 29(1): 53-73.

Raising the bar for sustainable events

By Louise Thomsen

How often do we as event coordinators ask ourselves: how can I minimize the plastic use, the waste, the paper? I could also reverse the question and ask: Could we imagine a smarter, more efficient and even more inspiring new way to host events?

Copenhagen Business School hosts a significant number of conferences and other events throughout a year and all carry the opportunity to be managed more sustainably. But, what makes an event sustainable? In June, the Sustainable Consumption Conference hosted by the VELUX Endowed Chair in Corporate Sustainability at CBS became the first pilot conference for implementing sustainable initiatives at a bigger event at CBS.

Hosting events is a wasteful affair

We all know exactly what to expect when attending a conference. You receive a name tag when you register, which you usually throw in the waste bin when you leave. You get a plastic bottle of water, and when you are done with that, or even before you are done, you get another one. You get the conference programme and the participant list which you look at a couple of times before that goes into the waste bin. Often printed in colour.

Now, imagine attending a conference with no plastic bottles, no paper, no meat, and no food waste. Imagine, how this conference would increase the level of awareness, communication and engagement between the participants and the hosts. And ignite fruitful discussions because we would realize, how much we can actually achieve with little changes in our everyday lives.

Sustainability taken to new heights

On June 27-30, more than 200 scholars and policy practitioners participated in an international conference on sustainable consumption at Copenhagen Business School, The conference topic Sustainable Consumption naturally raised the question how a sustainable conference could look like at Copenhagen Business School? No attempt at all to satisfy the conference’s title would be more than hypocritical.

In order to make sure that the sustainability initiatives implemented at the conference were the most sustainable solutions and had a high impact factor, the conference organizers allied themselves with a group of students from the Danish Technical University (DTU) who were doing a course on Life Cycle Assessments.

The students received 2 cases

  1. How should the conference supply water?
  2. How should the conference be catered?

Over the course of 4 months, the DTU student teams collected data from CBS and carried out life cycle assessments taking into account various impact factors such as production, transportation, use and disposal etc. Based on the results, all conference meals were vegetarian, and all conference participants received one glass bottle that could be filled from water dispensers throughout the entire conference.


The conference participants also received information about the sustainability initiatives that they could expect prior to the conference. The findings from the life cycle assessment were communicated on posters and on the back of the staff t-shirts. All conference staff engaged with the participants and assisted with water bottles and waste sorting. Furthermore, the conference participants were continuously encouraged to share feedback and discuss the attempts made with each other and the staff.

Implemented sustainability initiatives at the Sustainable Consumption Conference

  • Each conference participant received one reusable glass bottle, which replaced single-use plastic bottles for the distribution of water throughout the conference.
  • Every meal served at the conference was vegetarian, reducing the environmental impact of the conference’s catering by 44% compared to meat-based meals.
  • Participants were asked to sort their waste throughout the conference, using designated bins for paper, plastic, food, and general waste.
  • The conference was largely paperless. Programs and other general information were made available in ways that reduced the need for paper, such as printed posters and an app with, among other information, the timetable.
  • The lanyards for name tags were made from recycled polyester, and both name tags and lanyards were collected for reuse after the conference.
  • Food waste was minimized by asking participants to give notice in advance about which meals they were going to participate in, and any leftover food was brought to a nearby centre for homeless people.
  • All conference staff wore a sustainable and organic cotton t-shirt with key sustainability messages on the back.

Invitation to a learning journey

When hosting an event at CBS, you are in touch with many different stakeholders who have procedures on how to efficiently meet requests on catering, waste handling, or cleaning. This means that it must be a collaborative effort if you want to change the existing structures. Engagement and communication are key.

We should not get carried away by the belief that the easiest solutions to implement will necessarily be the most impactful or more environmentally significant than our starting point. There is a big difference between solutions that carry a high degree of reducing CO2-emissions (real impact), and solutions that have the purpose of creating awareness. Both aspects are highly important. However, we should be aware of when we spend resources on one or the other and communicate this clearly.

I want to invite you to think about how we can improve our ecological footprint when we host events at CBS and elsewhere. As you will soon learn, there is no such thing as a “sustainable event”. However, there are well-founded decisions and much to learn if we dare to ask the question:

How can we raise the bar for sustainable events?


Louise Thomsen is Project Manager for CBS PRME and the VELUX Chair in Corporate Sustainability at the Department of Management, Society and Communication, CBS. Louise is focused on implementing the UN Sustainable Development Goals in an university context through student engagement. Follow her on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Save the date: 29 August, 15 h, Dalgas Have, Copenhagen Business School.

Creating a whole conference to have a significantly reduced amount of waste, use of paper and plastics is a big challenge. But many people also wonder, what they can do as individuals to limit climate change, if there is anything at all.
This issue is treated in another edition of the Sustainability Seminar Series at the department of Management, Society and Communication at CBS.

For more information and sign-up click on “What Can the Individual Do to help Limit Climate Change?”.

Feeling the Pain

By Robin Porsfelt.

While the recent US ’opioid crisis’ has been widely reported, a second, less recognized, crisis related to opioids has been taking place, and is still ongoing, more quietly in countries with less Western media visibility. Whereas the crisis in the US is arguably related to an over-subscription to opioid-based pain relief, such as OxyContin, the second crisis could rather be seen as a case of too tightly regulated access to opioids in health-care systems. This is at least the argument of a recent report commissioned by The Lancet which proclaims that the world is experiencing an under-management of pain where as many as 25 million people are suffering partly as a result of regulatory and cultural approaches to the use of opioids.

Severe lack of access

The report was the result of a three-year study on the integration and access of pain relief and palliative care in health systems. It opens with a succinct description of the problem: “Poor people in all parts of the world live and die with little or no palliative care or pain relief. Staring into this access abyss, one sees the depth of extreme suffering in the cruel face of poverty and inequity” (Knaul, Farmer & Krakauer et al, 2017: 1).

Those suffering from lack of access to adequate medication are predominantly found in low-income and middle-income countries, often with terminal illnesses, and includes approximately 2.5 million children dying with, what the report terms, ‘serious health-related suffering’ each year (Knaul, Farmer & Krakauer et al, 2017: 2). Of the almost 300 metric tons of morphine-equivalent opioids distributed annually, only 0.1 metric tons reach health systems in low-income countries. This is something the report’s authors condemn as: “a medical, public health, and moral failing and a travesty of justice” (Knaul, Farmer & Krakauer et al, 2017: 1).

Addiction and pain relief

But what are the reasons for this state of potentially unnecessary suffering? In contrast to many other debates on access to medication, the problem is in this case not predominantly related to questions of scarcity, costs, or tightly enforced intellectual property rights to drugs, but rather a mix of cultural and regulatory factors. There are (at least) two factors that explain the pattern: One is a lack of visibility due to fragmented patient advocacy and exclusion of pain alleviation from standard measures of health. Another key factor is that opioids do not only fall under the scope of medical regulation but are also controlled substances under international drug conventions (Ibid.).

As substances such as morphine are listed and regulated as narcotic substances by the UN, they become part of a machinery of international checks and balances on their flow, including import quotas and reporting requirements. The UN treaties are based on two imperatives, on the one hand the limitation of harmful and addictive substances, and on the other hand to secure access to medically vital analgesics.[1] In recent decades, the war on a drugs-compatible first imperative of strict control has become increasingly dominant, making such medication harder to access (Knaul, Farmer & Krakauer et al, 2017: 8).

A second related issue suggested by the report is ‘opiophobia’, described as prejudice and misinformation concerning medical use of opioids. Whereas a balanced approach to opioid prescriptions is needed, a prevalent fear of non-medical use and its side-effects among health-care providers, regulators, and patients have led to an underestimation of needs and insufficient medical use in many countries (Ibid.).

What’s to be done

Even though this inequity in pain relief is indeed under-acknowledged, potential solutions should at least, in theory, not be gridlocked by economic interests. As morphine and morphine-like medication is cheap to produce and commonly used in Western medical systems, the problem is rather about framing and contesting stigmatization. While acknowledging the risks with a too laissez-faire approach, there is a need to recognize the value in a controlled medical use of opioids to avoid unnecessary suffering as well.

A way to do so, as the report highlights, would for instance be a broadening of the third Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) on ensuring healthy lives and well-being for all. Currently, the battle against substance abuse is covered in the SDG target 3.5, a step forward however would be to include pain alleviation and access to pain relief as similarly essential objectives – for instance as part of SDG target 3.8 on universal health coverage. As a measure, this is of course not enough, but at the current stage, and given the documented ‘abyss’ of equity in pain treatment worldwide, simply diagnosing the issue as problematic per se would to some degree seem like progress.

 

[1] A member of a group of drugs to achieve analgesia, i.e. relief from pain. (editor’s note)

References

Knaul, F. M., Farmer, P. E., Krakauer, E. L., et al. (2017). Alleviating the access abyss in palliative care and pain relief––an imperative of universal health coverage: The Lancet Commission report. Lancet. DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(17)32513-8


Robin Porsfelt is a PhD fellow at the Department of Management, Society and Communication. He is part of a PhD cohort on time and societal challenges, with particular research interests in the sociology of valuation and global governance

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash.

“Publish or Perish”

by Luisa Murphy

In academia -especially for young researchers- there seems to be only one way to the top: publish frequently and in well-regarded journals. This pressure however may sometimes come at the expense of academic quality. As with other things, good research sometimes just needs time. Unfortunately, infrequent publishing might be followed by less recognition, and funding might be more difficult to obtain in the short-term. Eventually, one might lose the opportunity to move up the career ladder. In a nutshell: Publish or perish.

The pressure of frequent publishing

My experience is that the phrase seems to ignite a range of emotions from rage to acceptance among academics. This can be a conversation starter or something that inevitably comes up in conversation. The dilemma is also at the epicenter of different symposia, conferences and other scholarly debates. The woes of the publish or perish dilemma are manifold. To name a few, ‘salami slicing’ e.g. taking one idea or dataset and reusing it in various papers, disillusionment with the publishing process and lack of creativity. Yet, few researchers investigate the publish or perish dilemma and why it endures (de Rond & Miller, 2005). In essence, is it the publish or perish dilemma that is the problem, or are we?

Below, I briefly introduce the birth of ‘the publish or perish’ dilemma and then delineate a few points on what I call the short-term pleasure dilemma of the publish or perish dilemma. I conclude with a few questions to consider what a ‘publish or perish’ free world would look like. I suggest that paradoxically, we might enjoy the publish or perish dilemma because it provides short-term gratification in a long-term context. In this age of publish or perish, I should note that I am by no means a gratification theory scholar and raise these questions based on my own personal experiences in academia for further research purposes.

To publish or to perish

The idea behind the publish or perish dilemma is often traced back to two studies by the Carnegie and Ford Foundations in the mid-1950’s which looked at the state of business education in the US. The findings of the studies deplored the lack of intellectual relevance and dynamism, analytical prowess and lack of high quality journals in organization sciences (de Rond & Miller, 2005, citing Gordon & Howell, 1959, pp. 355, 379). As a result, research which had been on the backburner compared to teaching endeavors became the hallmark, or at least of equal significance, to teaching in academic organizations (ibid). The idea also traveled to Europe with similar studies conducted in the UK and France in the 1960s and 70s and has since spread like wildfire globally. In essence, with the prevailing publish or perish idea, there has been a focus on publishing in top-tiered peer reviewed journals, citation impact factors and tenure rewarded as a result of publications. This has led to the criticism that scientific quality e.g. innovation and intellectual inquiry has come at the expense of publishing expeditiously to move up the career ladder. One example of these costs is the phenomena of “rogue publishers” or journals which offer to publish (often younger scholars) at a fee thereby abusing the peer-review system.

Short-term gratification?

Taking this into consideration, I suggest some areas that require further research (to do at another time due to the publish or perish dilemmaJ) which suggest that the publish or perish system endures because it provides short-term gratification in a long-term academic game.

Publishing frequently

While it has been argued that publishing frequently comes at the expense of originality and innovation, academics also cite deadlines such as paper calls and conferences and the review process itself as means to work through ideas and enable them to come to fruition. This suggests that there may be some short-term gratification that results from publishing often as opposed to waiting years for a high-quality idea to emerge and be published. On the contrary, if the idea might not amount to something publishable, the review process may be a way to root it out. Clearly, the inverse is also true e.g. that great ideas and theories are obviously not developed in a day but short-term gratification might be attained from delivering frequent outputs.

Publishing in top-tiered peer reviewed journals

Publishing in top-tier peer-reviewed journals has been a source of great contention as many argue that the process forces publications into certain conversations and might prize certain discourses, that the metrics which rank journals are problematic and that the peer-review process itself is rife with transparency, bias and time allocation issues. Yet, publishing in top-tiered journals also provides scholars with a sense of pride, inclusion into an academic conversation and sense of accomplishment. Again, there seems to be a sense of short-term gratification related to publishing in top-tiered peer reviewed journals: scholars develop a certain prestige, are able to network and communicate with others in the community and use a yardstick to measure their progress. Given that senior scholars do not need to prove themselves to the same extent that junior scholars do, it can be argued that gratification might be more of a short-term benefit.

Moving up the career ladder

Publishing frequently and in top-tiered peer reviewed journals is the ticket to advancing in academia. But once you move to the top, there is likely less gratification received from publishing in top-tiered journals and publishing frequently. Therefore, it is likely more gratifying in the short-term to publish frequently and in top-tiered journals because they can lead to career advancement.

The short-term publish or perish pleasure dilemma or an alternative?

Taking these factors into consideration, the question remains as to whether this short-term gratification is at the expense of the long-term. This raises the question as to what the alternative would look like. Presumably, it would involve publishing less frequently, in journals of the author’s choice and using other metrics for evaluation. What do you think? Is this what the new generation of academics should strive for or should we continue to play the game and enjoy the short-term gratification / pleasure dilemma like eating a Snickers bar?

 

Reference

De Rond, M., & Miller, A. (2005). Publish or Perish: Bane or Boon of Academic Life? Journal of Management Inquiry, 14(4), 321-329.


Luisa Murphy is a PhD Fellow at Copenhagen Business School and supported by the VELUX Endowed Chair in Corporate Sustainability. Her research examines governance for anti-corruption. She brings a human rights and business background from the University of Oxford and legal experience from the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice.

 

Photo by Simson Petrol on Unsplash.

A framework for assessing the potential of behaviour change for global decarbonisation

By Kristian Steensen Nielsen

Addressing climate change requires an urgent implementation of far-reaching solutions. Policy-makers and natural scientists have mainly offered supply-side solutions to solving the climate problem, such as widespread adoption of new or innovative technologies. While of critical importance, strictly prioritising supply-side solutions is unlikely to deliver the necessary greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions within the desired time frame. An often-overlooked demand-side solution is behaviour change, which can offer both immediate and long-term reductions in GHG emissions.

There is an urgent need for rapid decarbonisation to reduce the magnitude of climate change. The Paris Agreement reflected this urgency in its formulation of ambitious goals to keep the global temperature increase below 2°C and preferably 1.5°C. Since the Paris Agreement, researchers—often affiliated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—have with accelerated frequency been building scenarios for potential pathways to reach the temperature goals.[1] These far-reaching—and arguably radical—pathways involve urgent transitions to renewable energy sources and the majority assumes the use of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies, such as afforestation or bio energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). Neither of the pathway scenarios take behavioral changes into account despite the fact that studies have shown its potential to reduce GHG emissions. For example, Thomas Dietz and colleagues (2009) found that a national implementation of behavioural changes in the United States could reduce U.S. households’ direct emissions by 20% within 10 years (representing 123 million tons of CO2). Although not sufficient single-handedly, behaviour change can help speed up the decarbonisation of societies.

 

Three dimensions of behaviour change

To identify the potential of behavioural changes to reduce GHG emissions, it is critical to consider three dimensions[2]:

  1. the technical potential (TP) of a behaviour, or the emissions reduction achieved if an individual or a target population collectively adopted the behaviour;
  2. behavioural plasticity (BP), or the proportion of the technical potential achievable through the most effective behavioural interventions; and
  3. feasibility of initiatives (IF) to induce change, which refers to the likelihood that the most effective interventions are achievable within a target population.

Focusing exclusively on either of the three dimensions will result in skewed analyses from which only imperfect interventions can be developed. For example, substituting a GHG-intensive behaviour with a less GHG-intensive alternative (e.g., flying to Bermuda on vacation versus vacationing in one’s own country) will promise a high TP but the extent to which people are willing to make such a behavioural substitution may be less promising (BP) and so might the feasibility of achieving the behavioural change across a large population (IF). Conversely, a behaviour could be easy to change (e.g., getting people to shut off lights in unoccupied rooms) and feasibly be implemented in a large population, yet hold a very low TP and therefore even in the aggregate fail to reduce emissions by much.

Identifying the most promising target behaviours

The task of researchers (across disciplines) in collaboration with policy-makers and companies is to identify the behaviours with the highest potential to reduce GHG emissions while considering all three dimensions in cohesion. Making such calculations is no easy task—as the dimensions may vary substantially between and within countries—but neither is adopting innovative technologies at a massive scale. However, focusing on both supply- and demand-side solutions will heighten the likelihood of achieving the Paris goals.

[1] Rogelj et al., 2018.

[2] Dietz et al., 2009; Vandenbergh & Gilligan, 2017.

 

References

Dietz, T., Gardner, G. T., Gilligan, J., Stern, P. C., & Vandenbergh, M. P. (2009). Household actions can provide a behavioral wedge to rapidly reduce US carbon emissions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences106(44), 18452-18456.

Rogelj, J., Popp, A., Calvin, K. V., Luderer, G., Emmerling, J., Gernaat, D., … & Krey, V. (2018). Scenarios towards limiting global mean temperature increase below 1.5° C. Nature Climate Change8(4), 325.

Vandenbergh, M. P., & Gilligan, J. M. (2017). Beyond Politics. Cambridge University Press.


Kristian Steensen Nielsen is a PhD Fellow in environmental behaviour change at Copenhagen Business School. His research interests are self-control, behaviour change, and environmentally significant behaviour.

 

Pic by Duncan Harris, Flickr.

The not-so-sharing economy

By Attila Marton

With the rise of Airbnb and Uber into the elite club of Silicon Valley superstar firms, the sharing economy has become an accepted business concept and social practice. Apart from the fact that sharing economy platforms (SEPs), such as Airbnb and Uber, are very savvy in playing labelling games (most of them have little to nothing to do with actual sharing), they are also very savvy in purposefully blurring established institutional boundaries and categories – most prominently, categories of employment and labour. By facilitating the “casual participation” of private individuals as users of their services, SEPs can gain significant advantages over well-established incumbents as they disrupt mature markets and labour structures as well as challenge long-held wisdoms of how to organize the creation and distribution of value.

It’s a thing now

The sharing economy is here to stay. Although, it is not yet clear whether the sharing economy will turn out to be as big a thing as the hype surrounding it suggests. Just to give some indicative numbers; The Economist estimates that the consumer peer-to-peer rental market is worth $26 billion, McKinsey predicts that the sharing economy will rise to $335 billion in revenues by 2025. In Denmark, 10% of the population has participated in the sharing economy in some form, while the Danish government announced a sharing economy strategy. At least it is safe to say that the hype is real and so are the expectations for high returns on the investments made into sharing economy platforms.

Something new, something old

The sharing economy, in its contemporary digitally platformed version, is the result of the confluence of three developments:

  • The rise of access-over-ownership as consumers are increasingly okay with paying for services and servitised products rather than to buy stuff. Streaming services, such as Netflix and Spotify, are telling examples. When we say access-based consumption or on-demand economy, we typically refer to this development.
  • The rise of peer-to-peer networks, which allow for direct inter- and transactions between peers coordinated by trust and reputation mechanisms. Think eBay and YouTube – typical examples of what we sometimes call the peer-to-peer economy or collaborative economy.
  • Allocating idle resources in order to tap into privately owned resources (assets and labour) and to promote more economical and sustainable use of resources as a result. Examples are IKEA’s second-hand campaign or renting out idle storage space via sharemystorage.com. Terms such as collaborative consumption and circular economy typically refer to this notion.

None of these developments is, of course, new nor exclusive to the sharing economy. Clans have been sharing food and tools since the dawn of humanity. Donating blood peer-to-peer has been around for at least half a century and the allocation of idle resources in brick-and-mortar second-hand shops even longer. The same applies to digital varieties of these practices; sharing files or selling/buying peer-to-peer online have been around since the 1990s (eBay was founded in 1995, Napster in 1999, Wikipedia in 2001). What is new is how these developments come together under specific technological, economic and cultural circumstances.

Mature technologies of automation enable private individuals to casually participate in economic activities as they self-service on dedicated platforms, which run automated matchmaking algorithms. Network effects attract larger groups of participants, increasing the economic value of those platforms (and of the corporations owning them). Thus, the coordination of casual participants has become a highly profitable business model. Culturally, these developments have become socially acceptable and appropriate as the new narrative of the Web 2.0 propagates “sharing is caring” and a general fascination with technological wizardry.

Four generic types of sharing economy platforms

An important outcome of above developments is that established institutional categories are becoming blurred, and static boundaries are becoming fluid. SEPs purposefully utilize these fluid boundaries to their advantage – be it between firms and markets (are Uber drivers employees or self-employed?), between internal and external resources (Airbnb hosts bring their own assets and have all the risks), and between private and business spheres (participants monetize and commodify their private life into assets), to name but only the most important examples. In our research (with Ioanna Constantiou, Dept. of Digitalization, CBS, and Virpi Tuunainen, Dept. of Information and Service Economy, Aalto University), we found that successful SEPs are very good at exploiting these boundary fluidity for their purposes. We identified four generic types we call the Franchiser, Chaperone, Principal, and Gardener.

  • The Franchiser aims for tight control over the platform participants and high rivalry among the service providers. The prototypical example is Uber, exploiting boundary fluidity by treating its drivers like employees while making them compete for fares dictated by Uber’s algorithm.
  • The Chaperone aims for loose control over the participants and high rivalry among the service providers. This is, of course, the Airbnb model; Airbnb exploits boundary fluidity by treating its participants like community members expected to follow norms and values while making the hosts compete like micro-entrepreneurs, who set their own prices based on Airbnb’s recommendation.
  • The Principal aims for tight control over the participants and low rivalry among the service providers. For instance, Handy (a per-task labour platform) treats its service providers like employees by making them sign contracts while the service providers participate in tenders based on standardized prices dictated by Handy.
  • Finally, the Gardener aims for loose control over the participants and low rivalry among the service providers. For instance, Couchsurfing (facilitating short-term, free-of-charge accommodation) leaves it to the participants to coordinate their accommodation while eliminating rivalry among the hosts by not allowing them to charge money.

Not so obvious implications

What each of these four types have in common is that they all rely on the casual participation of their user base; that is, their users typically operate on smaller scale, use their personal resources, and are less experienced than traditional service providers and professionals (not only in terms of delivering services but also protecting oneself against exploitative business practices).[1] Combined with digitalisation, such casualness provides unprecedented sources for creating value and disguises large portions of the labour of the participants.

It is the degree to which this hidden labour has become the core of the business models of Uber, Airbnb, Handy, and Couchsurfing, that is really new.

To name just two examples. By means of the app and data-driven algorithms, Uber obviously replaces taxi dispatchers. Not so obvious, however, is the hidden labour provided by the Uber riders who, by scoring their rides, control the service quality. This used to be the purview of employed and paid middle managers. Likewise, Airbnb does not only profit from on-boarding private individuals as hosts (instead of hiring professional concierges) but also from the marketing those hosts provide not just for themselves but for Airbnb, the corporation – hidden labour, which would have traditionally required to pay marketing specialists.

It is a not-so-sharing economy we are dealing with. In fact, the sharing economy is the quintessential expression of a new logic of capital accumulation in the digital economy, where large portions of labour are disguised as casual (or even pleasurable) participation in the name of self-servicing and sharing. These forms of hidden labour are not unintended consequences; they are essential parts of the platform business model, as they sustain the digital systems and algorithmic operations of those platforms in order to make “sharing” not only economically viable but, above all, profitable. As a result, the historically and culturally important institution of sharing (in the true sense of the word) is thinned out and replaced by the logic of the platform economy, the micro-entrepreneurial ethos of monetizing every aspect of one’s “everydayness”, and the precarity of depending on demand.


Attila Marton is Associate Professor at the Department of Digitalization at Copenhagen Business School. He  focuses the interplay between information management and digital memory studies and the question how we will remember and forget the past in the future.His research can also be found on Academia and ResearchGate.

Academic Reference

[1] See Katz, V. 2015. “Regulating the sharing economy,” Berkeley Technology Law Journal (30:385).

Photo by Fancycrave on Unsplash

 

Consider also our post from last week, dealing with the topic of sharing.

Hybrid organizing in the face of grand challenges

By Ali Aslan Gümüsay.

Sharing is not always caring

In 2015, thousands of refugees arrived in Europe. A recent paper by Kornberger and colleagues (2017) zooms in on the “Train of Hope”, a civil society organization that organically gained exclusive operational command at Vienna’s main train station during this refugee crisis. The paper is a critical reflection on much of the current sharing economy ‘hype’. In contrast to cases of “collaborative consumption”[1], where platform companies such as AirBnB or Uber offer (share?) other people’s resources, this is an exemplary case of engagement and sharing without expectations for direct individual return: a sharing of a concern for social well-being.[2] Sharing then becomes caring.

Hybridity everywhere

What is Train of Hope? It is probably something of a platform and social movement blend that combines various skills like first aid, translation and accommodation services. It is a hybrid organization – and such hybrids seem to pop up everywhere lately. These novel forms of organizing combine different logics, orders of worth, value spheres, organizational forms and/or identities – struggling for a value(s) synthesis.[3] I see incubators, social ventures, ateliers, fab labs struggling to organize, represent and scale – and find their diverse pursuits fascinating, enriching and complementary. They do hybrid organizing in and for society and are frequently novel, digital, flexible, fluid, cross-boundary, multi-jurisdictional, and temporary forms.

Grand challenges & novel forms of organizing

Why now? A potential answer may lie in the types of challenges our societies face. Scholars from the field of management and organization studies speak of “grand challenges”[4] that are complex, uncertain, and multi-jurisdictional phenomena.[5] They represent fundamental, global societal concerns of ecological or social nature that require coordinated and collective efforts of multiple actors, including business firms, governments, civil society, and academia – as well as new forms of (hybrid) organizing.

Together with Emilio Marti (Erasmus University Rotterdam), Hannah Trittin (Leuphana University Lüneburg), and Christopher Wickert (VU University Amsterdam), I have initiated a scientific network that will be funded by the German National Science Foundation (DFG). The network will zoom in over the next three years on the interrelationship between grand challenges and new forms of organizing. Such organizations attempt to tackle the various sustainable development goals from climate change, decent work and sustainable growth, gender equality, populism and racism, societal cohesion, responsible consumption and production, to sustainable cities and communities.

A Janus face

The scientific network takes the vantage point in the assumption that such new forms of organizing often have a Janus face. They are both potential cause and solution for certain grand societal challenges. On the one hand, social entrepreneurial ventures[6], online communities such as Wikipedia and Linux[7], crowd science projects like Foldit, Galaxy Zoo and Polymath[8], and social initiatives like “Train of Hope” promise novel means to tackle these challenges. On the other hand, they also create new ones. For example, crowdsourcing and other new forms of platform-organized work crafted along the surge of the digital economy[9] often fuel the proliferation of precarious, self-employed and low-paid work that undermines social welfare systems and thus endanger modern democracies.[10] Likewise, in her recent book “Weapons of Math Destruction”, O’Neil (2016) describes how the (ab)use of new, seemingly efficient big data management techniques can promote, rather than reduce, racism, inequality and discrimination. Clearly then, novel hybrid forms of organizing promise many opportunities to tackle grand challenges – yet also create new (grand) challenges for society.


Ali Aslan Gümüsay is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Hamburg and Research Fellow at Vienna University of Economics & Business. Twitter: @guemuesay

 

[1] Botsman & Rogers, 2010.

[2] Gümüsay, 2018.

[3] Gümüsay, 2017.

[4] George, Howard-Grenville, Joshi, & Tihanyi, 2016.

[5] Ferraro, Etzion, & Gehman, 2015.

[6] Mair & Martí, 2006.

[7] Garud, Jain, & Tuertscher, 2008.

[8] Franzoni & Sauermann, 2014.

[9] Bauer & Gegenhuber, 2015; Boes, Kämpf, Langes, & Lühr, 2016.

[10] Morozov, 2015.

References

Bauer, R. M., & Gegenhuber, T. 2015. Crowdsourcing: Global search and the twisted roles of consumers and producers. Organization, 22(5): 661–681.

Boes, A., Kämpf, T., Langes, B., & Lühr, T. 2016. “Lean” und “agil” im Büro: Neue Formen der Organisation von Kopfarbeit in der digitalen Transformation, Working Paper Forschungsförderung. Düsseldorf: Hans-Böckler-Stiftung.

Botsman, R., & Rogers, R. 2010. Beyond zipcar: Collaborative consumption. Harvard Business Review, 88(10): 30.

Ferraro, F., Etzion, D., & Gehman, J. 2015. Tackling Grand Challenges Pragmatically: Robust Action Revisited. Organization Studies, 36(3): 363–390.

Franzoni, C., & Sauermann, H. 2014. Crowd science: The organization of scientific research in open collaborative projects. Research Policy, 43(1): 1–20.

Garud, R., Jain, S., & Tuertscher, P. 2008. Incomplete by Design and Designing for Incompleteness. Organization Studies, 29(3): 351–371.

George, G., Howard-Grenville, J., Joshi, A., & Tihanyi, L. 2016. Understanding and Tackling Societal Grand Challenges through Management Research. Academy of Management Journal, 59(6): 1880–1895.

Gümüsay, A. A. 2017. Unpacking entrepreneurial opportunities: an institutional logics perspective. Innovation: Organization & Management, 1–14.

Gümüsay, A. A. 2018. COMMENTARY: Sharing is caring: From material to socio-material sharing. Academy of Management Discoveries. [Forthcoming]

Kornberger, M., Leixnering, S., Meyer, R., & Hoellerer, M. 2017. Rethinking the Sharing Economy: The Nature and Organization of Sharing in the 2015 Refugee Crisis. Academy of Management Discoveries. https://doi.org/10.5465/amd.2016.0138.

Mair, J., & Martí, I. 2006. Social entrepreneurship research: A source of explanation, prediction, and delight. Journal of World Business, 41(1): 36–44.

O’Neil, C. 2016. Weapons of math destruction: how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. London: Allen Lane.

Pic: SDGs, circle, by UN WMO; edited.

Behavioural change in the work environment: a first review on MSC’s sustainable food policy.

By Jan Bauer.

  • MSC reviews six months of its sustainable food policy
  • Setting defaults can be highly effective
  • Guiding principles for the “right” defaults are not always easy to determine

During the summer 2017, the Department for Management, Society & Communication (MSC) at CBS hold a competition among its members to come up with ideas to foster sustainable behaviour within the daily work-life of the department. In addition to talking the talk in lectures and research, MSC hosts the CBS center for Corporate Social Responsibility, we also wanted to walk it.

Among many interesting submissions, the newly founded sustainable infrastructure task force (SIT) awarded the best idea, based on the potential impact and the feasibility of application within MSC. An idea to reduce the consumption of meat was declared as the winner. According to many studies, the reduction of meat reduces CO2 emissions and is associated with various health benefits.

Despite this evidence, banning meat in the department would have certainly and rightfully created substantial backlash. Banning meat would have unlikely been supported by a majority of the department members or its leadership as it can be arguably considered as an overly strong infringement of individual freedom.

Behavioural policy and the power of defaults

Based on a behavioral policy approach, the new food policy, publicly discussed in a department meeting and implemented in October 2017, ultimately changed the choice architecture of the way people order meals for meetings and events. For a trial period of six months, all meals became vegetarian by default; meaning that people get a vegetarian meal unless they actively opt-out and order a meat-based dish with a short email reply or by ticking a button (see example from a recent workshop invitation).

This idea is based on the principle of libertarian paternalism, which aims to steer peoples’ behaviour without restricting the freedom of choice and has been famously advocated by our colleague Cass Sunstein.

The power and controversy about purposefully setting defaults is often discussed in the context of organ donation. There is little doubt about the fact that people’s inertia to register as a donor can be linked to preventable deaths under the opt-out rule. The Netherlands recently change the default on the issue, but not all countries are expected to follow their example.

Predominant support for a sustainable default rule

The trial period of our food policy helped to understand the difficulties of implementing such a policy, e.g. what to do when you cannot ask participants. But it also aimed to collect data on how many vegetarian and meat-based meals were ordered. After the end of the trial period, a survey was conducted to elicit peoples’ attitudes towards and experiences with the policy.

More than 90% of the self-reported food orderings were vegetarian and the survey revealed that a majority supports to expand the policy beyond the trial period. However, the policy was not exclusively received with praise. Different concerns were raised about the policy, including the perception not feeling free to publicly speak up against such an initiative aimed and officially framed to “save the planet”.

Guiding principles: scientific evidence or democratic process?

I am confident that this pilot project will resolve its remaining issues, but the process itself has been a valuable learning experience and sparked some reflection. One issue is the rather simple question on what guiding principle should the default be selected in such an example. Two ideas come to mind instantly: assuming there is corporate interest in the health of employees and low CO2 emissions, the scientific evidence suggests that the vegetarian default should be the preferred way. However, decisions based on naturally broad scientific claims might miss important case-specific aspects, neglect the (corporate) culture and individual preferences.

Alternatively, setting the default by a democratic process might suffer from limited debate for such a morally loaded topic and individual biases against the abstract value of one’s own long-term health or reducing global warming. In principle, the aim should be to maximize overall welfare and nudge people to be “better off as judged by the themselves”. For reasons outlined above, it is not always easy or even fully clear, how and when individual judgement of such a policy should be assessed.

Judgement at the right time

When it comes to the food itself, having the light, vegetarian meal could be judged as less appealing before or during lunch when being extremely hungry, but evaluation might already change shortly after the meal. Reflecting on a meal in a satiated state can alter the importance of different aspects. Research suggests that hunger shifts preferences towards more palatable and less healthy foods, but also repeated exposure to a specific food increases preference for it. Hence, only 30 minutes could make all the difference, but potential benefits to health and environment might manifest in 30 years and only by then alter retrospective evaluation of such a policy.

Even though there is no natural default, most people like eating meat despite potential adverse health effects, including myself, which makes justifying any default rule difficult. In our case, all approaches we tried point towards the same result, which makes us hopeful to do the right thing. A decision to prolong the experimental policy by another year was recently made in the Department Forum. However, it is important to keep in mind that at its worst, this specific policy presents a die-hard meat lover with a vegetarian meal that he forgot to opt-out of – a hopefully rare event I am nevertheless sorry for.


Jan Bauer is Assistant Professor at Copenhagen Business School and part of CBS’ Governing Responsible Business Research Environment. His research interests are in the fields of health economics and consumer behaviour. As part of the Nudge-it Project, he focused on fostering healthy food choices of children and adults.


Photo: courtesy of Felix Bärmann.

Big fuss about a big policy plan – and why this matters for corporate social responsibility: the Chinese social credit system

By Dieter Zinnbauer & Hans Krause Hansen.

Few statist policy blueprints on matters pretty technical have captured our collective imagination as has the Chinese Social Credit System (SCS). Announced by China’s State Council on June 14, 2014, and building on experimentation with related mechanisms since the early 2000s, it sets out a hugely ambitious effort, officially described to instil societal trust, integrity and cohesion in a highly complex society. To get there it seeks to combine cutting-edge technology and vast amounts of data to create incredibly granular behavioural profiles of both companies and individuals. Good and bad behaviours are meant to be recorded in and through elaborate rating systems and blacklists, and made public on digital platforms. The expectation is that punishments and rewards will deter deviance and incentivise good conduct in close to any sphere of life.

With the West in the mirror

After years of relative in-attention, the SCS has loudly burst onto the Western media landscape. Here, it is typically described in Orwellian terms as a totalitarian system of surveillance and control. On closer inspection, the SCS is in fact embryonic, fragmentary and faced with enormous implementation challenges.

But the scale, scope and level of invasiveness associated with the data collection effort currently emerging in China should not look so shockingly unprecedented to Western publics once they begin to scrutinize their own backyards. Take the use of social media in the policing of protests as an example. Here the UK government engages in the analysis of big data to predict, pre-empt and respond in real time to a range of issues, including public dissent. Take information on someone’s physical whereabouts as another example. As it turns out the exact location of cell phone owners in 95% of the US is being tracked with the help of all major carriers in close to real time (ok, with a 15 seconds delay) and related data is being available to nudge people’s behaviour for a wide variety of purposes, e.g. by sending them last-minute campaign pitches when they wait in line outside a particular polling station or anti-abortion messages when they are found to linger outside health clinics that carry out these procedures or by sending political messages when they wait in line outside a particular polling station.

Or take the most popular new media companies. They are collecting extremely granular dockets of what their users do, say and who they socialise with on their own platforms. But less in the spotlight they also track users and non-users alike across millions of other websites and across the bulk of the most popular mobile applications, recording anything from detailed surfing behaviour down to the modes of movement – is the user currently cycling or on the train? What’s more, they increasingly merge theses profiles with billions of data points collected by other parties. One leading new media company claims to have access to information on 70% of all credit card purchases and thus approximating a rather totalitarian 360 degree, 24/7 view of user conduct, all the way to – no kidding – the barometric pressure of the users’ environment.

Public and private entanglements

A special matter of concern in the West relating to SCS is its fusion of socialist government and private sector capabilities, technical affordances and interests that make such a system feasible in the first place.

However, long gone in the West are the times when governments were the main purveyors and guardians of data about their citizens.  Even the holy grail of state information prowess, the census is not immune to private sector resources and influences. The UK government for example is exploring ways to make its census more cost-effective with the help of other big data sources and acknowledges that this will also have to include privately-held ones.

And there is also a proximity of big tech and political actors on a much more fundamental level. Tech companies evolved into some of  the most vocal and most prolific donors and lobbyists on the political scene. An entirely legitimate democratic engagement, but it raises questions about outsize influence given the scale of these efforts. Yet, much more unnerving, the leading social media and tech companies in the US   seconded staff as pro-bono experts to become part of the support teams of most presidential candidates in the run up to the 2016 presidential elections, giving them unique insights and connections into the affairs of some of the leading politicians in the country.

Subtle social sorting and weak institutional safeguards

A factor that explains the extraordinary attention that the SCS has received might pertain to the breadth of sanctions and consequences that these early uses have already resulted in. Bad social credit makes it more difficult for Chinese citizens to travel, find a home or get a job.  Unfortunately, this is nothing new and happens all over the world.  Under the label of risk- management citizens whose criminal record or financial credit history contains some irregularities have long been subjected to inferior treatment when renting a home, looking for a job or seeking insurance.

In principle, the protection of individual rights and limits on state over-reach and surveillance in most western countries relies on a host of elaborate institutional safeguards, checks and balances. While some of the egregious examples referenced above have actually been remedied when they were exposed, thus attesting to some degree of efficacy of legal and broader societal protections, other incidences have not been resolved and are somehow even seen as acceptable.

So shifting some of the attention and moral outrage that is being directed towards the Chinese SCS back to the home turf, and to investigate what troubling data practices and regulatory gaps that are germinating over here is more than warranted. In the wake of the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandals this has begun to happen and more commentators are noting the troublesome parallels between Chinese SCS and emergent data surveillance and discrimination issues in the West.

Enter the urgent business of business

And this is where business and its social responsibility comes in. Because one of the fundamental differences between the SCS and many issues in the West is that the disciplinary power, control functions and discriminatory implications of big data-driven social scoring are not primarily organised and instrumentalised through government, but deployed by the private sector and working their way into everyday lives.

Egged on by a growing populist Tech-lash, a whirlwind of new regulatory efforts and undoubtedly also in many cases by a deeper sense for doing no harm, the new tech companies have begun to take note, moving from denial to a gradual re-examination of some of their working principles, practices and normative anchoring.

Yet, the proof is still in the pudding whether this is a substantive change of minds and hearts. The Performance of the new tech sector on some standard measures of corporate integrity and transparency is still mediocre and lagging many other established industries.

The ways to a much more comprehensive, proactive and transformational integration of corporate social responsibilities into the strategy and practice of tech will have to coalesce around a broad band of issues, ranging from responsible stewardship of data, platform power and emergent artificial intelligence capabilities to bread and butter CSR issues such as responsible corporate political activity and supply chain and subsidiary integrity.

Think tanks and tech activists are putting forward a sprawling pool of ideas and initiatives from data collaboratives or privacy by design standards to high-profile research endeavours into artificial intelligence ethics. Meanwhile  European regulators are putting into force trailblazing rules as we write this column.

But a big tech embrace of a substantive and comprehensive notion of corporate social responsibility is urgently required to stave off the threat of an even more populist, illiberal, unequal, misogynistic and fragile future in which the tech industry is more part of the problem than a solution to it.


Dieter Zinnbauer is Governing Responsible Business Research Fellow at Copenhagen Business School in the Department of Management, Society and Communication.

Hans Krause Hansen is Professor at the Department of Management, Society and Communication at Copenhagen Business School. He teaches and researches about various aspects of public and private governance, including corruption, anti-corruption and transparency regimes in the global North and South.

 

Pic by Alias, Flickr.

‘Just Sustainabilities’ in a World of Global Value Chains

By Stefano Ponte.

What if we used our size and resources to make this country and this earth an even better place for all of us: customers, Associates, our children, and generations unborn? What if the very things that many people criticize us for—our size and reach—became a trusted friend? 

Excerpt from ‘Leadership in the 21st Century’, speech by Lee Scott, then CEO of Walmart, Bentonville, Arkansas, 24 October 2005 (as in Humes 2011: 102)

Whenever we engage in consumption or production patterns which take more than we need, we are engaging in violence.

Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace (2016: 102)

A New Era

Human activity is having major impact on the earth and its biosphere, to the point that geologists have now defined a new era – the Anthropocene – to reflect this phenomenon. For some, this is a period that started in the late 18th century with a marked increase in fossil fuel use, and that has accelerated dramatically since the middle of the 19th century. During this time, human action has overshadowed nature’s work in influencing the ecology of the Earth. Global sustainability crises, such as climate change, the acidification of oceans, and the ‘sixth great extinction’ of planetary life characterize this period of great turbulence in the relation between humanity and nature.

Others question the focus on humanity as an undifferentiated whole in the term ‘Anthropocene’, and propose a different term to explain the same result: Capitalocene, ‘the era of capitalism as a world-ecology of power, capital and nature’ (Moore 2016: 6). This term shifts focus away from the putative duality of human-nature relations and towards capitalism as a way of organizing nature. From a Capitalocene perspective, major changes in the world-ecology started taking place already in the mid-15th century – with a progressive transition from control of land as a way to appropriate surplus value, to control of land as a way of increasing labour productivity for commodity production. In other words, it is not enough to simply examine what capitalism does to nature and how humanity can solve global sustainability challenges through innovation in technology and business models. We need to conceptualize power, value and nature as thinkable only in relation to each other.

Sustainability Management

In addition to cost, flexibility and speed, sustainability management has become another key element of contemporary capitalism. The practices that corporations enact to address sustainability issues are also (re)shaping the existing spatial, organizational and technological fixes that are needed to ensure continuous capital accumulation.  Geographically, production is moving to locations that can meet basic sustainability specifications in large volumes and at low cost; organizationally, multi-stakeholder initiatives on sustainability have come to play a key role in global value chain (GVC) functioning; labour conditions among suppliers are under pressure from the need to meet increasing environmental sustainability demands from lead firms; and the need to verify sustainability compliance has led to the adoption of new technologies of measurement, verification, and trust.

The ‘business case’ for sustainability has been by and large solved – lead firms do not only extract sustainability value from suppliers, but also benefit from internal cost savings, supplier squeezing, reputation enhancement and improved market capitalization. As the value of goods increasingly depends on their intangible properties (including those related to sustainability) than on their functional or economic value, sustainability management becomes a central function of corporate strategy – filtering through organization, marketing, operations and logistics. Lead firms in GVCs are leveraging sustainability to extract more information from suppliers, strengthen power relations to their advantage, and find new venues of value creation and capture.

The business of sustainability is not sufficient as a global solution to pressing climate change and other environmental problems. It is doing enough for corporations seeking to acquire legitimacy and governance authority. This legitimacy is further enhanced through partnerships with governments and civil society groups. Some of this engagement is used strategically to provide ‘soft’ solutions to sustainability concerns and to avoid more stringent regulation. While the business of sustainability is leading to some environmental improvements in some places, and better use of resources in relative terms in some industries, the overall pressure on global resources is increasing. The unit-level environmental impact of production, processing, trade and retail is improving. But constantly growing consumption, both in the global North and in the global South, means that in the aggregate environmental sustainability suffers.

What To Do

Public actors at all jurisdictional levels need to put in place orchestration strategies that improve the actual achievement of sustainability goals, and activists and civil society groups should identify and leverage pressure to strengthen the effectiveness of orchestration. But these strategies have to be informed by the realities of the daily practices, power relations and governance structures of a world economy that is organized in global value chains. Orchestration is more likely to succeed when a combination of directive and facilitative instruments is used; when sustainability issues have high visibility in a global value chains; when the interests of private and public sectors are aligned, and when orchestrators are aware of the kinds of power that underpin the governance of value chains and act to reshape these power configurations accordingly.

A path towards ‘just sustainabilities’ means addressing inequality – since it drives competitive consumption and leads to lower levels of trust in societies, which makes public action more difficult; it entails focusing on improving quality of life and wellbeing, rather than growth; it demands a community economy and more public consumption; it involves meeting the needs of both current and future generations and at the same time reimagining these ‘needs’; it demands a paradigm of ‘sufficiency’, rather than maximization of consumption; it recognizes that overconsumption and environmental degradation impacts on many people’s right to enjoy a decent quality of life; and it requires a different kind of ‘green entrepreneurial state’, which also caters to these needs. Just sustainabilities necessitate building a social foundation for an inclusive and stable economic system that operates within our environmental planetary boundaries; and it demands business to behave responsibly (within its organizational boundaries and along value chains) to maintain its social license to operate.

This text is based on excerpts of Stefano Ponte’s forthcoming book Green Capital, Brown Environments: Business and Sustainability in a World of Global Value Chains, Zed Books: London. The book is based on 20 years of research on sustainability and global value chains, and builds from empirical work on several agro-food value chains (wine, coffee, biofuels) and capital-intensive industries (shipping and aviation).

Stefano Ponte is Professor of International Political Economy in the Department of Business and Politics, Copenhagen Business School and the former academic co-director of the Sustainability Platform at CBS. Twitter: @AfricaBusPol


Selected books for further reading on this topic:

Agyeman, J. 2013. Introducing just sustainabilities: Policy, planning, and practice. Zed Books.

Dauvergne, P. 2016. Environmentalism of the Rich. MIT Press.

Humes, E. 2011. Force of nature: The unlikely story of Wal-Mart’s green revolution. HarperBusiness New York.

Jackson, T. 2009. Prosperity without growth: Economics for a finite planet. Routledge.

Moore, J. 2016. Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, history, and the crisis of capitalism. PM Press.

Shiva, V. 2016. Earth democracy: Justice, sustainability and peace. Zed Books.

 

Pic by Marufish, Flickr.

Wonder Tech and the Institution of Gender

by Jeremy Moon

“I didn’t realize that I was a woman until I went to the US.”

This was the rather arresting comment of a keynote speaker at the WonderTech Summit in Copenhagen, organized by a group of, mainly female, IT professionals. The speaker in question (a Senior Vice President of a leading MNC and leader of a women’s innovation initiative) explained that this awakening to gender was because in her home country, Denmark, she was used to being treated as another ‘person’ and, by inference, equal to men.

I have noted elements of equality in Denmark in: the extent of public funding for schools (overwhelmingly mixed sex) and parental leave; and the involvement of fathers in parenting. However, this is not to suggest that there is no gender institution in Denmark. The speaker referred to her disappointment that Denmark was only ranked 14th in the World Economic Forum Report for Women, and some other speakers alluded to the institution of gender in the tech industry and higher education in Denmark, and the way it worked against women.

Gender as an Institution – marco, meso and micro level

This comment struck me as a nice illustration of the idea of gender as an institution[1]: the way gender delineates the largely taken for granted roles of men and women. At the systemic (macro) level there are the respective norms, laws and rules. At the organizational (meso) level gender regimes shape the ‘way things are done here’. At the individual (micro) level there are the gendered practices in daily interactions. Of course, the gender institution is manifest in different ways in different places as illustrated by the aforementioned speaker’s contrast of its operation in Denmark and the USA.

So what, I wondered, would be the approach to this issue recommended at the conference whose purpose was ‘to celebrate the achievements of women in the industry and inspire diversity in tech’?

I was interested in the way participants addressed gender in their contexts. The aforementioned speaker advised that women disappointed in job / promotion applications, should not complain but try harder and better next time. Another speaker referred to a role model for women in blockchain entrepreneurship who advised ‘not to talk about gender’. The emphasis was upon innovation and taking initiatives at the individual level, and the numerous awards that were made enabled yet more such personal stories to be told. Wilma Rudolph was a used as a role model by one speaker (check out her amazing story of overcoming obstacles of socio-economic means and physical disability alone).

Network merit

Another key theme of the conference was at the meso level but focusing not on the oppressive organization, but on women’s self-help networks for mentoring, capacity building, career modelling, and sheer encouragement. The conference was replete with evidence of network organizations and social enterprises working in the field.

All this was so positive. The conference speakers and participants seem confident in their abilities to work professionally and effectively. There was little sense of inferiority or ‘being a woman’ in their organizations. How representative or scalable are these stories?

Too little attention on the political level

Which leads to my final observation that there was little attention to the systemic, or political, level of the gender institution to advance the careers of participants at WonderTech, even though the conference did give cases of ‘solving problems for people, businesses, and the planet’ (e.g. how ICT could be deployed to address systemic obstacles to equality for women in developing countries?).

Solving Problems for People, Businesses, and the Planet.

Can the inspiring individual stories and the network values and achievements carry the day or will more political action along the lines of the suffragettes or #MeToo be required? This might be to increase female participation in Tech science education, to increase women leaders in the Tech industry, and to enable women not to need ‘to feel like women’ – at least when doing so is a sign of adverse effects of the gender institution?[2]

 

[1] The subject of a forthcoming paper with Lauren McCarthy (more when it is published)

[2] Former Soviet countries lead the EU rankings of women in the tech workforce, presumably a legacy both of their policies of enrolling the brightest students in specialist maths high schools, and of current practices of selecting equal numbers of boys and girls in these schools, and encouraging girls to study computer science at university https://www.ft.com/content/e2fdfe6e-0513-11e8-9e12-af73e8db3c71


Jeremy Moon with some help from Marjahan Begum, Plamena Cherneva, Lavinia-Cristina Iosif-Lazar and Lauren McCarthy.

Jeremy Moon is professor at the Department of Management, Society and Communication, member of the Governing Responsible Business Environment and holds the VELUX Chair of Corporate Sustainability, all at Copenhagen Business School.

 

Pic by Jennifer C, Flickr.

A Taxonomy of Sustainable Business Model Patterns

By Florian Lüdeke-Freund & Sarah Carroux.

In recent years, so-called “sustainable business models” are increasingly gaining in importance in both practice and research.[1] There is hope that business models and business model innovation could, for instance, support the diffusion of ecologically and socially-beneficial products and services in the market.[2] Despite the growing interest, there still exists a lack of systematically-generated knowledge about the different shapes (or “patterns”) such business models can take. Hence, our research project aims to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of presently known business model patterns that can contribute to the diffusion of ecologically and socially beneficial innovations. We developed a structured patterns system, a new taxonomy, of 45 patterns organized into 11 groups, including experts’ expectations for their contributions to sustainable value creation.

Key Objectives of the Study

A broad range of business models are being discussed in current scientific and applied literature. These are often identified as “patterns”.[3] Following Christopher Alexander, a pattern theory pioneer from the field of architecture, a pattern basically represents a solution to a reoccurring problem.[4] What makes patterns so special is that their solutions can be applied in different contexts. For instance, a window is a universal solution for the problem of a lack of lighting in a room. A window exists in different variations and can be applied in various contexts (e.g., for residential buildings, skyscrapers, small windows, large windows etc.). Similarly, business model patterns can be understood as replicable and modifiable solutions to reoccurring business challenges. For instance, the “freemium” business model can not only be used for online services such as Spotify, but also to market high-quality medical services that, depending on patient type, are offered either for “free” or for a “premium” (e.g. Aravind, an eye-care service provider in India).[5] The key objectives of this study are (i) to consolidate the current knowledge about business model patterns with the potential to support sustainable innovations, i.e. to develop a new taxonomy, and (ii) to prepare the foundations for a “sustainable business model pattern language”.[6]

Methodology

We identified a total of 102 potential business model patterns in the relevant literature. These were critically assessed and duplicates or irrelevant items were eliminated, resulting in a sample of 45 patterns. These were reviewed and organized into groups by 10 international experts to condense the large number of patterns in a way that allowed recognizing a systematic order. In the second survey round, the international experts were asked to assess the patterns with respect to their potential contributions to ecological, social, and economic value creation. This enabled us to develop a structured patterns system, a taxonomy, of 45 patterns organized into 11 groups, including experts’ expectations for their contributions to sustainable value creation.

 

Results and Practical Implications

The patterns system is comprised of 45 patterns that were each allocated to one out of the 11 identified groups according to their problem-solution combination. The following groups of sustainable business model patterns were found:

  1. Pricing & revenue patterns
  2. Financing patterns
  3. Eco-design patterns
  4. Closing-the-loop patterns
  5. Supply chain patterns
  6. Giving patterns
  7. Access provision patterns
  8. Social mission patterns
  9. Service & performance patterns
  10. Cooperative patterns
  11. Community platform patterns

These groups can be characterized based on (i) their specific problem-solution combinations (e.g., solving the problem of limited access to health care through a specific pricing model), and (ii) their expected ecological, social, or economic effects (i.e. their expected contribution to sustainable value creation). The patterns system is highly practice-oriented, given the input provided by the experts. For instance, it could be used as an instrument in innovation workshops. Furthermore, our patterns system could be used in combination with business model innovation tools such as the Business Model Canvas, the Business Innovation Kit, or the Smart Business Modeler. Our pattern taxonomy is based on an essential principle in business and innovation: “learning by example”. Companies that want to integrate sustainability into their business models can refer to our taxonomy for guidance and inspiration and use it as a catalogue that also includes practical examples. This means that companies do not have to start from scratch and, instead, can learn from the experiences of others and use these to progress towards sustainability. All-in-all, our sustainable business pattern taxonomy is an efficient and effective instrument that enables practitioners and scholars alike to benefit from vast years of experience. The sustainable business model pattern taxonomy is dynamic in nature and can be easily expanded with new patterns and examples. It can already be used for online business modelling by using the Smart Business Modeler.

[1] Lüdeke-Freund, F. & Dembek, K. (2017): Sustainable Business Model Research and Practice: Emerging Field or Passing Fancy?, Journal of Cleaner Production, Vol. 168, 1668-1678. [ DOI | ResearchGate ]

[2] Boons, F. & Lüdeke-Freund, F. (2013): Business Models for Sustainable Innovation: State of the Art and Steps Towards a Research Agenda, Journal of Cleaner Production, Vol. 45, 9-19. [ DOI | ResearchGate ]

[3] E.g., Remane, G.; Hanelt, A.; Tesch, J. & Kolbe, L. M. (2017): The Business Model Pattern Database — A Tool for Systematic Business Model Innovation, International Journal of Innovation Management, Vol. 21, No. 1, Article No. 1750004. [ DOI ]

[4] Alexander, C.; Ishikawa, S.; Silverstein, M.; Jacobson, M.; Fiksdahl-King, I. & Angel, S. (1977): A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. Cambridge, MA: Oxford University Press. [ Website ]

[5] Breuer, H. & Lüdeke-Freund, F. (2017): Values-Based Innovation Management: Innovating by What We Care About. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. [ Website ]

[6] Lüdeke-Freund, F.; Bohnsack, R.; Breuer, H. & Massa, L. (forthcoming): Research on Sustainable Business Model Patterns – Status quo, Methodological Issues, and a Research Agenda, in: Aagaard, A. (ed.): Sustainable Business Models. Houndmills: Palgrave.


Florian Lüdeke-Freund is a Lecturer at ESCP Europe Business School, Berlin, where he also holds the Chair for Corporate Sustainability. Since 2013, Florian facilitates the research hub www.SustainableBusinessModel.org.

Sarah Carroux is a research associate and doctoral candidate at the University of Hamburg. As member of the Chair of Management and Sustainability, lead by Prof. Timo Busch, Sarah researches topics related to sustainable finance with a strong focus on impact investing, as well as the business case for sustainability and sustainable business models

 

Pic by Eli Duke, Flickr.

Researchers in BLOXHUB seeking to improve indoor climate

by Lara Hale

In the second week of May 2018, the architectural and design worlds were abuzz with reviews of the new green glass giant looming over the Copenhagen harbour – BLOX. There have been critiques of design, urban planning, participation processes, and more, but perhaps less likely to emerge in your social media and news feeds is the nature of organizational development and experimentation designed into the very heart of BLOX.

Physical, organizational and cultural diversity under one roof

BLOX as a physical building is composed of various building elements but is also socially composed of diverse elements. The property is home to the old military storage buildings at Fæstningens Materialgård, still stunning with their yellow-washed walls and currently under renovation for becoming part of the BLOX family of offices and meeting spaces. The new building houses top-floor apartments, a large fitness centre, the Danish Architecture Center (DAC), the Danish Design Center (DDC), and last but not least, BLOXHUB, the new building industry innovation hub.

These last elements are where the organizational potential lies. Firstly, there are the yet-to-be woven together threads that draw across DAC, DDC, and BLOXHUB, opening up for potential co-conferences and exhibitions that not only blend spaces, but blend disciplines. Secondly, BLOXHUB is a non-profit organization of around 150 members (and anticipated to grow) aiming to stimulate innovation for sustainable building and urbanization by facilitating co-working, co-creation, and experimentation. Beyond the potential stemming from sharing working spaces, the hub supports the organization of seminars and conferences and offers access to labs that can serve as platforms for new products or services, including, for example, epiito’s virtual reality (VR) lab and UnderBroen’s maker-space equipment. And thirdly, nested in BLOXHUB is the Science Forum, hosting a suite of built environment researchers.

Smart Building research among industrial researchers

Now the Science Forum is one of my offices-away-from-the-office. Since the start of this year, we are a cluster of nine industrial researchers – seven PhDs and two postdocs – with projects concerning “Smart Buildings and Cities” (read here about the formation of the cluster). Launching from my postdoc project with VELUX and CBS on smart building business model innovation, we have already  identified several crossovers and synthesis possibilities within the first months. This begs the question: what happens when you combine companies, universities, and industrial researchers into an innovation hub? How does this change how research, investment, and innovation are done? And how does this change how industry can relate to academia?

With user-friendly tech to better indoor climate

With VELUX, the starting point is smart device automation, but based on the people who live and work in buildings (read: all of us). But even if the indoor climate is ubiquitous and something we all experience, we also take it for granted and may not even notice how we are feeling unless something disturbs us. Even more importantly, the more serious health consequences of a poor indoor environment stem from factors that cannot necessarily be noticed just by paying attention, including for example, high CO2 levels from poor ventilation or off-gassing chemicals from unsustainable building materials. My research investigates both how smart devices can be designed based on an organization’s inquiry into the user experience, but also how the nature of these user-driven digital devices can change the way traditional manufacturing companies do business.

Much more to expect in the future of BLOX

The project has only been running a few months, and BLOXHUB has only been open not even a month – so there will be many more exciting developments and synergies to report in the future. In the meantime, swing by the great glass giant and experience the shifting landscape around Langebro. You can visit the most recent DAC Exhibition “Welcome Home” looking at how the meaning of home has shifted historically and continues to adapt in Denmark, and your kids can have a go at the new playground on the city-side of the building. A new bicycle and pedestrian bridge is planned for 2019, as well, and then the connections will go even further; from connecting industry and researchers to connecting the city on a level we all can meet.


Lara Anne Hale is an industrial postdoc fellow with VELUX and Copenhagen Business School’s Governing Responsible Business World Class Research Environment. The 3-year project is part of Realdania’s Smart Buildings & Cities cluster within BLOXHUB’s Science Forum. It builds upon her PhD work on experimental standards for sustainable building to look at the business model innovation process in organizations’ adaptation to the smart building business. Follow her on Twitter.

Pic by Michael Levin, taken from BLOX.dk.

Acting Collectively and Bottom-up for Sustainability: Does it work? How do we know? Why does it matter?

by Maria Josefina Figueroa.

Collective bottom-up actions for sustainability are on the rise in many corners of the global community. Actions are inspired by a realization that local solutions present opportunities to also pursue and reach global commitments, especially those agreed by all nations with the Paris climate agreement and the Agenda 2030, and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (short SDGs).

What counts as collective bottom-up action?

A wide array of actions and forms of engagement by civil society, public and private actors can be counted as forms of collective bottom-up action. Examples range from actions of green activist and volunteers in organized community-led activities, over private entrepreneurs in small and medium enterprises and local businesses, to local authorities seeking to engage citizen participation in the implementation of sustainability solutions. With the sense of urgency attributed to both achieving climate goals and the SDGs, a logical expectation can be that increasing bottom-up engagement and action will easily translate into contributions for sustainability. Moving away from a mere presumption to gaining knowledge in support of this case requires posing questions such as these: “Does bottom-up collective acting work for sustainability?”, “How can we know?”, and “Why does it matter that we know?”

Does it work?

From a systems perspective, a simplified affirmative answer can be offered: bottom-up collective actions can play a big or small part toward systemic change. They can do this by setting in motion key system levers or eventually by helping catalyse a movement that can potentially contribute toward systemic change. However, even if this is the case, how can we know that the change set in motion will be advancing important sustainability goals?

How do we know?

The answer can be approached within a variety of disciplinary fields. These include (but are not limited to) social science, engineering, psychology, economics, political science, technological innovation studies and economy-energy studies. Some approaches target consumption and production, behaviour, lifestyles, and service provision; others target systemic infrastructure impacts and technology choices. Each approach favours a partial disciplinary assessment. Each field converges towards certain expert knowledge which tends to make its use difficult in an open public conversation or public deliberation. Gaining full understanding of the way collective bottom-up actions can work for sustainability requires further efforts to synthesize partial field approaches and for learning in action.

Recent efforts by the international research community are helping advance multidisciplinary frameworks for assessment and systemic thinking in approaching complex sustainability challenges and solutions. Evolving research efforts in multi-disciplinary teams are helping find ways of bridging evidence from natural and social systems with political and ethical considerations. The results offer a more complete evaluation of bottom-up actions’ impacts, synergies and potential conflicts. Similarly, they offer a scope for creative thinking and innovation enlarging the sustainable solutions space.

Experimentation, assessment, learning and knowledge creation approaches are a necessary component of the transition

Why does it matter to know if bottom-up actions work for sustainability?

Here are three reasons why it matters. First, because gaining knowledge of what constitutes effective collective action is essential for informed decision-making at all levels. There is a short time span for countries to deliver on their commitments to limit global warming below dangerous levels and to achieve SDGs as an integrated vision. More knowledge can make clear the opportunities for innovation and help to understand where trade-offs may be unavoidable.

Second, because sustainability gains may be easier to obtain and assess locally but it is also important to learn how they can be scaled up and offer improvements toward global goals.

Finally, because experimentation, assessment, learning and knowledge creation approaches are a necessary component of this transition, in this process universities have a very important role to play.

The task of universities is to form well-equipped sustainability professionals with strong capabilities to work in multi-disciplinary teams. General eagerness to understand the systemic interconnections between sustainability and climate challenges and solutions is just as important.

So far, this task has been addressed in Denmark by the University of Copenhagen (UCPH), the Danish Technical University (DTU) and Copenhagen Business School (CBS) joint developing electives (e.g. this and this) that can be chosen by students from any discipline and from any of the three universities – provided their study board will accept the course for credit.

Universities have unique resources and facilities to contribute in strengthening the knowledge creation, self-awareness, complex system thinking and multidisciplinary learning process. They can help enrich and transform the scope of bottom-up collective action into plausible solutions that pave a sustainability-transition path.


Maria Josefina Figueroa is assistant professor and academic coordinator of the Copenhagen Sustainability Initiative COSI at Copenhagen Business School. She is also lead author of the IPCC Fifth and coming Sixth Assessment Report.

Pic by Sharon Mollerus, Flickr

Droned

by Glen Whelan.

A Military Heritage

A drone is an unmanned aircraft. Long used to refer to male honeybees – whose main function is to fertilize a receptive queen bee (and then die a seemingly horrific death) the word was first used to refer to remote-controlled aircraft by the US Navy back in the 1930s. The word was chosen as a homage to ‘the Queen Bee’, a remote-control aircraft that the Royal Navy demonstrated to the US Navy, and that inspired the US Navy to develop similar aircraft.

In the 1990s, the word drone was being used as a verb to describe the act of turning a piloted aircraft into an unpiloted one.[i] And by 2009, the word drone was being used to describe the act of remotely killing someone. As Fattima Bhutto wrote in 2009:

“Droned” is a verb we use now in Pakistan. It turns out, interestingly enough, that those US predator drones that have been killing Pakistani citizens almost weekly have been taking off from and landing within our own country. Secret airbases in Balochistan – what did we ever do before Google Earth? [ii]

Various Civilian Uses

With the development of consumer market autonomous drones[iii] that can be told to follow yourself or another person, it seems that the word ‘droned’, or ‘droning’, is soon to be used more regularly. Rather than just being used to describe acts of murder (or defense), however, it seems it will be used to refer to the act of being filmed or recorded by (autonomous) flying devices more generally.

Such filming will clearly be a good thing for legitimate film-making. And there are possibilities for autonomous drones to be used to improve accountability: as a form of sousveillance in response to surveillance by the powerful. But drones have other uses as well. Indeed, there are already numerous cases of drones being used for stalking around the world. Late last year for example, it was reported that:

“A group of women living in a rural setting near Port Lincoln on South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula have been woken at night by a drone looking into their home…. One of the women, who like the rest of the group did not want to be identified, was asleep and alone at home on her relatively remote hobby farm. She was woken by a bang on her bedroom window and when she looked out into the darkness was confronted by a camera attached to a drone, hovering within centimetres of her window”.

Technologically Changing Society

Whilst such reports are alarming, Nick Bilton[iv] has used a personal anecdote to suggest that the negatives of being droned could be overstated. As he writes:

“I was sitting in my home office, working on this very column about neighbours getting into arguments over drones, when I heard a strange buzzing sound outside. I looked up and hovering 20 feet (around 6 metres) from my window was a black drone with a beady-eyed camera pointed at me.

At first, I was upset and felt spied upon. But the more I thought about it, the more I came to the opposite conclusion. Maybe it’s because I’ve become inured to the reality of being monitored 24/7, whether it’s through surveillance cameras or Internet browsers. I see little difference between a drone hovering near my window, and someone standing across the street with a pair of binoculars. Both can peer into my office.”

Whether or not the majority of people would agree, or disagree, with Bilton’s sentiment, is well beyond the present piece. But what should be noted with regard to it, is that he seems to be correct to emphasize that droning will have a material impact on what we deem (un)acceptable. Thus, as more and more people get droned – and as the capacity to make more sophisticated autonomous drones gathers pace – we should expect social norms and practices regarding privacy and personal (air) space to change as well.


Glen Whelan teaches at McGill, is a Visiting Scholar at York University’s Schulich School of Business, and the social media editor for the Journal of Business Ethics. He was GRB Fellow at CBS in 2016/2017.  His research focuses on the moral and political influence of corporations, and high-tech corporations in particular. He is on twitter @grwhelan.

Links

[i] Zimmmer, B. 2013. The flight of ‘drone’ from bees to planes. The Wall Street Journal, July 26. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324110404578625803736954968

[ii] Bhutto, F. 2009. Missing you already. New Statesman, March 12. https://www.newstatesman.com/asia/2009/03/pakistan-war-government-terror

[iii] https://www.skydio.com

[iv] Bilton, N. 2016. When your neighbor’s drone pays an unwelome visit. The New York Times, January 27. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/28/style/neighbors-drones-invade-privacy.html

Pic by Cambodia, P.I. Networt, Flickr. No changes made.

Bottom-up Sustainability: Let’s make CBS the First Business School with a Green Community Currency!

by Stine Eiersholt & Lena Tünkers.

In an earlier BOS article, Louise Thomsen from CBS PRME asked the question whether universities are falling behind on the green transition. We, as students, might not feel resourceful enough to bring up the debate about sustainable development and large-scale transitions. But in fact, we have tremendous possibilities to help our own institutions walk the walk towards reaching a more sustainable environment, for example with a campus currency.

One foot first and then another

We are students. We don’t have to wait for people in a boardroom to decide whether or not to add sustainability to the agenda. We can start taking the first steps now. Today. You can actively engage with socially responsible or green student organizations, participate in events concerning everything from circular economy to the sustainable development goals (SDGs) and you can try and influence such things as how the canteen handles food waste. Why not just take an extra step and start transforming the campus ourselves? That is what the SuPo community currency project is all about: Creating bottom-up sustainability at CBS campus. Since the beginning of the project, we have already taken many steps, some of which took us down the busy streets of Manhattan towards the office of the UN Global Compact.

1 Hackathon, 4 SDGs and 3 strangers

Let’s rewind for a second to explain how we ended up in the Big Apple on a chilly day in March. This recap is for those of you, who have been so focused on this semester’s curriculum that words such as SuPo, Sustainable Campus Hackathon and PRME have escaped your vocabulary.

The number 3 has always been magical. We were three girls, from three different countries and three different universities who met for the first time during the Sustainable Campus Hackathon in November 2017 at the Student & Innovation House. The hackathon involved four SDGs and the aim was to encourage sustainability-driven changes of the CBS campus. Coincidentally, we decided to team up to develop an idea related to green infrastructure during the day-and-a-half long case competition. After walking around in circles for 6 hours trying to come up with the right idea, we somehow had a ‘light bulb moment’ after some much-needed pizza: the idea of SuPo was born.

SuPo; a CBS community currency to promote sustainable behaviour where virtual points can be earned and spent around the campus. Suddenly we were rushing through a 4-minute pitch, first at a preliminary heat, then the finale. It felt unbelievable, but we won. Now to the exciting stuff: Besides implementing SuPo at CBS, the prize included flying to New York City to present our idea to the joint UN Global Compact and PRME office!

The project takes off

Thanks to our jetlag, there was no need to set an alarm as we were wide awake by 3 am anyway. Over the last few weeks we have been excitedly talking about this day so many times, each day with increasing anticipation. Today was finally the day: The bags were packed, the presentation was tuned, the shirt ironed. We were ready to present at the UN Global Compact office and share with them how we thought this project could transform our campus for the better. It felt like a massive step. And it was still just 5 am.

SuPo took a bite of the Big Apple

To start off on the right leg that morning, we had a good old American bagel with coffee before rushing through the busy underground metro network to the first meeting of the day. After an introduction by the UN Global Compact and PRME, we took the floor and presented the Sustainable Campus Hackathon as well as the ideas, collaborations and visions behind the SuPo project. The 2-hour long meeting was an incredible experience for us and everyone present participated in the discussion after the presentation. The idea about a community currency based on sustainable behaviour definitely gained support, as one of the UN interns was asked to research the possibilities of inferring a similar system within the UN office. Mission accomplished!

Our next stop was the Social Innovation Lab of Fordham University which is located right at South Central Park. Our morning bagels were long gone by now, so our empty stomachs were rumbling when a range of American pizzas were brought in. You know, the thick, cheesy, mainly meat style pizzas you see Joey eat in Friends. We started the meeting by giving a less detailed presentation of SuPo. Afterwards, the Social Innovation Lab students shared their own projects and interests which ranged from projects on self-sufficient housing to project collaborations with large environmental-advocacy networks. Impressive. Later that day, we received emails from the professors present at the university meeting highlighting their interest in testing SuPo at Fordham as soon as a pilot project has been developed at CBS. They were also eager to organize their own Sustainable Campus Hackathon with help from the organizers in Copenhagen. What a day!

Get involved and create change

It took one hackathon and one good idea before we sat at the long meeting room table in the UN Global Compact office. It took a few more meetings at home before we were able to sit around that table and talk about collaborations on sustainability across the Atlantic. If we can do that in the space of four months, so can you. Get involved around campus, make up your own projects or join the SuPo community. We would love to get involved and take our next steps with you.

Since the hackathon, SuPo has grown to become a CBS-owned project with funding and staff support. The short-term aim of the project is to develop a simulation of the community currency and a pilot project at CBS. Never before has a community currency been introduced to a Business School – SuPo could be the first one. So rather than closing the SuPo chapter after NYC, we embrace the positive response we got on our trip and will use it to push harder for the development of SuPo. The difficult but exciting journey of creating a reward system for sustainable behaviour on CBS campus is just taking off.

If you want to be part of the future SuPo story and join a thrilling sustainable movement to make an impact, get in contact or like & follow us on Facebook and Instagram.


Stine Eiersholt is a MSc in Climate Change student at the University of Copenhagen and works as a student assistant at Climate-KIC – a European climate innovation initiative. In her free time, she hosts a podcast called Influenced by Nature with the aim to highlight people and projects striving to solve climate change, environmental and sustainability related issues.  Follow her on Twitter: @inflbynature

Lena Tünkers is a master student at CBS studying Organizational Innovation and Entrepreneurship with a strong interest in innovative business models that lead to more sustainable behavior.

Making it to the World Heritage List: Envisioned and Hidden Effects

By Lotte Thomsen.

UNESCO’s World Heritage designation of places around the world has the honorable purpose of taking responsibility. Taking responsibility for the preservation of things that may otherwise be left unpreserved, and for which destruction would be a severe loss. Yet, making it to the World Heritage List is known to have both positive and negative effects that reach far beyond the  preservation of, for example, architecture. It may change the daily life of host communities immensely – not least in the Global South. The World Heritage site of Hoi An in central Vietnam is one of those places in which listing has led to preservation and enormous change at the same time! The city itself certainly is both well-preserved and stunning. But what is going on behind the facades of the beautiful old houses that millions of tourists visit every year? And what are the effects on the business sector?  

‘Authenticity’ and Retail in Hoi An
In the newly published article ‘Retail in Places of World Heritage and Transition: Selling Clothes to Tourists in a Context of ‘Planned Authenticity’’ (Thomsen, 2018), I show how Hoi An’s transformation into a heritage tourism site has led to the emergence of a clothing retail sector that barely existed before. The sector plays a key role in the city’s contemporary tourism industry, and has come to appear as an ‘authentic’ part of the landscape of ancient buildings and monuments.

The paper shows how the creation of a clothing retail market was linked to a well-planned configuration of an ‘authentic’ Tailor City. It is to a large extent a reflection of interactions between the transitional Vietnamese economy and heritage listing. And it is reinforced by the urge of tourists to buy presumed place-specific products such as souvenirs or tailored clothes to preserve their memories of the place of Hoi An – regardless of how few links such products actually have to the place or its history and traditions.

A Retail Landscape of Opportunities and Challenges
So, why is this revitalization of Hoi An not merely impressive, but also in some ways problematic, not least seen from a development perspective?

Well, heritage designation did in many ways boost the city’s economy, making Hoi An one of Vietnam’s largest tourist attractions. And surely this came about due to extremely well targeted and impressive local planning in interplay with the World Heritage listing. It also created much needed jobs and prosperity linked to the tourism industry in the formerly poor agrarian area. Still, the revitalization of the city also represents a development that is highly uneven. It has made certain people more powerful, some activities and products more important and ‘authentic’, and some retailers better positioned in Hoi An’s tourism economy than others.

The paper shows how the opportunities of the clothing retailers vary significantly and are related to their status within a network of tourism stakeholders. A network that is intrinsically related to the ways that businesses and the state interact in Vietnam’s transitional economy. My intention here is not at all to point fingers at the Vietnamese authorities that cleverly utilized highly needed opportunities for economic development. What else should they have done? My intention is also not really to blame UNESCO that acted to preserve invaluable world heritage.

The impact on clothing retailers that are explored in much more detail in the paper was not easily foreseen. Yet, certain consequences could perhaps have be mitigated if international interventions like those of UNESCO are done with more caution and based on a deeper understanding of those local contexts and relations they tip into.

The example of Hoi An surely serves to remind us to critically assess and consider all kinds of effects of interventions locally. It reminds us of the importance of understanding better how different types of interventions – that undoubtedly are essential in their own right and done in the spirit of responsibility – play out differently in different places.

The full paper can be accessed via this temporarily free link: Thomsen, L. (2018). Retailing in places of World Heritage, transition and “planned authenticity.” Geoforum,91, 245–252.


Lotte Thomsen is Associate Professor of Business and Development at the Department of Management, Society and Communication at Copenhagen Business School. She holds a PhD in economic geography from Copenhagen University.

Pic by Qui Nguyen Khac, Pixabay.

Why it Doesn’t Matter that Facers are Annoying

By Jacob Schjødt.

You are walking down a high-traffic street in Copenhagen minding your own business. You’re thinking about the new pair of pants you’re about to buy. But then. About 30 meters ahead. You see something that immediately provokes a feeling of mild anxiety. You decide to take a detour, and walk to the very edge of the street. But it’s too late. You have already been spotted. A friendly looking young man with long hair, piercings and a big smile calls at you. ‘Is it me, he’s calling at?’ you ask yourself – hoping the answer to be ‘no’. But it is you. You have been caught. By a Facer.

What is a Facer?
In the most general sense, a Facer is a professional salesperson who sales products, services or memberships face-to-face. Facers are usually found on high-traffic shopping streets in large cities. Facers can take many forms and promote various causes, ranging from Scientology to insurance and memberships to charities. In this blog, I will only consider the latter, as you know them from Unicef, Amnesty, Care etc.

Why Facers are annoying
Usually when people talk about facers, they readily settle on the apparent fact that Facers are rather, if not very, annoying. And, in general, I agree with these people: Facers are annoying. They force you out of your comfort zone, they completely ignore your interests, and they ask you to consider something that is not at all related to your life. Facers force you into a situation in which you have to choose between two negative outcomes: 1) feel bad about not helping someone in need or 2) give away money that you had other plans with. Also, facers are fake. Facers pretend to like you, just to get your money. This creates an unfamiliar and unpleasant encounter in which it’s easy to feel that you have to be rude to maintain a sense of control. And the list goes on…

And Why it Doesn’t Matter That They Are
The situation is clear. Facers are super annoying. But to jump from this fact of reality to the conclusion, that one should not support their cause – or that it’s fine to talk ill of them – is a school book example of an ad hominem argument. Contrary to many other cases of ad hominem thinking, however, we can actually justify Facer’s annoying behaviour (assuming that we sympathize with the charity they are promoting).

A decent facer can sign up 3 new members on a 6 hour shift, and these member will donate around 75-150 DKK per month. A charity membership lasts about 1.5 years on average (an estimate), and a Facer makes around 120DKK per shift (depending on their salary model). If a Facer works 2 times per week, he/she will then make around 60.000 DKK in a year, and earn the charity well above 400.000 DKK. If you thought being annoying could save lives, wouldn’t you be annoying?

Beware of the Facer Fallacy
Our tendency to found moral arguments on unpleasant feelings is one of the most heavily supported claims in moral psychology (Haidt, 2001; 2012, Haidt et al., 2000; Greene, 2001; 2009; 2014). I think that Facer-bashing is a solid example thereof. I think that we too readily succumb to a ‘if the messenger is annoying, he cannot be on to something’, fallacy when it comes to Facers, and that we should make an effort to develop a more positive attitude towards these people and their work.

References

  • Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108(4), 814–834. https://doi.org/10.1037//0033-295X.108.4.814

  • Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind. Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion …, (January), 1–508. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107415324.004

  • Haidt, J., Bjorklund, F., & Murphy, S. (2000). Moral dumbfounding: When intuiton finds no reason. Working Paper. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107415324.004

  • Greene, J. (2014). Moral Tribes. Emotion, Reason and the Gap Between Us and Them, 300. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107415324.004

  • Greene, J. D., Sommerville, R. B., Nystrom, L. E., Darley, J. M., & Cohen, J. D. (2001). An fMRI investigation of emotional engagement in moral judgment. Science, 293(5537), 2105–2108. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1062872

  • Greene, J. D. (2009). Dual-process morality and the personal/impersonal distinction: A reply to McGuire, Langdon, Coltheart, and Mackenzie. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45(3), 581–584. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2009.01.003

Jacob Schjødt is a Master student of Business Administration and Philosophy at CBS and Student assistant at CBS PRME. He has been responsible for organising the first Students for the Global Goals Festival at CBS on April 11, 2018. Follow CBS PRME on Facebook and Twitter for the latest updates.

Pic by Daniel Lombraña González, Unsplash. Edited by BOS.

CSR: When High Aspirations Go Low – and How to Avoid it

By Peter Winkler & Michael Etter.

Managers’ public claims to improve CSR can have self-persuasive effects on corporations and their members. However, sometimes such “aspirational talk” can have the opposite effect. We explain why this may happen and how to avoid it.

“Green washing” or “smoke and mirrors” are labels that are often attached to the promises of managers who publicly claim to improve CSR. CBS researchers have challenged this sceptical view and argue that “aspirational talk” by managers, by raising public expectations and scrutiny, can make corporations and their members live up to these aspirations.

Sometimes, however, we argue that even the best-intended aspirations can have opposite, even detrimental effects. In the following we provide some reflections on the conditions, under which high CSR aspirations may “go low” and we suggest some ideas how to prevent such outcome.

From persuasive to provisional aspirations
Aspirations are helpful to direct and motivate employees. However, the last thing managers need on a mission towards substantial corporate responsibilisation are “blind believers”. Employees, who simply rely on a visionary manager and do not voice, where current business conduct impedes aspired CSR, will contribute little to change. Hence, we propose that managers should avoid getting too persuasive and creating “corporate cultism” around aspired CSR. Rather, managers should signal that visions are provisional and that employees, who critique contradictions between vision and reality, are the true driver of change.

From insistent to revisable aspirations
We suggest that managers should not stick too closely to their initial CSR aspirations. As innovation research tells us, insistence on initial ideas is never a good advisor to affect change. In contrary, managerial insistence on initial CSR aspirations may prevent that different ideas about future CSR by employees develop. Hence, managerial willingness to revise their aspirations in accordance to what employees consider responsible practice is crucial. After all, it is the employees who enact CSR in their daily work.

From broad to locally grounded aspirations
Aspirations, by nature, have a bias when it comes to envisioned scope and gravity. Dreams are larger than life. On a managerial mission towards better CSR, hence, the goal cannot, and maybe should not be to live up to managerial ideas. Rather, we suggest that corporate responsibilisation is about local grounding and depth of CSR in situated understandings and practices. In other words, CSR is less a question of reaching an aspired scope, but about winning depth and grounding in corporate practices.

Our ideas should by no means discourage managers to think big and speak out about CSR. However, we suggest that voicing CSR aspirations is only the first step. In a second step, managers might need to modify or sacrifice these aspirations for locally committed CSR practices.


Peter Winkler is a FH professor at the FHWien der WKW – University of Applied Sciences in Management and Communication, Vienna, and guest professor in organizational communication at the University of Salzburg, Austria. He is interested in sociological approaches to organizational and management communication research. In 2015/16, he was a research fellow at the Governing Responsible Business Research Environment at CBS.

Michael Etter, Ph.D., is a Marie Curie Research Fellow at Cass Business School, City University of London. He is interested in CSR, new ICTs, and social approval of firms. He tweets about media, technology, and business & society issues @MichaelEtter_.

Pic by Nick Fewings, Unsplash.

The Winners and Losers of Reward-based Crowdfunding

By Kristian Roed Nielsen.

Proponents of reward-based crowdfunding have touted its emergence as an alternative source of innovation finance as an exciting and democratizing event. This democratization is enabled via the unique blend of crowdsourcing (Poetz and Schreier 2012) and micro-financing (Morduch 1999). Fundraising is enabled by a widely dispersed community of users, whose interactions are facilitated by one or more platforms (e.g., IndieGoGo, Kickstarter, Kiva), trading “a small group of sophisticated investors” for “large audiences (the ‘crowd’)” (Belleflamme, Lambert, and Schwienbacher 2014:2). But how does the change in investors really change who is rewarded – basically who are the winners and losers of reward-based crowdfunding? It was with this question in mind that Caleb Gallemore, Kristjan Jespersen and I set out to follow the money and identify exactly where and who benefits from this new source of finance by analyzing data from the large US-based reward-based platform IndieGoGo.

Where does the (crowd) money go and why?
Firstly, and perhaps not surprisingly, it appears that it is the already affluent regions that benefit the most from crowdfunding activities, while less well-off areas still receive the short end of the stick. Clearly while crowdfunding may offer an extra opportunity for achieving financing, this does not offset other factors that play an important role in entrepreneurial success e.g. background, education and social network that favour areas already affluent.

More surprisingly we also found that increased competition – i.e. more campaigns – actually increase the likelihood of funding success. For each percentage increase in the number of campaigns in the same neighborhood, we estimate a decrease of about 11% in the odds that each of those campaigns will receive no funding pledges. Indicating the increased competition actually results in a net positive outcome where campaigns rather than leeching of one another, generate momentum for further success. This may be because of increased levels of visibility of crowdfunding activities as a whole at the local level. In other words, people living in areas with more crowdfunding activities might be more aware of the practice, increasing the pool of potential investors. Another possibility is that areas with high levels of crowdfunding activities might generate local communities that can share knowledge and advice about the process, improving the quality of local ventures.

Finally, and still undergoing analysis, we increasingly find that certain people are – naturally – more successful then others at achieving crowdfunding success. Witnessing that for each successful campaign launched by an individual or group the likelihood for future success increases dramatically – hence after five successful campaigns launched by a given person or group they have a near 100 pct. chance of future success. We are perhaps witnessing the birth of the professional crowdfunder.

Crowdfunding as the democratizing agent of innovation?
As money seems to coalesce around certain regions and individuals we have to wonder whether this trend will continue. Will we increasingly see certain regions and individuals benefitting while other less well-off or professional lose out? And what does this mean for crowdfunding as the democratizing agent of innovation? It offers opportunity for you and I to drive innovation, but that innovation process itself perhaps unsurprisingly still seems to cluster around certain regions and persons. While this is by no means the final word – this is still early day research of only one sample – these observations nevertheless complicate the idea of relying on crowdfunding as a new mechanism for economic development, poverty reduction, or social action. While crowdfunding certainly provides a new way to access capital, it may not provide such access equitably.


Kristian is Assistant Professor at the Department of Management, Society and Communication and Visiting Researcher at Mistra Center for Sustainable Markets – Stockholm School of Economics. His research explores the potential role that “the crowd” could play in enabling sustainable entrepreneurship and innovation. Follow him on Twitter @RoedNielsen.

Pic by olgavisavi, via Fotolia.

Is Social Media Redefining the Pursuit of Social Change?

By Daniel Lundgaard.

  • Social media has become a battleground where NGOs with global perspectives, corporations and new digital social movements all fight to shape public opinion in the pursuit of social change
  • Though often criticized for the low quality of online deliberation, social media has become one of the primary avenues for diffusion of information, and increasingly an embedded part of our infrastructure
  • This calls for more research on how social media is changing various aspects of our lives and how we, through collaborative efforts, may foster change

Approximate Reading Time: 2-3 min.

Social Media for Social Change?
The impact of social media on the way we live our lives is undeniable. Recent statistics suggests that there are more than three billion active social media users. This makes social networking sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter some of the most influential contexts regarding diffusion of information and they are, to a certain extent and as many of us would admit, emotionally contagious. This has created a digitalized world where social media has ‘given a voice to the people’, as civil society can use social media to express concerns. However, the debate about whether expressing concerns through social media leads to any substantial change is only just at the beginning.

What is your take on this? Is social media cultivating global collaboration and facilitating a pursuit for a better world, or instead disrupting the debate by cultivating polarization and fragmentation? – And are these two arguments necessarily mutually exclusive? Join me as we explore these two sides a bit further to understand how social media might be the key to pursuing social change.

The two sides of the debate
On the one side of the debate, we have the argument that social media facilitates constructive, powerful and impactful digitally networked action to pursue social change, as for example seen with the Arab Spring and recently the #Metoo movement. This follows the argument that these online platforms are evolving from a tool for social interaction towards becoming an embedded part of our infrastructure and some of the primary contexts for collaborative efforts.

On the other side, we have the argument that simply enabling collaborative efforts is not enough to promote social change, as social media is argued to be “ripping apart the social fabric of how society works” (former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya. The challenge is that social media is heavily criticized for disrupting the pursuit for social change by cultivating echo-chambers, destructive polarization, fake-news and filter bubbles which hinder constructive online deliberation. This critique is further substantiated by critics arguing that social media cultivates non-committal activism (often referred to as slacktivism), which can thwart efforts to achieve social change, as ‘likes’ or ‘shares’ still can’t be eaten, and sharing or liking an image of a starving child doesn’t solve any issues by itself.

Why you shouldn’t disregard social media’s potential
The keywords here are “by itself”, because while the isolated ability for social media to cultivate social change is questioned, social media’s ability to connect millions of disparate actors and facilitate engagement in collaborative efforts cannot be denied. Social media has the innate ability to link individual contributions and facilitate large-scale collaboration that leads to a better outcome than what each individual could have achieved on his or her own as for example illustrated by how Change.org and SumOfUs.org use social media to fight social injustice and socially irresponsible corporations. Fostering polarization might very well be destructive, but it can also be constructive and facilitate social change by inspiring stronger commitment within specific groups, which might help ‘fuel’ collaborative efforts towards more substantial change.

These two sides are thus not necessarily mutually exclusive, as the coherent large-scale collaboration potentially benefit from emerging through more polarized communities that can give a ‘voice’ to otherwise squelched and ‘minor’ opinions, as seen with the #BlackLivesMatter-movement and the #Metoo-movement. The key to using social media in the pursuit for social change is therefore to harness the ability for social media to link disparate like-minded actors and facilitate coherent large-scale collaboration, as illustrated by the Occupy Wall Street-movement as well as the Tunisian uprising that sparked the Arab Spring. The ability to connect globally disparate actors based on perceived shared values and some form of collective mind-set is thus one of the primary ways that social media is changing the pursuit for social change.

Social media has become a battleground
These examples illuminate that social media has become a battleground where NGOs with global perspectives, corporations and new digital social movements all fight to shape public opinion on the pursuit for social change. The important thing to note is that we are seeing the beginning of change. Implications of business practices are becoming a matter of civic concern, as evidenced by how consumers use social media to express their concerns and continuously attempt to influence corporate behavior in the pursuit for a better world. Social media is thus at the core of pursuing social change, as consumers can circumvent the traditional ‘gate-keeping’ function of traditional media and directly interact with organizations, which to a certain extent have empowered the digitalized civil society.

The critique of social media should however not be disregarded. Echo-chambers can be highly destructive, and social networking sites can create personalized ‘bubbles’ where your exposure to information is determined by the platform, as illustrated by the recent Facebook-data leak suggesting that data was harvested and exploited in an attempt to reshape political deliberation.

However, using the strengths of social media to unite in numbers has undoubtedly created new opportunities for us as consumers to affect public opinion towards an increased emphasis on social responsibility and social change. The next question is then how these collaborative efforts lead to substantial change, potentially by influencing the behavior of organizations, which is something I will continue to investigate in my research going forwards.


Daniel Lundgaard is a PhD fellow at the CBS Governing Responsible Business Research Environment. His research is mainly focused on the impact of the digital transformation, in particular, how social media has ‘given a voice to the people’ as a way to challenge norms and dominating discourses, and thereby changed our world and influenced the relationship between business and society.

Pic by Kym Ellis via Unsplash, edited by BOS.

Who is Responsible for Educating Students in the World’s Agenda on Sustainable Development, if not Universities?

By Louise Kofod Thomsen.

In September 2017, the CBS PRME office hosted a small SDG awareness event at Solbjerg Plads. At the event, the students were asked to answer a brief survey in order to assess their awareness of the SDGs. Out of the 108 students, 67,6 percent indicated that they did not know about the sustainable development goals. From the students who indicated that they knew about the goals, 82,9 % answered that they learned about them outside of CBS.

But let’s zoom out from CBS for a moment and look at some examples from Danish business society. The Danish Global Compact Network was launched on 24 October 2017. This marked an increased focus on the private sector’s crucial role in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals in Denmark. Another recent event was the launch of the SDG Accelerator, a DKK 3 billion initiative by the UNDP (UN Development Programme) in collaboration with Industriens Fond with the aim to empower 20 SMEs with competencies to work strategically with the SDGs.

Funded by the Carlsberg Foundation, UNLEASH was held for the first time in Aarhus in August 2017, and gathered 1000 talents (students and alumni) from around the world to spend 5 days developing concrete solutions to the SDGs. The list of SDG initiatives in corporate sector could go on, but this is just to state that the corporate sector is mobilizing, we are seeing more investments focusing on SDG activities and even the Danish Parliament now has a Cross-Political Network on the Global Goals.

There is no doubt that the SDGs will be a strong influencer on the strategies and activities of the above-mentioned stakeholders until 2030. In the light of these developments, can universities afford not to take action?

Students do not learn about the SDGs from CBS
It has been two years since the SDGs were launched, but when CBS PRME hosted the SDG awareness event in September 2017, that was the first time the SDGs were present at a public event at CBS. This is while the DANIDA (The Danish International Development Agency), in collaboration with the UNDP, has developed teaching material and platforms for Danish highschool students and teachers. Highschools now host theme weeks on the SDGs providing the students with knowledge, opinions and competencies related to the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

At university level, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation (KADK) is now requiring all graduates to incorporate the SDGs into their final projects and DTU has established a team of 3 working closely with DTU top management on implementing the SDGs at the university.

While we should acknowledge the CBS courses including SDGs into curriculum and teaching, CBS needs to take a much stronger stand and acknowledge the SDGs as a crucial part of all business education. It is time we break down the belief that the SDGs are not part of e.g. finance and accounting and acknowledge that sustainable development are relevant for all discplines and practises if you want a sound and longlasting business.

Universities can benefit greatly from engaging in the SDGs
A report developed by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network in collaboration with Monash University, University of Wellington and Macquarie University argues that universities not only have a critical role to play in achieving the SDGs, but will also benefit greatly from doing so. Among the benefits, the report mentions an increased demand for SDG related education, a framework for demonstrating impact, accessing of new funding streams and collaboration with new external and internal partners. Evident of this is PRMEs upcoming SDG Day 11 April with 13 student organizations coordinating a full day of SDG activities and events all funded by Chr. Hansen, VELUX and Ørsted who got engaged when they heard “SDGs in a business context”.

Education is at the core of achieving the SDGs, and universities are with their teaching and research activities of fundamental importance to the implementation of the goals. The SDGs are a global framework and shared language and understanding of the world’s development with strong buy-ins from governments, business, civil society, foundations and other universities. CBS can benefit greatly from this support and use the SDG platform to position itself as a meaningful contributor in the areas of research and education.

Next step –  reach, engage  and educate the 67 percent of CBS students, who have never heard of the SDGs.


Louise Thomsen is Project Manager for CBS PRME and the VELUX Chair in Corporate Sustainability at the Department of Management, Society and Communication, CBS. Her areas of interest are sustainable consumption, innovation, student engagement, education and partnerships for sustainable development. Follow her on LinkedIn and Twitter

Pic by CBS PRME.

After #Metoo: Are We as Equal as We Would Like to Think?

By Sara Louise Muhr & Florence Villesèche.

The me too movement was founded in 2006 by Tarana Burke to help survivors of sexual violence, but it was not until after the public revelations of sexual misconduct allegations against Harvey Weinstein in October 2017 that it went viral as a hashtag and ended up demonstrating the world-wide prevalence of sexual assault and harassment, especially in the workplace.

It has been a shock to many how widespread sexual assault and harassment is – not least in a Scandinavian context, where the assumption of equality and respect long has been a foundational societal value. The massive amount of me too stories from Scandinavia – from all social classes, all occupations, all ages and ethnicities – have forced us to take another hard look at our beloved equality and ask the question ‘are men and women after all as equal as we would like to think?’.

Let’s look at some numbers…
And if we look at the numbers, we’re not… Just to take a few examples: Denmark has 6 % female CEOs in private companies, Denmark has a 16 % overall gender pay gap: 30 % among CEOs, 6,6 % among newly educated candidates, 2,6 % among our students. Around 50 % experience sexual harassment at work. Moreover, all studies point to the fact that women (and other minorities) are consistently evaluated lower than (white) men and women (and other minorities) systematically receive shorter, less-praise worthy letters of recommendation compared to (white) men.

What’s in a fight?
This means that we are not as equal as we would like to think. Some bodies fit the business world; some have to fight their way up and deal with a lot of resistance on the way. The difference here lies in the fight. Those women who make it to the top, are those who don’t give up. They are those who can take it, who have the power (or patience) to deal with or fight off the sexism and sexual harassment they are faced with on the way, every day.

Other bodies who fit the context of the business world, don’t have to fight. They just fit in. We might therefore on paper have equal opportunities, but some bodies meet resistance, some fit and do not meet resistance. As Sarah Ahmed argues in an essay about ‘Phenomenology of Whiteness’, if whiteness is our starting point – the default – then the black body is out of place. A black body is a black body; a white body is just a body. Similarly, the female body is out of place, not at home, not natural in a top management context. A female leader is a therefore always already a female leader; a male leader is just a leader. A female leader cannot escape her body.

The privilege of invisibility
This links to the privilege of invisibility, the privilege of ‘fitting’ the context, fitting the room. Karen Ashcraft refers to this as the glass slipper. Certain bodies fit certain occupations, whereas other bodies need to adapt and adjust and never really fit, always stand out. This is both the female top-manager and the male kindergarten teacher; the female fire-fighter or the male stay at home dad. The problem here, is not necessarily ‘not fitting the room’. Rather, the problem is the harassment, which is normalized against the ones not fitting the room. This is what the wide impact of the me too campaign has shown: The normalization and naturalisation of sexism against women at the workplace – from demeaning comments to actual sexual assault – which holds women back, keeps men in a positions of power; makes it necessary for women to fight for their right to a career, stick it out, deal with all the crap. It is a normalization of harassment and bullying of various kinds targeted the bodies that don’t fit in. And as Jaqueline Rose points out in a recent article in London Review of books, although sexism and harassment is often excused by being just for fun or a singular slip, it is ‘’never innocent, or a mere trifle, playful, or a ‘joke’‘.

The aggregation of micro aggressions
We therefore need to call out the sexism that sieves through every layer of our society and is weaved into our workplace cultures. Sexism is naturalized to a degree that many even feel entitled to it. Like the other day when one of us was presenting a diversity and inclusion plan to increase the number of female professors at our university, where a male participant in full honestly claimed that the low number of female professors was ‘natural’ as ‘it is scientifically proven that men are more intelligent than women’. Nobody said anything, nobody called out the injustice of such a remark, it was seen as his right to say this. The problem here is that nobody realises that micro aggressions like this – or remarks and behaviour which are even worse – are repeated every single day. And where they in and of themselves possibly can be seen as innocent and as jokes or as a remark from one radical person, together they construct the foundation of our work culture and in this way aggregated create systematic discrimination. The below quote from the everyday sexism project powerfully shows how everyday micro aggressions function in bulks:

Board member in my office: “how’s my little staff girl doing?” Same board member at an event: “it’s okay about your tits — I’m an ass man.” Another board member: “how’d a pretty girl like you get so smart?” Another board member, “I actually like that you’re so outspoken.” Another board member: “just type this up for me.” Sign on my way to work: “real men vote for Trump.” Bumper sticker on the car in front of me: “don’t be sexist — broads hate that!” At the supermarket, “gimme a smile, baby.” In the parking lot, “move it, you fat bitch.” New stories every day, every day, every day. (Website post, April 2017, Tags: Everywhere, Public space, Workplace. Themes Bodies; Experience; Resignation)

It is about time we wake up and realize that gender imbalance at management and board level, is not just because women rather want to stay at home or are less ambitious or don’t have what it takes. We have a problem with systematic discrimination in the form of every day micro aggressions – covering everything from demeaning comments to sexual harassment. And it is not a sustainable development. We do not use all the talent we have at hand when we systematically discourage parts of the population. Times up!


Sara Louise Muhr is Associate Professor at Copenhagen Business School. Her research focuses on critical perspectives on managerial identity, diversity, and HRM, and has appeared in journals such as Organization Studies, Organization; Gender, Work and OrganizationJournal of Business Ethics, Culture & Organization and Scandinavian Journal of Management.

Florence Villesèche is Assistant Professor at Copenhagen Business School. She is a Marie Curie Fellow and received an Emerald/EFMD Highly Commended Award for outstanding doctoral research. Her published work about diversity, identity and networks includes contributions to Human RelationsEuropean Management Review, Personnel Review, and Equality, Diversity & Inclusion.

Pic by Kristopher Roller, Unsplash. Edited by BOS.

The Ethical Blindness of Corporate Sustainability

By Andreas Rasche.

Corporate sustainability (and related concepts like ESG and materiality) have been reduced to discussions around financial value. This makes these concepts “ethically blind”. We are in need of a resurgence of business ethics, otherwise the endless discussions of the “business case” for sustainability will turn out to be the error at the heart of true leadership for sustainable business practices.

My LinkedIn and Facebook feeds are filled with great stories about how well corporate sustainability aligns with financial measures (be it revenue, profit or another metric). Sustainability practitioners seem to love these research findings. No one can blame them. They are the ones who need to “sell” sustainability efforts to top management, and having evidence that sustainability aligns well with financial goals makes this task a lot easier. I do not necessarily doubt these findings, although any researcher will tell you that results always depend on how a study is built, and also that correlation and causation are often confused in these studies.

What I am concerned about is that research findings are turned into normative prescriptions without much reflection: just because some research finds that corporate sustainability efforts support the financial bottom line of a company, we should not conclude that these efforts should only be undertaken whenever they support the financial bottom line. Corporate sustainability is most urgently needed whenever it does not support the financial bottom line. In those situations, the decision for sustainability is a tough one; it requires courage and, in many cases, ethical reflection.

Future thinking, writing, and speaking about corporate sustainability needs to much better balance the financial gains and the moral dilemmas attached to relevant issues. Otherwise, we risk to become ethically blind. Such blindness is often referred to as the “inability of a decision maker to see the ethical dimension of a decision at stake.” (Palazzo et al., 2012: 325) Practitioners’ and academics’ obsessions with the business case has clearly diminished our ability to turn a problem/issue into a case for moral reflection and imagination.

A good example are materiality assessments. These assessments rank ESG issues according to their influence on a firm’s strategy (incl. financial bottom line) and the interest of the firm’s stakeholders in these issues. The moral need to address an issue, because it is the right thing to do, falls off the agenda. Corporate sustainability becomes a pick and choose exercise, which corporations often frame in whatever way they please.

The field, which we nowadays refer to as corporate sustainability (incl. ESG and materiality etc.), started out with discussions around the moral responsibility of businessmen. Back then the focus was, among other things, on how moral dilemmas can be resolved. I am not saying these are the good old times. But it is clear that the discourse has not only changed label (from ethics to responsibility to sustainability), but also that this very discourse has been hijacked by the belief that corporate sustainability is only a worthwhile endeavour whenever it creates financial value for a company.

All of this is not to say that corporations should not financially profit from their corporate sustainability efforts. It is also not to say that managerial tools like materiality assessment are completely useless – they can be of great help. However, it is to say that we cannot and should not reduce discussions around sustainability to a single dimension: be it the financial one, the moral one, or any other one. Corporate sustainability issues are by design multi-faceted, and so must be our thinking about them.

Former CEO of General Electric, Jack Welch, once famously declared:

On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy …your main constituencies are employees, your customers and your products” (quoted in Moon, 2014, p. 106)

We should extend this argument to the business case for sustainability. The idea of a business case itself is a stupid one; such a case should never be the sole motivation of engaging in corporate sustainability, although it can be an outcome of such engagement.

I prefer morally informed decisions. But it is getting harder to convince practitioners and academics that there is more to corporate sustainability than the financial bottom line. Having a business case for corporate sustainability should never be a precondition for addressing an issue or a problem. Otherwise, we move towards moral mediocrity…


Andreas Rasche is Professor of Business in Society at Copenhagen Business School and Director of CBS’s World-Class Research Environment “Governing Responsible Business”. He is also Visiting Professor at the Stockholm School of Economics. Andreas can be reached at: ar.msc@cbs.dk and @RascheAndreas. More at: http://www.arasche.com

Sources:
Moon, J. (2014). Corporate Social Responsibility: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford et al.: Oxford University Press.
Palazzo, G., Krings, F., & Hoffrage, U. (2012). Ethical Blindness. Journal of Business Ethics, 109(3), 323–338.

Pic by Caleb Jones, Unsplash.

Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives and Legitimacy

By Mikkel Kruuse.

  • Which groups of actors typically drive the standard development within Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives (MSIs) and why?
  • Power imbalances between actors within MSIs go beyond the global North/South dichotomy.
  • There seems to be a trade-off between input legitimacy (via equal participation) and output legitimacy (outcomes) of MSIs.

Approximate Reading Time: 2-3 minutes.

Private governance in a globalized economy
While it is difficult to dispute the benefits of globalization, the integration of production and trade has made it increasingly difficult for even highly developed nations to regulate activities that extend beyond their borders. For example, how do we decide who is responsible for the negative externalities of global production, such as emission of greenhouse gasses, when considering that goods often pass through several countries before reaching their final destination? Some of these issues can potentially be resolved through cooperation in intergovernmental organizations that are able to establish extraterritorial jurisdiction, but it is important to keep in mind that the implementation relies on the individual governments that in some cases may not be able or willing to do so.

Resulting from the absence of legally enforceable regulation, there has emerged a great number of non-state market-driven governance systems since the 1980s. However, unlike democracies where the government derives its legitimacy through public elections, this is not an inherent part of private governance. As such, a particular concern is that private governance could essentially be equivalent to corporate self-regulation. In order to avoid this issue, non-governmental organizations are increasingly encouraging companies to participate in so-called multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs), in which different types of stakeholders work together to achieve a common goal, such as the implementation of social and environmental standards for global production.

Stakeholder Participation and Distribution of Power
Some of the more well-known examples of MSIs include the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), which have both grown considerably since they were established in 1993 and 1996, respectively. Although the membership diversity ideally helps to ensure that MSIs are not being controlled by a single type of actor, this may not always be the case in practice. In particular, it has been suggested in the academic literature that this form of civil regulation is primarily being driven by actors from the global North, while values and knowledge originating in the global South are often marginalized.

Notwithstanding this naturally questions the legitimacy of MSIs, it still seems appropriate to ask why this tendency persists. First, there is a significant cost associated with creating a new initiative and the individual actors must therefore possess sufficient resources to do so. However, as resources are finite there is a trade-off between where to best apply them, and as such it appears reasonable to want something in return. In other words, there must be an opportunity to realize highly valued interests for an actor to spend the resource required to create and maintain an MSI. To be sure, this is not to say that the global South does not share an interest in solving the various social and environmental issues, but when viewed as a single group they have fewer total resources compared to the North. This may offer a partial explanation of why MSIs appears to be dominated by Northern interests, yet it is highly unlikely that there are no actors within the global South group that have the required resources to participate in the various standards-development activities.

Input and Output Legitimacy
Returning to the question of legitimacy, it does not really improve the situation to replace the commonly remarked North/South divide with a big/small distinction. Even so, it may help to better understand why actors behave in a certain way and how MSIs function. As noted above, the purpose of MSIs is to provide for a common good when national governments are unable or unwilling to do so, but at the same time it is not free to create and maintain these initiatives. Thus, while all parties may benefit from the common good, the associated cost renders it implausible that actors would be willing to carry the burden of providing it – that is, unless the reward is considered to be proportional.

In summary, it can be argued that having a small group of actors responsible for the majority of standards development will question the input legitimacy of an MSI, in terms of who participates in the process. But at the same time, the issue at hand is likely to remain unresolved if no one is willing to allocate the necessary resources, which ultimately lowers the output legitimacy of the MSI. In this way, some MSIs may present a trade-off between input and output legitimacy when it comes to regulating global production, where some actors gain increased influence over the decision-making in exchange for spending additional resources.

Finally, it is important to mention that there are a great many different MSIs in existence, and that the contents of this post do not apply to every single one. Instead, the purpose is to help advance the discussion of MSI and legitimacy in general, where these insights will hopefully prove beneficial.


Mikkel is a MSc Candidate in International Business and Politics at Copenhagen Business School and research assistant at the Department of Management, Society and Communication

Pic by Margarida CSilva, Unsplash.

How two CBS Alumni are Selling Ugly Fruits and Veggies for a Change

By Carolin Schiemer.

Never seen a 3-legged carrot in real life? You might not be alone, because you can’t find crooked fruit and veggies in Danish supermarkets, where all produce has exactly the same size, shape and colour. Give this a thought or two more and you might ask yourself: what happens to all those cucumbers, potatoes and apples that are aren’t big, small, red, green, square, round or straight enough to “pass” the strict retail beauty test?

The Issue with Standardisation
Right now, what you get in supermarkets is according to UNECE standards categorized as “first class produce”, which has to be uniform in colour, shape and size. What is being withheld from you is the perfectly edible produce of the second class or even below, which might be visually defective but retains its “essential characteristics as regards the quality, the keeping quality and presentation” – yummy stuff just with marks of life experience, so to speak!

If not sold cheaply to the food processing industry, all too often “ugly” produce never reaches end consumers. Farmers, who are well aware of their demanding buyers, have different options when it comes to dealing with the unwanted produce. It can be left on the fields as natural fertiliser, used to feed animals or to produce biogas, and often it is simply thrown away in a landfill.

In Need for New Understandings of Quality
Food waste is a huge problem globally, as about 1/6 of all veggies and fruits grown are lost on farms, where in some cases every second piece is tossed due to cosmetic flaws. EVERY SECOND. In Denmark alone, that amounts to about 100.000 tons of food waste a year during primary production only. Food waste happens in every step of our food supply chain, so globally we use about 21% of the world’s fresh water and 28% of arable land to grow food we never eat.

At the same time we are worried that we don’t have enough food for a growing world population – a narrative I have found particularly prevalent in marketing food items as the “solution” to global health and climate challenges caused by unsustainable food systems, such as quinoa and edible insects. But what this narrative often fails to address is the difficult configuration of ‘how’ to achieve a positive impact in practice. How can we say we are worried about food security while throwing away or misusing food that has been grown with the purpose of feeding people? The narrative about doomsday being just around the corner is not telling the whole story. Something’s rotten here… and it’s not an apple!

It’s Time to Feed “Ugly” Produce back into our Food Systems
The whole story describes a reality where each actor in our food systems continues to market and accept flawlessness as an indicator for quality, with the consequence that produce earns its edibility through its looks and not through its nutritional qualities. And while there are several solutions in Denmark tackling food waste at the end of the food supply chain, such as WeFood, YourLocal or TooGooToGo, there are almost none at the beginning of it. Danish farmers are lacking time, resources and channels to connect with consumers while being constantly under price pressure from cheaper producers located down south and the short contractual agreements with buyers.

As a response to this craze, my partner and good friend Petra Kaukua and I founded GRIM, a new Copenhagen food waste business. Our mission is to fight food waste and traditional food industry beauty standards by delivering boxes of ugly, organic & seasonal fruits and veggies of all shapes, colours and sizes right to Your door, which we source directly from awesome farmers located in Denmark.

Petra and I met in the first week of our Master studies in Organizational Innovation & Entrepreneurship at CBS. We are both internationals in Copenhagen and share a love for food and music, so there was no party and no school project we didn’t do together. In that sense, GRIM was really a brainchild of our teamwork in a course in Social Entrepreneurship, where we investigated with a problem-centered approach how food waste is rooted within the Danish society.

Are you the next GRIM Ambassador?
Fast forward: Since February 2018, GRIM has been part of the one year start-up incubator InnoFounder run by Innovation Fund Denmark, where we receive funding, mentoring and a desk in one of Scandinavia’s best co-working spaces, Founders House (A little side note: the application round for the next InnoFounder batch just opened, so if you are a recent graduate or about to graduate soon, go apply now!) Last month, we completed our first test run. Soon, we are hoping to come back with a second round of ugly delivery, where we for the first time want to test out pick up locations. But we need YOUR help!

We are looking for GRIM ambassadors who help us make the world an uglier place. So if you are excited about what you’ve just read and you want to be with us in our mission to put a hold on food waste, you can get involved or help us find the next GRIM pick up point location – maybe at your school, your workplace or kollegium? Drop us an email to hejsa@eatgrim.dk to learn more about what we are looking for and get yourself and your friends some great GRIM rewards.

We believe it’s time for an ugly food revolution – one where we are questioning the current concept of quality and edibility. The future of eating is ugly!


Carolin is the co-founder of the start-up GRIM and former student assistant at the CBS Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility (cbsCSR). She graduated from her Master in Organizational Innovation and Entrepreneurship at CBS in June 2017 and is the co-author of the book chapter “Marketing insects: Superfood or Solution-Food?” in: Edible insects in Sustainable Food Systems (out soon on Springer International Publishing).

Check out GRIM’s website & follow on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Pic by Supermercat Studio.

Changing Sustainability Norms through Processes of Negotiation – Strategic Arguments and Collaborative Regulation

By Karin Buhmann.

Two newly published CBS-authored books look at how public-private collaboration can bring sustainability norms into existence and offer recommendations for civil society, business, regulators and academics. Based on research on the discursive evolution of the Business & Human Rights regime and taking an interdisciplinary social science approach, both volumes target broad audiences of sustainability-concerned practitioners and academics across the social sciences.

Read on to learn about the background (urgency for sustainability-concerned stakeholder to have knowledge on processes to develop norms of conduct for transnational economic operations) and insights offered by the books in regard to argumentative strategies for advancing new sustainability norms and their acceptance; and procedural organisation to balance power disparities and avoid capture of the negotiation processes. Titles and details for ordering can be found at the end of this post (with discount offers).

The urgency
What does a Tesla in space have in common with conflict minerals or labour abuse in the garment supply chain? The question may look like a new school children’s riddle. In fact, it is a strong reminder of the urgency to consider how public and private organisations can collaborate to develop norms of responsible conduct, especially in areas marked by governance gaps; how such processes can avoid capture by particular interests; and what communicative strategies actors can deploy to advance the acceptance of new norms across functions and interests.

When Elon Musk earlier in February 2018 successfully launched a space rocket that carried a Tesla headed for Mars (although in missing that target it was less successful), the project was heralded as a break-through in private space exploration. Some have described Musk’s idea of colonizing Mars as a ground-breaking response to the Earth’s depletion of resources and space (!) for an ever-growing human population. Others have lamented the quest for extra-terrestrial resources, and called for humanity to solve problems on this planet before moving on to (as it has been put: wreck) other planets and their eco-systems. Some have been raising warning signs in regard to private exploration of resources in space at the backdrop of an absent or at best immature Earth-ly system for governance of earthlings’ interests and desires in extra-terrestrial resources, whether explored and potentially exploited by private or public actors.

Unfortunately, issues of territory and governance gaps are not limited to outer space. They are very much a fact of life on Earth. They are the cause of many of the social and environmental sustainability concerns that keep media, corporate watchdogs and CSR consultants busy. They are also the causes of tragedies like the 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, which killed more than 1000 workers employed in garment factories in the building, and injured more than 2000.

Governance Gaps – not only a matter of state weakness
Governance gaps caused by limited territorial jurisdiction of companies’ home states and limited political will to adopt international rules setting a level playing field for companies without freezing the bar at low levels are also at least partial reasons for abuse of workers in numerous other factories, mines, quarries, infrastructure or agri-industry projects or in the informal industry that form part of global value chains, typically supplying goods made in low-wage countries to buyers or retailers in higher-wage countries. These problems have been argued to be due to states (in capacity of governance phenomena) being absent, weak or ineffective. Academics have been debating so-called political CSR, arguing for private enterprises to fill gaps left by ineffective nation states. However, the reason for governance gaps is not only state weakness. Jurisdictional limitations on states’ powers to regulate and enforce rules outside their territory is also part of the reason, shared by nations across the world and exacerbated by disagreement and lack of political will at the international governance level to adopt international rules pertaining to business.

The issue of nation state jurisdiction and territory can be compared to tedious situations in everyday life that are annoying but hard to change: If your neighbour plays music that you do not like in his or her home, you are not allowed, to access that home and turn down the volume.  Unless, of course, the neighbour invites you to do so, or a prior agreement has been put in place. Similarly, you probably would not be pleased if your neighbour trespassed your property to turn off your music. Instead, the solution is to communicate and to do so in a manner that will – hopefully – drive change with your neighbour. Governance of transnational business activity largely depends on similar action, at least until governments agree to adopt and accept strong national rules with extraterritorial application, and/or international rules that apply to business. And as long as Earth’s governments do not agree on such rules for earthlings’ activities beyond our planet, this goes for exploration and exploitation of outer space too.

Beyond CSR guidelines, reporting and codes of conduct
Global sustainability concerns go beyond climate change, often related to economic practices with social and environmental impacts. Excessive natural resource exploitation, land grabbing and sub-standard labour conditions in global supply chains are frequent occurrences that also have high sustainability relevance.  Such practices pose risks to the environment and human lives currently as well as in a longer term sustainability perspective of balancing current needs with those of the future. Investments and trade have caused depletion of large stretches of tropical forests, which not only harms the environment and adds to climate change, but also affects the socio-economic conditions of communities. The transnational character of these economic activities often involve or affect numerous private and public actors in several states or regions. This causes challenges for singular or even sector-wide private self-regulatory initiatives, and reduces the effectiveness of self-regulation by individual actors on their own. The enormity and encompassing character of global sustainability challenges have also drawn attention to the limitations of singular initiatives like private or sectoral Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) guidelines, reporting schemes and codes of conduct. Hence, broadly applicable multi-stakeholder-created sustainability governance schemes have emerged to fill gaps left by public as well as private governance.

Breakthroughs in global sustainability governance
The UN Global Compact with its ten principles in the four issue areas of human rights, working standards, environment and anti-corruption, is a prominent example. Yet like the Paris Climate Change Accord offers a general normative framework but leaves much to further detailing of implementation. The UN ‘Protect, Respect and Remedy’ Framework  and Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) offer more detailed guidance that has inspired several other transnational business governance instruments even beyond human rights, thus influencing the evolution of CSR norms and governance in a broader sense (Buhmann 2016, 2015). All these instruments were firsts within their fields, and broke previous stalemates. What causes such breakthrough? How can organisations concerned with sustainability engage with a regulatory process to advance substantive outputs? Understanding this can have far-reaching impacts for future public, private and hybrid governance of sustainability, locally, globally and beyond, and whether private, public or hybrid.

Norms of conduct: the road to the product is as important as the product
When we think of normative directives for private or public organisations for actions that conform with global sustainability needs, the focus is often on the substantive content of the rule as such: in other words, what are organisations encouraged or required to do? However, the road that leads to that substantive content of a rule is a condition for what ends up in the rule, whether soft (guiding) or hard (binding). It is therefore crucial to understand what makes some processes progress and deliver results, whereas others stall.

Across the globe, organisations of many types encounter difficulty in adequately meeting environmental and social sustainability challenges. The diversity of processes and outcomes calls for insights on what drives and impedes processes of clarifying what constitutes acceptable conduct. There is a particular need for knowledge on what makes for effective processes for defining norms for such conduct, and for the norms to become accepted with a view to integrate into organisational practice.

The field of business responsibilities for their societal impacts is marked by a diversity of interests that are often not aligned, even within a sector: those of different business organisations and sectors, different civil society organisations with diverse focus issues, and various national or local governments with diverging interests. As result, developing norms of conduct becomes a process of negotiation in which participants often have regard to what is in their own interests. The bumpy road to the 2015 Paris Climate Change Accord is a case in point, but not unique. The evolution of international normative guidance for businesses in regard to human rights leading to agreement on the 2008 UN  Framework and 2011 Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights have received less attention and acclaim outside human rights circles, but the processes to those results represent important innovation too and potential lessons for future collaborative regulation.

Studies suggest that while some initiatives to develop norms of conduct for responsible business conduct get weakened in the process, typically as a result of lobbying by certain organisations (Kinderman 2013; Fairbrass 2011; Buhmann 2011), in other cases the key to a strong or weak result is in the capacity of actors at making the effective argument, and linking up with the right partners for that purpose (Hajer 1995; Kolk 2001[1], Arts 2001[2]).

How are norms on sustainability issues negotiated?
At this backdrop, it is highly necessary to understand how norms on sustainability issues are negotiated and how stalemates that mark many such efforts can be broken. Two new books by CBS professor Karin Buhmann deal with this issue, both drawing on the evolution of the emergent regime on business responsibilities for human rights. Of the two monographs, Changing sustainability norms through communicative processes: the emergence of the Business & Human Rights regime as transnational law (Edward Elgar 2017) undertakes an analysis of the discourse that marked the construction of detailed normative guidance for businesses and states in regard to business responsibilities on human rights. It analyses communicative and argumentative dynamics that allowed the multi-stakeholder process launched by the UN to break previous stalemates in several settings, as well as dynamics that caused previous initiatives to fail. It finds that the ability to address other actors in terms that directly speak to their rationality and interests holds big potential for obtaining significant influence on the details of the normative outcome, and its acceptance. The book offers a theoretical explanation of this, and expands the analysis through findings and explanations on how actors in multi-stakeholder regulatory processes may strategically play on the interest of other actors in change and in preserving their interests. It offers insights on argumentative strategies that can be applied by civil society, CSR- and sustainability-committed companies, regulators or others to advance the acceptance of new norms on sustainability with other actor

Collaborative regulation for balancing of power disparities
In recognition that where negotiations take place on issues marked by highly divergent interests and issues of power, legitimacy of the process and output are significant for a normative outcome to be meaningful, the other monograph, Power, Procedure, Participation and Legitimacy in Global Sustainability Regulation: a theory of Collaborative Regulation (Routledge 2017) offers a theory-based proposal for collaborative regulation that takes account of power disparities and continuously manages these. The analysis combines empirical experience on public-private regulation of global sustainability concerns and theoretical perspectives on transnational regulation to offer a new theoretical approach to guide multi-stakeholder negotiations. It sets out detailed suggestions for the organization of multi-stakeholder processes to regulate sustainability issues to avoid capture and ensure the legitimacy of the regulatory process as well as the outcome of that process. In a global legal and political order, in which the private sector is increasingly replacing the public in terms of power and privilege but lacks the democratic legitimacy of the state and international organisations, such issues are of global as well as regional or local pertinence.

By addressing the same overall topic of developing sustainability norm and empirical cases to inform the analysis, the books develop synergy through two separate analyses that are mutually complementary. Both volumes apply theoretical perspectives from organisational and communication studies, political science and sociology to enrich the socio-legal analysis of regulatory strategies and innovative transnational law-making. This makes the volumes speak to the broad audiences that are engaged in the development of sustainability norms in practice and theory.

Focusing on the processes for developing norms of conduct, the analyses leave assessments of the uptake and effectiveness of such norms in organisations to future studies.

Titles and publisher details

Karin Buhmann (2017) Changing sustainability norms through communicative processes: the emergence of the Business & Human Rights regime as transnational law Edward Elgar Publishers (Globalization, Corporations and the Law). 416 pages.  Order here; 35 % discount code valid through March 2018: VIP35.

 

Karin Buhmann (2017) Power, Procedure, Participation and Legitimacy in Global Sustainability Regulation: a theory of Collaborative Regulation. Routledge/Taylor & Francis Publishers (Globalization: Law and Policy). 200 pages.  Hardcover and e-book available here.

 

 


Karin Buhmann is Professor with special responsibilities for Business and Human Rights. She is employed at the Department of Management, Society and Communication (MSC) at Copenhagen Business School (CBS). She currently serves as the interim Academic Director of the cbsCSR (CBS Center for Corporate Social Responsibility) and CBS Sustainability.

[1] Kolk, A. (2001) Multinational enterprises and international climate policy. In Arts, Bas, Math Noortmann and Bob Reinalda (eds) Non-state actors in international relations, Hants: Ashgate: 211-225.

[2] Arts, B. (2001) The impact of environmental NGOs in international conventions. In B. Arts, M. Noortmann and B. Reinalda (eds). Non-state actors in international relations, Hants: Ashgate: 195-210.

Pic by David Watkis, Unsplash.

 

 

 

 

Investigating Emerging Responsible Corporate Tax Practice

By Sara Jespersen.

  • In the absence of an over-arching world tax authority, much agency and power remains in the hands of the corporations operating the system.
  • Much of the discussion on responsible corporate tax practice is focused on those corporations that maximize the use of the rules to minimize their tax payments
  • But what about those corporations that do not participate in the race to the bottom on tax practices –  can we see emerging trends of responsible corporate tax practice and where?

Approximate reading time: 2-3 minutes.

The issue – corporate tax and globalization
Corporate tax planning is high on the political agenda in Denmark and, indeed, internationally since the revelations of how corporations minimize their tax bills through the use of tax havens have started rolling. Several corporations have been exposed for their aggressive practices by the European Commission, NGOs, journalists – to the great outrage of the public and politicians.

Valuable work is being undertaken to understand the depth of the crisis for society, the seriousness of the problem – its persistence and scale, and the dynamics of the politics of solving it. Much of which is focused on those corporations that maximize the use of the rules to minimize their tax payments.

But what about those corporations that already pay their so-called fair share and do not participate in the race to the bottom on tax practices? In particular, those who are not afraid to show it?

The governance challenge – tax competition among sovereign states and the offshore world
The challenge of all this arises because of the way in which the governance of the tax affairs of multinational enterprises (MNEs) is set up. MNEs that operate in several countries from the North to the South of the world operate in various judicial systems. Many of them also have mobile assets that can be moved from one jurisdiction to another through the click of a mouse and has little to do with the physical world. Some jurisdictions have set themselves up to attract the location of this type of intangible assets and will give favourable tax conditions in return. Judging where corporate assets should be taxed and what the market value is of intangible assets is no easy task for any one country in the world. With no over-arching world tax authority the outlook for permanent solutions to some of these fundamental challenges to the taxation of MNEs corporate profits is looking somewhat long-term.

What role for business and for responsible corporate tax practices?
So it looks that much agency and power remains in the hands of the corporations operating the system. In a society where the focus on corporate tax payments remains one of the hottest topics and trust in corporate tax affairs is dwindling for years on end conditions are perfect for encouraging greater responsibility in corporate tax matters. But what responses are we seeing from the business world of their own initiative if any? How are they responding to this mounting distrust in corporate taxation practices from “society”?

There are signals that somethings are brewing. The fair tax mark in the UK have taken off, CSR Europe have included the issue of corporate tax in their work, as has the network of responsible investors the Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) and the European Commission is not shy to be clear about their vision of tax as a part of CSR (speech by Margrethe Vestager, EU trade commissioner.

My research going forward will focus on investigating this emerging trend of responsible corporate tax practice. It will investigate to what degree it is already taking place and what it might consists of, as well as its meaning and potential in an international political economy with a great focus on corporate tax payments and MNE’s role in supporting the achievement of the sustainable development goals around the world.


Sara is PhD Fellow at Copenhagen Business School and her research is focused on the emerging relationship between responsible business conduct and corporate tax planning of multinational enterprises. Building on several years of experience from working with international development NGOs, Sara is particularly interested in how this affects developing countries’ financing challenges and the focus on the role of the private sector in achieving the sustainable development goals (SDGs).  

You can contact Sara via email and follow her on Twitter.

Pic by Madison Kaminski (Unsplash), edited by BOS.

Banking on the Future – Driving Responsibility and Sustainability in the Financial Sector

By Lavinia Iosif-Lazar.

While the world seems to have moved on from the last financial crisis, one can only wonder if banks and financial institutions have learnt something from it that could steer them away from repeating the experience. From the educational side, we also have to consider whether business schools are able to instill in their graduates the values and norms to navigate financial institutions into clearer waters.

100 Years CBS – Time to Rethink Finance
During a CBS conference in the late months of 2017, academics and practitioners within the finance and banking industries alike had come together to think and “rethink the financial sector”. The purpose of the event was to bring to light the issues and opportunities of responsibility and sustainability within the financial sector, and create an agenda for future research and teaching in business schools, like CBS.

Over the course of the event, the ambition was to develop a dialogue with stakeholders from the banking and finance industry and to challenge the current attitude towards banking and its future with “responsibility” being the word of the day. The hope was that this dialogue would ignite new ideas and develop an agenda for future research and teaching in business schools towards 2117.

During the three tracks focusing on society, business models and the individual, with responsible banking being the overarching theme, participants heard speakers address issues spanning from the role Fintech and disruptive technologies like blockchain and cryptocurrencies play in industry innovation to different religious perspectives on banking and finance.

To Rethink Finance, we need to Rethink Education
When it comes to financial education, the focus was set on bringing it in sync with the new developments and real life challenges, while at the same time stressing the need for a business model based on valuation and normative principles. In crisis situations, the clear-cut modelling learnt in school no longer represents the norm. Education plays a major role in securing that the new generations of graduates have the capabilities needed to identify and understand people and their needs, rethink and modernize local banking and be attuned to the technological developments that can pave the way to a more responsible banking sector  – centered on people instead of money.


Lavinia is project coordinator at CBS PRME. You can visit the PRME Office at Dalgas Have 15, Room 2C.007  & follow CBS PRME on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

Pic by Markus Leo (Unsplash), edited by BOS.

Can Your Green Building Rub Off On You?

By Lara Anne Hale.

  • How can the standardization of green default rules influences those living in or working with buildings?
  • Both the green and performance gap can be bridge through choice architecture within building infrastructure, thus facilitating sustainable consumption.
  • Counter to prior literature on default rules, my research finds that one key aspect of how design affects people is through awareness.

Approximate reading time: 2-3 minutes.

The Green Gap and the Performance Gap
There has been a wealth of research into sustainable consumption suggesting that individuals may value protecting the environment, but then not make green purchases, known as the “green gap” (Barbarossa & Pastore, 2015; Johnstone & Tan, 2015; Gleim & Lawson, 2014). At the same time there is a discrepancy between the way green buildings are built to energetically perform and how they perform in reality, known as the “performance gap”. Theorists, practitioners, and policy makers alike have sought to tackle the green gap with choice architecture, designing the way choices are framed to increase the likelihood of some choices over others (including choosing green products over standard ones) (Thaler & Sustein, 2008). And in recent years, there has been a demonstrated shrinking of the performance gap when learning from buildings as they are used, and then using these learnings to improve building performance predictions (Menezes et al., 2012). But what if these two strategies came together?

Closing the Gaps: Design for Awareness
As outlined in my recently published article “At Home with Sustainability: From Green Default Rules to Sustainable Consumption” (Hale, 2018), choice architecture within building infrastructure can be the starting point to sustainable consumption; and buildings designed this way can work towards reducing both the green and performance gaps. The article examines the building demonstration projects using the Active House standard and how the standardization of green default rules – choice architecture that sets the default choice for settings, such as temperature, lighting, water pressure, etc. (Sunstein & Reisch, 2013) – influences those living in or working with the buildings. Counter to prior literature on default rules, the research finds that one key aspect of how the design affects people is through awareness. By experiencing the Active House buildings and then later experiencing a contrast in a different built environment, they gained an appreciation for the conveniently designed way with which the buildings helped them to live better and consume fewer resources.

 

From green defaults to sustainable consumption through standards (Hale 2018)

A “Learning by Living” Approach to Sustainable Consumption
These positive effects work both ways. On the one hand, the very real impact of living in a sustainable home can generate an interest in seeking a green lifestyle in broader ways. For example, while living in one of the demonstration homes named Maison Air et Lumière, the Pastour family’s youngest child did not experience asthma attacks and was even able to stop taking his medication. However, upon moving back to a standard house, his attacks resumed. This poignant change in their child’s health drove the Pastour family to testify for the significance of sustainable living (Pastour, 2013). On the other hand, the standard makers learn from the experiences of those living in the demonstration buildings and can adapt and improve upon the building projections so that there is a better match between expectations and reality, and so that the buildings are better designed with people at the center.

Maison Air et Lumière. Pic by Adam Mørk for VELUX.

Altogether there are promising avenues for combining choice architecture and sustainable building design that make more healthy, comfortable indoor spaces for people, while basically offering a “learning by doing”…or “learning by living” approach to sustainable consumption.


Lara Anne Hale is an industrial postdoc fellow with VELUX and Copenhagen Business School’s Governing Responsible Business World Class Research Environment. The 3-year project is part of Realdania’s Smart Buildings & Cities cluster within BLOXHUB’s Science Forum. It builds upon her PhD work on experimental standards for sustainable building to look at the business model innovation process in organizations’ adaptation to the smart building business. Follow her on Twitter.
 Pic by Kate Ausburn (Unsplash), edited by BOS.

CBS Hosts 6th Biennial International Symposium on Cross-Sector Social Interactions in June 2018


How can business, government, and civil society interact to better address societal challenges such as climate change, immigration, social exclusion, and poverty?

The 6th biennial International Symposium on Cross-Sector Social Interactions (CSSI 2018), hosted by Copenhagen Business School (CBS) on June 10-12 2018, will bring together researchers and practitioners to understand and address this question. The event is a meeting point for the fast-growing research community on cross-sector interaction and collaboration.

Under the theme of “Collaborative Societal Governance: Orchestrating Cross-Sector Social Partnerships for Social Welfare”, academics and practitioners will present and discuss new and innovative ideas for organizing and managing cross-sector collaboration. How can current and future approaches, systems and tools foster cross-sector collaboration and create societal impacts?

The event will include keynote speeches, panel debates and workshops related to cross-sector collaboration and partnerships. Topics to be addressed include, but are not limited to the following:

  • Cross sector collaboration and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
  • Communicating collaboration and partnerships
  • The role of partnership brokering
  • Financing cross-sector collaboration and partnerships
  • Formal and informal governance of cross-sector collaboration
  • Tracking the impacts of cross-sector collaboration
  • Cross-sector collaboration for the circular economy
  • The changing role of the state in the partnership society

Call for Extended Abstracts and Full Papers
The organisers of CSSI 2018 Symposium invite scholars and practitioners to submit papers linked to the overall theme ”Collaborative Societal Governance”. The aim of the Call is to open up collaborative societal governance as a new multi-disciplinary area of research by inviting contributions on the nexus of public administration, social policy, management and sociology. See the full Call text here.

CSSI 2018 Special Issues
Papers presented at CSSI 2018 can be submitted to either a symposium issue of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly (NVSQ) on “Collaborative Societal Governance” or to a special issue of Business and Society entitled “Collaborative Cross-Sector Business Models for Sustainability”. More information about special issues and other publications will be uploaded on the CSSI 2018 website.

Doctoral Consortium
The CSSI 2018 event will begin with a Doctoral Consortium, where PhD students will present and discuss their research with senior researchers from the CSSI community. Participants will also get new insights on theories, methodologies and tools for research on CSSI-related topics. The Doctoral Consortium will be held Sunday, June 10, 2018. You can read more about the Doctoral Consortium on the CSSI 2018 on the CSSI 2018 website or click here.

For more information visit the CSSI 2018 website.


Copenhagen Business School Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility (cbsCSR) is responsible for the organization of CSSI 2018. Questions and comments regarding the conference should be sent to: CSSI2018.info@cbs.dk. The CSSI 2018 event is organized with support from The Danish Chamber of Commerce, the GRB Research Environment and The Carlsberg Foundation.

 

 

Considering Impact on the Road to Sustainability

By Paige Olmsted.

Mainstreaming the environment is a key component to achieving sustainability objectives – how organizations account for their existing impact, and assess the impact of innovative solutions is a focal area for a new CBS effort bringing academic expertise to real-world challenges.

Why nature matters
When we hear words like “biodiversity” and “conservation”, it often conjures images of tigers or coral reefs, of rare and endangered species in faraway places. The benefits that are provided to us from ecosystems however, are not just something that happen somewhere else. Forests not only provide paper goods and construction materials, they regulate rainfall, are the source for new medical discoveries, and remove toxins from the air and soil. Coastal wetlands provide flood regulation, improve water quality, and sequester vast stores of carbon.  With the advent of climate change it has become increasingly clear that protecting wild places and sustainably managing natural resources is critical to sustainable communities and economies.

Despite increased awareness of the large-scale impacts of human activity on natural resources, at best we have collectively slowed bad trends, rather than reversed course toward positive ones. Part of this may be explained by Malthusian logic – even if we produce goods more efficiently and with less net input per unit, as populations increase geometrically, and middle class populations balloon in countries like Brazil, China, and India, demand for more goods far exceeds any efficiencies of new design or technology.  Reconciling how to navigate on this road to sustainability is a central question of our time.

What is the role of business?
Since natural resource consumption — agriculture, mining, fisheries — are major drivers of habitat conversion, corporate actors receive particular attention with respect to their role in ecosystem degradation. This also means that changes toward more sustainable practices can have substantial impact. The former president of WWF Canada explained the corporate relationship with Coca Cola in the following way

Coca Cola is in the top three consumers of sugar cane, glass, and coffee in the world.  We can campaign twenty-five different governments for fifteen years to change the way sugar cane is produced in countries that likely can’t enforce such regulation, or Coke can mandate change and it happens overnight” (Dauvergne and Lister, 2013).

There is inherent skepticism that consumption and corporate action can help address environmental concerns, but we have seen organizations increasingly recognize how sustainability matters are critical to their operations. The environment is not seen as being in opposition to economic growth, but instead seen as essential for it. International reports such as the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, and organizations like UNEP’s Green Growth Initiative and the World Business Council on Sustainable Development all either implicitly or explicitly endorse the idea that we (as individuals, governments, businesses) will benefit in the long term from healthy ecosystems.  Therefore, even for those not motivated by a conservation ethic, they emphasize that we all benefit directly from their sustainable management.

Of course, to deeply integrate sustainability to the core of doing business, and to achieve ambitious global targets such as those included in the UN’s sustainable development goals, truly transformative action is needed. It will have to involve innovation at all levels of society, across supply chains, and through creative partnerships that leverage the reach of large corporations without discounting the livelihoods and well-being of communities all over the world.

What is happening at CBS?
As one effort to support transformative change in the realm of sustainability, CBS is developing an “Impact for Innovation Lab”. We have chosen impact as the core theme because it is so crucial to understanding whether solutions are truly making a difference – within organizations or on the ground.

The Impact Lab will be a hub for engagement across academic disciplines, civil society, and private sector actors to collaborate on real-world challenges. We will combine ecological, economic, and institutional expertise to develop and test new tools and methodologies. With agricultural commodities, the built environment, and technology as overarching themes, we aim to address environmental and social issues across supply chains, consider the most impactful (as in damaging) practices, to implement the most impactful (as in positive) outcomes. If these sound like challenges your organization is wrestling with, or you want to apply your research efforts to tackling complex problems, do not hesitate to contact Paige Olmsted (po.msc@cbs.dk) or Kristjan Jespersen (kj.msc@cbs.dk). With respect to the road to sustainability, there is likely more than one route or vehicle needed, and we are looking for test drivers.


Paige Olmsted is a postdoctoral scholar at the Institute for Resources, Environment & Sustainability at the University of British Columbia, and a guest researcher at CBS in the Department of Management, Society and Communication for 2017-2018.

Pic by Pranam Gurung, Unsplash.

Challenges & Opportunities in Local Textile Production

By Kirsti Reitan Andersen.

Today the progressive digitalization of the economy is shaping the way in which the fashion industry operates. The overarching discourse often highlights new technical concepts and currents trends of automatization and data exchange in manufacturing (the so-called fourth industrial revolution) as the primary sources of product and process innovation. However, while exploring organizational tensions in ‘local’ textile and fashion production in Norway, we were reminded that the human element of craftsmanship has always lent itself to innovation and the evolution of techniques and applications.

Local Fashion Producers in Norway – An Upstream Miracle?
Aiming to explore the way in which organizations manage opposing demands in everyday organizational life, e.g. creating high quality garments at a ‘reasonable’ price point but also produce locally, we visited some of the remaining textile and fashion producers in Norway. Amongst these were Hillesvåg Ullvarefabrikk AS, Oleana and Krivi Vev. Producing textiles and garments in a country which holds some of the world’s highest minimum salaries seems like a lost cause in an industry that over the last decades has been leading the so-called race to the bottom. Nonetheless, the designers and manufacturers with whom we met have managed to stay in business — and over the last few years — received increasing interest in their services and grow their business.

The Creative Potential of Human Craftsmanship
Arguably, the reasons behind this turn of events are many. However, during our fieldwork, two things stood out. First, although the textile and garment factories that we visited run on technologies traditional to the industry, they manage to offer services similar to those that in recent discussions have been tied to the promise of 3D printing technologies to re-localize production, enabling “close-to-market mini-factories that allow interaction with customers during localized manufacturing processes” (Ihl & Piller 20016). For example, having a flexible set up and being geographically close, they engage in co-creation, developing products in close collaboration with both designers and customers.

Second, the designers and manufacturers with whom we met continuously create new products (e.g. new fiber qualities), drawing on traditional craft techniques combined with technologies traditional to the industry. Notably, years of training and practical experience are required by craft practitioners before they are able to successfully deliver craft innovation.

New technologies offer great opportunities for innovation, not least in the textile and garment industry. However, a fascination with new technologies should never make us forget or underestimate the exceptional creative potential of human craftsmanship in combination with both old and new technologies.


Kirsti Reitan Andersen is a Post Doc at the Department of Management, Society and Communication, Copenhagen Business School. In her current work, she explores organizational tensions — specifically focusing on challenges and opportunities in local production and sustainability.

Pic by Igor Ovsyannykov, Unsplash.

Entrepreneurship: The Solution to Africa’s Youth Unemployment Crisis?

By Thilde Langevang and Katherine V. Gough.

  • Small-scale entrepreneurial activities currently provide livelihoods to a large proportion of the youth population in sub-Saharan Africa
  • In spite of a promising rise of entrepreneurship, we should be careful not to celebrate youth entrepreneurship uncritically

Approximate reading time: 3-4 minutes.

Africa is teeming with business activity managed by young people. In cities and towns, young traders are touting their goods in traffic jams, trying to sell everything from phone credits and toilet paper to drinking water and Christmas decorations. Alongside streets and pathways, young people sell a variety of items and foodstuffs from table tops or shacks. In neighbourhoods, women operate hairdressing salons and dressmaking shops often from their homes, whilst young men carve wood and fix electrical equipment. In the busy market places, young women and men trade a variety of goods including locally grown fruits and vegetables, imported new and second-hand clothes, shoes, mobile phones, and housewares. Some young people offer inventive services as and when the need arises; young men fill in potholes on the roads, hoping that passing vehicles will acknowledge their work with a token payment, while others rent out gumboots to pedestrians who seek to pass flooded streets. Others again act as ‘traffic police’ when narrow roads become jammed with cars, motorbikes and minivans.

Everyday Forms of Entrepreneurship
Such entrepreneurial practices might seem mundane, trivial, or insignificant when compared to instances of high-growth and high-tech entrepreneurship in the global North. And some might even dispute whether these types of income-generating activities should at all be labelled entrepreneurship. Yet such “everyday forms of entrepreneurship” (Welter, 2017) are significant since they currently provide livelihoods to a large proportion of the youth population in sub-Saharan Africa.

In the book ‘Young Entrepreneurs in Sub-Saharan Africa’ (Gough and Langevang 2016), we examine the rates, characteristics and experiences of young entrepreneurs in Ghana, Uganda and Zambia. Drawing on surveys conducted by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, we show how African youth are the most entrepreneurial in the world with around 40% of young people in Ghana, Uganda and Zambia being involved in “early state entrepreneurial activity” (which includes young people aged 18-35 setting up a business or running a business less than three and a half years old). These levels are equal to or higher than the adult population in their respective countries, and much higher than their youth counterparts in other regions of the world where average rates range from just 9% in Europe to 18% in Latin America.

Youth Entrepreneurship in Africa – Promises and Limitations
At first sight these high rates of youth entrepreneurship might look encouraging for African governments and international development organisations, which are increasingly promoting youth entrepreneurship as a solution to the mounting youth unemployment crisis. Whilst Ghana, Uganda and Zambia, together with a number of other African countries, have experienced high and sustained economic growth rates during the last two to three decades, the growth has not generated adequate, decent jobs. In a situation of very limited wage employment, and a rapidly growing youth population, young Africans are increasingly encouraged to change their mind-set from being ‘job seekers’ to becoming ‘job creators’ and are hard pressed into using their entrepreneurial ingenuity to start their own businesses as a means of creating livelihoods for themselves.

When looking closer at the statistics and listening to the experiences of young people, however, the picture is mixed. While entrepreneurship rates are high and the attitudes to business start-up very positive, a common characteristic of African young entrepreneurs is that their businesses stay at the micro-level and are concentrated in the informal economy, hence lie outside the protection and regulation of the state. Their businesses are concentrated in a limited number of vocations, with the majority engaged in trading or providing similar services. Competition is, therefore, cutthroat and earnings minimal. Noticeably, the majority of young entrepreneurs have no or only a small number of employees, which means they contribute little to job creation apart from self-employment, have low expectations for growth, and their businesses close down at a high rate.

Consequently, we should be careful not to celebrate youth entrepreneurship uncritically. It is important to acknowledge that not all young people have the skills or resources required to pursue viable entrepreneurial ven­tures. Indeed, most young people in Africa currently appear to be poorly equipped to become successful entrepreneurs in the sense of establishing durable businesses and growing them. There is also the risk that an excessive focus on entrepreneurship becomes a way to blame young people themselves for their misfortunes and provides an excuse for states not to deliver welfare services and ensure decent jobs (Jeffrey and Dyson, 2013).

No Silver Bullet for Tackling Youth Unemployment in Africa
So far the strong policy discourse on entrepreneurship in Africa has not been backed by adequate support measures. While the book reveals that the three African countries have all witnessed a similar mushrooming of entrepreneurship promotion schemes initiated by governments, NGOs and international development organizations, the general picture emerging is that youth entrepreneurship promotion is characterized by many uncoordinated schemes, which tend to have limited uptake and scope. Moreover, there tends to be a quite narrow focus on promoting business start-ups through providing finance. While more holistic approaches to entrepreneurship promotion are clearly needed it is equally vital that entrepreneurship is not singled out as the only solution to the youth unemployment crisis but rather is seen as just one element of broader labour market policies, which cannot themselves be separated from wider policies aimed at stimulating job-generating, inclusive, and sustainable economic growth and development.


Thilde Langevang is Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship and Development Studies at Copenhagen Business School.

Katherine V. Gough is Professor of Human Geography at Loughborough University.

Pic by Thilde Langevang, edited by BOS.

 

 

About Meta-MSIs and Private Governance

By Luisa Murphy.

  • What are Meta-Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives (MSIs)?
  • What is their role and contribution to private governance?
  • How do Meta-MSIs enable the translation of responsible business policies and practices in unique octopus like ways?

Approximate reading time: 4-5 minutes.

Meta-MSIs, octopus arms and brains
What do Meta-multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSI) and octopuses have in common? Through my own PhD research of what I call a ‘Meta-MSI’ (the ASEAN CSR network), a phenomenon similar to the MSI (definition below), I have been investigating the dynamics and interactions between national networks which I liken to an octopus’ eight arms and corresponding eight mini- brains and the headquarters or “global network”. In this blog, I will define the Meta-MSI and briefly discuss how its constitution of networks provides important new insights into national level practices which may enable it to translate responsible business in intelligent, efficient and indeed, octopus like ways.

Towards a definition of the ‘Meta-MSI’
A Meta-MSI is a new type of MSI whose members comprise distinct organizational forms such as foundations, listed companies’ associations, chambers of commerce and industry and MSIs not individual members which usually constitute MSIs. In this regard, it also appears to have some key similarities to the ‘Meta-organization’ (e.g. Ahrne & Brunsson, 2005 & 2008) although I am still exploring the link (blog for another day).

Similar to MSIs, Meta-MSIs promote responsible business policies and practices through collective action, capacity building and shared vision. It includes MNCs, intergovernmental organizations and sometimes government agencies as partners. The members but also the partners are key to its legitimacy and vice versa. Hence, like an octopus, a Meta-MSI has a central brain (headquarters) but also eight mini-brains (national networks) which carry out autonomous activities. Moreover, like an octopus which coordinates with other sea creatures when necessary to achieve its ends, Meta-MSIs collaborate with partners on specific issues at the headquarter and national network level.

One example of a Meta-MSI is the ASEAN CSR network which is comprised of eight networks, including seven national networks and one regional network in Southeast Asia. It includes listed companies associations: CSR Club of Thai Listed Companies Association, MSIs: Global Compact Network Singapore, foundations: Indonesia Business Links; League of Corporate Foundations; ASEAN Foundation and national and international chamber of commerce and industries: Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry; Union of Myanmar Federation of Chambers and Commerce and Industry and International Chamber of Commerce – Malaysia. Moreover, it engages corporate partners such as Hitachi and intergovernmental partners such as United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). These four types of member organizations are similar to the three hearts of the octopus which ensure circulation through its organs.

Meta-MSI contributions to private governance
Due to their structure, Meta-MSIs appear to be uniquely tailored to national level contexts and dynamics which provides for efficient functioning of the whole. Below, I briefly highlight three areas which I think enable the translation of responsible business policies and practices in unique and flexible octopus like ways.

First, as mentioned Meta-MSIs incorporation of heterogeneous member organizations provides insights into diverse ‘national business systems’ (Whitley, 1999) and how responsible business is approached in different contexts. In turn, Meta-MSIs operate by allowing policies and practices to be contextualized to these settings. Hence, like an octopus, the Meta-MSI is able to camouflage or adapt its policies and practices to its environment. This may lead the organization to be more efficient in the long-run, given that organizations do not need to defend the implementation of policies and practices which are different from other member organizations. Instead, all organizations are working towards the same goal of responsible business but may achieve them via different means.

Second, important studies (e.g. Rasche, 2012) have shown that the co-existence of loose and tight couplings within global networks provide MSIs with the ability to manage issues related to stability, flexibility and legitimacy, Meta-MSIs appear to navigate these challenges solely through an underlying loose organizational structure. This facilitates the translation of responsible business because it enables national networks to work even more autonomously (similar to an octopus with its eight arms) yet contribute to the whole through best practice sharing etc. The Meta-MSI is hence like the brain of the octopus, it coordinates with its eight mini-brains (it does not command), which allows (national) ownership of the relevant policies and practices. This may be important for promoting effective outcomes in the long-run as national organizations will develop institutions for responsible business which do not require micro-management by the “global” organization.

Finally, Meta-MSIs appear to be more exclusive than MSIs given their small number of member organizations at the “global” level and their corresponding memberships which range from being more exclusive to inclusive at the national levels. How this exclusivity impacts efficiency is another question. For instance, it might be worth considering whether it is more efficient to engage with one set of organizations e.g. SMEs through a national network (e.g. chamber of commerce) rather than SMEs and MNCs in the same network. Meta-MSIs are hence similar to an octopus which has a fixed number of arms and is wily about the other creatures it forms collaborations with.

In conclusion, while Meta-MSIs appear to be similar to octopuses in that they do not like the spotlight, I think it is worthwhile to cast a light on them and their national networks by considering how these global-national network (eight mini-brain- octopus) dynamics influence the governance for responsible business. I look forward to continuing the dialogue with you on octopuses, Meta-MSIs and other creatures in the private governance sea.


Luisa Murphy is a PhD Fellow at Copenhagen Business School and supported by the VELUX Endowed Chair in Corporate Sustainability. Her research examines governance for anti-corruption. She brings a human rights and business background from the University of Oxford and legal experience from the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice.

Pic by Taylor Ann Wright, Unsplash.

Is CSR Effectively Altruistic?

By Lot Elshuis.

CSR is the part of a company that focusses on doing good. Interestingly enough, business is all about impact and effectiveness when it comes to the core of the business, but when strategies of doing good are developed and implemented there is often more concern for what sounds good than for the effectiveness and impact of their actions on recipients. Why is the rigor applied to core business activities often not applied to CSR-strategies as well?

Effective Altruism: Maximize impact, not feel-good moments
Effective Altruism takes exactly this approach. Kick-started by philosopher Peter Singer, Effective Altruism is a community that wants to change how ‘doing-good’ is often approached. First of all, Effective Altruism emphasizes that most people in developed countries, and especially those belonging to the richest 10% of the world population, have an outstanding opportunity to do good. We have won the lottery! Therefore we have the beautiful chance to add value to the lives of others.

Second of all, if we indeed want to take the opportunity to do good, we can do the most good by focusing on maximizing positive impact through applying scientific evidence and reason, instead of only looking at what sounds and feels good. Without thinking carefully about how exactly to do good, there is a risk of wasting important resources on things that do not work. Even worse is having the idea of doing good, while actually causing harm.

The Case of Play-Pumps International
Let me give an often-used example. Many developing-world communities are provided with water through hand-pumps. The social enterprise Play-Pumps International had the idea to replace these hand-pumps by merry-go-rounds, which would pump up water while children played on them. It seemed to be the ideal win-win situation. The enterprise received a grant from the US Government, a World Bank Development Marketplace award, and (it can’t get much better) a visit and sponsorship from rapper Jay-Z. However, sadly enough, the Play-Pumps didn’t have the positive impact that everyone assumed it had. One of the main problems was that the pumps needed constant force to obtain the water, which, obviously, made the kids tired. This often compelled the women of the communities to struggle to push the pumps. Moreover, the Play-Pumps were several times the cost of a hand-pump, which were able to pump more water an hour as well. (see Doing Good Better by William MacAskill for a more elaborate description of the case)

Rule of Thumb: Importance, Neglectedness, Tractability
Although Effective Altruism is focused on the individual who is willing to do good, we could apply the same to corporations who pursue CSR or social entrepreneurial strategies. Especially because effective altruists often focus on the cost-effectiveness of a cause or approach. This line of thought shouldn’t be unworldly to corporations, since cost-effective rationalizations are applied on a regular basis. An often-used rule of thumb by Effective Altruism for evaluating causes or approaches is assessing the following criteria:

  • Importance: What is the scale of the problem; how many people are affected and how deeply?
  • Neglectedness: Is there still enough opportunity to do good, or are a lot of other people already working on improvement in this field?
  • Tractability: Is there something practical you can do, with the possibility of succeeding?

By applying these criteria and looking for evidence through research, companies are likely to have a more profound impact on the area in which they want to do good.

Responsibility – but where?
As the name says, CSR is about responsibilities. Therefore, we might wonder whether companies who apply CSR actually have the responsibility to do the most good they can (with the same amount of time and money). Can we argue for saving lives in the poorest countries instead of improving the labor conditions of the workers in one’s own supply chain? While the former has a bigger impact, the latter might, to a greater extend, be in line with the more obvious responsibilities of the particular company. This is an interesting discussion, but unfortunately outside the scope of this post to deal with.

However, a lot of multinational organizations are already involved in causes that do not directly relate to their own supply chain. Google is for example awarding $1 billion in grants and contributes 1 million employee volunteer hours ‘to create more opportunity for everyone’. More specifically, H&M announced in a press release in September that they are donating $200,000 to Save the Children for “South Asia’s worst flooding in years”. From an effective altruist perspective, it would be rational to figure out, what the scale of this cause is at the moment, if there aren’t already a lot of other donors involved in this particular disaster relief in South Asia, and whether Save the Children can actually do something successfully about the situation of those affected by the floods. Accordingly, this could be compared to the measured impact of other causes to conclude where H&M’s, or Google’s, resources would be most valuable.

Impact before Marketing!
We all know that CSR is more often than not linked to marketing strategies. There is a high chance that H&M chose to donate to South Asia’s flooding because more potential consumers will be affected since they probably have heard about the flooding recently and were emotionally moved. However, this doesn’t have to pose a problem, because Effective Altruism is not per se about ‘selflessness’, although often used as definition for altruism. It is totally fine to feel good about doing good. In fact, it would be wonderful if everyone felt better by doing good, because then it is likely that more people will actually do good. Therefore, it would be all the more impactful if organizations started to market the impact of their causes, rather than doing and marketing what feels good. With that, consumers could support companies that do good effectively, instead of companies that scream the loudest without having a real positive impact on important cause areas.


Lot Elshuis is a MSc Candidate in Business Administration and Philosophy at Copenhagen Business School. With a background in philosophy, her research interest is focused on discussions about the role and responsibility of business in society and the ethical dilemmas that these discussions entails. You can contact her on LinkedIn.

Pic by Diego PH, unsplash.

 

A Story of Poison, Pork and Consumer Protection

By Jan Bauer.

  • Renewal of controversial weed killer supported by Germany despite internal dissent
  • Corporate support seems the only consistency in many decisions
  • What evidence should determine the public opinion of a minister?

Glyphosate and a German Minister under Fire
The German Minister of Food and Agriculture, Christian Schmidt (CSU), came under fire in the end of November. He voted in favor of renewing the license for the controversial weed killer Glyphosate in Europe – against the will of the Minister of the Environment, Barbara Hendricks (SPD), and without consulting chancellor Merkel. Mr. Schmidt said he “made the decision on [his] own and within the responsibility [his] department”. While the potential health and environmental risks of Glyphosate, better known under Monsanto’s commercial name Roundup, are still subject to debate, the unilateral approach by the minister has at least poisoned the political climate between the two parties before the upcoming exploratory negotiations to renew their “grand coalition”.

Many Question Marks behind a Political Free Solo
One can only speculate why Mr. Schmidt considered it necessary to purposefully violate the joint rules of procedure between the federal ministries that would have required him to abstain from voting as long as there is a disagreement between the federal ministries. Mr. Schmidt defended his actions by claiming that his vote will lead to a more restrictive use of the herbicide in some areas. Glyphosate producer Monsanto, currently in the process of being taken over by the German chemical company Bayer, seems not satisfied with the renewal either and would have expected an extension of the license by more than five years.

Eat more Meat, but don’t sell a “Vegan” Schnitzel
This decision is by no means the first controversy surrounding the German Minister of Food and Agriculture and his duty to balance cooperate and consumer interests. Mr. Schmidt openly promoted the consumption of pork in public institutions, which has been abandoned by some canteens to avoid complications with religious customers. Additionally, he encouraged to ban the use of common marketing practices to sell meat replacements as “vegetarian sausages” or a “vegan schnitzel”. This effort was advocated to prevent the confusion of consumers, as they might be overburdened by linking the words “vegan” or “vegetarian” with the meatlessness of the product in questions – what should happen to German meat dishes that falsely claim to be vegetarian, such as “Leberkäse” (literally translated to “liver cheese”) remains unclear. Despite the minister’s concern, there is little evidence for an actual confusion among consumers and the fact that the growing popularity of vegetarian and vegan products negatively affects the meat industry created some skepticism about the motives for such a proposal.

The ambivalent Role of Scientific Evidence in the Process of Policy Making
This issue relates to larger questions about the importance of scientific evidence to guide regulatory action. Despite increasing efforts to foster evidence-based policy, the scientific evidence rarely provides perfect guidance on what will be the outcome of a certain policy (the discussion about the impact of the planned U.S. tax reform is another famous example). So in the absence of clear evidence; what determines a minister to go one way or the other: personal beliefs, the opinion of his constituency, the influence of lobbyists?

The Traffic Light System for Food Labels – as Case in Point
For the specific case, we might shed some light on this by looking at remarks from Mr. Schmidt on issues with clearer evidence. In the area of nutritional food labels, research shows that the mere provision of nutritional facts on the back of products does insufficiently guide consumer choices and recent studies highlight that salient and simplified front-of-package labels, such as the traffic light system, can help consumer making healthier choices. Additionally, there is a broad public support for better food labelling that guide consumers and make healthy choices easier. Despite this evidence, the minister considers such labels as an “impermissible simplification” and rejects further regulation in this direction as too paternalistic.

A view shared by several other EU countries that tried to go against the voluntary traffic light food label in the UK, as it “aimed at classifying food as more or less “healthy””, which would violate trade legislation. Traditional product manufactures have little leeway to reformulate their products and claim to be disadvantaged. For instance, the majority of meat products would receive a red label which might negatively affect sales – in other words, the fear is that such labelling actually works from a consumer’s point of view. Hence, there seems to be an inherent tension between consumers’ needs for guidance and industry claims of discrimination. The European Commission apparently announced “a thorough review” by the end of 2017.

People before Profits
It is hard to understand on what basis Mr. Schmidt himself determines the needs for regulatory action and why he made each of these individual decisions. While the Glyphosate incident appears to be a procedural failure in the absence of clear evidence, his stances on food labelling fails to acknowledge a general consumer science and public consensus. All decisions, however, seem to be in line with the interests of the industry. Mr. Schmidt himself stated that “we should not restrict the choice for the majority of society for reasons of ease or cost” when it comes to leaving pork off the menu. Hence, I propose to consistently follow this logic and not restrict consumer protection supported by the majority of scientists and the public for reasons of ease or costs for some special interest groups.


Jan Bauer is Assistant Professor at Copenhagen Business School and part of CBS’ Governing Responsible Business Research Environment. His research interests are in the fields of health economics and consumer behaviour. As part of the Nudge-it Project, he focused on fostering healthy food choices of children and adults.

Pic by GLOBAL 2000 / Christoph Liebentritt, flickr.

Role Reversal: When Business Safeguards the Public Good

By Erin Leitheiser.

Earlier this week Patagonia launched what may be corporate America’s most forceful action yet against the government’s assaults on the environment and vulnerable communities: announcing that it would sue the Trump administration.  Such action signals a new era for business leadership on social and sustainability issues.

No Government-as-usual and no Business-as-usual
More than a year ago – and before the 2017 U.S. election – I wrote about Trump, anti-intellectualism and the new role for business.  While the takeaway then was that business was increasingly expected to step up contributions to solving social and sustainability issues, the new reality of a Trump administration necessitates yet another re-evaluation of business’s role in society.  No longer is it simply enough for companies to contribute to the broader public good via philanthropy or (more) sustainable business practices; such approaches assume a stable and accepted regulatory environment facilitated by the government.  We now live in a time when Americans are facing a hostile government that is pushing through major changes to the tax code which would benefit the wealthiest at the expense of the poorest, rolling back protections for women to access reproductive healthcare, and reneging on the country’s commitments and obligations to do its fair share to stymy carbon emissions, among countless others.  This is not government-as-usual, so it can no longer be business-as-usual either.

A new Role of Business in Trump Times
We have seen encouraging moves by state and local governments to do what they can to work around Trump (for example, on the Paris agreement), and business is also playing a new role.  While corporate lobbying and political involvement is nothing new, what is different is that business is now engaging on a range of social and environmental issues that have little to do with their core business activities.  A few notable examples include:

Earlier this week, Patagonia’s homepage shifted from its usual backdrop of surfers and climbers to solely a black backdrop with writing in white stating:

The President Stole Your Land
In an illegal move, the president just reduced the size of Bears Ears
and Grand Staircase-Esclante National Monuments.  This is the largest
elimination of protected land in American history.

 

Patagonia – A Frontrunner in Opposing Harmful Governmental Policy Changes
Patagonia has a long and established history of progressive action both internally and externally.  But, its new efforts signal a move from lodging disagreements to using its corporate resources to actively oppose harmful and discriminatory governmental policy changes.  While in yesteryear government was the space where protections were afforded and business need only comply with relevant regulations, we are now in an era where business must step up to defend the greater good.

Hats off to you, Patagonia.  Corporate America, please take note and know that people everywhere are looking to you to use your power and resources to defend and advance the public good.  Now is your time.


Erin Leitheiser is a PhD Fellow in Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability at Copenhagen Business School.  Her research interests revolve around the changing role and expectations of business in society.  Prior to pursuing her PhD she worked as a CSR manager in a U.S. Fortune-50 company, as well as a public policy consultant with a focus on convening and facilitating of multi-stakeholder initiatives.  She is supported by the Velux Foundation and is on Twitter @erinleit

Pic by Erin Leitheiser, taken from Patagonia’s homepage Tuesday 5th 2017.

Need an SDG Solution? Hack it.

By Lara Anne Hale.

November 16 – 18, 2017 marked the beginning of a student-driven innovation era at Copenhagen Business School. The Student Innovation House – in collaboration with Oikos and PRME – hosted their first major event, the Sustainable Campus Hackathon 2017.

A Hackathon for more campus sustainability
Having received an impressive 120 applications to participate in the event, 66 students from universities across Denmark were invited to join an intensive 2.5-day spree of hacking sustainability ideas in four UN Sustainable Development Goal areas: Green Infrastructure, Healthy and Sustainable Food, Diversity and Inclusion, and Human Well Being and Mental Health. The goal? To come up with an idea that is feasible, implementable, scalable, and imparting a big impact; and the winning proposal will be further developed and implemented on the CBS campus next year.

Not all SDGs are created equally
Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the first challenges was that not all SDGs are created equally, at least not in terms of student interest. Fully half of the students formed groups competing in the Healthy and Sustainable Food area, leaving Human Well Being and Green Infrastructure perfectly fitted with teams, but Diversity and Inclusion completely empty. I can’t help but wonder what this says about what is being integrated into students’ curriculum, especially in regards to sustainable development. Many students, during our “speed dating” for forming teams, remarked to me that they had recently had some courses relating to food systems and circular economy, and that this inspired them to innovate in this arena. Are we not giving gender equality the sustainability context – or even the examples of success and impact – that attract students to think critically and generate solutions for the future? Perhaps this in part is a reflection of Denmark’s rapid slide down the rankings.

Hacking the SDGs – with dedication, creativity & open minds
But by and by, teams drew from a hat, and we were sorted out. The next 36 hours involved input from experts, brainstorming, drafting, brainstorming again, and ultimately “hacking” the SDGs. My group’s subject area was Human Well Being and Mental Health, and my teammates hailed from Danish Technical University and Roskilde University. Their approach to the task was impressive: on the one hand they were hard-working and dedicated; and on the other hand they were playful with ideas and throwing around true creativity. It didn’t seem to bother them that the winning proposal would not directly, or at least immediately affect their universities. Rather, they were there to work on inspiration, on their own knowledge, and on collaboration. Beyond opening minds within teams, individuals across teams chatted over breaks, and mentors circled around, getting to know the breadth of people and ideas represented.

A playful approach to raise awareness around gender (in)equality
The hackathon was set up so that teams first presented for four minutes in a “heat”, and then were judged if they would be one of four teams proceeding to the finals. Notably, one of my favourite presentations was within the Diversity and Inclusion category. The team proposed circulating a quiz concerning “How much will you earn after your degree?” Respondents would enter their degree programs, age, experience, and so forth, and then be presented with their expected monthly wages. But then a pop-up would ask the user’s gender. If the response was male, the quiz would say “Sorry! We were mistaken. You will actually earn more than those who are not male!” and if the response was female, “Sorry! You will actually earn less than that, and less than your male counterparts.” This quiz idea is indeed a clever way to promote critical awareness, and hopefully more discussions concerning gender equality on campus (especially at CBS, where more than 80% of full professors are male).

And the winner is… Everyone!
Ultimately, the winners of the hackathon were Team Supo, who propose a student card-linked electronic point system for registering and incentivising sustainability actions, such as choosing to cycle to campus. Team Supo will be sent on a trip to New York, where they will expand upon their idea to the head office of PRME. Indeed I look forward to the implementation of their idea, but truth be told, the brilliance of a hackathon is the way it cracks open so many ideas, and brings together so many people. Supo will not be the only reason I’ll be back at Student Innovation House, as there are many more hacks – formal or informal – yet to come.


Lara Anne Hale is a former PhD student at Copenhagen Business School’s Governing Responsible Business World Class Research Environment. Her PhD focused on Experimental Standards in Sustainable Building as part of the EU Innovation for Sustainability project with VELUX. Follow her on Twitter.

Pic by Aafke Diepeveen, edited by BOS.

Where is the Space for Ethics in Rule Governed Organizations?

By Anna Kirkebæk Gosovic.

Imagine that you work in an organization where your choices, your knowledge and your thoroughness in your work could potentially impact the lives and health of people; for the better, yes, but also for the worse, if you make a mistake. Imagine then, that at any moment, someone could come and go through all your work, ask for all the details of your choices and demand proof that you made the right decision according to all the rules that you need to know. And then imagine that large investments are at stake and that the failure or success of these investments depend, partly, on the thoroughness of your work.

Strict rules and procedures
This is the reality that many employees in pharmaceutical companies operate in. Many organizations today are governed by policies and procedures to make things run smoothly but some organizations are – to a larger extent – characterized by strict monitoring and reporting procedures, high preoccupation with failure and commitment to organizational resilience. Weick and Sutcliffe name such organizations “High Reliability Organizations” (HRO) (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2007). HROs are organizations working in fields where mistakes can have severe consequences and which, as a result of this, have strict procedures for ensuring compliance with processes and policies.

Studying HROs, scholars have focused on organizations such as air craft carriers (Weick & Roberts, 1993), nuclear power plants (Schulman, 1993), hospitals (Chassin & Loeb, 2013) and military units (Bierly & Spender, 1995; Demchak, 1996); all of which operate in environments rich with potential for error but where the consequences of such are too severe to allow them to happen (Cf. Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 1999, p. 32).

With their close attention to monitoring, following procedures and regimes for registering data, actions and decisions, pharmaceutical companies can be defined as HROs.

Is following the rules enough?
Organizations preoccupied with reliability may spend more time and effort organizing for controlled information processing, mindful attention and action than other organizations. Weick and Roberts call this “mindful organizing” (Weick & Roberts, 1993, p. 357). But with such elaborate legislative frameworks in place as in the pharmaceutical industry, how do employees experience their room for maneuvering and for acting ethically? And how do staff and managers perceive the ethical dilemmas they meet? Is it enough to have followed the rules? And what happens in situations when there is a wider space for interpretation of such rules? How does moral reasoning take place at the intersection between legislative frameworks, financial considerations, scientific possibilities and human lives? And what domain outweighs the others at which points in time?

These are the questions that I hope to answer by studying within – and in partnership with – a pharmaceutical company. The project only started in January, so if you are interested in the answers to this, be patient, and stay tuned!


Anna Kirkebæk Gosovic is a PhD student at the Department for Management, Society and Communication at Copenhagen Business School. She is working on business ethics within a multinational pharmaceutical corporation.

Pic by G. Crescoli, Unsplash.

 

Adventures in Materiality. Notes from the first CBS Sustainability Seminar

By Steen Vallentin.

  • On October 31, 2017 the new CSB Sustainability seminar series was launched
  • With a room full of practitioners and academics, the topic “Materiality and Quantification” in CSR and sustainability reporting was discussed
  • Diverse input for discussions were given by presentations by CBS, DTU and a practitioner in corporate sustainability reporting

Approximate reading time: 4-5 minutes

All we need is Materiality?
Materiality is arguably gaining significance in corporate approaches to CSR and sustainability. While strong narratives remain important, they do not suffice in a world filled with increasing amounts of data calling for transparency and factual assessment of corporate accomplishments, progress or decline. There can, however, be a price to pay for an increasing reliance on metrics and measurements. What happens to ethical and moral concerns, to fundamental values and the sense of overall purpose if CSR/sustainability is reduced to a technical matter of taking numbers and ticking boxes? This was the topic of the first in a new series of CBS Sustainability Seminars. Here is some background on the topic and the seminar series, plus some notes on the presentations of the day.

The rise of materiality in CSR and sustainability
Sustainability reporting and efforts to assess the materiality of corporate responsibilities toward the people and the planet are undergoing interesting transformations these years. Not only is sustainability reporting becoming a more and more widespread practice internationally, due to mandatory disclosure requirements and the institutionalization of standardized reporting formats such as GRI and integrated reporting. We are also, among other developments, witnessing corporate efforts to integrate adherence to the UN Sustainable Development Goals into non-financial reporting formats, including materiality assessment, and companies committed to set and communicate science based emission reduction targets (see Science Based Targets).

The new cbsCSR sustainability seminar series: research-based & multidisciplinary
Hence, “Materiality and Quantification” was an obvious choice as topic for the first event in the new series of CBS Sustainability seminars that will be taking place from the Fall of 2017 and onwards. The inaugural seminar took place on October 31 and featured three speakers: Professor Andreas Rasche from CBS, Frances Iris Lu (CBS and Maersk) and associate professor Niki Bey from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU).

The purpose of the seminar series is to forge closer ties between researchers at CBS and professionals from companies and organizations – to enable collaboration and easier access to each other’s knowledge and resources on an ongoing basis. And to build stronger relations among researchers at CBS. The USP of the network is that it is research-based and multi-disciplinary. One aim is to help bridge divides between knowledge silos and facilitate dialogue between different knowledge disciplines. Another aim is to broaden the scope of how we think and speak about sustainability, and to explore how far we can take this concept – in different  indicated by its three pillars: environmental, economic, social. To this end, the seminar series will present many speakers from CBS and other research environments that would not ordinarily see their research as part of a sustainability agenda.

Materiality assessments are no moral assessments
In the first seminar, however, we were on familiar ground with regard to sustainability. Based on a forthcoming research paper (using data from the Netherlands and co-authored with Koen van Bommel and André Spicer), Andreas Rasche showed how sustainability reporting has gradually developed into being a more and more standardized and technical practice. A key concept in this research is commensuration, which refers to the process of transforming different qualities into a common metric. It reduces and simplifies ‘thick’ information into metrics that are comparable to other metrics. Over time, commensuration stimulates a standardization of the meaning of sustainability. When something is turned into a metric and standardized, it often leads to a crowding out of moral questions and concerns. Subsequently, sustainability reporting can be a driver of ‘amoralization’ processes by which questions of morality, values and purpose are replaced by technical performance measures. On the one hand, this technical and instrumental turn can be part of the explanation for why sustainability reporting has become so popular (because it sidelines ambivalence and difficult moral quandaries). This need not be an entirely negative outcome, as pointed out by a participant, because it can be an indicator of increasing business integration of sustainability. We do, however, on the other hand, need to be aware of the possible downsides of this proposed ‘technicalization of sustainability’.

Moving beyond ethical idealism – the price to pay for conquering the mainstream?
While this finding is based on a longitudinal empirical study, I have made a similar point in a conceptual paper reflecting on the effects of instrumentalization in the realm of CSR more broadly. To quote myself (at length):

“As a result [of instrumentalization], it is now all too easy to speak of CSR without making any mention of ‘ethics’ or bringing up moral issues or dilemmas; a development that can lead to a strangely depersonalized understanding of responsibility and which raises questions about the relevance of ethics for CSR altogether. Whether this is a problem or not is of course debatable. On the one hand, it can be considered as a sign of progress in the sense that the CSR debate (and CSR as corporate practice) has decidedly moved beyond ethical idealism and the subjectivity/arbitrariness that may be associated with individual values and choices. CSR has developed into a socially embedded, highly institutionalized and material phenomenon. On the other, it is worth pondering what, if anything, has been lost on the path to (apparent) victory in the public realm of ideas. Is the displacement of ‘ethics’ a sign that the responsibility discourse has lost its normative bearings and that this has been the price to pay for conquering the mainstream?”

A practitioner’s perspective on values & materiality: We can have it all – (can we?)
Frances Iris Lu gave a presentation of the evolution of materiality and materiality assessments in recent years, drawing on her experience from KPMG and Mærsk. She showed how materiality assessments can often, in practice, be rather loose exercises bereft of analytical rigor, but also how it is possible to add more rigor to the process. One key feature (and possible limitation) of a conventional materiality assessment is that it tends to focus strongly on the risk as opposed to the opportunity side of responsibility, making it difficult to reconcile with policies aiming to create (shared) value.

To bridge this gap, and to make room for the company values in the account of materiality, Mærsk has created a new ‘materiality beyond the matrix’ model. Frances presented this new and more comprehensive and multi-faceted model which accounts for materiality under the three headings: Risk, Shared Value, and Responsibility. Challenging the amoralization narrative presented by Andreas, Frances argued that we are seeing a sort of pendulum swing taking place in sustainability right now where values and purpose are getting more attention – alongside the continued focus on metrics.

Materiality and Quantification in practice: The Life Cycle Assessment Lens
Finally, Niki Bey brought the quantification of sustainability through Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) into the discussion. LCA is used as a general framework to avoid the problem of cost shifting across impact categories (e.g. using less plastic might ultimately increase food waste). Although the LCA is never completely objective, we need to try to approach matters of sustainability systematically and to focus on available facts – how far can we get in terms of what we know and what we can measure, instead of focusing on subjective criteria.

A participant mentioned enthusiastically that the LCA is the most important decision-tool she has ever worked with because it makes people able to move up and down in perspective and allow them to see the bigger picture in regard to sustainability and corporate responsibilities. While LCA is usually applied as a relative measure that can be used to compare and choose between different courses of action, it can also be applied in an absolute fashion, as with the Planetary Boundaries.

Overall, the seminar brought out as many questions as it did answers. We look forward to continuing this and other adventurous discussions in future CBS Sustainability seminars.


Steen Vallentin is Director of the CBS Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility (cbsCSR) and Associate Professor in the Department of Management, Society and Communication at Copenhagen Business School.

Pic by Miguel A. Amutio, edited by BOS.

The Sustainable Development Goals: Elite Pluralism, not Democratic Governance

By Daniel Esser.

  • Was the process leading up to the SDGs really an exercise in global democratic policy making?
  • Although broad consultation efforts shaped the process, these alone were not able to alter the power structures undergirding the political economy of aid.
  • In the end, UN members states finalized the agenda behind closed doors and civil society organisations were once again relegated to serving as commentators and claqueurs.

Approximate reading time: 3-4 minutes.

The MDGs: An exercise in top-down development planning
Almost twenty years ago, a small group of white men sat together and dreamed up the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Soon after, the United Nations (UN) deployed them as carrot and stick to halve extreme poverty and hunger, reduce infant mortality, and put all girls and boys into primary education, all by 2015. There was real confidence that the MDGs’ top-down programming would eventually reach the farthest and most destitute corners of the globe, and that national as well as global resources would finally be spent on well-coordinated and effective projects. Listening to UN technocrats pontificate about the MDGs’ indispensability, one could have almost believed that old-fashioned development planning had finally been put on the right tracks. By the end of the exercise, thousands of new jobs in the international development industry had been created, yet most of the goals had been missed. The MDGs had begotten a hyperactive global network of goodwill ambassadors, faithful implementers and intrepid evaluators staff while billions in the global South continued to suffer.

The SDGs: Consultations as the end of procedural elitism?
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were supposed to end the MDGs’ dual legacy of procedural elitism and edentulism. Framed by the UN as the world’s foremost post-2015 development agenda, the new goals were designed to be more comprehensive in both scope and impact. Crucially, the UN also launched considerable efforts to incorporate voices from outside of the UN system. Thematic consultations took place around eleven areas selected by the UN Development Group (UNDG). They were complemented by web consultations, national consultations in 88 countries, and global high-level meetings. In addition, the UN created two websites to allow for direct consultation by inviting users to submit proposals and vote for challenges they considered most pressing. Moreover, a UN-sponsored civil society organization (CSO), ‘Beyond 2015’, brought together another 1,000 CSOs participating in national consultations.

Global democratic policy making – high aspirations, sobering facts
Undeniably, these efforts marked a clear departure from the MDGs’ backroom fecundation. But have they been sufficient to justify senior UN staffers’ praise of the SDGs as an exercise in global democratic policy making? Broad consultation alone does not alter the power structures undergirding the political economy of aid. Instead, it creates a thin layer of legitimacy that fades away as soon as accountability in invoked. The process leading up to the SDGs was rooted in an assumption that a goal-based framework was the only viable option; alternatives to such goals were never considered publicly. Countries were selected by UNDG and UN Resident Coordinators, and the breadth and depth of national consultations varied starkly. And although UNDG’s final report listed crowd-sourced issue rankings, it did not provide any rationale for excluding issues from subsequent high-level negotiations.

Closed doors, revisited
In the end, UN members states finalized the agenda behind closed doors. CSOs were once again relegated to serving as commentators and claqueurs. When push came to shove, the UN leadership thus followed its half-century-old practice of elitist international governance. Even though the UN leadership has been relentless in praising the virtues of accountability for post-2015 development cooperation, it has so far shied away from institutionalizing accountability in a way that would really make a difference: between the UN system and its powerful national agenda setters on one side, and CSOs, taxpayers, and intended beneficiaries on the other. If the SDGs demonstrate anything, it is that the UN remain unlikely to usher genuine global democratic governance into being.


Daniel E. Esser is Associate Professor of International Development at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC. His research on local governance amid violence, organizational management, and global health politics is widely cited. A former staff member of the United Nations in New York and Bangkok, he follows the organization’s continuous struggle to make a difference in the world from a safe academic distance. He can be reached at esser@american.edu.

Pic by UN Ukraine, edited by BOS.

Corporate Criminal Liability in Germany – An Idea Whose Time Has Come

By Andreas Rasche.

Siemens, Volkswagen, Deutsche Bank … and now Airbus. What is wrong with German companies? It seems that German firms are disproportionally exposed to corporate irresponsibility. Of course, this is more of a subjective assessment than a statistical fact, and to be fair Airbus SE is a European company. Corporate irresponsibility appears in all jurisdictions, for all sorts of companies, and for a number of different reasons. My argument here is that Germany still has a legal infrastructure that makes prosecution of corporate criminal acts more difficult than in other countries.

It may come as a surprise, but Germany has, so far, not enacted an explicit corporate criminal law. While other countries have passed strict legislation to fight corporate criminality (e.g., the FCPA in the US or also the UK Bribery Act 2010), German legislation stands out in a number of ways. Unlike in other countries, you need to overcome a number of hurdles to sue corporations directly for criminal conduct. Existing legal provisions regarding corporate criminal liability are mostly found in §30 of the German Ordungswidrigkeitengesetz (OWiG). This law stipulates that corporations can be held legally accountable if someone representing the company has committed a criminal offense.

The Current Legal Situation in Germany
This legal framework puts Germany in a special role, as many other (developed) nations do not require prosecutors to prove individual guilt. As we know from CSR-related studies, corporate misconduct is usually diffused in organizations and it is often difficult to single out individuals as drivers of misconduct. Even if individuals can be singled out, it is still necessary to prove – beyond doubt – that this person was responsible for the criminal conduct on behalf of the corporation. The discussions around who was responsible for Volkswagen’s Dieselgate are a case in point. This leads to an interesting situation: While a rather high number of corporate crimes come to the attention of German public prosecutors (around 63.000 cases in 2014), few of these cases go to court, and in even fewer cases legal fines are imposed. The reason for this situation is mostly related to the fact that public prosecutors need to prove individual guilt rather than corporate guilt.

Of course, German companies are aware of the legal situation and this provides negative incentives. The current legal infrastructure may not directly motivate misconduct, but it is likely that it favors ‘lax behavior’ and unreflective actions.

Enact a Corporate Criminal Code
My plea here is simple: Germany has to enact and enforce an explicit corporate criminal code as soon as possible. The current legal instrument – the OWiG – is neither timely nor sufficient to fight corporate crimes like corruption. Actually, looking into the legal provisions reminds me a little of Milton Friedman’s famous saying that only individual actors – i.e. people with flesh and blood or ‘natural persons’ in legal lingo – can have responsibilities, and that corporate actors cannot have responsibilities because they are just a collection of individuals. We know that such an argumentation only works in the ideal world of economists (and even there its explanatory power is very limited). Any organization theorist would agree that corporations are collective actors; they possess shared norms, values and belief systems and hence there is agency beyond the individual. This is why we cannot and should not make the identification of individual guilt a precondition for corporate criminal liability.

In 2013, Thomas Kutschaty, then Minister of Justice of North Rhine Westphalia, presented a first draft for a German corporate criminal code (the so-called Verbandsstrafgesetzbuch). Ever since not much, if anything, has happened. The defense line of hardnosed corporate lobbyists is clear: under German law criminal liability is related to a fault on the side of the offender (the so-called Schuldprinzip) and hence fault cannot exist for a corporate entity itself, at least not as long as individual misconduct under the name of the company is proven. It is time to rethink the basic condition underlying such an argumentation: the legal principle and ancient rule societas delinquere non potest – responsibility belongs to individuals – may really be antique and outdated.

It is not necessary to simply transfer the legal liability of a natural person to a corporation, which probably would be very controversial. Fault can also be based on, for instance, a legal person’s internal organization or aggressive corporate cultures (as several cases of misconduct have shown). The bottom line? – Crimes are not always committed by men…


Andreas Rasche is Professor of Business and Society at Copenhagen Business School and Visiting Professor at the Stockholm Schools of Economics. More at www.arasche.com and @RascheAndreas.

Pic by zolnierek, Fotolia.

Empowerment Inc.

By Lauren McCarthy.

  • Empowering individual women will not on its own bring about a transformation in gender relations between men and women
  • There’s a focus on economic empowerment at the detriment of other forms of equality
  • If ‘empowerment’ becomes a byword for individualised wealth accumulation, led by corporations, then it loses its transformative magic

Approximate reading time: 2-3 minutes.

Girl Power meets Corporate Power
What does ‘empowerment’ mean? To give oneself some sort of power? This is the crux of empowerment’s initial meaning, but today the concept has been hacked apart and put back together again into some kind of neoliberal Frankenstein’s monster. We’ve seen adverts selling leggings, moisturiser and make-up touted as ‘empowering’, while the ‘clean, sculptural lines’ of designer clothing promise to empower. Sheryl Sandberg and other elite women business leaders speak of the empowerment that comes with ‘leaning in’ at work- but oh, don’t forget to #BanBossy. And some of the biggest investments in recent years have been seen in ‘women’s empowerment programmes’, especially those in supply chains in the global South.

Three Major Problems with Empowerment Inc.
In my recent publication in Business Ethics Quarterly I reflect on one of these programmes, and some of the challenges that come with our modern-day contortions of empowerment.

First, there’s the focus on individuals. Gender equality is about social transformation- it’s about equality and equity for human beings regardless of their sex or gender. So a focus on empowering individual women may make life better for that one woman- but it will not on its own bring about a transformation in gender relations between men and women.

Second, there’s the focus on economic empowerment at the detriment of other forms of equality. Of course it’s great if women can earn more from their micro-businesses (or earn mega-bucks as CEOs). But without the social standing to challenge patriarchy, and without voice in political systems, long-term gender equality is far from won.

Third, we need to talk about who is doing the empowering. So much of corporate rhetoric on empowerment is corporate led- ‘we will empower’, ‘we will enable’. Where are the voices of the women themselves in all this? In the 1960s and 70s, in the era of civil rights movements and women’s liberation, empowerment was associated with consciousness-raising and the importance of people (often in groups) recognising the structural power relations which oppressed them- and their own ‘power within’ to challenge oppression. Empowerment, then, is related to society- and to oppressed groups finding their own economic, social and political power within that society. Empowerment is not ‘done onto’ another.

Remember Radicalism?
Promoting gender equality is a much-needed string to the CSR bow. Yet if ‘empowerment’ becomes a byword for individualised wealth accumulation, led by corporations, then it loses its transformative magic. As my colleague Jeremy argued in a recent BOS blog– we need to make feminism- and by association empowerment- radical again.


Lauren McCarthy is a Lecturer in Strategy and Sustainability at Royal Holloway, University of London and a Velux Visiting Fellow, at Copenhagen Business School. She tweets @genderCSR.

Pic by Tara, edited by BOS.

When Good CSR Intentions With Communities Go Bad

By Rajiv Maher.

  • Can companies get CSR efforts “right” by engaging in dialogue with communities, thus improve relations and their impacts?
  • Reality shows that companies tend to engage with a few selected community leaders only (who normally receive certain benefits), which creates internal tensions
  • Indeed, consultations processes offer a platform for companies and governments to fragment and divide resistance to their projects

Approximate reading time: 3-4 minutes.

In this post I reflect on the past ten years of working as a practitioner and researcher on the issue of CSR, company – community relations and conflicts. Overall, it is striking to see the gap between the optimism held by practitioners and the pessimism of those affected in communities when it comes to the companies’ socio-economic and environmental impacts. A common response from those working in CSR is that the company’s intentions are good and sincere. Though I have little reason to doubt this point, unfortunately nice intentions from companies, governments, and NGOs carry little currency for communities affected by extractives and natural resources projects.

CSR, Dialogue and Engagement as solutions to territorial conflicts with business
The term CSR has lost much credibility within business and practitioner circles, who these days tend to associate the term more with philanthropy. Instead, practitioners have shifted over to preferring terms like sustainable business, sustainability, community investment, shared value and even human rights and business to label their efforts with nearby communities. Nonetheless all these concepts have in common the aim to bring more good than harm whilst creating genuine win-win scenarios with the communities. A key concept, that cuts across all these terms of implementation is that of dialogue and engagement.

Dozens of well written guidebooks and manuals or toolkits have been published in recent years by multilateral institutions such as the UN and World Bank and governments on community engagement, dialogue and investment by business.  The theory underpinning this is that by engaging in dialogue with communities, companies can then get it right, meaning improve relations and their impacts. It is this assumption that I have tried to interrogate over the past ten years whilst visiting 11 mining and four hydropower affected communities across Brazil, Chile and Peru in addition to multiple conversations with relevant officials from business, government, civil society and activism.

What does CSR and Engagement look like from those who are Engaged?
In short these well intended policies are seen as decisive in nature by those on the receiving end. In every community I have visited the saddening common denominator so far has been the fragmentation of community fabric due to the arrival of these megaprojects armed with their well-meaning CSR strategies. The divisions take place mostly along the lines of those who are willing to accept and engage with the CSR and those who are outrightly opposed to the megaproject on the grounds of the impacts to their culture, spirituality, ecology and livelihoods.

At first communities often start out as collectively opposed to the siting of the project, however, exhaustion and fatigue set in over time as governments and companies stubbornly persist with imposing the project with an increasing number of CSR related carrots. As time passes the dejected phrase I often hear in communities is “we are tired, we just want the conflict to end and make the most of this bad situation. The company has the backing of the state, and we don’t seem to have the power to reject it.” Consequences of these community divisions have included the rupture of relations amongst nuclear family members, neighbours, the eviction of tenants from their rental accommodation and even threats of violence and to personal security.

Next I have found that the group that chooses to give the company a chance and engage with it soon loses its faith and trust in the process as the promised jobs and benefits do not materialize. The companies tend to engage with a few selected community leaders only (who normally receive certain benefits), which creates further internal tensions. I have felt these tensions and mistrust grow with each repeat visit to a community.

The companies are also keen to follow best practice community investment approaches as espoused by leading development practitioners. A key message from this group of professionals seem to be well captured by the mantra “give a man a fish and he eats for a day, but teach him to fish and he eats forever.” This has translated itself in practice into a plethora of training or capacity building courses delivered by companies to communities around entrepreneurship. Typical courses I have encountered include biscuit making, handcraft and beauty/hair salon courses, which community members found of limited worth. Residents stressed they all had immediate needs of having a fish for the day as well as learning how to fish, but that eating for the day mattered most and this is frowned upon by companies and CSR professionals. In short you can imagine the complex internal social and political struggles that now take place between and amongst community residents who are now divided into different groups that have no trust in one another.

What do companies say about this?
The corporate response to the abovementioned critique has normally been to refute the level of internal divisions, stating it was worse before they arrived. Practitioners often claim that the CSR standards themselves are not at fault, but they just need to be better implemented. Poor implementation of CSR would explain the gap in its portrayal. Implicit in these responses is that the projects should always go ahead, but in a more responsible manner, one that satisfies all stakeholders. Perhaps it is time for business and authorities to assess whether their projects should be sited in communities where rejection is outright from the beginning.

So what’s the solution? That’s what counts!
This is the question I am slapped in the face with by practitioners in the CSR field. The implication here is that, if one has no better solution then we should permit the lesser evil to continue. Of course the role of the state is fundamental in these situations and this cannot be done justice in a short blog post. My main nugget of advice to all those working with or studying CSR would be to view its implementation primarily from the perspective of affected actor. Taking a bottom-up approach will undoubtedly add more complexity for CSR professionals. However, it may also lessen the grievances experienced by communities and workers. In the case of indigenous peoples we should look to international legal instruments from the UN such as the Declaration on Indigenous Peoples from 2007. Here the UN state the importance of self-determination of communities and this affords them the right to veto certain projects in their territory. Unfortunately to date companies together with governments have been able to astutely maneuverer themselves around international indigenous peoples rights by imposing consultations on them where they have the perfect platform to fragment and divide resistance to their projects.

The complexities outlined above need to be taken into account by all those who wish to work and research CSR in the community in natural resource related contexts. I would like to emphasize that this post is not a dismissal of all CSR related attempts. However, I would like to raise the flag that in general the sentiment that CSR is used to manufacture consent is strengthening, and practitioners would be wise to consider real as opposed to reformatory changes to CSR. It would appear there are no more new bottles for the wine.


Rajiv Maher is Assistant Professor in Critical Management Studies at Université Paris-Dauphine and is a current research fellow at the Governing Responsible Business Research Environment, CBS. He researches the impacts of CSR related initiatives in communities affected by extractives and natural resources projects. 

Pic by Rajiv Maher, edited by BOS.
The community in Los Choros village, Chile are mostly fishermen, farmers or working with eco-tourism. They are highly opposed to the Dominga mine project. The community from Higuera however is very much in favour of the mine. Yet, earlier this year in August 2017, the government rejected the mine due to the impacts it would have on the marine reserve hotspot of Punta de Choros, where most of the worlds humboldt penguins spend time.

 

Business and Open Government / Open Data – An Advocacy Role for Business?

By Dieter Zinnbauer.

  • There is a much needed conversation on what stronger role business could and should take in the realm of open data
  • If business decides to put its powerful voice behind efforts to open up government data everyone could win
  •  More effective accountability and democratic empowerment via open government/open data would make a lasting contribution to the common good, put corporate political engagement to work and reaffirm the readiness of business to live up to its role as good corporate citizen

Approximate reading time: 4-5 minutes.

Two worlds apart?
Big excitement in the corporate world about big data is mirrored by big excitement in the NGO world about open data, the nearly world-wide move towards making data held by governments and the public sector more broadly available and usable. Big data is often described as the new oil, an essential commodity powering the economies of the near future. Quite similarly open data / and open government are celebrated as the new oil to lubricate and fuel democratic participation and accountability.

At first sight it looks like these two types of data-related euphoria should really complement each other and make business an enthusiastic proponent of open data. Yet, there still seems to be quite a substantial disconnect between these two spheres. The corporate world is primarily thinking about data in proprietary terms. The more exclusive, the more lucrative this asset class is going to be. The NGO world in contrast frames open data as a public good opportunity. The more freely available the more valuable it is – socially and politically. These contrasting world views are arguably one of the main reasons why interest by business to actively engage in the open government, open data movement appears to be rather tepid. At the same time, efforts by civil society to actively reach out to and proactively engage business are perhaps also not as enthusiastic or systematic as they could be.

Yet, I would suggest, that this narrative of an intrinsic antagonism between the business and open views of the new data era is a rather false and counter-productive one. It masks how interwoven both domains actually are, delays a much needed conversation on what stronger role business could and should take in the realm of open data.

Multiple inter-linkages
So here just a set of observations to help soften and shake up this rigid narrative and to provide a flavor of the things to come with regard to the potential engagement of business on open data issues.

  1. Public data has long been an important raw material for business. Commercial information brokers that build on, make more accessible and add further value to publicly available data have a long tradition (think phone books). And even in the early digital days before the enormous scale, scope and potential of open data had even appeared on the horizon the empirical picture was astounding: assessments for Europe, for example, put the overall commercial value of public sector information as input to economic activity at an amazing EUR 200 billion or 1.7% of total GDP fur the EU 27 (Vickery 2011).
  2. Businesses have been early protagonists in the open data world. It is rarely explicitly appreciated that business also has a very active history of pushing open data boundaries. As it turns out it was companies that pioneered some of the food labeling and related data initiatives that helped establish new expectations and regulatory standards about what types of data should be collected and made openly available for food items, since consumer trust was essential for rapidly industrializing food industries and a competitive advantage could be gained by first movers on that front. (Schudson 2015).
  3. Business are major users of open government mechanisms. It is companies –not journalist or citizen groups – that are by far the main user of freedom of information requests to help push more government held information into the open in the US (Kwoka 2016) – and turned these data trawls into lucrative trading opportunities (Gargano et al. 2016).

Where could this go next?
All this bodes well for business to take a much stronger interest in and help advance the open data/open government agenda.

What could be priority areas for such an engagement that are both critical to the open government idea and also provide some tangible benefits to business? Here just two examples:

  • Open contracting and open procurement: two groups of information that are central planks of many open data/open government reforms and that can help provide a level playing field for market access, push out unfair collusion rackets and more broadly provide a much broader set of valuable market intelligence when interacting with and devising bids for government clients, something that can be of particular importance when operating outside the home market;
  • Data on beneficial ownership of companies/property/land, as well as disclosure of assets/income/interests by senior government officials: a major push is underway by open government advocates to press for more data collection and public disclosure in these two areas, which are also essential for companies and what is often very resource-intensive due diligence/compliance in vetting new clients, identify conflicts of interest, guard against self-dealing etc.

If business decides to put its powerful voice behind such efforts to open up government data everyone could win. First such a corporate commitment would amount to a step change in the momentum for deepening such initiatives and expanding them to more countries, now that the lower-hanging fruits have been picked. Secondly, it would provide opportunities for business to lower costs for market intelligence, risk-management and compliance, while yielding indirect benefits in terms of fairer competition and lower entry thresholds. Third, the opening of these new data troves makes it possible to build new business models that curate, re-combine and apply advanced analytics to these datasets and offer related information services. This in turn would help to mitigate the chicken and egg problem for open public data ecologies where public authorities are hesitant to commit over a longer horizon and invest steadily in open data as long as they cannot see widespread use, while companies are reluctant to invest in the use of these data sources as long as they do not expect reliable maintenance and sustainable upkeep (Jetzek 2017). Finally, a stronger business commitment to supporting the open government / open data movement and the concomitant impact on more effective accountability and democratic empowerment would make a lasting contribution to the common good, put corporate political engagement to work for both company as well as societal interests and reaffirm the readiness of business to live up to its role as good corporate citizen.

What do you think?
So how to deepen this engagement? A good starting point is to unpack in a bit more detail where interests most strongly overlap, which types of open government and open data are most interesting for business. Any insights? What types of open data do you think are most useful for business? What is your company already doing in this area? I would love to hear your view on this, particularly if you are from the business world. You can take this 5min survey  to share your opinion – and I will report back on aggregate findings in a later post.


Dieter Zinnbauer works on emerging policy issues and innovation for Transparency International (TI) and is a current research fellow at the Governing Responsible Business Research Environment, CBS. He has held various post-doctorate research fellow positions on technology, governance and development issues. Prior to joining TI Dieter worked for more than 10 years in Asia, Africa, North America and Europe as policy analyst and research manager for a variety of organizations in the field of development, democratization and ICT policy, including with UNDP, UNDESA, and the European Commission.

Follow him on Twitter.

Pic by Jenny Downing, edited by BOS.

Another Inconvenient Truth: “Win-Win” Only Won’t Transform Our World

By Katherine Richardson.

  • A green growth project can contribute to sustainable development, but this is by no means a given
  • Characterized by a singular focus on synergies, the concept of green growth neglects unavoidable trade-offs
  • Truly contributing to the sustainable development agenda means that businesses need to abandon an exclusive focus on win-wins by acknowledging and addressing trade-offs

Approximate reading time: 3-4 minutes.

Development based on “Green/blue growth” must not be confused with sustainable development
“Green growth” and now also “blue growth”, when attention turns to things maritime, have become the new black when discussions turn to consideration of what we will live on in the future. “Green” (by design when used in this context) conjures up an image of nature and this has meant that many incorrectly assume that green growth = sustainable growth, i.e., that green growth, by definition, contributes to redirecting the societal trajectory towards sustainable development. This is simply not the case. I do not deny that there can be instances where a green growth project contributes to sustainable development, but this is by no means a given. Too often, the “green growth” label is applied to projects where the underlying philosophy is “business as usual but now we will make money on the environment”.

Sustainable development is anything but business as usual
Since the 1960s, we have had access to pictures of the Earth taken from space. These show clearly that the Earth has no connection to any other celestial body. In other words, these pictures provide proof that – once we have used the nature resources upon which we are dependent- they will not be replenished. They also show that we can never really get rid of our waste. Plastic in the ocean? Where else would it be when we since the 1950s have known that it is essentially non-degradable and our culture has embraced its one-time use? Climate change? Our society has, since the Industrial Revolution, relied on the combustion of nearly inert solid carbon products which has resulted in an excessive production of carbon containing greenhouse gas waste, including CO2. As in the case of plastic, we cannot see this waste but it is still with us.

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
Despite the emergence of these pictures in the middle of the 20th Century, it was not until 2015 with the adoption in the UN of the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs that a global convention was agreed that acknowledges that the resources upon which we depend are limited. After acknowledging something is limited, one has to address how it is to be shared. In effect, the SDGs can be seen as a vision for how we want to share the Earth’s resources among what will soon be 9-10 billion people – all with a right to development. Thus, the SDGs are relevant for every person, country and company on Earth. Many assume that the SDGs’ primary focus is developing countries but, when it comes to resource (over)use, it is the developed countries that are the greatest sinners.

“Win-Win” AND Lose: Moving from green to sustainable growth
Many companies are implementing the SDGs in their activities – not least of which in their marketing! Their strategies for doing so, however, differ greatly. There are 17 goals in all. That’s a lot to handle so most companies “cherry-pick” a handful of goals against which they see a particular advantage in marketing their products. The 17 SDGs are, however, all inter-connected and must always be seen in relation to one another. When any activity is measured up against the SDGs, there will be positive interactions, i.e., synergies (“win-win”) but also negative interactions, i.e., “trade-offs”. Green growth  is characterized by a singular focus on synergies. Cherry-picking SDGs to position a company or its products in the most favourable light is nothing more than green growth by another name. Of course, sustainable development requires that we exploit the synergies that emerge from interactions between the SDGs to their fullest but it also demands that we minimize the trade-offs that emerge. It is easy to appreciate that companies don’t feel they can benchmark against all 17 SDGs but, when they focus only on SDGs that profile synergies and fail to tell the world what they are doing to minimize trade-offs, it is hard to take their commitment to sustainability seriously.


Katherine Richardson is professor and leader of the Sustainability Science Centre at the University of Copenhagen and Member of UN Panel of experts writing the 2019 Global Sustainable Development Report.

Follow Katherine and the Sustainability Science Centre on Twitter!

Pic by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Flickr.

 

’Make Feminism Radical Again’

By Jeremy Moon.

Approximate reading time: 3-4 minutes.

’Make Feminism Radical Again’ – An unlikely fashion choice in some quarters but, yes, a fellow passenger at Copenhagen airport was donning a T-shirt bearing just this slogan.

The wearing of political slogans always sets off questions in my mind, as I try to imagine what goes through the wearer’s mind.

‘What shall I wear today?  Ah yes, I’m flying, I think that the fellow passengers need a dose of radicalization’.  ‘Wednesday: shall it be women’s rights or animal rights?’
‘I need a white T shirt with these jeans. Ah well, this is the only clean one left in the drawer.  It will do.’

Or maybe they are really committed and wear one of these shirts every day?
Or maybe they just don this shirt without a second thought?

The questions in my head wouldn’t stop.

‘When was feminism radical?’
‘What does she mean by radical?’
‘What would it mean for women?’
‘What would it mean for society?’
‘What would it mean for me?’

Gender – a salient concern in CSR and business ethics literatures?
As it happens Kate Grosser, Julie Nelson and I had just put the finishing touches to an essay on the place of gender in the business ethics and corporate social responsibility academic literatures over the last quarter of a century.

So it was really great to see this topic that we had been weighing up in our usual academic ways was ‘out there on the streets’… or at least in the security check area…

Kate, Julie and I had found that the subject of gender had enjoyed some status in this literature (as measured by the number of articles published on the subject in the leading business ethics and corporate social responsibility journals).

The de-radicalization of feminist theory to an empirical variable
On closer analysis we were struck that, whereas the original debates in these literatures about gender had been inspired by the core of feminism (notably the concerns with gender relations and gender equality) this focus had subsequently appeared to get weaker.  Only 20% of the papers in our study focused on this feminist core, and the remainder used gender as a variable in studies of attitudes towards social, environmental or economic issues, or of ethical dilemmas.

Moreover, we were surprised that only 15% of the studies addressing gender issues in the business ethics /corporate social responsibility literature were theoretical papers (and the majority of these referenced theory from outwith feminism).  While empirical papers are clearly a vital part of the literature, theorization is necessary for evaluation of empirical work, and for framing the way academic subjects, in this case feminism, are thought about and studied in the empirical work.

We also noted that the empirical literature was overwhelmingly focused on countries in the ‘Global North’ despite many of the greatest challenges in gender relations and equality being in the ‘Global South’.

Reflecting on our academic journey into feminism, I wondered if what my fellow passenger meant by wearing that slogan was … ’Make feminism radical again by focusing on gender relations and equality’.  But when I had finally plucked up the courage to ask her… she had gone.

P.S. My friend Lauren tells me that there are other feminist T-shirts available
… but none are quite as to the point as that on my fellow traveller…


Jeremy Moon is Velux Professor of Corporate Sustainability at the Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility, CBS. He has written widely about the rise, context, dynamics and impact of CSR.  He is particularly interested in corporations’ political roles and in the regulation of CSR and corporate sustainability. Jeremy is the author of Corporate Social Responsibility: A Very Short Introduction (2014 Oxford) and co-author of Visible Hands: Government Regulation and International Business Responsibility (2017 Cambridge).

Pic by Jonathan Eyler-Werve, edited by BOS.

Enjoy the Silence? CSR Communication and the Phenomenon of “Greenhushing”

By Dennis Schoeneborn.

  • Why do some companies don’t “talk their walk”?
  • Especially SMEs face cost barriers to CSR communication
  • Scandals or reputational crises taught companies to be very careful with their CSR communication
  • Yet, there are reasons why firms should engage in CSR communication nevertheless…

All I ever wanted
All I ever needed
Is here in my arms
Words are very unnecessary
They can only do harm
(Depeche Mode – Enjoy the silence)

When firms talk in public about their CSR activities, a common suspicion (by critical activists, journalists, academic scholars, etc.) is that they would only do so for the purpose of “greenwashing”. The term greenwashing, in turn, implies that firms would talk in public about CSR (primarily to gain reputational benefits) but without actually “walking the talk”, i.e. putting CSR into practice. However, a recent study by Font et al. (2017) in the tourism industry highlights that a common practice in CSR communication rather seems to be the contrary, i.e. what is called “greenhushing”. This term refers to situations where firms indeed put in CSR into practice but deliberately under-report about these activities.

Cost barriers for SMEs
So what might be the root causes for greenhushing? First, extensive CSR communication is costly. As Wickert et al. (2016) argue, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are particularly likely to engage in greenhushing. This is because SMEs, if compared to large firms, can more easily implement CSR activities in their business practices (due to usually less complex value chains) but it is harder for them to run a centrally located CSR department (that would be in charge of public CSR communication), as it would require a comparatively larger chunk of their overall costs.

Fearing the spotlight
Second, extensive CSR communication can backfire. For instance, firms are confronted today with the risk of eruptive scandalizations or “firestorms” in social media. In turn, firms become increasingly cautious about exposing themselves too strongly with public CSR communication, fearing that they would be in the spotlight of particularly harsh critique as soon as they are hit by a scandal or reputational crisis. Accordingly, some scholars (e.g., Morsing et al., 2008) recommend that firms should pursue a rather modest approach to CSR communication, while relying primarily on third-party endorsements.

Reasons to break the silence
In sum, should firms follow Depeche Mode’s advice to “enjoy the silence” and simply avoid any CSR communication in public? There are a couple of good reasons why firms should engage in CSR communication nevertheless. For instance, in order to further advance CSR practices, public communication by leading and committed firms is needed, also because these firms can ideally serve as role models that can inspire other firms in their industries or beyond. Furthermore, committing publicly to CSR can serve as an important resource for initiating intra-organizational change towards integrating CSR in core business practices (see also Christensen et al., 2013). In any case, further research will be needed to shed light on how firms can successfully navigate their ways in CSR communication – without greenwashing, -hushing, nor -blushing.


Dennis Schoeneborn is a Professor of Organization Studies at Leuphana University Lüneburg and a Professor (MSO) of Organization, Communication, and CSR at Copenhagen Business School.

This post is part of our new series “BOS Blog Classics” in which we revive and refresh selected posts from the old BOS Blog that is not up and running anymore…

Pic by franciscopgr, Fotolia.

License to Critique: Inoculating Standards against Closure

By Lars Thøger Christensen.

  • Sustainability and responsibility standards entail a danger of organizational actors stopping to reflect about what these values could or should entail in each particular situation and setting.
  • Rather than passive compliance, standards should produce participation, involvement and contestation.
  • Several communication principles need to be respected for a license to critique approach to have its desired effects.

Approximate reading time: 3-4 minutes.

Fixed, clear and authoritative standards able to discipline and regulate organizational behavior are often called for on the sustainability and responsibility arenas. This makes perfect sense. Standards that are loose, vague or open-ended allow organizations to subscribe to the values of sustainability and responsibility without changing their behaviors significantly. In such cases, standards may be criticized for being simply “lofty pronouncements” disconnected from other organizational practices. Yet, if standards become too strict and rigid they may end up working against their original purposes.

Standards are voluntary and predefined norms and procedures that specify desirable organizational behavior in particular social or environmental contexts.

Most standards in sustainability and responsibility are developed, designed and assessed by international organizations, governments, or multi-stakeholder initiatives outside the adopting organization, often with the intent of prescribing and shaping the dos and don’ts in a particular context. Their ability to generate compliance is usually considered an important success criterion. Passive compliance, however, may not serve the social and environmental interests at play. Strict standards tend to produce mechanical and unreflective “ticking the box” exercises where the main concern is to appear good and be let “off the hook” by critical stakeholders.

Compliance is not necessarily the best measure for responsibility and sustainability.

When responsibility and sustainability are prespecified in detail, there is a great danger that organizational actors stop reflecting about what these values could or should entail in each particular situation and setting. Such “closure” is detrimental to both the environment and to society. Under conditions of closure, curiosity and argument about values are replaced by attempts to manage the standards, to transform their ideals into technical measures, and to document their impacts on organizational practices. By naturalizing the standard as the “normal thing to do”, closure transfers responsibility from the organization to the standard itself in a way that allows the organization to demonstrate responsiveness without responsibility: “It is not our fault. We are complying with the standard”.

 Strict and closed standards produce organizational responsiveness without responsibility.

Rather than passive compliance, standards should produce participation, involvement and contestation. Involvement, critique and contestation are vital dimensions in processes of testing, fine-tuning and improving standards to fit changing social and environmental problems. To facilitate such processes, organizations would be better off embracing – rather than repudiating – critical voices. Such attitude may be described as a “license to critique”. License to critique is a managerial philosophy designed to involve managers and employees, draw on their insights and stimulate their critical thinking while avoiding a premature closing down of discussions along with a potential to improve organizational practices. Critique in the shape of criticisms, appraisals, examinations, opinions, argumentations, or the suggestion of alternatives is recognized as an important and necessary dimension of organizational development and learning.

A license to critique approach welcomes and encourages constructive input from all corners of the organization.

Several communication principles need to be respected for a license to critique approach to have its desired effects. The most important are these:

  • Confronting alternatives. The licence to critique approach invites alternatives by regarding the standard as a “lens” through which managers as well as employees are expected to observe and challenge existing ideals, assumptions and practices.
  • Authorizing participation. The license to critique approach invites participation with a focus on openness, mutuality, and trust, as well as a tolerance for difference and variety. This invitation calls on organizational members to act constructively in shaping organisational ideas and practices. Simultaneously, they call on managers to allow for intensive boundary spanning and to draw actively and systematically on the day-to-day experiences, ideas and enactments of standard users.
  • Talking to learn. Since sustainability and responsibility are complex issues without finite answers and solutions, the role of communication is not simply to convey prepackaged ideals and explain necessary practices. Rather, participants, including managers, need to hear themselves talk about sustainability in order to understand what the ideal means to their particular organizations and to discover the possibilities and limitations of the ideal in specific contexts.

In sum, contestation of values and assumptions and their implied practices in contested contexts such as sustainability and responsibility is necessary to cultivate a variety of perspectives, ensure commitment among involved parties and stimulate creative solutions.

 

See further: Christensen, L.T., Morsing, M., & Thyssen, O. (2017). License to Critique: A Communication Perspective on Sustainability Standards. Business Ethics Quarterly, 27(2): 239-262.


Lars Thøger Christensen is Professor of Communication and Organization at the Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. 

Pic by alphaspirit, Fotolia.

Really Fake

By Glen Whelan.

  • With generative technologies on their way to maturity, ‘Fake News’ may soon reach a whole new level of ‘realness’
  • No less than the authenticity and credibility of video and audio footage is at stake
  • Verified identities might help, but come with their own problems

Approximate reading time: 2-3 minutes

 As little as five years ago the idea of ‘fake news’ referred to satires like The Daily Show or The Colbert Report. Now, fake news refers to phenomena that are ‘really fake’: i.e., news or events that are fabricated to appear real. Recent examples include those that place a target or puppet – such as Obama or Françoise Madeline Hardy – under the control of a puppeteer who directs the puppet’s facial expressions, speech, and so on.

Technically faking reality
Whilst we have long been told not to believe everything we see or read, and whilst photoshop and fashion and hip-hop and auto-tune have gone hand in hand for a while now, current developments look like a step change. One key technology behind these changes is Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). A sub-field of deep learning (which Facebook, Google, and Microsoft all have a major interest in), GANs work by pitting two algorithmic models – a generative model and an adversary – against each other.

The generative model can be thought of as analogous to a team of counterfeiters, trying to produce fake currency and use it without detection, while the discriminative model is analogous to the police, trying to detect the counterfeit currency. Competition in this game drives both teams to improve their methods until the counterfeits are indistinguishable from the genuine articles. (Goodfellow et al., 2014: 1)

Although currently limited, machine learning expert Ian Goodfellow – who has a PhD from the University of Montréal, but now works for Google Brain – suggests that “the generation of YouTube fakes that are very plausible may be possible within three years”. Where all this is heading gives rise to two concerns.

Was it you?
The first concern is that our ability to distinguish between the fake and the real regarding other people is undermined. Once generative technologies hit a certain level of advancement, it will be prima facie impossible to tell whether or not a given piece of audio or video is a fake generated by a puppeteer, or a true piece of documented experience. When one realizes that this does not just apply to the powerful and famous, but to our partners, children and friends as well, the full extent of the problem becomes clear.

The second and related concern is that generative technologies might increase the likelihood of people raising doubts as to whether or not documented footage or recordings, of themselves, are true. A person filmed engaging in something embarrassing, unsavory, or outright criminal, could suggest that the footage in question is a fake generation, and not a real documentation of any actual event.  Whereas the first concern relates to the ability to identify truths about other people, the second concern relates to people potentially escaping, or avoiding the consequences of, truths about themselves.

To be or not to be (verified)
In light of such, an increased push towards verification should be expected. Verified identities are already central to platforms such as Facebook, AirBnB and Twitter, and Amnesty International is involved in creating verification processes for ‘citizen media’ images or video that are relevant to human rights considerations.

In and of itself, this seems a good thing. But the fact that verification processes need to be organizationally controlled suggests prudence is warranted. It is not, for example, difficult to imagine one of the current tech giants coming to monopolize the world of verified interactions in both our private and public lives. As the threat of fake realities become ever present, then, we should remind ourselves that an increasingly verified existence would likely come with its own, all-encompassing, problems.


Glen Whelan teaches at McGill, is a GRB Fellow at CBS, a Visiting Scholar at York University’s Schulich School of Business, and the social media editor for the Journal of Business Ethics. His research focuses on the moral and political influence of corporations, and high-tech corporations in particular. He is on twitter @grwhelan.

Pic by EtiAmmos, Fotolia.

The Risks of Intuitive Thinking in Environmentally Friendly Clothing Consumption

By Kristian Steensen Nielsen & Wencke Gwozdz.

  • Clothing behaviors might be well-intended, but they do not necessarily reduce environmental impact
  • Environmentally friendly clothing in one geographical location may not be environmentally friendly in another
  • Our judgments are likely influenced by prevailing options of environmentally friendly clothing consumption, which may overshadow less known but more effective behaviors

Approximate reading time: 4-5 minutes

The production, purchase, maintenance, and disposal of clothing carry a heavy environmental burden. To reduce this burden, we need to change our clothing consumption behavior. An increasing number of consumers accept this notion, but what does it actually imply to make our clothing consumption more environmentally friendly? Should we purchase products made from organic cotton, reduce our clothing consumption, rent and share clothing, or all of the above?

In the preparation of a recently published research article (Gwozdz, Nielsen & Müller, 2017), we were confronted and puzzled by exactly these questions. What we came to realize was that all we really had was a bunch of intuitive judgments and assumptions about what actually constituted environmentally friendly clothing consumption. Relying on intuition is, however, a potentially risky route to take to reduce the environmental impact of clothing consumption.

Environmental Risks
While our intuitions sometimes serve us well, they can also lead us astray (Kahneman & Tversky, 1973). If behavioral scientists (or policy-makers or industry or NGOs) depend on intuitively-generated solutions to environmentally friendly clothing consumption, three immediate risks emerge.

The first, and most potent, risk is to identify environmentally friendly clothing behavior that are in fact not so environmentally friendly. This implies that, although the identified clothing behaviors might be well-intended, they do not reduce the environmental impact. For example, favoring wool-based clothing products over products made from other materials (e.g., cotton or polyester) may appear more natural and environmentally friendly, but may actually be worse for the environment due to its emission of the highly potent greenhouse gas methane.

Sheep Wool, Pic by Brett Neilson

The second risk is to universalize environmentally friendly clothing behaviors. What might be an environmentally friendly behavior in one geographical location may not be environmentally friendly in another. The reason is that the environmental impact of a clothing products and its maintenance can vary significantly in production method, energy supply systems, transportation distance and channel, or whether personal transportation is involved during the acquisition phase. For instance, clothing libraries can be a good alternative to acquire clothing items, but its environmental benefits depend on the mode of transportation during the acquisition phase (Roos et al., 2017). In cases where walking, biking or public transportation is used to come to a fashion library, its impact will be lower than conventional consumption alternatives. The environmental benefits of fashion libraries will, however, evaporate if the acquisition entails private car driving (unless supplied with renewable energy).

Transportation matters, Pic by University of Exeter

The third environmental risk of relying on intuitive judgments is that these judgments are likely influenced by prevailing options of environmentally friendly clothing consumption, which may overshadow, less known, more effective behaviors. In other words, the low hanging fruits may not be the most effective means. For example, many people perceive organic cotton as an environmentally friendly alternative to conventional cotton, whereas fewer people perceive secondhand clothing or reducing clothing consumption as being environmentally friendly alternatives. Organic cotton is, subsequently, more likely to be identified as a viable solution despite the fact that increasing the longevity of existing clothing (i.e. reducing consumption) is a much more effective way to lower the environmental impact of clothing (Roos et al., 2017). One reason is that organic cotton production requires more land use compared to conventional cotton. But, of course, known behaviors are easier replaced with similar behaviors (e.g., replace a t-shirt made of conventional cotton with one made of organic cotton) than with completely new behaviors (e.g., buying less).

Organic Cotton Yarn, Pic by Natalia Wilson

Ways Forward
The consequence of promoting mistaken “environmentally friendly” behaviors is that well-intended efforts achieve limited benefits for the environment. In some instances, they can even undermine the prospects of environmental progress. One approach to counteract the potentially detrimental consequences of misguided behaviors of environmentally friendly clothing consumption created through intuitive judgments is to shed light on the true environmental impact of clothing behaviors. Another is to send clear messages (see e.g. bioRE; respect-code) to consumers of which behaviors are environmentally superior to others. Informational systems  have a strong influence on consumers’ ways to consume more environmentally friendly. If recommendations for misguided behaviors originate in the scientific community or amongst policy-makers and NGOs, we can actually take on the responsibility and change that through promoting more interdisciplinary collaborations between natural and behavioral scientists where we as behavioral scientists learn about the actual environmental impacts instead of making intuitive judgments. The identification of research-based target behaviors is of critical importance before undertaking behavioral campaigns or policy interventions.


Kristian Steensen Nielsen is a PhD fellow in environmentally friendly behavior at the Department of Management, Society and Communication, CBS. His main research interest is how self-control influences environmental behavior change.

Wencke Gwozdz is Associate Professor at the Department of Management, Society and Communication, CBS. Her  main research focus is on transformative consumer research and sustainable consumption including public policy research, social marketing and quality of life research.

Pic by Studio Grand Ouest, Fotolia.

Seeing Like a Standard: Sustainable Palm Oil and the Coasian Challenge

By Kristjan Jespersen & Caleb Gallemore.

Approximate reading time: 3-4 minutes.

Go to any supermarket and you’ll see labels, so many labels. Some of them seem reputable: the Marine Stewardship Council, the Forest Stewardship Council. Some of them seem less so, such as Bob’s House of Sustainability standard, which we just created five minutes ago.

One challenge – countless standards
Credible or not, these standards, developed mostly by the private sector and civil society, are growing in number. In Jessica Green’s 2014 book, Rethinking Private Authority, she counts 119 such environmental standards as of 2009, 90% of them created after 1990 – and this without considering Bob’s House of Sustainability. In a way, all these standards attempt something economist Ronald Coase imagined virtually impossible: to convey information about the true social costs and benefits of actions via pricing mechanisms. In this way, complex social and ecological interactions could be made intelligible to stakeholders like customers at the corner store.

The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil – A Case Study
So how are such illustrious standards as Bob’s House of Sustainability put together in the first place? Like James Scott in his 1995 book Seeing like a State, we are interested in how social systems require the production of certain kinds of information. But we suspect that because the pressures on private standards for sustainability are different from the pressures on state governments, the types of phenomena standards make intelligible will be different. In other words, we are interested in what it means to see not like a state, but like a standard, using a detailed case study of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). Working with support from Copenhagen Business School’s Governing Responsible Business Research Environment, we are in the process of collecting data on the internal processes of the RSPO from a range of sources that include webscraping, document analysis, and interviews.

Various Adverse Effects of Palm Oil Production
There are certainly plenty harrowing problems posed by palm oil production that ideally should be readily legible to consumers: palm oil production causes deforestation and attendant greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity loss, particularly affecting orangutan populations. Because land clearance to plant oil palm often is undertaken with the use of fire, it contributes to local air pollution and the notorious Southeast Asian haze problem. What is more, oil palm plantations often engage in exploitative labor practices, promote tenurial conflict, and can benefit local elites at the expense of others.

Lead by conservation and social justice NGOs, there have been numerous brand attacks against unsustainable and exploitative palm oil production. These have lead to such notable episodes as the successful campaign by two American girl scouts to get the manufacturer of Girl Scout Cookies to purchase certified sustainable palm oil, and the recent awareness campaign launched in Denmark by Freja Bruun, also a successful teenage environmental activist.

Reputation is Key
The founders of the RSPO intended to respond to these challenges by managing a private standard certifying sustainable palm oil production. Because initiatives like the RSPO are private rather than public, decisions about what information needs to be made intelligible are driven primarily by branding concerns. The RSPO’s reputation is critical, as it is the validity of the standard that allows it to differentiate itself from the likes of Bob’s House of Sustainability. While there have been vociferous debates about the RSPO’s on-the-ground requirements, another key concern is the traceability of certified palm oil across the supply chain. Within the standard, certified sustainable palm oil prices tend to be differentiated by the level of traceability, ranging from the Book & Claim mechanism, which acts like an offset, to the RSPO-Next system, which envisions traceability to the source plantation.

Shift in Power Balance within the RSPO
Working with several Master’s students at CBS, we have found that the RSPO has, over time, undergone a noticeable shift in the balance of power between upstream members (consumer-goods manufacturers, investors, and retailers), and downstream members (oil palm growers and palm oil refiners), as the number of downstream voting members has grown considerably (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Composition of RSPO membership, by year (RSPO Website Data). Credit: Mikkel Kruuse and Kaspar Tangbaek.

As downstream members have become a stronger bloc, the RSPO’s intelligibility efforts have shifted from on-the-ground impacts to the traceability of the supply chain. While separate, traceable supply chains have been a stated goal since the RSPO’s founding, a noted shift is apparent. The share of total certified sustainable palm oil sold on the offset-like Book & Claim (B&C) system, for example, is declining rapidly (see Figure 2), and even B&C’s name has been rebranded to PalmTrace.

Figure 2: Percentage of total RSPO CSPO sold via the B&C system, by year (RSPO, various years).

Benefits of RSPO Membership only so good as the Label
Faced with concerted brand attacks, downstream members of the RSPO, in particular, have to overcome a public goods problem. The benefits of RSPO membership are only so good as the label, and downstream firms are understandably nervous about buying from suppliers who are cheating, exposing them to brand attacks. Faced with that risk, raising traceability requirements is one straightforward way to maintain the brand’s integrity. While enhanced traceability encourages downstream firms to police their supply chains, and geographic information systems and remote sensing are making traceability more robust, there is a monetary and policy cost to cutting through the supply-chain haze. The more traceable tiers of certification – which, with the exception of the newly minted RSPO-Next, do not involve more stringent on-the-ground requirements – are prohibitively expensive for smallholders and small businesses that must push those costs onto consumers. The desire for intelligibility, in other words, can strengthen standards, but has its own costs: first, it may focus intelligibility efforts in unproductive directions, and, second, when being intelligible involves transaction costs, only bigger players have the wherewithal to stand up and be counted.


Kristjan Jespersen primary research focus is the growing development and management of Ecosystem Services in developing countries. Within the field, Kristjan focuses his attention on the institutional legitimacy of such initiatives and the overall compensation tools used to ensure compliance. He has a background in International Relations and Economics.

Follow Kristjan on Twitter.

Caleb Gallemore is an Assistant Professor in the International Affairs Program at Lafayette College. A geographer by training, Caleb’s research focuses on land-use teleconnections and international environmental policy and politics.

Pic by JAM Project, edited by BOS.

Behavioral Insights All Over the World: A New Study from cbsCSR, CBS GRB and Harvard University

By Cass R. Sunstein & Lucia Reisch.

Worldwide, officials are employing behavioral insights to improve policies in areas that include health, finance, highway safety, employment, discrimination, the environment, and consumer protection. Some of these policies take the form of mandates, incentives, and bans, but a prominent set of behaviorally informed tools involves information, warnings, reminders, social norms, and default rules. Insofar as they steer people in certain directions without imposing significant costs, tools of this kind are called “nudges”, a term coined by Cass R. Sunstein (a CBS Honorary Professor) and Richard Thaler, one of the leading US economists about a decade ago.

Do people like nudges?
Today, more than 150 governments worldwide make use of behavioral insights and “nudges” to influence consumer behavior and consumer choices. A recent OECD report published in March 2017 presents more than a hundred examples of how they work in practice. However, not much is known about whether citizens approve of these nudges as governmental policy tools. Some work has been done in the United States and in several nations in Europe, including our own study on “Do people like nudges?”, published 2016. With the aim to provide policy makers and the public debate with empirical evidence on public attitudes towards some of these nudges, we explored the reactions from a diverse array of citizens and began to “map” people’s views across the globe. One result is that the world’s nations fall into discernible categories.

Current literature on public acceptance of nudges offers five general lessons:

  • First, citizens in diverse nations generally approve of nudges, at least of the kind that have been adopted or under serious consideration in recent years.
  • Second, citizens do not approve of nudges that they perceive to be inconsistent with the interests or values of most choosers such as a default rule by which men’s last name would automatically change to that of their wives.
  • Third, citizens do not approve of nudges that are perceived as having an illicit goal, such as religious or political favoritism.
  • Fourth, citizens object to manipulation, but they define it quite narrowly, as in the cases of visual illusions to reduce speeding and subliminal advertising (the latter does not qualify as a nudge, though).
  • Fifth, and quite surprisingly, political affiliation is generally a weak predictor of citizens’ reactions to the tested nudges.

With respect to cross-national differences, there seems, thus far, to be only one major fault line. In an impressively wide array of democratic nations, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, France, and Sweden, all five lessons apply (with relatively minor variations), and citizen evaluations are unexpectedly similar. But in two nations, approval rates are significantly lower. These nations are Denmark and Hungary. To be sure, majorities in both nations do tend to approve of the tested nudges, but the level of approval is consistently lower, and in some cases, approval rates fall below 50 percent. A full explanation for these lower approval rates has yet to be provided, but greater distrust or fear of government undoubtedly provides part of the picture.

Behavioral insights all over the world
In our most recent survey from November/December 2016, we offer results from Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Japan, Russia, South Africa, and South Korea. These nations were chosen in order obtain a broad sample of countries with diversity along several lines. We conducted representative online surveys, providing data from about 1,000 respondents per country, who were asked whether they approve or disapprove of 15 selected nudges. In order to be able to compare and enlarge the overall data set, we used the same survey instrument and largely the same methodology applied in our  earlier European study.

A general lesson is that majority support for nudges cuts across many nations with diverse cultures, political inclinations, and histories. At the same time, we find that the nations of the world can be provisionally grouped into three categories.

  • The first, consistent with the existing U.S. and European data and including several of the nations studied here, reflect all of the five lessons sketched above. Of the nations for which data are available, this is the largest group.
  • The second category, consistent with data from Denmark and Hungary, shows significantly lower approval rates; Japan now joins this category.
  • The third category, identified for the first time here, consists of nations with massively high approval ratings. China and South Korea are the current examples.

Lessons learned
For public officials, the major lesson is simple and positive: So long as the underlying end is legitimate, and so long as nudges are consistent with people’s values and interests, most citizens are offering an enthusiastic permission slip or green light. They are hardly troubled by nudges as such. Notably, the level of public support is likely to be significantly lower for mandates and bans, though of course the relevant subject area is important (people do not object to prohibitions on murder and assault).

Public approval – necessary but not sufficient
It is important to emphasize that surveys hardly tell officials everything they need to know. A full evaluation of the welfare effects of nudges, and of the underlying ethical issues, would be necessary to decide whether and how to nudge. A nudge might receive widespread public approval even though it would do little good and considerable harm – and even if it would, on reflection, raise troublesome questions on either utilitarian or deontological grounds. But insofar as officials are concerned about public opinion, they generally need not worry, at least with respect to the most of the nudges tested here.

Cross-national differences – an avenue for future research
With respect to cross-national differences, much remains to be learned. For example, we do not know whether the very high levels of support in China reflect trust in government, enthusiasm about the policy goals, adaptation to the extensive use of government power, or some form of “preference falsification”, producing misleadingly high levels of support in surveys. Nor do we know, as yet, whether many countries fall within the category of overwhelmingly pro-nudge nations, now containing only China and South Korea, or whether the category of more cautiously pro-nudge nations is small and greatly dominated, in terms of sheer numbers, by the principled pro-nudge consensus among democratic nations (as now appears). It also remains possible that some nations would show only minority support for the nudges tested here.

Read the full study here


Lucia Reisch is a behavioral economist and full professor for intercultural consumer research and European consumer policy at the Copenhagen Business School. She is also Visiting Professor at Friedrichshafen’s Zeppelin University, Germany. She is currently chairing several German and European research projects in the field of sustainable development. The main focus of her work is on consumer, health and sustainability policy, empirical research into consumer behavior (in particular sustainable consumption and production) as well as behaviorally based regulation and innovation research.

Cass R. Sunstein is currently the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard. From 2009 to 2012, he was Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. He is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School. Mr. Sunstein has testified before congressional committees on many subjects, and he has been involved in constitution-making and law reform activities in a number of nations.

Follow Cass R. Sunstein on Twitter.

Dirty Oil or Green Energy in the Faroe Islands?

By Árni Johan Petersen.

These are the stories from the two divided camps in the Faroe Islands – please give your take on this dilemma. Should the Faroese explore and produce oil in the Faroe Islands that will contribute to global energy safety and stability to an ever growing global energy demand? Or should the Faroese stop this process now, and rethink the current state of the world where the Faroe Islands could become the front-runner for green solutions to statuette an example, and stop the greenhouse gasses deriving from fossil fuel energy by saying no to oil?

Background
The 4th license round for rights to oil exploration in the Faroe Islands was May 17th 2017, and the search for oil in the offshore subsoil in the Faroe Islands might continue if there is an interest from international oil companies to invest in the exploration. Since the first license round in 2000 there have been conducted nine drillings in the Faroese offshore subsoil without any commercial fund but results have concluded the subsoil to have a hydro-carbon active system in place.

Today, the Faroese economy is strong, unemployment rate is close to 2 per cent, young Faroese are moving back home, population has surpassed 50.000 inhabitants for the first time, salmon industry is booming (has done so for seven years), tourism is booming (four years), and the fishery is booming. A society in prosperity where the incentives to create new jobs might be vanishing because there are no Faroese to fill in the positions and foreign workforce might become a necessary solution to keep the (capitalistic) wheels going.

Pro-oil exploration Camp
The Faroese Ben Arabo, CEO at Atlantic Petroleum, argues that the Faroe Islands should explore for oil in the Faroese subsoil. The world, he argues, demands oil and gas in large quantities because the world consumes 100 million barrels of oil every day, and the demand is increasing. Oil, as a percentage of the total world energy consumption, is decreasing but the growth of energy demand is so great that the demand for oil in quantity increases every year. Currently, he continues, approximately one third of the global energy demand derives from oil, one third from coal, and one fourth from gas. The rest derives from nuclear energy, water and other renewable energy currently supplying one-digit percentage of the global energy production.

We, who live in the privileged part of the world, Ben argues, take energy stability and security for granted while other parts of the world, e.g. India, China, Indonesia etc., do not have this luxury. Ben recommends people who think they could survive without oil should examine how long time passes before they use the first object that demands oil in its production process (e.g. tooth brush). Hydrocarbon is present in a large numbers of product ranging from mountain helmet, solar panels, aspirin, and tooth paste. The wishful thinking of “no-oil-tomorrow” is based on ideology rather than technology, Ben concludes.

Resistance Camp
For the first time since the Faroese started to dream about finding oil we are observing resistance in the Faroese community. These are mainly environmentalists who have joined forces in an attempt to stop the oil exploration in the Faroe Islands. One local NGO, Ringrás, is represented by Ingmar Valdemarsson á Løgmansbø who argues:

“The context of the opening of the fourth Faroese hydrocarbon licensing round is marked by increasing ecological turmoil and biosphere degradation stemming from anthropogenic climate change and widespread habitat destruction. Fundamentally, our global society is built upon a measure of success (unrelenting growth) which, when achieved, clashes with the integrity of the interconnected ecosystems that make life on earth viable, and thus, enable civilisation as we know it.

The challenges we face, as a country and a global community, are much greater and more fundamental than the question of energy supply alone. But nevertheless, it is evident that the energy systems of the future must, by necessity, be renewable, if they – and we – are to last. Reality is catching up with our complacency and the thwarted efforts to ditch fossil fuels and racing ahead of our expectations, but luckily on two fronts:

  1. The forecast dangers of rapid climate change are showing themselves at an accelerated, unexpected and ominous pace.
  2. Key renewable technologies have matured to take on and render fossil fuels largely obsolete.

Focusing on the latter in relation to the former, it is entirely untimely, unnecessary and unethical for the Faroe Islands to venture into a dirty industry that would threaten the mainstays of the Faroese economy, namely the fishing industry and tourism, whilst contributing to an uncertain future in favor of very dubious short-term financial gain, prone to suffer from stranded assets as disruptive technologies coupled with global weirding and climate policy expedite the transition to a low-carbon society. This is underlined by the recent developments in India, where 14 Gt of planned coal power stations have been cancelled in May alone on account of Solar PV directly outcompeting coal.

In this environment of change, we must embrace the shift away from fossil fuels and take on the potential leading role that our national goal of 100% renewable electricity generation by 2030 promises to imbue us with. This path is what we as a country need and what the world needs and, best of all, it won’t cost the world.”

According to Ingmar the Faroe Islands, the Faroese Government, has signed the Paris Agreement (COP21) which includes lowering the carbon emission to decrease the global warming.  The Faroese Minister of Industry and Foreign Affairs, Poul Michelsen, has also publically stated his support to the agreement and the Faroe Islands should be the frontrunner in the battle against fossil fuel emission adding to the fire of global warming. The long term perspective, according to Ingmar, is that this will be the sustainable solution regarding environment, society, and economics because the Faroe Islands are heavily dependent on their fisheries, salmon farming, and tourism. Oil industry will add to the carbon quantity in the natural environment and changes in the ecology will alter the livelihood of the resources in the sea. This, in turn, will negatively affect the natural resources in the Faroe Islands harming the economy and society in the long run. Exploring for oil has to stop now!

The Broader Picture
The International Energy Agency (IEA) recommends exploring for more oil in the Scandinavian area because this will provide global energy stability and security. This argument is based on the fact that the political system is transparent, and the regulation for oil activities is progressive in terms of natural environment, work processes, and overall safety. The Middle East is, according to IEA, not the most reliable nor stable area, while Scandinavian countries are triple-A-democracies, market economies and predictable partners.

Producing more oil will lower the price of oil and this automatically decreases the incentives to invest in research and development of renewable energy solutions because the energy consumer demand will, in general, follow the least expensive solution. In contrast, if the oil production is stopped the oil price will go up and the demand for alternative solutions becomes pressing and the investors will predict return on investment. This will speed up the process to develop renewable energy solutions but we will probably experience political power changes on the global arena, e.g. a stronger Middle East. The question is, for how long? The sooner the world moves to alternative energy solution the global arena will change, again, and this might be the only sustainable solution because the emission and global warming is already at a critical stage.

So, should the Faroese provide for energy stability and security, or should they be the front-runners to say “no” to oil? Could the Faroe Islands become a role model for other societies in the Arctic and beyond? And if the Faroe Islands can do this, could other countries learn from this small country? Is the Faroese political (Governmental) agenda hypocritical because of its duplicity? Or is this hypocrisy a necessary aspiration to prosper as a small society in the Arctic that might spread to other small societies in the Arctic?


Árni Petersen is PhD-Fellow at the Department of Management, Society and Communication at Copenhagen Business School. His PhD project pursues the research question: “How does future expectation of wealth deriving from the oil affect the Faroese society and the potential outcomes in the future in the Faroe Islands?” His research features an in-depth case study of the Faroese Oil Industry, including interviews, observations, and local newspaper articles about the oil industry.

You can find Árni on LinkedIn.

Pics by BSEE & Christian Reimer, edited by BOS.

Universities – Front Runners or Falling Behind The Green Transition?

By Louise Kofod Thomsen.

Universities are knowledge generators, facilitators of innovation and play a key role in shaping the mindsets and developing the skills of our future leaders.
Universities bear a tremendous responsibility for not just talking the talk, but also for walking the walk on social responsibility. However, when visiting a university campus, it is not always commonplace that we find universities in the forefront when it comes to acting sustainably and responsibly.

Universities proudly take on the role of advisors in setting universal guidelines for how others should act, but how good are they when it comes to implementing sustainability initiatives on their own campuses? The CBS campus is a wonderful place to take a stroll around, especially on a hot summer day, where you will be greeted by the sight of the students sitting on the grass and enjoying the green areas. You will quickly discover that CBS is a real Copenhagen campus with bikes as far as the eye can see. However, as with many universities, the CBS campus has a long journey ahead when it comes to implementing sustainability initiatives and decreasing CO2 emissions.

The pressure is on
Every third year, the Minister for Education and Science negotiates the new university development contracts, setting the goals for all Danish universities’ future development. The contracts contain self-defined targets by the individual institutions, reflecting their own strategic priorities as well as obligatory targets based on societal needs as defined by the Minister for Education and Science. However, until now, these contracts have mentioned no legal obligation for universities to implement sustainability initiatives on campus. Universities’ lack of focus on sustainability initiatives on campus is somewhat surprising. You would think that there should be considerable pressure on universities to show a higher degree of engagement on campus regarding sustainable development considering the growing concern and initiatives globally.

The dominating theme at Rio+20 was how to achieve environmental and social sustainable development globally. The green transition is also a leading theme for the Danish government with its ambition of having Denmark ranked as the top country worldwide for green initiatives. The green transition is reinforced not least by the recent adoption of the EU Action Plan for Circular Economy. In 2015, the world adopted the 17 Sustainable Development Goals aiming to engage governments, the public sector, civil society and universities to bring about global sustainable development and in November 2016, the Paris Agreement entered into force with 158 ratifying parties working towards the goal of staying below 2 degrees.

There is no doubt that there is a growing demand for better standards for sustainability and resource efficiency. Yet, if we are to achieve the highly ambitious global targets, we need drastic changes and stronger commitments by key actors. Considering universities’ crucial societal role in educating the generations, you might wonder what keeps universities from taking up this challenge?

CBS Goes Green – or did it?
In 2012, an initiative known as the “CBS Goes Green” was launched to, among other things, allow for waste sorting for the students at Solbjerg Plads. Today, 5 years on, waste sorting has still not been implemented at Solbjerg Plads or any other of CBS’ main buildings. This is generally explained to be due to “a lack of interest by the students”. Another explanation has been prior lack of waste sorting systems in the municipality of Frederiksberg. However, today Frederiksberg has a well-functioning system including clear guidelines as well as consultation services for correct waste sorting. With no clear strategy for handling waste (such as plastic, bio and metal) within the various CBS departments, it appears that sorting waste is difficult not only for students, but for staff and faculty as well. Despite often good intentions, the systems for sorting waste are generally lacking.

You might wonder why sorting your apple core from your paper trash is such a challenge when most do it at home. It seems as if the challenge lies within some rather old, out-of-date structures and a “this is how we have always done it” approach. Despite the fact that sustainability is a growing priority for universities all over the world placing a strong focus on teaching and research in this area, not many universities commit to integrate operational sustainability on campus.

Universities as test centers for sustainable initiatives
Universities are in many ways a powerful platform and a crucial component for achieving sustainable development across the globe, but also very importantly, locally, on campus. Universities have a responsibility as role models to lead the way and show students how to act responsibly. There are also long-term economic incentives for taking on the challenge.

In 2008, Copenhagen University adopted its first Green Campus targets and has since saved DKK 35 million on energy. The University of British Colombia is treating their campus as a living lab for students to work with behavior and innovation to develop sustainable solutions for the campus. They have launched The SEEDS Sustainability Program with the aim of advancing campus sustainability by creating partnerships between students, operational staff, and faculty on innovative and impactful research projects to be implemented on campus.

CBS has just launched a similar initiative, The Sustainable Living Lab, a project that opens up campus data for students, researchers etc. to use the campus to implement, test, research and teach sustainability with the CBS campus as the focal point (campus as a living lab). The Sustainable Living Lab project engages student organizations to create a better and greener campus, but we need CBS staff, faculty and management to contribute directly to projects like this if we want to transform CBS into a more sustainable university. However, we do see small steps towards a sustainable movement internally at CBS, with the recent establishment of the Sustainable Infrastructure Taskforce at the Department of Management, Society and Communication. Among others, the taskforce has set out to implement waste sorting using the department as a pilot project and in time use this knowledge for similar initiatives around campus.

Reflecting on CBS’ role as a business university with significant social science expertise, the unique focus of the CBS approach is its emphasis on business and societal dimensions that we can make use of for a sustainable campus redevelopment. There is a tremendous opportunity for universities to play a key role in this sustainable transition in terms of research, economical benefits and branding of universities as green contributors just to mention a few.

I believe, it is time we started redefining the role of universities in the sustainable transition and engaging students and staff alike in the journey towards creating a green campus.


Louise Thomsen is Project Manager for CBS PRME and the VELUX Chair in Corporate Sustainability at the Department of Management, Society and Communication, CBS. Her areas of interest are sustainable consumption, innovation, student engagement, education and partnerships for sustainable development. Follow her on LinkedIn and Twitter

Pic by Bjarke MacCarthy.

CBS new Knowledge Partner of the OECD

By Karin Buhmann.

In early 2017 CBS accepted an invitation from the Organisation of Economic Collaboration and Development (OECD) to become an OECD Knowledge Partner. As an OECD Knowledge Partner, CBS joins a small group of prestigious universities – including the University of Geneva, the University of Sydney, London School of Economics and SciencesPo (Institut d’études politiques de Paris) – that are invited to share and discuss research based knowledge with the OECD, thus enhancing its ability to deliver on regional and global challenges related to economic collaboration and development. For 2017 CBS was invited to participate in two key ways: scholarly interaction at the annual political OECD Global Forum, and contributing an article to the OECD Yearbook. Both were connected to the topic at this year’s Global Forum: Bridging Divides, with particular focus on inclusive growth, digitalization, and trust.

Three CBS professors (Karin Buhmann (MSC), Kim Andersen (DIG), and Christian Asmussen (SMG) and the CBS Vice-President for International Affairs (Dorte Salskov-Iversen, who is also Head of Department of MSC) participated in the OECD Global Forum, which took place at the OECD Headquarters in Paris on 6-8 June 2017. Presenting and moderating at an ‘Idea Factory’, Professor Kim Andersen shared views on artificial intelligence. Professors Christian Geisler Rasmussen and Karin Buhmann interacted with OECD experts on issues of Inclusive Growth and the Location Choices of Multinational Firms (Geisler Rasmussen) and The role and challenges of OECD’s Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises for building trust through Responsible Business Conduct in a context of global competition (Buhmann).

With permission from the OECD, the CBS contribution to OECD’s 2017 Yearbook  is reproduced in the following.

Responsible Business Conduct and Competition: OECD’s Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises and responsible supply chain management

By Karin Buhmann, Copenhagen Business School

Surprised looks with colleagues or students are commonplace when I observe that the OECD plays an important part for the promotion of responsible business conduct (RBC), not just in OECD countries but globally. RBC is OECD ‘speak’ for corporate social responsibility, corporate sustainability and other terms indicating an expectation that businesses take responsibility for their impact on society. The OECD’s key normative instrument for RBC, the Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, and the remedy institution that adhering states commit to establishing, the National Contact Points (NCPs), are relevant to help offset some of the social cost that competition causes to employees and communities. The Guidelines provide norms of conduct for MNEs and for how they should act to avoid harmful impact caused by their supply chains. Revised several times since first adopted in 1976, the Guidelines provide normative standards in regard to human rights, labour/employment and industrial relations, environment, bribery, consumer concerns, science and technology, competition and technology. The Guidelines also apply to institutional investors, including minority shareholders.[1] Jurisprudence (‘case law’) emerging through complaints (‘specific instances’) handled by NCPs elaborates the practical implications of the Guidelines for companies and investors, within and beyond the sector and country concerned by each case. Like the Guidelines have extraterritorial reach beyond MNE home states, NCPs may also deal with business conduct arising in non-OECD states or other states having acceded to the Guidelines (provided a connection to that state).

A case[2] that was recently handled by the Danish NCP highlights the pertinence of OECD’s Guidelines at a time when SMEs too have transnational operations, as well as of the evolving guidance developed by NCPs. The case concerned a Danish textile company that sourced from a supplier in the Rana Plaza building at the time of its collapse in 2013.

The Guidelines are recommendations from governments to companies operating in or out of states (whether or not OECD-Members) adhering to the Guidelines. With the 2011 revision, the Guidelines adopted the risk-based due diligence approach.[3] This is a process for companies to identify, prevent, mitigate and account for their impact on society. Whereas corporate legal or financial liability due diligence aims at protecting the company against harm, risk-based due diligence is about protecting society against harm caused by the company or its business relations. Of course, if done well it also protects the company against liability or reputational harm.

The case on the Danish textile company concerned the adequacy of the company’s due diligence to prevent harm directly linked to its operations by a business relationship. The NCP found that the company did not apply processes for due diligence in compliance with OECD’s MNE Guidelines. In particular, the company failed to make demands that its supplier ensure employees’ human and labour rights, including through adequate steps to ensure occupational health and safety. As to whether the company had acted consistent with what it argued to be buyer practice in regard to building inspection, the NCP observed that practice by itself may be indicative, but not conclusive regarding the scope of risk-based due diligence. In other words, a company must think and act for itself in regard to demands on suppliers to take ap­propriate measures to ensure health and safety in the workplace. Thus, the NCP statement elaborates on the practical implications of the Guidelines and due diligence for companies in the textile and other sectors for the future, in regards to building safety and supply chain management.

The collapse of the Rana Plaza building was a wake-up call in many OECD countries concerning the human and social cost that can be the price for the quest for economic gain that drives much competition. Global companies have long taken advantage of wage differentials and weak regulation to keep costs low.[4] Concerns with labour and human rights have been strong if too often ineffective drivers for corporate change and the conditions for competition.[5] The textile sector is not unique in competition causing adverse social or environmental impacts. Agri-industry and mining are among sectors in which adverse social and environmental impacts of business activity are regularly reported. Enhanced knowledge of OECDs MNE Guidelines may contribute to promoting RBC in such transnational economic activities.

 

[1] OECD (2014) Scope and application of ‘Business Relationships’ in the financial sector under OECD’s Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, Paris: OECD Global Forum on Responsible Business Conduct.

[2] Final Statement on Specific Instance notified by Clean Clothes Campaign Denmark and Active Consumers regarding the activities of PWT Group.

[3] The term was adopted from the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), United Nations Human Rights Council (2011) UN Doc. A/HRC/17/31.

[4] Krugman P, Obstfeld M, and Melitz M (2014). International Economics: Theory and Policy, Global Edition. 10th ed. Online: Pearson.

[5] Ruggie J (2013) Just Business – Multinational Corporations and Human Rights. Boston: W.W. Norton.


Karin Buhmann is professor at Copenhagen Business School (CBS) where she is charged with special responsibilities for Business & Human Rights, and a part-time member of the Danish National Contact Point (NCP) under OECD’s Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises. Her academic background is in international human rights law.

Pic by Solidarity Center, edited by BOS.

How Businesses Can Profit with Purpose

By Robert Strand.

Money helps us meet our basic needs, but what about our need for meaning? Businesses will profit — not just financially — by finding their souls.

How do you motivate someone to work? For many the response is quite simple: money. Want more work? Pay more money. Economists have long instructed us that human beings are rational self-interest maximizers motivated solely by the dollar.

The discipline of economics has historically dominated business schools and management research and, it follows, that the fundamental assumption of self-interest maximization is applied to companies. As the economist Milton Friedman famously wrote “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.”

A more powerful motivator
However, the view that money is the way to motivate someone to work is only half correct. And it is half terribly, terribly wrong. The research is in and it is clear: For knowledge workers, one must pay enough money to take the issue of money off the table. But beyond that, money is a terrible motivator.

In fact, money can be a demotivator as incentive plans often end up encouraging employees to think more about money than the work. Instead, purpose is increasingly recognized as the greatest motivator for employees and organizing force.

Purpose grows in importance with new generations of employees who are increasingly demanding that the organizations at which they spend their precious time connect to something much bigger. Great thinkers like Daniel Pink and my Berkeley-Haas colleague Barry Schwartz have much to say in support of this.

Can a business self-actualize?
Themes like social inclusion and climate change represent opportunities for companies to connect their employees with purpose. We recently held an event to explore how companies like Adobe and Microsoft are innovating their hiring practices to make it more possible for individuals from underrepresented populations to fulfill their potentials at their firms and, ultimately, encourage greater social inclusion.

For many large, established companies, connecting employees with a sense of purpose is remarkably challenging. This is where a corporate social responsibility (CSR) or sustainability group can serve an important role. CSR and sustainability groups can identify material issues for that company, such as encouraging social inclusion or battling climate change, and bring these issues into the company. Profits are a bit to the company like oxygen is to the body: Necessary for survival but a pretty lousy thing to live for. Companies that connect their employees to a greater sense of purpose are those that will foster healthier organizations and ultimately realize greater profits.

This article was first published in the San Francisco Chronicle Late Edition, 28 June 2017.


Robert Strand is Sustainability Professor and Executive Director at Berkeley-Haas Center for Responsible Business. Follow him on Twitter @robertgstrand

Pic by Hamza Butt.

How the Fringe is Becoming Mainstream. Or is it the Other Way Around?

By Hans Krause Hansen.

These are indeed interesting times! as one of my good colleagues recently exclaimed over a cup of coffee. Disinformation and conspiracy theories all over the place. Obama now accused of being the founding father of ISIS. Can you believe it? Politics is definitely going berserk.

Needless to say, I happened to be in complete agreement with my colleague’s diagnosis. And of course, just as confused. A few days later two fresh pieces of research arrived on my desk, helping me to make some sense of the mess. What is disinformation today? What’s its role in the new media ecology? And what are the social and political dynamics behind and implications of all this?

Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online by Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis from the Data & Society Research Institute investigates the spread of radical rightwing beliefs in the US. The study shows how various subcultures take advantage of the Internet to manipulate mainstream media and propagate their ideas. Michael Barkun’s Conspiracy Theory as Stigmatized Knowledge, recently published in the journal Diogenes, explores the migration of conspiracy theory from the fringe to the mainstream. Both texts provide fresh food for thought on issues that are becoming more and more important every day.

Manipulation and disinformation online
Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online is written in the spirit of “if you wish to fight disinformation, you need to know where it comes from and how it spreads.” It explores the complicated and intersecting networks of online subcultures in the US, including how white nationalists, men’s rights advocates, anti-feminists, trolls, techno-libertarians, anti-migration activists, anti-Semitists, and bored young people, amongst many others, disseminate their ideas via sophisticated techniques and countless interlinked platforms. More than anything, it demonstrates how vulnerable the Internet and mass media are to manipulation.

But at a time when the most valued content seems to be that which is most likely to attract attention – this is what the authors aptly term the “attention economy” – it may be of some consolation that mediated disinformation is actually no novelty. State sponsored disinformation if not propaganda via mass media was commonplace in modern Western democracies during the Cold War, years before the advent of the Internet. In the pre-digital age, corporate marketing campaigns and branding efforts often proved to have a relatively tensed relationship to common standards of truth, just as they do today. Sweeping claims that we have come to live in a “post-truth” society, in part due to the Internet and social media, should be taken with a big grant of salt. Things happen to be considerably more complex.

Conspiracy theory, offline
But much has of course changed, and there is a real issue today with regard to the ways in which knowledge production and circulation is authorized and validated. Especially intriguing in Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis’ Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online is the observation that Internet platforms have become fertile ground for the growth and spread of conspiracy theories, including that mass media “has greatly profited off the appeal of conspiracies despite their potential for harm” (p. 19).

But what are conspiracy theories? How do they thrive in the new media environment and its associated attention economy? In Conspiracy Theories as Stigmatized Knowledge, Michael Barkun describes conspiracies as intellectual constructs, which are different from actual conspiracies: covert plots, carried out by two or more people. Actual conspiracies we find since the dawn of time. In modern times, the Watergate Affair is still the case par excellence. But all countries have had their conspiracies. High politics aside, innocent but also potentially dangerous conspiracies are natural ingredients of social life in the workplace and neighborhood.

Research on conspiracy theory has a long pedigree. It bears a lot of relevance to contemporary scholarship on transparency, secrecy and suspicion, given the fact that much of this work is concerned with invisibilities, the production of truth and the always troublesome process of holding accountable the powers that be. Research on conspiracy theories is also interesting in the context of what some writers have called the “deep state theory”, according to which networks of people within the bureaucracy are said to be able to exercise a hidden will on their own.

Inspirational detours aside, a good starting point for understanding the place of conspiracy theories in today’s rapidly evolving media ecology is the fact that conspiracy theorists typically claim to have special knowledge and to speak the truth. But their claims are at odds with some official or dominant version of truth. Barkun conceptualizes conspiracy theories as stigmatized knowledge. Ignored or rejected by those institutions that, in most democracies, commonly relied on the respect to the validation and certification of claims to knowledge – government agencies, universities and the traditional mass media – stigmatized knowledge exhibits a deep skepticism towards such institutions. These are considered power centers, each with their own secrets and deceptions, which the conspiracy theorist seeks to unmask.

Conspiracy theory, online
Until recently, conspiracy theory was a fringe phenomenon and in effect largely excluded from mainstream media. There was a relatively clear boundary between what was considered fringe and mainstream in the public sphere. Gatekeepers employed by research and educational institutions, including the editors of major media, maintained and nurtured the boundary.

This situation begins to change in the 1990s. Digitization enables people, including politicians, to create individual platforms and to communicate, bypassing established media and institutions. The public sphere, if ever unitary, transforms into a globalized hydra-faced machinery with multiple access points and dark zones. Content is no longer filtered the way it was and “fringe ideas” can more easily migrate into mainstream media subject to the ruthless forces of market competition.A proliferating public mistrust of political authority – resulting from economic and financial crises, governmental secrecy and endless cases of corruption that feed public skepticism – also prompts mainstream institutions and their gatekeepers to consider non-orthodox accounts of reality more seriously.

To cut a long story short: If conspiracy theories have always been imbricated in power relations and yet to a large extent been successfully ignored, the once clear boundary between the fringe and the mainstream has eroded. And with stigmatized knowledge entering mainstream media, a process of de-stigmatization begins to take place. Established media and political institutions begin to confer pseudo legitimacy on conspiracy theories. For example, the so-called Obama “birther” story, vividly promoted by the current president of the US, gained prominence because national media first exposed it and the White House later produced birth documents in response to pressures, all of which gave credibility to what in the beginning had been nothing more than a rumor emerging from the fringe.

Today, we know that even a modest blueprinting of conspiracy theories through established mass media can co-develop with political change that brings groups of people into formal political power that were once on the fringe producing stigmatized knowledge en masse. But now mostly mainstream. Elite or not.

What’s next? That mainstream goes completely fringe? Yes, perhaps.

What’s next for me? A damn fine cup of coffee with my good colleague, quickly, please…


Hans Krause Hansen is Professor at the Department of Management, Society and Communication at Copenhagen Business School. He teaches and researches about various aspects of public and private governance, including corruption, anti-corruption and transparency regimes in the global North and South.

Pic by The Public Domain Review, edited by BOS.

Malcolm McIntosh – Tribute to an Academic Entrepreneur

By Andreas Rasche.

Malcolm McIntosh passed away on 7 June 2017. We lost, as Sandra Waddock recently remarked, an intellectual shaman – someone who cared deeply about the state of the world and who was thinking so wonderfully enthusiastic, “wild” and unconventional about corporate responsibility and sustainability.

I first met Malcolm at the 2nd PRME Global Forum in New York in 2010. Ever since we had many thought-provoking exchanges about academic and non-academic matters, most often around the importance of health and happiness. What always struck me was Malcolm’s desire to make a difference; he not only was an intellectual shaman but also an academic entrepreneur.

He belonged to the few of us who knew how to navigate the worlds of “practice” and “academia” (whatever these labels may mean). Malcolm recognized that good research is about creating an impact; it is about changing peoples’ behavior and making them think about whatever problem we address through our scholarly work. While the academic community has recently started to discuss impact (mostly instrumentally driven by the UK REF system), Malcolm more pragmatically engaged with impact in his own way. He founded the Journal of Corporate Citizenship which until today puts practical relevance and impact high on its agenda; he created one of the first research centers on what back then was coined “corporate citizenship” at the University of Warwick; and he collaborated early on with the UN Global Compact and thereby helped to enact a global action network dedicated to corporate sustainability.

Malcolm did all this because and despite of the omnipresent pressures that surround the academic system, such as publishing in “A” journals (which usually have a quite narrow definition of impact). He published many influential books and articles on different topics related to corporate responsibility and sustainability. He co-edited the first book on the UN Global Compact titled “Learning to Talk” (Greenleaf, 2004). The book captured very well the zeitgeist of the CSR/sustainability movement – back then, it was very much about different societal actors learning to engage in meaningful discussions. Later, Malcolm looked at macro-level change when publishing “SEE Change – Making the Transition to a Sustainable Enterprise Economy” (together with Sandra Waddock, Greenleaf, 2011). The book skillfully outlined how systems-level transformations can happen and what it takes to move from organizational-level efforts (like CSR) to a reform of the whole economic system.

Malcolm’s work lives on in the work of the many people he inspired throughout his life (including my own academic work). He worked relentlessly to open doors for new ideas to take shape. He will be missed but he won’t be forgotten, because every entrepreneur leaves a trace. Malcolm left many of them…


Andreas Rasche is Professor of Business in Society at Copenhagen Business School and Visiting Professor at the Stockholm School of Economics. He can be reached at: ar.msc@cbs.dk and @RascheAndreas

Pic by Colin Poellot.

Reward-based Crowdfunding for Sustainable Entrepreneurs: A Practitioner’s Guide

By Kristian Roed Nielsen.

 In my last blog post, I offered some initial insights and ideas into how crowdfunding could be employed to support sustainable innovation. This time, having just finished my Ph.D. dissertation, I provide some hands-on advice for (sustainable) entrepreneurs wishing to succeed with reward-based crowdfunding based on mine and others’ latest research.

 Reward-based crowdfunding represents a rapidly growing source of innovation funding for a diversity of entrepreneurs, start-ups and even established firms. Crowdfunding success depends on the ability to mobilize strangers to support other strangers for causes, products or services that have not yet been realized and of which they have little direct oversight or control. This trust between and in strangers is fascinating for a host of reasons – how do individuals project trust so that others believe it, why do people trust and not least how is trust maintained? Also, what happens when innovation financiers are no longer professional investors, but rather ‘normal’ citizens like you and me? This is what my dissertation tried to uncover and below are a series of Q&As with regard to the question of how entrepreneurs can successfully achieve funding.

Q&As for Sustainable Entrepreneurs Planning to Pursue Reward-based Crowdfunding

1. What is your target?
The amounts typically raised by successful crowdfunding campaigns vary greatly. However, the average funding level of fully funded campaigns is approximately $8,000. Campaigns seeking significantly greater sums should also consider alternatives

2. Have you budgeted for failure (and success)?
A large majority of campaigns fail to meet their funding goals, but the costs relating to preparation are rarely accounted for (Gerber & Hui 2013; Mollick 2014). Even when successful, campaign founders often fail to account accurately for costs associated with implementing their project plan. These include higher than expected development costs or even mailing and return costs (Blaseg & Skiera 2016). Blaseg & Skiera (2016) note that one-in-ten fully funded campaigns fail to deliver on the promised product or service.

3. Have you succeeded or failed in the past?
Past success and failure are strongly associated with the likelihood of funding success. A prior successful campaign is associated with a 173% increase in expected funding receipts, while past failure is associated with a 17,7% reduction in expected funding receipts. Therefore, at the very least consider asking successful campaigns’ founders for advice.

4. Have you prepared a dissemination strategy?
The scale, connectedness, and “quality” of your team are significant predictors of crowdfunding success (Zheng et al. 2014; Nielsen et al. 2017). A large majority of campaigns receive only small amounts of support, while a small minority of campaigns receives the bulk of funds raised. For example, in the case of IndieGoGo “the top 10% of campaigns receive nearly 80 % of funds pledged to campaigns in our sample” (Nielsen et al. 2017: 16). Most campaigns fail early and significantly below their target. In addition, the ability to mobilize female support appears to lead to higher pledging levels (Nielsen 2017).

5. Where are you located?
A campaign located in an urban setting with high median income and social capital is significantly more likely to receive funding as compared to ones located in poorer rural areas.

6. What type of product are you pursuing?
Consumer goods that are out of sight or not directly related to personal style appear to attract significant higher levels of pledges, based on altruistic and/or environmental values. Conversely, visible consumer-goods related to personal style (e.g. new headphones or fashion items) appear to attract investments based on egocentric (or hedonistic) characteristics. The product you are pursuing affects what message works and which doesn’t.

7. Finally, how easy is your product to copy?
Be aware that there are copy-cats that use platforms like IndieGoGo and Kickstarter to trawl for easy to copy ideas and products (Smith 2013). Hence before announcing your campaign try to have your supply chain as ready as possible.

Reward-based Crowdfunding: Multifaceted Challenges and Untapped Potentials for Sustainable Entrepreneurs
Aside from these areas that sustainable entrepreneurs (and others) should be aware of when pursuing reward-based crowdfunding: is reward-based crowdfunding is a good match for sustainable entrepreneurs at all? As academic as it sounds, it depends. It depends on the purpose of the endeavor that sustainable entrepreneurs pursue, the sum of money they seek, where they are located, their social capital and network, their prior experience, and to a not insignificant extend on the product they are pursuing.

Furthermore, for all these attributes outlined, numerous of others are unaccounted for. As with any other human activity, there is a complexity that cannot simply be unspun in the span of a single dissertation. Nor can we detangle consumption in crowdfunding from the larger driving forces of consumer behavior. The fact that innovation finance can now be driven by consumers rather than professional investors does not in itself change consumer demands – demands which more often than not fail to correlate well with sustainable consumption behavior (Jackson & Michaelis 2003).

However, this does not imply a lack of significant potential within reward-based crowdfunding; especially because of the increasing recognition that individual behavior is strongly affected by, for example, the choice architecture inhabited by the individual (Thaler & Sunstein 2008; Sunstein & Reisch 2014). There is thus an evident potential for utilizing these insights in online crowdfunding platforms as well. Individual behavior is neither linear nor is it written in stone. It is rather shaped by a multitude of factors as illustrated in the dissertation; hence it is a matter of constructing a context that encourages the better angels of our nature.

The message, which the dissertation then seeks to instill in the reader, is that reward-based crowdfunding is not a silver-bullet to solving the funding concerns of sustainable entrepreneurship. Yet,  at the heart of what we call “the crowd” there lies a potential that remains – at least at the moment – largely untapped.


Kristian is a PhD-Fellow studying the potential of crowdfunding in driving sustainable innovation. He is home to the Department of Management, Society and Communication (MSC) at Copenhagen Business School. Follow him on Twitter.

Pic by Torsten Maue, edited by BOS.

In Tribute: Malcolm McIntosh

 

‘Have fun and laugh. I had a ball. Sorry to go early. Laugh a lot, it oxygenizes the brain just as well as yoga. Malcolm McIntosh

Malcolm McIntosh’s words, quoted in an announcement of his passing on June 7, 2017, sent out by his family, epitomize how he lived his life. I first met Malcolm in the late 1990s when he was forwarding the then-new conversation about corporate citizenship through conferences and a center at the University of Warwick and later at Coventry. He came to academia non-traditionally, through careers in TV production and journalism with the BBC, with a PhD and lifelong interest in peace research that spread out to understanding corporate responsibility and citizenship and, more recently, political economy. In the early 2000s, he founded the Journal of Corporate Citizenship and served as its editor multiple times over the years, including several stints as part of team of guest editors, guiding it to be an outlet for big ideas that bridge from theory to practice, from empiricism to thought leadership. He was the founding director and Professor at Griffith University’s Asia Pacific Centre for Sustainable Enterprise in, Brisbane, Australia, where he served for five years.

Malcolm was a wonderful thinker, a polymath who followed his own path towards making the world a better place. A global citizen of the first order, there was little that he didn’t know about—from music to philosophy to sustainability to how the world actually works. He was a true intellectual shaman, and a serial social entrepreneur, who was always thinking forward to the next big thing that could serve—or perhaps save—the world. He was a pioneer in the conversation about corporate citizenship, political economy, sustainability, and human rights, who pulled few punches in telling it like he saw it, yet always did so with the most amazing sense of human and personal insight.

Malcolm fully embodied the three tasks of the intellectual shaman: healing, connecting, and sensemaking the service of a better world. As a healer, he was profoundly concerned about the state of the world, ecological, politically, and socially, and worked tirelessly to make a difference through his teaching, writing, and consulting. As a connector and global citizen, he bridged across boundaries of all sort, bringing people together in conversations and convenings that informed and enlightened. As a sensemaker and prolific author of more than 25 books and numerous articles, he engaged ideas and shared his insights as a public intellectual. And all of this work aimed at making the world a better place for all.

Malcolm recognized early on the potential of the UN’s Global Compact and, later, the Principles for Responsible Management Education, as levers for positive change in the world, engaging with those initiatives in a variety of ways. He always ‘thought forward,’ systemically, and with a keen sense of the need to bring about change in the world for the better. He brought many of his ideas to fruition in two of his last books Thinking the Twenty-First Century, and The Good Society, which will be published posthumously by Greenleaf.

What I will most remember about him, I suspect, is his spirit, his sense of life, his philosophy that we should, as his website says, ‘Love life, love the plant.’ Most of all I will remember his sense of humor, his prototypical intelligent British wit, his ability to laugh at his own situation, including facing his illness over the last years of his life. He was not afraid to die and he approached that possibility with the same wit he approached everything else. He was not afraid to die because he lived fully and enjoyed every minute of it, including his long marriage to Lou and his wonderful daughters Cleo and Sophie, the work that he did, and his many, many friends around the world. I will miss his spirit, his energy, and his healing presence in our world and also know that the good work that he did will live on.

Words by Sandra Waddock, Boston College, June 2017

When diversity is everyone’s business

By Jannick Friis Christensen.

In April, CBS celebrated not only its centenary but also how diverse the business school has become over the years on Diversity Day 2017. If unconscious bias—along with stereotypes and prejudice—is what undermines diversity efforts in organisations, then, what difference can such a (diversity) day make? We took an experimental research approach to organising CBS Diversity Day to find out.

The purpose of CBS Diversity Day is to put a strong focus on diversity and inclusion both internally in our own organisation and in educating future business leaders. One way of supporting this double purpose is to organise events that introduce the concepts of diversity and inclusion to the 22,000 students at CBS as well as to our researchers and administrative staff. In particular, we do this on Diversity Day.

How to approach organisational diversity?

In previous years, focus has been on putting to the forefront best practices in companies that manage to use their core competencies in creating an organisation, which is sustainable both financially and socially – in other words the good business case. We believe that CBS should be perceived as an organisation committed to promoting diversity and inclusion.

We would like to acquaint the CBS community with the diversity represented by the people—for example ability/disability, sexual orientation, gender, ethnicity, religion, and nationality—who study and work at CBS and how their experiences may differ as a result of those differences. In doing so, emphasis this year was on the practical implications of how to approach organisational diversity in a way meaningful to all parties involved, including those aforementioned groups typically casted as being diverse. It was therefore not a question of defining what diversity is or if it ‘pays off’ but rather to explore how diversity issues may inspire different practices for alternative and more inclusive organising.

Researching diversity requires diverse approaches

The idea was to challenge any ‘conventional’ knowledge diversity and inclusion and we were interested in measuring the overall potential effect(s) of Diversity Day, that is, the combination of events that included logical-rational as well as emotional and action- and solution-oriented presentations. All presentations were live-streamed and recorded and can be watched via this link.

A citizen science approach was adopted prior to Diversity Day to allow the student population at Copenhagen Business School to identity the problem that will be turned into our research issue. This was done by having a random sample of students fill in a questionnaire about the diversity issues of ethnicity and religion in Denmark. This part of the study is expected to show to what degree students hold explicit bias towards ethnic and religious minorities.

To measure implicit bias and the potential impact of Diversity Day we designed clicker tests that were conducted before and after each scheduled event. We expect the results from these tests to show a reduction in latency as the day progressed, since the respondents ought to spend less time becoming consciously aware of own unconscious biases due to a heightened awareness level prompted by the critically reflexive focus on various diversity issues. The results will, however, not be able to say anything about whether this change (if any) will last or whether it I will lead to changes in behaviour – only that a momentary bias reduction can be achieved.

The final part of the project consists of focus group interviews to get an in-depth understanding of participants’ own perceptions of and experiences with Diversity Day as well as to follow up on the questionnaires and clicker tests. Due to the experimental research design we need elaborations on the various aspects from the participants’ perspectives. The interviews take place in weeks 25 and 26 so if you attended CBS Diversity Day 2017 on 27 April we would like to hear from you. Sign up via this link by adding your name + email and select the dates/timeslots that fit your calendar. The interviews will take approximately 1-1½ hours and the questions will be open-ended for you to reflect on what you got out of Diversity Day. We aim for including five to seven people in each focus group and the interviews will be anonymized.

The next big diversity event is on 19 August 2017 where CBS for the first time joins the Copenhagen Pride Parade from Frederiksberg Town Hall at 13:00. Check cbs.dk for updates.


About Diversity Day

CBS Diversity Day 2017 was co-organised by Jannick Friis Christensen and Associate Professor Sara Louise Muhr (Dept. of Organization). The specific research project discussed in this blog post is conducted in collaboration with Associate Professor Ana Maria Munar (Dept. of International Economics and Management) and Postdoc Kristian Møller Moltke Martiny (University of Copenhagen).


Jannick Friis Christensen is PhD Fellow at the Department of Organization. His research project seeks to develop new methods for intervening diversity by bridging critical performativity theory with organisational practice and managerial discourse. It explores—ethnographically—the norms of diversity practices in contemporary organisations, granting insights into how perceptions of diversity are constructed discursively, and how they govern people’s conduct. And it challenges existing practices and render them productive through continuous critical reflection on the underlying norms. You can find Jannick on LinkedIn, Instragram, Twitter and Facebook.

Pic by Lise Søstrøm (MSC)

CSR and the role of business in Areas of Limited Statehood

By Sameer Azizi.

The global search for new markets has pushed corporations to operate in national settings in the Global South that differ tremendously from Western understanding of business-society relations and CSR. The question is whether the mainstream understanding of CSR is adequate to cover the complexities of business-society issues that companies face in the diverse settings of Global South?

The point of departure in CSR debates is that local and global stakeholders use various means to push large companies to engage in CSR. The companies respond by engaging CSR practices – sometimes in collaboration and partnership with civil society actors and transnational organisations – to both deflect criticism and to set the CSR agenda for the future. Such CSR engagements enable the largest corporations to play a pivotal role in global governance. It is even claimed that they can complement or substitute the provision of a rights and basic level of public goods (e.g. education, health, infrastructure) that would otherwise be expected by the governments.

Such assumptions about stakeholder relations and claims about the role of large corporations in society are not reflecting the realities of many countries in the Global South. In my doctoral research I studied the Afghan mobile telecommunications industry as a particular case of CSR by large global firms operating in least developed setting with fragile state institutions and a massive need for social development. I underline that the Afghan state is limited and unable to provide security or basic public goods (e.g. basic education and health services) in certain geographic areas. These areas are in other words ‘Areas of Limited Statehood’. Studying CSR and the role of business in such settings lead to two points of criticism about the mainstream CSR assumptions and claims.

The role of conventional and unconventional stakeholders

First, in specific geographic areas (e.g. South-eastern parts of Afghanistan), the Afghan state and the Western coalition forces are in a continuous violent conflict with opposing groups over authority to rule. In such extreme cases of areas of limited statehood, there is a need to distinguish between the ‘conventional’ stakeholders (e.g. state actors, civil society organisations and UN agencies) as identified in CSR debates, and the less known and ‘unconventional’ stakeholders consisting of informal actors. Though typically not mentioned in the CSR literature, the latter is important to include as they influence business-society relations in such areas. The unconventional non-state actors are important governance actors in areas of limited statehood and can influence the business-society relations by operating as a de-facto state.

The study shows that the large corporations in Afghan mobile telecommunications industry operate in both state-controlled urban areas and in the rural parts of Afghanistan, where the non-conventional actors also operate. On the one hand, the corporations address CSR explicitly with/without conventional actors (e.g. UN offices, donor agencies, NGOs and state institutions) by drawing from CSR best practices and award-winning solutions on various community development projects and innovative solutions based on mobile technology. On the other hand, the corporations face unconventional actors in rural areas that use unorthodox methods to seek economic and political gains. As an example, various criminal groups utilise the ‘anarchical’ situation to seek ransom money by abducting corporate personnel working in these remote areas. Other more politically motivated groups threaten to vandalise corporate assets (e.g. tele-towers or corporate buildings) unless the mobile network is shut down in specific locations. Such lack of mobile network service would enable the insurgency groups to carry out activities against the central state without getting reported by the local populations and/or tracked through mobile phone technologies. The affected corporations either engage indirectly with the non-conventional actors by providing alternative community development projects or more directly by sporadic ransom and/or systematic informal tax in order to reduce threats and avoid the violent sanctions. These examples provide a more nuanced picture of stakeholders and pressures than yet covered in the mainstream debates on CSR.

The political role of business in Areas of Limited Statehood

The second point of critique of the CSR debates concerns the claims that corporations gain a political role in Global South as public good providers and enablers for democratic governance. In contrast, my findings suggest that the corporations do support – perhaps unwillingly – both the conventional actors that ideally strive for a democratic society and the unconventional actors that are opposing such ideals in Afghanistan. In other words, it is obvious that corporations have a political role in society, but the drivers and implications of this political role is somewhat different from the debates on political CSR.

The examples indicate that access to the rural market motivates the corporations to operate in the midst of a violent and ideological conflict. Hence, instrumental motivations are not contradicting or hampering for-profit corporations to engage in a political role as assumed in recent CSR debates. On the contrary, the for-profit logic serves as a driver for such role in society. In other words, CSR in such settings revitalises Friedman’s famous statement: “…there is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud” (Friedman 1970). Therefore, there is an urgent need to revise Western-biased assumptions about stakeholders and claims about the role of business in Global South when debating CSR in relation to Areas of Limited Statehood.


Sameer, PhD, is an External Lecturer at the CBS Department of Management, Society and Communication. His main research interests are in the fields of CSR and business-society relations in Areas of Limited Statehood, ICT4Development and critical management studies.

Pic by Todd Huffman

The “sandwich trick”: How ethically questionable practices get normalized

By Dennis Schoeneborn & Fabian Homberg.

At some resort hotels in Las Vegas, it is an established practice that guests at check-in hand-over to the receptionist a ‘$20 sandwich” (i.e. a banknote slipped between credit card and ID) in order to attain a room upgrade. Such benefits can include luxurious suites, top floor rooms with views, etc. In a recent study, Dennis Schoeneborn (Copenhagen Business School) and Fabian Homberg (Southampton Business School) have examined this ethically questionable practice that can be seen either as a “tip” or rather as a “bribe”, since it is paid before any services are received and with a clear expectation of reciprocity. Their study has been accepted for publication and is forthcoming at the Journal of Business Ethics.

In their article, the two researchers present findings from analyzing users self-reports on the website Frontdesktip.com that includes numerous stories of “succeeding” or “failing” when “playing the sandwich trick”. To give one example – one guest named “J.”, staying at the Bally’s Hotel, reports: The receptionist “asked for my driver’s license and credit card. I slid the $20 sandwich over, and before releasing the sandwich I asked ‘Are there any complimentary upgrades available?’ He immediately knew what I was talking about. He nodded his head, placed my sandwich under the counter on the keyboard and began typing away. Within a few moments, […] [w]e were upgraded to a King JR Suite in the North Tower. Well worth the $20.”

By studying self-reports of playing the “$20 sandwich trick”, the researchers found that this ethically questionable practice “worked” especially when hotel guests engaged in informal interactions that allowed to avoid the social stigma of bribery, for instance, by making small talk with the receptionist or claiming to be celebrating a “special occasion” (e.g., a birthday or anniversary). Based on these findings, the study makes an important contribution to existing understandings of how typified social interactions can stabilize and “normalize” petty forms of corruption or other ethically questionable practices.

You can find the full article here: Schoeneborn, D., & Homberg, F. (forthcoming). Goffman’s Return to Las Vegas: Studying Corruption as Social Interaction. Journal of Business Ethics.


Dennis Schoeneborn is a Professor (MSO) of Organization, Communication, and CSR at Copenhagen Business School (Denmark).  Fabian Homberg is an Associate Professor of Human Resources and Organizational Behavior at Southampton Business School (UK).

Pic by Max Pixel

Creativity: Africa’s new gold?

By Ana Alacovska and Thilde Langevang.

Cocoa, precious minerals and crude oil ceased to be Africa’s only natural resources. Creativity is ‘the oil of the 21st century’ (Ross, 2008). Creativity and culture are nowadays intensely hailed by global development institutions as ‘a wonderstuff’ (Ross, 2008)—the magical passkey to Africa’s sustainable development—poised to propel inclusive growth, cultural diversity and job creation especially for young people, peripheral communities and women.  Under the auspices of the UN agencies such as UNESCO, UNDP and UNCTAD, the bold and buoyant discourses of cultural and creative industries are enthusiastically embraced throughout the continent: creative industries will help Africa ‘leapfrog’ into emerging high-growth global economies (UN Report on the Creative Economy, 2008, 2013); African creative industries will ‘unleash’ growth potential (UNIDO, 2013); creative industries are ‘Africa’s sleeping giant’.

Such upbeat narratives of creative industries provides the much-desired antidote to Afro-pessimism. In conjunction with the optimistic stories of ‘Africa on the rise’, creative industries promise to make over the negative image of Africa marked by poverty, war and diseases, and replace it with entrepreneurial drive, coolness, hipness and success. ‘Agenda 2063’, the African Union’s strategic framework for the continent’s development optimistically bets on the creative industries to engender future Pan-African ‘self-awareness, well-being and prosperity’. The creative policy craze trickles in global media as well. Young and hip African creative entrepreneurs – from ballet dancers, fashion designers and poets, to photographers, architects and game developers – prominently grace media stories across platforms.

But what is the current state of African creative industries and can they really deliver on their promise? Can creative industries lead to sustainable development? Can African countries straightforwardly import and implement a creative industries model developed elsewhere?

The marriage between culture and development has been for long a political ‘dream ticket’ (Pratt, 2014). The initial (UNESCO-driven, 1982) cultural policies envisaged development to be delivered via cultural resources (for example, national identity to be promoted through folk songs or health-related knowledge to be disseminated via community theater). In contrast, the current creative industries policies aspire to directly drive the development processes through job creation, environmental sustainability, and social cohesion on par with the other industries, despite the fact that the creative industries defy the traditional models of ‘industry’ in terms of modes of value creation, labour organization, supply chain management or IP regulation. Yet such high-flying promises may fall short of empirical support. While Africa may boom with creative talent the continent so far has not been able to profit much from it. Currently Africa’s share of the global trade in creative products remains marginal and in terms of employment creation we know little about how many people the creative industries actually employ, who they employ and under what conditions. Apart from the eulogizing creative industries discourses sparsely do we understand the actual lived dynamics of the allegedly newly-fangled creative, inclusive or sustainable jobs, in Africa’s creative industries.

To question the sustainable development potential of creative industries becomes ever more relevant if we bear in mind the findings about equality and diversity in those industries in the Global North. Current scholarship casts doubts on creative industries’ progressive, sustainable and inclusive potential. Such studies vehemently criticize the image of creative industries as cool, creative, egalitarian and meritocratic (Gill, 2002). Creative work is precarious, involving insecure, unpaid and irregular employment. Study after study demonstrates that women are severely underrepresented, victimized and discriminated against in the creative industries in the Global North (see the contributions to the latest special issue of Organization entitled Diversifying the Creative: Creative Work, Creative Industries, Creative Identities (Finkel et al., 2017) as well as contributions to the special issue on Gender and Creative Labour by Conor et al., 2015). Class, race and ethnic inequalities are rampant in the music and publishing industries in the UK (O’Brien et al., 2016). People with disabilities are even further systematically excluded and disadvantaged in the film and television industries (Randle and Hardy, 2017).

Given such a state of affairs, the answer to whether creative industries can lead to sustainable development in Africa can be neither rushed nor divested from future rigorous and systematic research-based understanding of the cultural, social, economic, historical and technological specificities of African creative industries, in all their elusiveness, peculiarities, definitional hurdles and ambivalences.


Ana Alacovska is Assistant Professor and Thilde Langevang  is Associate Professor at the Department of Management, Society and Communication at CBS. Alacovska researches the creative/cultural industries, creative work and cultural production, while Langevang’s research areas are in business and development studies with a particular focus on youth, entrepreneurship and micro- and small enterprises in Africa.

Photo by Thilde Langevang.

The Society of Spectacle from the Inside Out

By Catarina Pessanha Gomes.

On Wednesday May, 3rd, like millions of people, I distractively watched the last and by far the most unpleasant Presidential Debate of the French elections. The two opponents,  Emmanuel Macron, who would become the future President the following week, and the candidate of the far-right Front National, Marine Le Pen, debated heartily but vaguely on several subjects, ranging from security to the future of France in the European Union.

The debate was more of a succession of childish insults in what looked like a theatrical play staging two ill-tempered children supervised by bored but resigned adults (the journalists‘ presence was barely noticeable), rather than an articulated, argumentative discussion confronting two political programs. Filled with sarcastic remarks, dirty games, personal attacks, most of it was a bland confrontation between pre-made, overheard anti-system formulas and the empty, normalized neoliberal remarks.

While the debate was broadcasted in the national television, another spectacle was simultaneously occurring on social media, where millions of internet users were sharing hilarious comments and memes from the debate. Faced with this abysm of representations of something that was an inherent representation in itself, I could only invoke Guy Debord’s major work, The society of spectacle, published in 1967.

According to Debord, the spectacle is the imposition of an external representation between “me and myself”, “me and others” and “me and my world, distorting any direct relationship with lived experiences, separating the individual from its own life, which becomes a passive consumer, a direct and concrete fabrication of alienation.

I am not sure Ryan Broderick, who tweeted the screen capture that is the cover picture to this post, is familiar with Debord’s work. But it is nevertheless a perfect illustration of its criticism of modern politics and their fake spectacular struggles, where forms of power struggles officially contradict each other while forming a real unity, a necessary representation of exposed rivalry necessary to the development of a uniform and homogenous system of representation.

In his comments of 1988, Debord highlights the culmination of the society of the spectacle, the integrated spectacular which represents the culmination of the excesses, the moment where spectacle and reality ceased to oppose, where the spectacle is mixed to all reality. As one internet user on twitter sarcastically said, the internet conversation around the debate reached such a pic of mockery and absurdity that people seem to be talking about the last reality show rather than a debate that could decide the country’s future. When any day of Trump’s presidency looks like the Apprentice with more unexpected plot twists and casting changes, when TV becomes reality, I could not help but wonder if social media add another level of spectacle representing the representation itself or if these remarks constitute the last act of parrhesia in our society, of speaking the honest truth, the whole truth (Foucault, 2001, p.348) which is that all of this is just a huge joke…on us.


Catarina is a PhD Fellow at the Department of Management, Society & Communication at Copenhagen Business School. Her PhD project investigates partnerships between social entrepreneurs and public institutions, with a particular focus on how social entrepreneurship can be institutionalized.

Pic by Ryan Broderick, Twitter

What if unethical behavior is just matter out of place?

By Anna Kirkebæk Gosovic.

It’s always puzzled me why it is that we might share words and concepts but that the meaning we fill into these concepts is very different. Kinda like a hotdog. Danish hot dog makers enjoy to fill it with important hotdog defining ingredients such as remoulade, mustard and pickles, whereas rumor has it that Swedish hot dog makers put a shrimp-mayo substance (the horror) on their hot dogs, and American ones don’t even put ketchup (seriously, just a bread and a sausage?).

Anyways, the point is that Danes, Swedes and Americans all call it a hotdog, although they don’t agree on what it actually consists of, what is right (onions and pickles of course) and what is wrong (shrimp-mayo, obviously). Banal observation, perhaps, but don’t worry – there is a point (also, you have to bear with me, as I’m a brand new PhD student and not yet as clever as the other bloggers).

Schooled as an anthropologist, I recently started my PhD study on how to ensure ethical standards within a multinational pharmaceutical corporation. As a point of departure, and trying to map out how corporations deal with this challenge, I started consulting the literature on business ethics in cross-cultural contexts.

As I read along, I realized that scholars (and companies) actually seem rather sensitive to cultural differences, and that local responsiveness to cultural norms and practices is considered beneficial and even necessary in many aspects of business operations. However, at the same time, within the field of business ethics, what may be otherwise recognized as cultural differences to be respected and responded to, seems here to somehow transform into unethical behavior not to be tolerated.

Take for example the reciprocal systems of dinner invitations, gift giving and thorough social interaction that comprise an inherent part of establishing relationships in parts of South East Asia. This can be interpreted as a cultural practice of creating good business relations. However, in a business ethics context, most (Western) ethical standards do not allow for e.g. gifts or expensive dinners to enter business relations. In these contexts, they do not keep their cultural label as gifts form the context in which they originate. Rather, they get a new cultural label from the context www.buy-trusted-tablets.com of Western ethics as something resembling corruption.

So – how can gifts (which for most of us has positive connotations) suddenly become corruption (which for most of us has negative connotations) when entering a business relation governed by Western principles for right or wrong? The answer might lie with an anthropological classic on purity and danger.
In her famous work on dirt, anthropologist Mary Douglas argues that notions of dirt express symbolic systems within a culture. Efforts to get rid of dirt, she writes, are not governed by an anxiety to escape disease. Rather, we are reordering our environment, making it conform to an idea that we share within our culture of what is dirty and what is not.

In my early years as an anthropology student, one lecturer explained Douglas’ theory like food on the shirt. In my opinion, an amazingly pedagogical way of explaining a basic anthropological theory which I will attempt to repeat:

It’s really rather simple. It’s about food and dirt. Perhaps the aforementioned hotdog should reenter the scene here. The Danish one with all the sauces, of course. While this hotdog is in your hand, it’s food. It’s a mouth watering hotdog just waiting to be eaten. But when you drop some of it (and believe me, you will) onto your shirt, it is no longer food. It’s dirt. Thus, the entire nature of a thing or a concept can change completely according to the context in which it is located and our culturally embedded understandings of that context’s rights and wrongs (hotdog in hand = good, hotdog on shirt = bad).

Douglas introduces the concept of matter out of place, which is a conceptualization of the ways in which we interpret the things we are exposed to and the understanding of where they belong. The hotdog belongs in your hand and not on your shirt. Therefore, when the matter of the hotdog is on your shirt, it transforms its qualities from being a hotdog to being dirt. It’s matter out of place.

Tongue in the anthropological cheek, I find it interesting to ask the business ethics community: What if the same goes for business ethics? What if all the things we consider unethical are merely not conforming to an idea we share within our culture of what is right and what is wrong? What I the logic governing the notion of say, e.g. bribery is similar to the notion of food and dirt: gifts in a local cultural system = good, gifts in a business relation = bad?

And if we try to conceptualize business ethics in this way – what does that do to our understanding of unethical practice? Would that be a move towards moral relativism? Or merely an attempt open up for a more nuanced approach to business ethics where we can also explore the ethical actions that companies take which do not conform to our (Western) understandings of rights and wrongs? Would that dilute the ethical principles of corporations? Or would it break a Western ethical hegemony? Is unethical behavior really just matter out of place? And lastly, is such an approach even manageable for corporations on a practical level?

I don’t know. But I will surely think about it some more.


Anna Kirkebæk Gosovic is PhD student at the Department for Management, Society and Communication at Copenhagen Business School. She is working on how to ensure ethical standards within a multinational pharmaceutical corporation.
Pic by Pixabay

Are you choosing what you really want?

By Jan Michael Bauer.

The value of individual freedom is rarely disputed within the Western society. However, more freedom is usually accompanied with making more choices, which might not be beneficial to everyone. For instance, the act of choosing itself can be burdensome, particularly when choices are complex and we face a large number of options. More importantly, can we trust that our own decisions are a true reflection of what we really want, if we accept the reality of our cognitive limitations and a manipulative environment?

Our economic system and democracy are both based on the principle that people know what is best for them and their decisions speak through their purchases in stores and their votes at the ballot box. This principle is also at the core of the neo-classical economic model that dominated the field over most of the 20th century. The underlying assumption is that people’s actions within the market place are the result of a well-considered reflection about the best use of limited resources to maximize their own well-being.

Even though this assumption sounds intuitive, it should be no news to most people that we not always act in our own best interest. Too familiar is the feeling of regret about drinking a glass too much on the night before, eating that second piece of chocolate cake or procrastinating instead of getting started with something unpleasant but important. This reality about human decision-making has entered the field of economics over the last decades, acknowledging that people are neither all-knowing nor perfect calculators and that their decisions are influenced by their feelings, worries and believes that not always accurately reflect objective realities.

Predictably irrational

It is now well-established in economics that people sometimes behave in a seemingly irrational way and that these deviations from the rational choice are systematic and therefore predictable. For instance, people are more likely to pay a bill on time if they fear a late fee, rather than the prospect of an early payer discount of similar monetary value. A simple change in the wording of two mathematically similar choices does influence our decisions. Such biases can often be explained by the so-called dual process theory and attributed to people’s limited cognitive resources resulting in an inability of carefully evaluating each of our decisions in daily life.

Most people are unaware that their choices are subject to such systematic irrationalities, but given the sound scientific evidence, we can be quite certain that people are often myopic, overconfident, or loss avers – just to name a few from a much longer list. Even when confronted with these scientific insights, it is not easy to accept that we have such biases which deem us irrational. This is however important as these biases are not only in the way of our long-term well-being, but make us susceptible to manipulation. If the way a choice is presented to us affects our decision, the person deciding the way of presentation (sometimes named choice architect) has the ability to influence our choice.

Phishing for Phools

If we accept that people are susceptible to influence, tend to make bad decisions under stress, and can be fooled, we might not be surprised that some people aim to exploit those weaknesses to make profits. A notion highlighted by “Phishing for Phools”, a recent book by Nobel Prize-winning Economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller. They argue that the free market, despite all its contribution to today’s prosperity, is a place for profit oriented individuals to fish for fools and where those prevail who capitalize best on exploiting human weaknesses. Food choices are an excellent example where companies try to seduce us with their tempting products and benefit from our failure to stick to a healthier diet. Fishing in the political landscape might not be much different from the market place. With the additional help of technology, marketers and campaign managers can make increasingly use of behavioural insights to promote their product or candidate.

What can be done?

Therefore, it is essential that people obtain a deeper understanding of their own psychological weaknesses and receive guidance how and when we are most likely to be manipulable. Even though it is impossible to be constantly aware of all the hooks surrounding us, education about our cognitive biases might help avoiding at least some of them in the market place (e.g. by reading Dan Ariely’s work).

Additionally, about 180 governments worldwide, the European Union and many international organizations enrich regulation with behaviour insights by acknowledging the multiple caveats of human decision-making. Behaviorally informed policy aims to create a choice architecture where people naturally gravitate towards decisions most likely in their own long-term interest. Working as a counterforce against commercial influence, regulation can also help consumers to make informed decisions by mandating the disclosure of important information presented in a simple and meaningful way.

Designing such policies, however, requires a detailed understanding of the relevant processes involved into human decision-making. As part of the EU research project Nudge-it, we aim to increase the knowledge specifically about food choice, which might translate into novel policy tools and help tackling the obesity epidemic.


Jan is assistant professor at the CBS Department of Management, Society and Communication. His main research interests are in the fields of health economics and consumer behaviour. As part of the Nudge-it Project, he currently focuses on decision-making and fostering healthier food choices.

Pic by Windell Oskay, Flickr

Business integrity, ideas and developments in the ASEAN way

By Luisa Murphy.

As a former employee of the United States Department of Justice Antitrust Division, I worked on corruption cases involving companies accused of both collusion and bribery. However, when these cases crossed borders, enforcement of US laws became particularly challenging. It also raised questions about the relevance of US Federal laws in regions of the globe such as Asia where different ‘national business systems’ (Witt & Redding, 2014) prevail. Today, through my PhD studies on the institutionalization of CSR, I find myself considering some of these same questions informed from the vantage point of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

Corruption in ASEAN

As with other areas, the ASEAN region has not been immune to the effects of corruption involving national, regional and transnational actors. One need look no further than the recent UK Rolls-Royce bribery scandal (which was settled for £671m) and moreover, implicated Thai Airways for taking bribes. The front page scandal involving the discovery of $1 billion dollars in Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak’s personal bank accounts which was allegedly taken from the state investment fund 1MDB has also directed attention to the region.

Thus, it is no secret then that the ASEAN region, in common with others around the globe, suffers from corruption issues and that this presents a major challenge to its socio-economic development. For instance, in 2015, Transparency International reported that ‘rampant corruption across the region threatens to derail plans for economic integration’ (Transparency International, 2015), while 7 out of 10 countries in ASEAN ranked 40 or under (100 is a perfect score) in Transparency International’s 2016 Corruption Perceptions Index. As a result, international, regional and national organizations have rallied together to confront these issues. And although the region still may be experimenting with different approaches, there appear to be a few distinctive ASEAN strategies which are taking hold and may very well, provide informative lessons for the future. A recent conference in Singapore organized by the ASEAN CSR network (a regional hub and leader on CSR issues which connects international, regional and national networks), brought a few takeaways to the forefront.

Triggering business integrity

Elements of hard law may be an important tool in inducing adherence to international soft-law frameworks such as the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC)’s 10th principle on Anti-Corruption, Goal 16.5 of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the ISO37001 anti-bribery management system among others. For instance, one company executive who participated in the Singapore conference captured the applicability of hard law enforcement approaches in relation to other CSR issues e.g. health and safety standards, by noting that workers in one country in the region didn’t take compliance seriously until they were fired for not wearing safety hats. This resulted in ‘triggering’ compliance with health and safety standards thereafter. In the case of Singapore, prohibitions such as littering in public places, jaywalking or chewing gum on the street have been particularly effective in engendering behaviors which need not be enforced in the long-run. Thus, an approach which utilizes elements of hard law in conjunction with binding international frameworks such as United Nations Convention against Corruption and the UK Bribery Act as well as regional frameworks (e.g. ASEAN 2020) may be an effective means to trigger adherence to soft law frameworks in the future.

Culture as an opportunity and not an excuse   

Corruption is not necessarily an ASEAN region cultural problem per se and certainly many positive aspects of the regional culture can be harnessed to fight corruption. While gift giving in the form of bribes may have previously been (or in some cases currently) is a ‘cultural norm’, it can also be argued that many companies operate with a spirit of business integrity. Although, it would be naive to say that the ethos of business integrity is inherent in every company, behavior and culture are different, and issues of corruption may be related to governance issues or other factors rather than ‘culture´ itself. Notwithstanding this, cultural norms such as the fear of ‘losing face’ have reportedly been successfully employed in efforts to pressure CEOs into implementing anti-corruption initiatives. The Thai Collective Action Coalition (CAC) is one such example of a private-sector initiative which has been particularly successful in combating corruption in Thailand, perhaps because it reportedly operates with a mindset which utilizes international frameworks such as Transparency International’s UK (TI-UK) Adequate Procedures Checklist while tapping into ASEAN cultural norms of e.g. ‘losing face’ to ensure that Thai CEOs join the initiative. Therefore, energies in the future might focus on norms which are counter to corruption rather than daunting conceptualizations of assumed ‘cultures’ of corruption.

Youth and SMEs as engines of business integrity

Finally, approaches to combating corruption are increasingly focusing on youth and SMEs and using them as indicators for progress on the issue. In the ASEAN context, this has meant mobilizing and providing resources which can contribute to business integrity among the youth population and also small and medium- sized enterprises (SMEs). While this may seem like a ‘no brainer,’ ASEAN countries and international organizations are still clarifying their approaches. For instance, whether there will be enough ‘trickle-down’ from top-down approaches which deliver e.g. training via multinational corporations (MNCs) or whether a bottom-up approach is necessary is still being debated. Moreover, while the youth of many ASEAN countries have good intentions, they are often derailed due to economic or familial concerns. For instance, a 2014 Transparency International report indicated that while honesty is more important than wealth to 94% of the youth in Vietnam, 41% are “willing to lie for the sake of family income or loyalty to family.’ (Transparency International, 2014). Despite these figures, we should remain optimistic given the integration of youth into CSR activities and the overall focus on reaching SMEs in the region (topics for another blog).

In conclusion, only time will tell how ASEAN triggers business integrity, uses culture as an opportunity and mobilizes youth and SMEs in the battle against corruption. I, for one, see promise in these developments and ideas which might just become part of the ASEAN way.


Luisa Murphy is PhD Fellow at Copenhagen Business School and supported by the VELUX Endowed Chair in Corporate Sustainability. Her research examines the governance of corporate social responsibility. She brings a human rights and business background from the University of Oxford and legal experience from the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice.

Pic by  Transparency International Indonesia

How is Ayn Rand still a thing? From ridicule to serious concern

By Steen Vallentin.

A recent article in The Washington Post informs us that Donald Trump is affectionate about the works of Ayn Rand (1905-1982), often referred to as the ‘high priestess of selfishness’. He shares this affection with several of his members of cabinet. These include Rex Tillerson, Secretary of State, Andy Puzder, Secretary of Labor, and Mike Pompeo, Director of the CIA. The speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, has also been an outspoken supporter of Rand, although he has recently distanced himself from her philosophy, citing its atheism as a fundamental concern (Rand famously viewed altruism as an evil form of self-sacrifice, and thus spoke against Christian values of giving and regard for others).

Trump has said that he identifies with Howard Roark, the main protagonist of Rand’s The Fountainhead, while Tillerson has listed Atlas Shrugged, Rand’s magnum opus, as his favorite book. The Fountainhead was made into a Hollywood movie in 1949, starring Gary Cooper as Roark, and this can of course lead one to speculate whether the president actually read the book or ‘just saw the movie’. This brand of speculation would, however, be typical of a tendency to ridicule rather than take Rand’s philosophy, its continued popularity and the influence it continues to have on the rich and the powerful seriously.

To name but a few examples of the ridicule: In 2009, the animated TV show The Simpsons had Lisa Simpson comment to her mother about The Fountainhead: “isn’t that the bible of right-wing losers?” In 2012, president Obama commented that Rand’s work is something that is picked up by teenagers that are “feeling mistunderstood”, and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver in 2014 dedicated a dismissive installment of “How is this still a thing?” to Rand’s work.

In popular treatments of her philosophy and the cult of personality that surrounded her, notions of ‘selfishness’, ‘greed’ and ‘objectivism’ are thrown around, but rarely with much argumentative depth. In scholarly circles, her work is often rejected as overly politicized ‘bad philosophy’, full of logical fallacies (and false distinctions), failing to constitute a coherent and closed system of thought (in spite of such pretense), and thus not deserving of more serious engagement. The literary form she uses in her major philosophical works also does not count in her favor among scholars. It can easily be dismissed as philosophical pulp fiction.

What I want to question here, however, is whether or how Rand’s work is deserving of more serious critical attention and treatment by those who are opposed to it. The idea is not to offer support or claim neutrality, but to lay bare the arguments presented in order to better understand and challenge their continued allure. In other words, Rand’s thinking continues to be an ideological force to be reckoned with, and we need to understand why and how it influences people, not least those in power.

Importantly, following Boltanski & Chiapello, the term ‘ideology’ should not be construed in the reductionist sense often suggested by Marxist uses, e.g., as a moralizing discourse intended to conceal material interests and constantly contradicted by practice, but rather as shared beliefs that are bound up with actions and hence anchored in reality. In other words, ideology must be considered as a practical concern with real effects (however loosely coupled with ideological precepts), not just as a mask veiling reality, a mode of deception or a sham.

Admittedly, Rand’s thinking is a hostile world to enter for non-believers. There are a number of reasons for this (apart from the endurance required to get through the 1100+ dogma-soaked pages of Atlas Shrugged). Objectivism is a closed philosophy, related to her mind’s work and reflecting her ideal world, a world that is often far removed from most people’s experience of the modern world. In spite of strong objectivist claims regarding Man’s mind and its relation to reality, her loyal followers often tend to ignore the obvious and to misrepresent reality when defending objectivist dogma. Objectivism is often associated with extreme/far-right political views, self-consciously flying in the face of political correctness and common morality and peddling the same sort of dystopian and polarizing view of the deterioration of American society that Trump campaigned on. However, the real ‘truth’ of Rand’s philosophy is to be found in her work, not in how various minions choose to carry her torch.

In Atlas Shrugged (1957), she creates a world in which industrialists, i.e., the prime movers, the makers, the traders, constitute a morally superior class of people. Opposed to these are the second handers, the takers, the looters, moochers, rotters of society. The industrialists represent everything that is good and capitalism everything that is proper in this world, but successful business people and proper market principles are persecuted by forces of envy and mediocrity operating under the flag of social responsibility. In Rand’s world, social responsibility is nothing but a battle cry for politically correct, collectivist-egalitarian and ultimately totalitarian schemes that are meant to keep great business people down by means of government interference and regulation. It is the way of the loser, who cannot make it in a man’s game of real market competition and who cannot cope with the innovative brilliance of the chosen few. Social responsibility and social welfare and progress are promoted by morally corrupt, hateful and obviously inferior people, whose actions are bereft of proper reason and any meaningful relation to reality.

In her depiction of an America that is falling apart due to lack of reason and totalitarianism, (and which in many ways more resembles her native Russia), Rand provides scathing critiques of the corrupted – and corrupting – forces of politics, government bureaucracy, science and media, the tyranny of public opinion and the lack of reason among the common people. Opposed to all this rot stands capitalism. To Rand, and her followers, capitalism pure and unadulterated is the solution to all imaginable ills of society. She offers a philosophy according to which selfishness and greed are virtues and nobody should ever feel ashamed about being successful.

We do not have to accept the claims of Rand’s philosophy or to sympathize with its underlying ideology to acknowledge that her dystopian world view has some resonance in regard to emla what we are living through right now. Besides, there is the matter of the continued influence of her thinking on the rich and the powerful. Atlas Shrugged portrays business people (the right kind) as innocent and by and large powerless victims of persecution and scapegoating perpetrated by a list of shameful characters ranging from government bureaucrats to spouses and family members. For one of the more extreme expressions of this message we can turn to a 1962 lecture where she asserted that: “In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessman” (quoted in Weiss, p. 53).

It is interesting how this perplexing narrative of persecution apparently continues to inspire extremely rich and successful people (the 1%) – in spite of all their success and all their well-documented power, and the fact that the societal view of business people and business as an institution has changed dramatically since Rand wrote her book.

In sum, Rand’s thinking is probably more a part of the problem than the solution to many of the crises we are facing, but it nevertheless call for more serious engagement – even by those radically opposed to her extreme view of the virtues of capitalism and everything that stands in its way. As the saying goes: keep your enemies closer …


Steen Vallentin is Director of the CBS Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility (cbsCSR) and Associate Professor in the Department of Management, Society and Communication at Copenhagen Business School.

Pic of Rand by David Seaton, edited by BOS.

If at first you don’t succeed, build, build again

By Lara Hale.

It is already challenging to make small changes to buildings – painting the window panels, upgrading the kitchen, or even (as many Copenhageners are familiar with) installing a shower. But there is a pressing need for more extensive change – we need to learn how to build again and build more sustainably. As part of the EU Marie Curie project “Innovation for Sustainability (I4S)”, my PhD dissertation investigates how the Active House Alliance and their co-founder, VELUX, experiment with demonstration houses in order to develop a sustainable building standard for a trifecta: environment, energy, and comfort. In other words, it examines how they use experiments (building, then building again) to best synergize the three and holistically improve building practice.

The third dimension “comfort” has been particularly challenging to develop in that there has not historically been a formal definition or measurement of comfort in buildings. The PhD’s first article delves into how Active House goes about legitimating technical specifications (i.e. measurable parameters) for comfort in buildings. Not least of all, this has involved revisiting basic elements like light exposure, air exchange, and indoor human health (see for example the Circadian House Report). The research finds a reciprocal relationship between commensuration (conversion of qualities into comparable quantities, see Espeland & Stevens, 1998 and 2008) processes and legitimacy building – both among other professionals internationally and locally in the context of the projects.

The second article addresses structurally influencing the building users towards sustainable consumption – so that by design, people may behave more sustainably in buildings. Buildings are made with default rules: the rules for which infrastructural set-ups come ready-made. We know that default rules can affect sustainability-related behaviors (Mont et al., 2014; Sunstein & Reisch, 2013; Dolan et al., 2011; Brown et al., 2013). For example, the space orientation determines how much light a living room receives, and thus when and how for how long one uses lights. The literature holds that default rules work, in part, because they do not engage people’s awareness. However, this research finds that, in relation to sustainable consumption, that there are further nuances. Where at first people are unaware of how the defaults are affecting their behavior, after they leave the experimental buildings and live in their former, non-sustainably designed structures, the contrast makes them aware. It is this change that gears them towards making more sustainability-oriented consumption choices in the future.

Lastly, the third paper delves into the development of sensor-based building technology systems, such as WindowMaster, NetAtmo, Nest, and so forth. In an era of pressure for technologies that can decide for or replace the actions of people (McIntyre-Mills, 2013), building systems can manage entire households – from running grocery lists and scheduling exercise to adjusting electricity usage and changing temperature. At the same time, the building industry grapples with the performance gap, wherein the planned energy performance of buildings does not match reality, largely explained by failures to grasp how people will behave (Frankel et al., 2015). Rather design needs both technical and social considerations (Maguire, 2014). This article uses the Active House building demonstrations to show how these experiments have helped standards makers to learn from too much focus on technological automation – as it leads to an overshoot, wherein people feel too controlled by technology and either submit or tamper with it, akin to technological interaction highlights in the works of Rip and Kemp (1998) and Shove (2003). The paper argues that the pendulum can swing too far towards technological reliance, and that co-design, a balance between human and technological development is needed – especially under seeking sustainable solutions to societal challenges.

Altogether, the idea is: that which is built can be rebuilt, our norms and practices are fluid and constantly under development. In the case of sustainable building, governance projects and experiments must tackle challenges of measurement, consumer base, and rapidly evolving technologies. It is an era of uncertainty, wherein there are no clear trajectories for sustainability transitions; but when experimenting within the frame of learning and adapting for the next steps, we can lay the first building blocks.


Lara Anne Hale, MSc, is Marie Curie PhD Fellow at Copenhagen Business School at the Department of Management, Society, and Communication. Her research areas explore experimental governance, standards, innovation, green building, sustainability transitions, sustainable production and consumption. You can follow her on Twitter.

Pic by Open Buildings, showing LichtAktiv Haus.

Who’s responsibility is it, anyway?

By Erin Leitheiser.

Workers and companies from across the globe each play a part in creating our clothes.  Yet, it’s unclear who is responsible for addressing the myriad of social and environmental sustainability issues in these global supply chains. 

Who is responsible for the social and environmental sustainability of the denims that you’re wearing? 

Chances are that when you check the tag you’ll see the name of a country like Bangladesh, China or Turkey.  While global sourcing from these and other textile hubs has been common practice for decades, we still face major issues related to child labor, poor and unsafe working conditions, modern slavery, gender inequality, pollution, and many more.  Partnerships and collaborations have sprung up across the board to address supply chain issues, with just a few examples including an initiative to remedy the safety of ready-made garment (RMG) factories in Bangladesh, attempts to raise the standards and traceability of extractive industries, and Ethical Trading Initiative’s recent launch of a platform for ethical trade in Turkey

While partnership and collaboration form the foundation of many of these efforts, there remains great confusion about who is and should be responsible for what in supply chains.  Looking specifically at ready-made apparel (RMG) supply chains, here’s a glimpse into some of the murky roles and responsibilities. 

  • Consumers.  Consumers are held up as king in the world of retail, and may indeed have great (collective) power through purchasing behavior.  Yet, it is difficult if not impossible for consumers to make informed choices about how and where a product was made.  (Side note: a relatively new NGO has been established to create a consumer-facing scoring system to help combat this issue.)  And, even ethically-minded consumers are rarely willing to sacrifice style or price for sustainability.  Therefore, consumers often point to the brands and retailers who put product on the shelves as responsible for ensuring the social and environmental sustainability of all of their offerings. 
  • Brands and Retailers.  The giants of the RMG world, brands and retailers demand high volumes, quick turn-around times, and low prices in their industry of fast fashion.  Even large brands and retailers don’t own many – if any – of their own factories, so instead, opt to purchase goods from a vast network of third-party suppliers.  While virtually all buying companies have codes of conduct governing things like child labor and basic safety practices, any one company’s orders may only constitute a small fraction of a factory’s production, making leverage with the supplier to make changes and upgrades difficult at best.  This may be even more problematic for small brands and retailers whom may depend upon agents (the industry’s equivalent of your friend who “knows a guy”) to find and contract with suppliers. 
  • Suppliers (Factories).  Suppliers simultaneously face downward price pressure and increasing compliance requirements.  First, suppliers must be able to produce a quality product within a short period of time for the right (low) price.  Then, they must comply with each and every buyer’s code of conduct, some of which include additional third party certification (e.g. Oeko-Tex certification on harmful chemicals and substances, a virtual requirement for any producer of maternity or children’s wear).  At the same time they often need to rely upon sub-suppliers to complete orders on time since particularly small factories (under 300 workers) employ enough people to be able to quickly deliver orders for 5,000, 10,000 or more pieces, which adds an additional layer of complexity and transparency. Suppliers often resist worker unionization or other process improvements beyond what is demanded by buyers, in part fearing soaring costs that will make them uncompetitive in the marketplace. 
  • Local Governments.  Governments in supplying countries are responsible for setting and enforcing the laws governing the industry.  While most countries with significant production levels have reasonable laws in place regarding human rights, child labor, and environmental impact, those countries also often suffer from a great lack of enforcement of said laws for a myriad of reasons: lack of financial resources, insufficient staffing levels, inadequate processes and capabilities, and bribery and corruption, to name a few. 
  • UN and ILO.  The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and ILO’s Decent Work agenda provide standards and a framework from which businesses can formulate and evaluate their human rights and labor policies.  While crucially important tools, neither have the purview or power to compel uptake or compliance. 

This brief overview of just the major players in global textile supply chains shows how blurred the responsibilities are for social and environmental sustainability.  No one person or party is responsible for or can solve the challenges we face.  But, if we can all be open to change and accept that we each bear some responsibility for solving the issues, we have a fighting chance to make systemic and meaningful change in the industry.  Indeed, in the words of Andrew Carnegie, “do your duty and a little more and the future will take care of itself.”


Erin Leitheiser is a PhD Fellow in Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability at Copenhagen Business School.  Her research interests revolve around the changing role and expectations of business in society.  Prior to pursuing her PhD she worked as a CSR manager in a U.S. Fortune-50 company, as well as a public policy consultant with a focus on convening and facilitating of multi-stakeholder initiatives.  She is supported by the Velux Foundation and is on Twitter @erinleit.

Pic by Unicef, found on Flickr

Big Data: Make Every Voice Count

By Michael Etter.

How do we determine if an organization behaves in a socially acceptable way? This question is highly relevant and not easy to answer. If we want to hold organizations accountable for their actions, we need to know what the norms are, against which we measure organizational behaviour. But how do we define these norms? And how do we make sure to include a variety of experiences, opinions, expectations, and values, when judging organizational behaviour? In a recently published article, my colleagues and I argue that social media and big data analytics might provide us with a possible answer to these questions.

When assessing the social acceptance of organizations, researchers typically consult one of three sources that make judgments about organizations visible: News media, accreditation bodies, and survey-based rankings. While well established in the academic literature, these sources are limited in their ability to account for the heterogeneity of norms and values of post-modern societies. In the following I will explain why.

Institutional evaluators represent homogenous norms and particular agendas

There is a general agreement that news media influence and reflect the public perception of acceptable corporate behaviour. As institutional evaluators news media are crucial for the identification and evaluation of organizational conduct and – even more so – misconduct. News media can therefore be seen as a public forum, where socially acceptable behaviour is constantly negotiated and defined. However, we have to remind ourselves that only a few privileged actors can actively participate and shape this forum. In fact, the possibilities for most citizens to express their experiences, views, and opinions in news media are limited.

Furthermore, news media only report certain events about certain organizations, while leaving others untouched. Indeed, the complex process of news production is determined by several selection processes, editorial routines, professional norms, and institutional constrains that substantially influence the expression and negotiation of judgments about organizations. For these reasons news media give only limited indication for the heterogeneity of experiences, opinions, values, and norms of wider parts of society.Accreditation bodies are a second source that gives indication, if organizations behave in a socially acceptable way. Accreditation bodies define the norms and standards, according to which organizations should conduct their business. If corporations fail to meet these standards, they are visibly downgraded, delisted, or otherwise sanctioned.

The judgments of organizational behaviour by accreditation bodies are typically based on balanced evaluation criteria that are established by experts. From a critical point of view, however, it can be argued that these judgments only partly represent the views of a wide array of civil society actors. In fact, even if standards include the inputs from certain stakeholder groups, these groups will represent merely their own agendas. As a result, again, accreditation bodies give only limited indication for the multifaceted expectations, opinions, views, and experiences of ordinary citizens.

Finally, researchers have used survey based measures to assess the public perception of corporate behaviour. Surveys can provide a representative picture about the opinions of certain societal groups. Nevertheless, surveys face several methodological challenges, such as social desirability bias or lacking knowledge about certain organizations. Furthermore, predefined evaluation criteria run the risk to miss or overemphasise certain aspects of organizational behaviour. This means, again, that survey based measures give only limited indication for the expectations, opinions, views, and experiences of ordinary citizens.

The value(s) of digital finger-pointing

Now, can social media provide a solution for these shortcomings? We believe that social media can at least complement the picture. In our article, we discuss how social media can give a more direct and inclusive access to a plurality of voices and opinions of ordinary citizens. This is the case, because social media are increasingly used by a variety of civil society actors to express their views, interpretations, and experiences.

Obviously, the expression and negotiation of judgments in social media are subject to various selection biases and power dynamics. Recent attention has been paid to “echo chambers”, where the plurality and negotiation of opinions are distorted, because everybody seems to have the same opinion and talking about the same topic. These filter bubbles form, because individuals tend to connect and surround themselves with individuals who have similar views. Technological filters and algorithms have further magnified the effects of these filter bubbles. Other biases are related to varying use of social media, self-censorship, and the tendency to promote a desirable self-image, which leads to selective behaviour when voicing opinions. Nevertheless, we argue that the voiced opinions and views substantially shape the ongoing discussions and give insights into a diversity of concerns and (niche-) conversations that need our attention.

Finally, one can argue that the expression and negotiation of judgments in social media is highly influenced by news media. However, recent developments in the political arena, such as the unexpected election of Donald Trump or Brexit, have shown that traditional news media are not always a good indicator for the opinions of large parts of society.

We therefore deem it valuable to include the digital finger-pointing in social media, when assessing the judgements about organizational behaviour. With new tools of big data analytics we can access and include every single opinion from the millions of public voices and therefore account for a large heterogeneity of norms, values, expectations, and experiences.


Michael Etter, PhD, is a Marie Curie Research Fellow at Cass Business School, City University London.

Pic by Ky, Flickr

The Task At Hand: Facing a Trump America

The following post by American CBS MBA student Wynne Lewis is an accompanying piece she wrote recently for the Financial Times’ MBA Blog.

Titled “Case for responsible business post Trump and Brexit shocks“, Wynne spoke to the shocks of the recent inauguration of Mr. Trump in the U.S. and the vote for Brexit in the UK. She argues that these events are creating many setbacks to the strides we have taken recently in favour of human rights and combating climate change. But they are also catalysts for positive change for the individuals who are fired up and ready to go stand up for what matters most – for example by contributing to a more sustainable economy by founding your own venture.

Read the full post on the FT MBA Blog.

In her latest piece on the CBS MBA blog, she now offers a little bit of inspiration to get you started with making a change.


By Wynne Lewis.

As Eleanor Roosevelt once said,

“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”

We fear regression, but there is much we can do.

I spoke with my classmates (representative of countries from all around the world), my professors, and visiting speakers and here is a little bit of inspiration to get you started.

For Employers / Employees:

  • Recognise the power of business. Do not be ignorant to your own influence. There is no such thing as an a-political corporation in the polarised climate under which we are operating today. Every decision must be intentional.
  • Create meaningful working class jobs. If your consumers are voting pro-nationalism, are they willing to pay a higher price for locally sourced products? Can you source your products or raw materials locally? Can you conduct market research to prove your case to investors? There may even be a risk management case to make for keeping the supply chain close for better transparency.
  • Treat your employees with respect and invest in their development. Look at the most recently hired/promoted people at your company. Are they a diverse group? Are you promoting from within? If not, chances are good that some of your talent is falling through the cracks or not being developed. It may not be intentional, but you can become aware of it and take strides to be sure you are capitalizing on your best resource – your employees.
  • If you have employees who may feel marginalised or unsafe in the current social climate sparked by the election, reach out and check-in with them. Do they feel safe in their commute to work? (This has been very relevant for many of my friends living in New York, so it is worth asking.) Is there anything you can do to help? Has the office climate changed at all for them? It is important that they are able to focus on doing a good job without feeling marginalised or harassed at work. Keep tabs on this. If handled with care, you will foster the establishment of a strong working environment and retain your talented minority (women included) workers.
  • Look for business opportunities. What was the change you were hoping for? Is there a gap in products/services today and the products/services we need to achieve that change? Your next great venture may just be hidden in the void.

You will know best how these things must ultimately align with a clear business case appropriate for your company, but it is important to point out those business practices that shape our countries, our politics, and ultimately our societies.

For Investors:

  • Divest from energy companies who are not investing in the future. Oil is booming right now with the recent elections, but the future will hold a diverse portfolio of energy sources. Companies who are only focused on fossil fuels are resisting innovation.
  • Be an active voter in the companies you invest in. If you hold stocks in companies that are doing things that you do not support – underpaying workers, polluting, vocalising racist sentiment – use your voice as a shareholder to change things. Be active and let them know that as an owner you do not support the way they are operating the business. Chances are high, you are not alone. Get other investors involved.
  • Invest in companies that are good for people, planet, and profit. There are many resources for those interested in impact investing. Read up and put your money where your values are.

On the personal side: invest in values you care about. Whatever they are, donate your time or money to the things that matter most. Create the world you want to live in and that you want your children to live in. Consider it a long-term investment.

The most important thing ultimately is to do something. So get out there, and be active.

Have some great ideas? Please add a comment below.


Based in New York, Wynne is currently enrolled as an MBA student at Copenhagen Business School. She was attracted to the Copenhagen MBA for its strong focus on Responsible Management and the promise of a global classroom. Post-MBA, she is toying with the idea of starting her own venture. She is a blogger for the Financial Times MBA blog, where she hopes to tell the story of what really powers her passion for Responsible Management on the far-reaching global business platform that is the Financial Times.

Pic by Pexels

CSR is Dead. Long Live CSR

By Andreas Rasche, Mette Morsing, and Jeremy Moon.

We – Andreas Rasche, Mette Morsing, and Jeremy Moon – just edited an international textbook entitled Corporate Social Responsibility: Strategy, Communication, Governance (Cambridge University Press). When talking to people about the book, one common response was: “Why didn’t you just call it Corporate Sustainability? After all, this term is used by everybody these days…” In 2014, Peter Bakker, the President of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, even declared: “CSR is dead. It’s over.” And Michael Porter and Mark Kramer made a very similar claim when pitching their “shared value” concept a couple of years earlier.

Mr Bakker’s main point was that CSR is mostly about philanthropy and that it is not properly embedded into business models yet. It is hard to disagree with this statement, but nevertheless neither Mr Bakker nor Mr Kramer and Professor Porter got to one point:

The core of the problem

First, if you do not have an antique understanding of CSR (as preached in the late 70s), you will recognize that it actually is about integrating firms’ social and environmental responsibilities in their value and supply chain activities as well as their business models. This is precisely what the entire debate on “strategic CSR” has been aiming at. Those companies who understand CSR in a contemporary way know that they have to integrate their responsibilities vis-à-vis society into everything they do; and this is not necessarily because they are environmentalists or social protagonists but because this is what society expects from them and this is what provides them with their license to operate.

However, simply changing labels from “CSR” to “Corporate Sustainability” won’t make firms more aware that their business models need to be aligned with their responsibilities vis-à-vis society. While Corporate Sustainability may enable a smoother dialogue between management scholars and economists and while it may also help to engage in dialogue with peers from the natural and technical sciences, it also blurs the importance of firms’ ethical responsibilities. In fact, one could argue that while the Corporate Sustainability language has increasingly helped to engage the investor community into what they label Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) issues, it has also sidelined important ethical dilemmas that were once at the core of the debate.

Second, we should not too quickly disparage corporate philanthropy as an outdated concept. Currently, philanthropic contributions are a key driver of many partnerships in support of broader development goals such as the UN’s Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs). Also, philanthropic contributions are often quite “strategic” – many firms directly benefit from such contributions, such as when charity investments in education secure a skilled future workforce. Also, many SMEs make strong philanthropic contributions to the local communities around them – for them CSR is a matter of personal values (often driven by the owner-manager).  Yet, this can bring benefits of employee motivation  (as, somewhat paradoxically, even Milton Friedman noted), social marketing and customer loyalty.

The bottom line: rationales, not labels

The core of the problem lies not so much in labels. It more profoundly lies in the challenges that systemic injustice, corruption, human rights and climate change pose for society and for business, and the resources and strategies that businesses bring to address them. Therefore, we should not focus too much on labels – labels come and labels go. But we should rather focus on ‘rationales’.

Actually, Chapter 2 of our book makes exactly this point. Corporations are often quickly relabelling and repackaging their engagement with responsible and sustainable business. What was formerly described as ethics was translated into CSR and now turns into Corporate Sustainability. In the future it may be given even another name. This is not to say that corporate practices are not changing. Actually, there is a lot of innovation around corporate sustainability and many firms have learned a great deal about which material issues need to be addressed. It is to say, however, that we should not simply throw away the “old” and believe that the “new” will be the Holy Grail.

In this sense, editing a textbook on “Corporate Social Responsibility” is a very timely undertaking. We cannot ignore the big societal challenges that are ahead of us, and by educating the business wo(men) of tomorrow we have to acknowledge that firms’ responsibilities have to be deliberately managed, regardless of whether we call this “CSR”, “corporate sustainability”, “shared value” or something else. We hope that our book will convey exactly this message.

CSR is a continuous journey

The point for us is this: Responsible and sustainable business has to be alive in our minds; it has to shape what we do, how we do it, and why do it. We have to look beyond and behind the different labels we ascribe to responsible business behavior. Truly engaging with a book is but one of the many important ways to achieve just that… CSR is a journey that has just begun and that continues to unfold on a daily basis.

Long live CSR!

Info: The book “Corporate Social Responsibility: Strategy, Communication, Governance” edited by Andreas Rasche, Mette Morsing, and Jeremy Moon is available from 17 March 2017.


Andreas, Mette and Jeremy are editors-in-chief of the BOS Blog and Professors at Copenhagen Business School’s World Class Research Environment Governing Responsible Business.

Poster by Cambridge University Press.

CBS UN Global Compact PRME report on progress: Not only what, but also who

By Lavinia-Cristina Iosif-Lazar.

68 pages, 6 principles, one year of data collection and CBS’ 4th report to the UN Global Compact PRME initiative: these are the numbers behind the latest report by the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) .

The report is now out and presents the main responsibility-related research projects, initiatives, publications and activities that have taken place throughout CBS over the course of the last two years. It is also, what we at the PRME office call “The CBS responsible management phone book”.

The paper presents the way in which CBS lives up to and embeds the six Principles for Responsible Management Education (purpose, values, method, research, partnership, dialogue), which constitute the foundation for the work we do on responsible management education. They provide a solid structure to help us excel in important areas that will contribute to improving our curricula and research.

The principle logos are allocated to each activity to indicate which principle(s) are being addressed. It also brings together in one, overreaching document, researchers, faculty and student organizations from across CBS working with responsibility in management education, sustainability, CSR, business and human rights, development studies and green tech to name but a few. Spanning from Green Shipping to Corporate Social Voluntarism, from student-led initiatives to external partners engagement projects, the report encompasses the diversity of CBS’s view on responsible education.

Having been previously granted with an “Excellence in Reporting” award by UNGC PRME, we constantly strive to put together the best possible report, documenting CBS’ work within responsible management, but also, more importantly, to draw special attention to the people behind this work.

You can find the entire CBS Report at here.

Note: Launched at the 2007 UN Global Compact Leaders Summit in Geneva, the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) initiative is the largest organised relationship between the United Nations and business schools. The mission of PRME is to transform management education, research and thought leadership globally by providing the Principles for Responsible Management Education framework, developing learning communities and promoting awareness about the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.


Lavinia is project coordinator at CBS PRME. Visit the PRME office at Porcelænshaven 18B, Room 1.123. Follow CBS PRME on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

Pic by CBS PRME.

Digitally Dominant Corporations

By Glen Whelan.

On Friday the 26th of January, Denmark’s foreign minister Anders Samuelsen announced that Denmark is to appoint the world’s first ‘digital ambassador’. In an interview with Politiken, and as reported by The Local, Samuelsen explained the decision by noting that digitally dominant “companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft ‘affect Denmark just as much as entire countries… These companies have become a type of new nation… and we need to confront that’”. Whilst Samuelsen was careful to note that Denmark “‘will of course maintain our old way of thinking in which we foster our relationships with other countries’”, he emphasized that “‘we simply need to have closer ties to some of the companies that affect us’”.

A Contentious Trend

Whilst Denmark appears to be the first country to so formalize relations with digitally dominant corporations, the conceiving of corporations as being state like is not particularly new. In 2016, for example, Foreign Policy magazine named Google as its ‘Diplomat of the Year’ due to its “digital diplomacy” and its “empowering citizens globally”. And approximately ten years prior to this, there was a spate of works suggesting that multinational corporations were beginning to take on increasingly state like responsibilities for individual citizenship rights, and that it was multinational corporations that were the new Leviathans of our time.

This trend to conceive of states and corporations as being on something like an equal footing, however, has often been criticized. Forbes contributor Emma Woollacott, or example, chastised Samuelsen for implying that if an organization amasses enough money, then it can “get a government to give… [it] not only special attention but a unique political status”. She thus suggested that whilst “appointing a senior official tasked with negotiating with tech companies makes a lot of sense, equating those companies with nations sets a rather worrying precedent”. In echoing what is now the decade old claim that corporations would likely seek protection “against arbitrary interference and expropriation by governments” for taking on ‘governmental’ responsibilities, Woollacott worries that equating corporations with governments will simply increase the power the former have over the latter.

A Symbolic Turn

In contrast to such normative concerns, Copenhagen University’s Martin Marcussen suggests that the Danish government’s planned appointment of the world’s first digital ambassador will be little more than symbolic. According to his understanding of the Foreign Ministry, “the ambassador will get an office, practically consisting solely of that individual. He or she will… be able to travel around, but it’s just one person, so one can’t expect too much’”.

In and of itself, this statement is difficult to argue with. Nevertheless, it risks obscuring the digital ambassador announcement’s important, albeit largely implicit, suggestion, that it is not corporate power in general that we need to be wary of, but the power of high-tech digital corporations in particular. The first point to take away from recent developments, then, is that the Danish government’s recognition that digitally dominant corporations have a significant impact on the life of Danish (and other) citizens is well founded.

The second and more important point to take away, however, is that we risk misunderstanding the uniqueness of such impacts by trying to conceive of digitally dominant corporations as governments, or by conceiving of their unique political status as arising once governments recognize them as ‘equals’. Indeed, the unique political importance of such digitally dominant corporations is clearly diminished by such an equating.

In other words, when we equate digitally dominant corporations with governments, it tends to take attention away from the fundamental, multitudinous, and technologically informed, ways, in which they (indirectly) shape what we consume, discover, experience, forget, and remember, on a daily basis. If Denmark’s digital ambassador announcement helps us recognize as such, then it will prove to be a very good thing.


Glen Whelan is Governing Responsible Business Fellow at Copenhagen Business School and Social Media Editor for the Journal of Business Ethics. He’s on twitter @grwhelan and @jbusinessethics.

Pic by cea +, Flickr, edited by BOS

US versus Him

By Catarina Pessanha Gomes.

The past months constituted the culmination of a sequence of events, completely unthinkable even one year ago. These events led to the inauguration of a man that many consider unfit for its position, a man demonstrating unprecedented levels of intolerance, bigotry and racism, a man questioning the foundation of our political system, separation of powers, free press, equality of rights, one tweet at the time.

Like many of us, my heart has been hesitating between a deep state of anxiety for its future decisions and a slight nausea when looking at its proclamation as Time’s person of the year. Yet, this got me thinking about the incongruity of reducing a whole sequence of events, times, peoples and places to a single individual, a troubled reflection of the individualistic tendencies of our societal and political system. While not dismissing the reality of asymmetrical power relations, the emphasis of this post is placed on the anonymous mass, the hidden collective power often forgotten by our political system, but also in our academic fields.

The common, collective, anonymous power is often left unstudied at the profit of the single individual, be it the President, the CEO or, in my academic field, the entrepreneur. Hence, I decided to put aside the overwhelming amount of research focusing on the personality of these special, heroic individuals, constituting a popular narrative of uniqueness and success, focusing instead on organizational studies calling for a comprehension of entrepreneurship in its everydayness, as a societal process with multiple actors and stakeholders rather than an individualistic phenomenon.

The sociologist Richard A. Peterson and Pardo´s studies open the door for considering entrepreneurship not as a special person or situation, but as an action commonly shared that can occur anytime. In this regard, the latter put forward a perspective on entrepreneurial moves through which citizens, here the popolino of Naples, create new possibilities in life, situating entrepreneurship beyond formal economy.  Recognizing this collective entrepreneurial action is the first step towards serious political changes, as our democratic system needs to be modified to recognize, listen and integrate this common potential in the political game as a legitimate form of power.

Lyotard states that the world is composed of events giving rise to multiple interpretations, and maybe I really needed a new storyline to help me cope with the current events; maybe I could not make sense of Donald Trump as the final expression of what our society can produce. Nevertheless, for the next four years, I will keep in mind that politics also lies on the everyday, collective power that change society in the shadows, the men and woman giving a hand, creating, collaborating, in organizations or in the anonymity of their own houses, making “US” the people of the year, one action at the time.


Catarina is a PhD Fellow at the Department of Management, Society & Innovation at Copenhagen Business School. Her PhD project investigates partnerships between social entrepreneurs and public institutions, with a particular focus on how social entrepreneurship can be institutionalized.

Pic by the Office of the President of the United State

Trumpism: On the road to state capture?

By Hans Krause Hansen

The inauguration of Donald Trump as President of the U.S. has caused widespread concern. On the long list of worries is Trump’s approach to corruption. With his business empire including hundreds of legal entities across the world, conflicts of interests will pile up.

Corruption is about office holders’ misuse of public office for private or organizational gain, and it has a wide reach. Grand corruption involves the collusion of networks of economic and political elites across national borders. Powerful corporate actors make business deals with political and administrative leaders at various levels, if not directly, then through intermediaries. While always difficult to document due to the secrecy of the deals, we only need to recall the Oil-For-Food and Siemens scandals to confirm that such things indeed take place on a massive scale.

Historically the U.S has suffered from various forms of grand corruption, like any other country. But U.S. governments have also come to play an important role in attempts to curb it. The country pioneered the prohibition of corporate bribery of foreign public officials, and many countries have followed suit. U.S engagement in anti-corruption, and anti-corruption itself, has been subject to controversies. But there is growing acknowledgement across the world of the damaging effects of corruption on economic affairs and trust in political and administrative institutions. Human rights, security and the environment are all affected negatively by corruption.

What are the policies to expect from Trump and his new administration on these matters? Of course we don’t know yet, but there are certainly issues to keep an eye on in time to come.

Conflicts of Interest

During the electoral campaign and as president–elect, Trump waged a war against corruption. Framed in the now well-known Trumpian elite vs. people metaphoric, its primary target was the Washington establishment.

But there are good reasons why Trump better begin to clean up his own house. Just before inauguration Trump explained his plan for how to separate his business empire from the work to be undertaken from the Oval Office. His decision not to create a blind trust for his assets, as well as the appointment of his closest relatives to run the Trump Organization instead of an independent board have been met with widespread suspicion Even from those who speculate it’s unfair that entrepreneurs involved in public life can ultimately be required to liquidate their business have lamented the absence of arms length.

So too has the general lack of transparency in Trump’s tax returns. Two days after his inauguration, WikiLeaks tweeted that “Trump’s breach of promise over the release of his tax returns is even more gratuitous than Clinton concealing her Goldman Sachs transcripts.” The organization has called for someone to blow the whistle.

Walter M. Shaub, Director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics has stated that Trump’s plan for avoiding conflicts of interest “does not comport with the tradition of our Presidents over the past 40 years.” Since the Watergate scandal, maintaining business while in office has been seen as ethically irresponsible and against the law. Moreover, it sets a very bad example: “The signal a President sends set the tone for ethics across the executive branch. Tone from the top matters.”

Following his statements, Shaub was called to testify before lawmakers in the House of Representatives, a step seen by many as a threat to his office.

The Emoluments Clause

With his family running the business empire, the President will of course be able to interfere directly in it. But he can also come under unduly influence of foreign powers, some of whom may already be enmeshed in it.

But the U.S. Constitution, as well as federal statutes that address nepotism, bribery and so on, forbid office holders to accept presents and other services from foreign powers. Legal scholars have discussed why and how in a recent study of the so-called Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution. While many transactions between the Trump empire and foreign powers will probably not involve “actual impropriety”, it is “a virtual certainty that many would create the risk of divided or blurred loyalties that the Clause was enacted to prohibit.” In a situation “when there is overwhelming evidence that a foreign power has indeed meddled in our political system, adherence to the strict prohibition on foreign government presents and emoluments ‘of any kind whatever’ is even more important for our national security and independence.”

State capture

So the fear is not only that Trump’s business liabilities may affect how he deals with the banks to whom he owes hundreds of millions of dollars in debts, but also how he will approach foreign countries that become business partners or seek special favors. Worst case, Trump’s presidency may lapse into state capture, a term referring to the systemic corruption of business and politics relations. Individuals, organizations and interest groups, domestic or foreign, can come to have disproportionate influence over policies and regulations emanating from the Oval Office and the administration.

Tools for state capture include the buying of laws and decrees, illicit or disproportionate contributions to political parties and groups, manipulation with electoral processes, illegitimate lobbying and revolving door commitments, and not least, through friendship, family ties and intertwined ownership of economic assets. State capture has many facets. It is often related to the illicit financial flows characterizing particular industrial sectors with profound economic and political power asymmetries. Some sectors are high risk, such as the extractive industries.

State capture and its associated processes of favoritism, bribery and blackmailing will need much more attention in the future. Especially the recent mobilization of digital technologies, hacktivism and cyber wars in the election of Trump draw attention to the increasing sophistication of the tools being used. The unknowns of Trump’s business ties to geopolitical adversaries and allies across the globe, together with the skillful use of digital technologies to manipulate global publics, will hopefully prompt investigative journalists and researchers to scrutinize what is going on and what to do.

Adiós FCPA?

A final set of speculations focuses on Trump’s stance towards the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), a legal cornerstone in the history of international anti-corruption. The FCPA was signed into law in 1977 after the Watergate scandal. It has extraterritorial reach and prohibits U.S. corporations from bribing officials of foreign governments in order to obtain business. The FCPA has inspired legal initiatives elsewhere, including the recent U.K. Bribery Act and important international anti-corruption conventions under the auspices of the OECD and UN, amongst others. Anti-corruption efforts by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund all echo various aspects of the pioneering FCPA, all of which tie into the much broader work of the world’s leading civil society organization on anti-corruption, Transparency International.

Since 2004, U.S Authorities have scaled up FCPA enforcement, targeting U.S companies and foreign companies. The FCPA is one of the key reference points for the increasing development and implementation of corporate compliance programs in multinational companies worldwide.

But will this continue? In 2012 Trump stated that the FCPA is “horrible law and it should be changed”, and also that it puts U.S. companies at a “huge disadvantage.” That fits with Trump’s preferences for U.S companies winning and his disdain for moral niceties.

However, let’s all take a deep breath when it comes to FCPA enforcement in the Trump Administration, as writes the FCPA Professor, a website that deals extensively with legal issues relating to corruption, anti-corruption and other interesting matters. The fate of the FCPA will depend on the more precise composition of the agencies responsible for the FCPA, bureaucratic inertia and a lot of other priorities. The FCPA Professor further notes there are probably “too many people making lots of money based on the current FCPA enforcement environment for FCPA enforcement to experience a sudden dramatic change.” Anti-corruption has become an industry, a profession, with lawyers, accountants, compliance officers and CSR consultancies making a living by providing expertise. No wonder that corruption has come to be seen as a risk to be managed, even by corporations themselves.

In conclusion, there are many reasons to be worried about what comes next from Trump in matters relating to corruption and anti-corruption. We are indeed in a phase of massive uncertainty and confusion, with unpredictability reigning, also in this area. Notable exceptions in the business of prophecy certainly do come around now and then, but not always for the good.


Hans Krause Hansen is Professor at the Department of Management, Society and Communication, Copenhagen Business School. He teaches and researches about various aspects of public and private governance, including corruption, anti-corruption and transparency regimes in the global North and South.

Pic by Chris Potter, Flickr

Redistributing resource rights in a resource-dependent economy: The case of the Faroese fisheries reform

By Árni Jóhan Petersen

The distribution of rights to natural resources is a complex and challenging task to solve because of the many stakeholders involved. At present, the Faroe Islands are in the process of reforming its fishing system, which undoubtedly will have a significant impact in a country where 95 percent of exports are fish products.

The case of the Faroe Islands can give us insights into how changes in the local economy unfold. The reform will not only change the local fishing industry but also the political landscape and the Faroese population.

Other countries in the region (e.g. Iceland, Greenland, Norway and Scotland) are observing the developments, as they could influence the constellations of their rights to natural resources. The topic is also of great relevance to academics and practitioners because of the economic, political and social challenges and opportunities that necessarily follow from such reforms.

Background

Since 1994 fishing rights in the Faroe Islands have generally been distributed on the basis of past performance (“grandfathering”). Licenses have typically be running for 10 years, but the 10-year period was typically deferred by one year, each year, whereby the licenses tended to become permanent. This led to capitalization, with licensed vessels changing hands for a price far exceeding the commercial value of the vessel.

In order to halt these developments the Faroese Parliament in 2007 decided to stop the annual renewal of the 10-year licenses, so that all existing licenses will expire by 1 January 2018. Thus far, less than a year before the expiry of the existing licenses, a new model has yet to be decided upon. However, the politicians in charge of the reform are now working hard in order to have a new system in place by 1 January 2018.

The Faroese government has required that a new reform should be market-based, and that recommendations for a reform should be developed within the political framework. Historical entitlement, or grandfathering, has been excluded as a possibility, and instruments like “beauty contests” are not to be considered in a new system. There are different opinions as to which solution is the most suitable – some of these will presented below.

I, however, will argue that a solution such as “beauty contests” might be a feasible strategy and that such as strategy could benefit society beyond future expectations – both economically and socially.

Historical entitlement to a market-based allocation of rights to fish the quotas

A commission appointed by the Minister of Fisheries, Høgni Hoydal, has argued that the political incentives of the reform are to maximize profits, increase public economic gains, and ensure that future fishing is environmentally sustainable. In doing so, the objective is to move away from the current grandfathering system to a more market-based system.

In October 2016, the same commission finished a report in which it recommends that a transition period (of, for example, 10 years) is introduced, meaning that rights will be recalled continuously over this period of time and subsequently distributed on market terms.

The commission’s report demonstrates a potential solution where fishing rights are to be divided into short term (1-year), medium-long term (5 years), and long term (10 years) licenses with a transition period of 10 years (2018-2027). 23 percent of the allotted quantity will be auctioned every year. The rationale behind this approach is based on the assumption that current companies in the fishing industry should have the opportunity to adapt to the changes caused by the new scheme while making sure that the industry will not be impaired in the meantime. With this model, the grandfather mechanism is partially preserved throughout the transition period.

Market-based: all rights recalled by 1 January 2018

Assistant Professor and Economists at the University of the Faroe Islands, Jóannes Jacobsen, who has been an active contributor to the debate on fishing reforms, prefers an alternative solution. He argues that all rights should be recalled by 1 January 2018, as already decided by Faroese legislators, and subsequently be distributed on market terms as short-term, small quotas.

The idea is to abolish the current system and establish a public auction where fishing rights are sold in as small as possible “packages” (e.g. every “package” equals one trip for one vessel). With such a system, all Faroese citizens will have the right to bid in on the auction for these fishing rights. This approach is based on three convictions:

1) It is democratically the best solution because every Faroese citizen has the opportunity to bid in, which is in contrast to the current system where political authorities distribute fishing rights to companies with authorized vessels.

2) It is the best solution in terms of economic gains, as both theory and praxis demonstrate that competition for production resources leads to improved commercial results.

3) It is a fairer solution because all Faroese fishing rights are “property of the Faroese people” (according to Faroese legislation), and that the Faroese people has the right of the market value of these rights. This is in stark contrast to the current system where rights are distributed to a few selected ship owners who have a “permit” to fish.

The ship owners and grandfathering

Needless to say, the companies currently involved in the industry would prefer to continue with the grandfathering scheme because it – according to the industry – facilitates long-term investments and innovation within the fishing industry. But, are there any alternative solutions that would encapsulate a broader preservation of all stakeholders’ interests? Or does it have to be one of the above-mentioned solutions?

Alternative solution (or supplementing elements)

Some solutions have not been assessed by the commission because of clear political incentives and requests for the framework to only consider purely market-based solutions. These market-based approaches are primarily concerned with optimizing and maximizing the economic benefits (e.g. highest bidder wins the rights), while other parameters are left out of the equation.

One supplementing solution could be to implement elements from a “beauty contest” (e.g. as used to regulate the Faroese oil industry) where companies bidding on fishing rights are obligated to abide by certain preconditions set prior to the auction.

Beauty contests in the Faroese fishing industry could be stakeholders bidding on other societal benefits. The licenses for oil explorations in the Faroe Islands were not auctioned, but administratively assessed by the competitors’ exploration scheme (e.g. commitment to safety, environment, shoot seismic and drill exploration wells), and their incentives to improve development progress of the Faroese industry in general (e.g. allocating resources for education, innovation and research etc.).

One of the more relevant considerations is the equitability of the system, where a small number of shipowners reap considerable benefits from a commonly owned resource. This might be remedied by introducing royalties on the catch, or by levying a special resource rent tax on their extraordinary profits.

Consequently, beauty contests in the fishing industry would bind the right-holder to generate some societal benefit that otherwise would not have been achieved in other systems (e.g. market-based). However, such a system would necessarily lead to less transparency than a market-based system, because here, industrial policy clashes with the market where the political objectives are not always clear and accountable.

If this should be an alternative solution, I would argue that that this would take time to develop and implement in the Faroese fishing industry because such preconditions are not used today. Hence, this approach will require a discussion in which companies and authorities will have to identify relevant and suitable parameters to include as preconditions (for a similar argument in a different context see also the recent BOS blog entry by Haack & Schoeneborn).

What are your thoughts? Any recommendations? Which solutions do you prefer? Do you have an alternative solution that should be considered?

 

Quick facts about the Faroe Islands

  • Approximately 50,000 inhabitants
  • 18 islands
  • Located in the in the North Atlantic Ocean
  • 1,399 square kilometers
  • 274,000 square kilometers of sea area
  • Self-governed part of the Danish Kingdom
  • Language: Faroese
  • Exports of approximately 6.5 billion DKK
  • 95% of exports is fish
  • 20% of export is pelagic fish
  • Five fishing companies have the rights of pelagic fishing
  • GDP is approximately 15 billion DKK

Five different distribution systems

  • First come, first served
  • Lottery
  • Historical entitlement (or grandfathering)
  • Beauty contests (in which other parameters are supplemented the bidding offer)
  • Market-based

Árni Petersen is PhD-Fellow at the Department of Management, Society and Communication at Copenhagen Business School. His PhD project sets out to explore the relationship between responsible business and governance in the Faroese Oil Industry by reflecting on the ways in which involved businesses act as governance takers and governance makers.

Pic by DavideGorla, Flickr

Digital Superpowers and the ‘Reality Business’

By Mikkel Flyverbom.

At certain points in their careers, university professors start to say strange things. I remember vividly how one of my professors at The New School for Social Research started one of his lectures by reflecting on the issue of ‘social taboos, guilt and shame’. I still cringe at the uncomfortable silence in the room when he told us very frankly that his sexual fantasies were what he found to be the most difficult to deal with and talk about.

Our reaction, obviously, was a perfect illustration of the point he was trying to make, although it hardly registered with any of us at the time. But professors may also start to produce very complex sentences or come up with sentences that have a disturbing life of their own, such as that ‘only communication can communicate’ or that a good researcher should be like an ant – ‘a blind, myopic, workaholic, trail-sniffing, collective traveler’.

Without being as explicit or profound, I find myself in conversations with colleagues, where the issue on the table is similarly odd. Our discussions about digital transformations and big data increasingly focus on ‘reality’. So what does this mean?

The point is that internet companies and digital platforms, like Google and Facebook, do not just allow for sharing and connecting, test established regulatory approaches, unsettle a wide range of traditional industries, and lead to new forms of working and organizing. The central role they play when it comes to accessing, organizing and distributing information means that they fundamentally shape how we view the world. Or as Shoshana Zuboff from Harvard Business School puts it in her forthcoming book, these companies are increasingly in ‘the reality business’.

The power of visibilities

Along with more prominent colleagues such as Manuel Castells, Evgeny Morozov, Kenneth Cukier and others, the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia has invited me to reflect on what they call the ‘Silicon Valley Empire and the New World Order’ for a special issue.

The result is a large magazine full of discussions about the workings and significance of these digital superpowers. My piece, titled Digital geopolitics: Information control and the power of visibilities, focuses on these questions about ‘reality’ – how information is controlled, how we come to know the world, how it is guided, and how things are made visible and invisible in digital spaces. Silicon Valley companies are obviously economic giants.

But they are also behemoths of a different kind: They are powerful because they have access to mind-blowing amounts of data about everything we do, care about and search for. What we used to think of as digitalization currently advances into ‘datafication’, where many parts of social life take the shape of digital traces.

Friendships become ‘likes’ on Facebook, movements through the city produce extensive digital footprints in GPS-enabled devices, and our searches for information show what we value or wish for as individuals and societies. Combined with automated sorting mechanisms, such as algorithms and artificial intelligence, these wild streams of digital traces can be used to show important patterns and inform a growing number of decisions about consumers, diseases or criminal activities. Down the road, much of what we can know about people, organizations and societies will come from such digital sources. As digital platforms move closer and closer to the core of social and cultural life, the questions we should be asking are about information control, the guidance of attention and the power of visibilities.

The point is that there is an intimate relationship between what you see, what you know and what you can control – as an individual, an organization or a society. Just think of how important the invention of the microscope was for the treatment of diseases that were not visible, knowable or controllable before, or how the emergence of maps made it possible to see, know and conquer new parts of the world.

Like earlier inventions, digital transformations fundamentally alter how we make things visible, knowable and possible to control. Because internet companies have the skills and resources to work with digital traces and algorithms, they come to shape our view of the world and guide our attention in individual, organizational and societal domains.

Compared to the internet giants’ size, financial advantages and number of users, these questions about information control and the power of visibilities are largely ignored. But they are central if we want to articulate the shape of contemporary digital transformations.

Reality, not cyberspace

Concerns about the power and significance of internet companies are particularly important to bring up at this moment in time. While some still talk about digital technologies as ‘cyberspace’, as if it is an independent and separate domain that we enter and leave again, their present role is very different.

It hardly makes sense to distinguish between online and offline worlds or the real or the virtual anymore, because digital platforms are the infrastructures and foundations of so many parts of social, economic and cultural life. But still, these digital infrastructures are in the making. Before they solidify and become taken completely for granted, there are a number of difficult questions about power, responsibility and rights that we need to grapple with.

These are difficult to ask, not to speak of answer, because they cut across economic, regulatory, social, cultural and personal spaces, and we seem to need new vocabularies to make sense of what they will mean for us as individuals, organizations and societies. And here, ‘reality’ comes in handy.

The issue of La Vanguardia can be found here. Contact Mikkel if you want to find out more.


Mikkel is Associate Professor at the Department of Intercultural Communication and Management at Copenhagen Business School. He is co-leading the Transparency subgroup of the department’s World Class Research Environment (WCRE) ‘Governing Responsible Business’ (GRB). He is on Twitter.

Pic by Isaiah van Hunen, Flickr.

Crowdfunding for Sustainability: Creating a platform for sustainable ideas

By Kristian Roed Nielsen.

Crowdfunding as phenomenon is strange as it fundamentally boils down to strangers supporting strangers for causes, products or services that have not yet been realized and of which they have little direct oversight or control. Despite this oddity, crowdfunding is growing rapidly.  Just between 2013 – 2014, approx. €2.3 billion were raised, enabling a vast number of enterprises to grow and ideas to become reality. As engaged scholars, the question thus becomes: how to utilize this phenomenon as a means to drive sustainable ideas and projects?

Early testbeds for sustainable crowdfunding

The examples of EcoCrowd, GreenCrowd, and Kiva all point to the potential of crowdfunding in driving both environmental, but also social development and innovation. The case of the German crowdfunding platform EcoCrowd is especially interesting as it illustrates how public finances can be used to create platforms dedicated to tackling environmental challenges by co-supporting their development.

The added benefit of these types of platforms is that they, if successful, become self-sustaining resource centers for further sustainable ideas and ventures. More precise, these platform allow citizens to engage directly in driving sustainable change by supporting, for example, community projects. One example of this includes the The Peckham Coal Line urban park that sought to convert the old raised Peckham coal line in London into a raised urban park via an online campaign on the civic crowdfunding website SpaceHive.

The Peckham Coal Line further illustrates how policymakers can draw-upon the strengths of crowdfunding by co-financing community projects if they hit a certain level of financing. The Peckham Coal Line ultimately successfully raising £75,757a of which government funds represented £10,000 in backing. In this way, community projects could be driven via the entrepreneurial ideas of members of the community.

Future platforms

The future of these platforms of course very much depends on many factors, such as the quality of the campaigns hosted. Prior successful campaigns show that people are indeed willing to engage and raise significant amounts of money. But this requires that people see value in the campaigns hosted. If to many campaigns fail or there simply aren’t enough to inspiring further action, then the platforms will slowly decline.

Therefore, I propose that a collaboration between sustainability-oriented organizations – like Sustainia – represent a great opportunity to find these inspiring campaigns. Sustainia with their Sustainia Awards have a huge database of sustainable ideas and projects just waiting to be supported and scaled. One could even imagine a “Peoples Choice” award where individual vote with their valets for the solution, technology or project they found most inspiring and worthwhile. Sustainia could thus create a platform rich with innovative ideas and projects and “the crowd” can offer the support needed to truly bring these ideas to life.


Kristian is PhD-Fellow studying the potential of crowdfunding in driving sustainable innovation. He is home to the Department of Intercultural Communication and Management at Copenhagen Business School. Follow him on Twitter.

Original Pic by Tommy L, Flickr, changes made by BOS

Don’t Blame 2016. Be 2017.

By Lara Hale.

I do not need to inform you about the major events of 2016: Devastation in Syria, Brexit, President-Elect Trump, drug wars in the Philippines, and so on. For a refresher, see The Guardian’s summary of 2016’s top global development stories. In the past month, news sources and social media alike have been flooded with tales of The Evil 2016, anthropomorphizing the entire year into a wicked, plotting villain. Curses, angry music, and obscene memes have been directed at the year. Certainly, as a sustainability researcher, I have been taken aback by the threats to environmental and political progress made thus far. But is it enough to leave these events in 2016 in hopes of a better 2017? Would we not have a better chance of a brighter 2017 if we considered our own opportunities for action rather than blaming an arbitrary bracket of time?

Activism for Sustainability

On the one hand, there was social sustainability progress in 2016. For example, it has become more socially and scientifically acceptable to link environmental disasters to the aggravation of political conflicts, such as in the case of extreme drought preceding the Syrian civil war. On the other hand, in some sense, I believe the essence of active citizenship in sustainability aims has been lost on us. In the groundwork definition of sustainable development, participation is highlighted as a founding pillar: political and financial equality is desirable for encouraging the participation of all citizens in development efforts; the broader participation of individuals, scientific bodies, and non-profit organizations improves societal knowledge and thus development; and local, community-driven citizen participation is needed to contextualize sustainable development. But say that you are a citizen who is relatively politically and financially privileged; has knowledge and a voice to express it; and is rooted in some form of community, be it urban, rural, or something in between: What does it mean to participate? To be active? Well, part of being an active participant is that you have the freedom and responsibility to determine for yourself the nature of your involvement. That said I would like to offer some considerations for 2017 and beyond, based on recent citizen engagement developments.

Nudge or Fudge?

The past several years have seen a rise in the design of choice architectures that encourage “good” — including  sustainability-oriented — behaviours. In other words, organizations, including governments, are working to set up decision making scenarios in ways that nudge you to make decisions they consider best for society. General examples of nudges in choice architecture include signs at your work entrance gently reminding you that choosing the stairs over the elevator is better for your health, or more aggressive devices that are programmed to shut off your apartment’s electricity when you have exceeded a desired usage level. Default rules, another form of choice architecture, refer to which choice is set up automatically for you before you make any active interference: such as whether you are signed up for your company’s 401k plan, or whether you demand renewable energy sources (as opposed to fossil fuel) from your utility company. When these scenarios are designed to favor environmentally-friendly settings, they are referred to as green default rules. Nudges work by suggesting choices for you, and default rules work by setting the automatic choice for you. Note the theme “for you”. Organizations are becoming more sophisticated at understanding and developing these techniques, as can be seen in the 2011 report for the UK government on influencing behaviour through public policy.

Oh hold up! What do these people think they are doing influencing our choices?! Well, unfortunately we have a tendency to not choose as we intend to when left to our own devices. For example, the green gap is a disappointing consumption pattern referring to the disconnect between the environmentally-friendly products consumers testify they will buy and what they actually purchase. We are also victims to the status quo bias, the phenomenon wherein we are most likely to accept whatever we are already accustomed to (harking the idiom “go with the flow”, ironically born out of the hippie era). As such, there certainly have been successful choice architecture outcomes, including with health food and waste disposal. I would also, however, ask you to question the longer-term, larger-scale impacts of allowing yourself to be distracted from active participation. For example, there is already some question as to whether Trump’s election was in some part due to Clinton’s label as the “status quo” candidate, furthering the assumption that business would carry on as usual and triggering a drop in voter turnout, down 2% from 2012 and 5,6% from 2008. Rather, it is those disrupted in their lives who dislodge the status quo, crack the mold, and form a new playing field.

The surprising thing to me about the recent popularity of choice architecture is failure to acknowledge that the choices being offered are not born out of the blue, dreamed up in a peaceful organizational slumber. Nay, these sustainability visions come from the same kind of dedicated activists who have been breaking the mold (arguably in the “bad” way) in 2016. For example, it is brilliant to simply automatically sign up everyone in the neighborhood to order electricity from renewable sources. But without a vigorous citizen-driven activism driving renewable energy first after the Oil Crisis 1978-9 and again with increasing climate change awareness, there would be no renewable energy production sites, no technologies for their construction, no advancement of their efficiencies towards market competition. It took a lot of work to offer the transmission of solar power to our comfortable couch-side lamps and laptops. Or another example is nudging communities to plant their outdoor spaces as bio-diversity supporting, fresh-air and nutrition-producing urban gardens, or nudging consumers to purchase locally produced groceries. But without the desperation of food shortages and community-driven reorganization of food access post-World War II, the concept of urban gardens and community-supported agriculture (CCS) would not exist.

Break on Through to 2017

Not surprisingly, such sustainability activism exists in 2016 as well. Here in Denmark, prevention of food waste has reached the national agenda and promises to expand further. All this, triggered by the persistent activism of Selina Juul, founder of the organization Stop Spild af Mad (English: Stop Food Waste), and the joining of more activists, such as 17-year old Rasmus Erichsen, founder of the app Stop Spild Lokalt (English: Stop Waste Locally), in what can be considered a social movement. Looking back again on 2016, we have reason to feel disrupted, enough drive for action. Please continue to engage in social media and write up your own blog posts about it, but also find yourself a practical, positive action that you can take. For me, I’ve chosen to pursue academic research in sustainable building (not practical!), but also to volunteer for trash clean-ups in nature areas and reduce my hot water usage at home. You do not have to make it your career, but you can take action for 2017. You can use your participatory power and be an activist for creating different, better choices for all of us in 2017.5, 2020.3, 2046.7, and beyond.


Lara is a PHD Fellow at the Department of Intercultural Communication and Management at Copenhagen Business School. Her PHD research is part of the Marie Curie network Innovation for Sustainability (I4S), with VELUX as a partner organization. 

Pic by 周小逸 Ian, Flickr

Workshop on Values-Based Business Model Innovation

Invitation: Join a workshop on values-based business model innovation, led by DR. Florian Lüdeke-Freund

Hosted by Governing Responsible Business (GRB) Research Environment, this workshop introduces the essentials of the Values-Based Innovation Framework. It will provide a framework, guidelines and tools to renew businesses by focusing on essential values and help innovators solve societal problems. Values-based innovation can motivate the development of new networks and business models that address complex societal problems, such as the unsustainability of current forms of energy supply. 

 We aim to bring together a group of practitioners and students in order to create a mutual learning environment and to test a card-based facilitation method to develop values-based and sustainability-oriented business models. This method builds on the Business Innovation Kit and the Sustainability Innovation Pack. The Business Innovation Kit has been applied in more than 100 workshops around the globe. The Sustainability Innovation Pack is a new extension set developed to support entrepreneurial teams in creating ecologically and socially responsible and sustainable business models.

There is a maximum number of 20 participants, i.e. 10 practitioners & 10 students.

Registration no later than 09.01.2017 (max. 20 participants): Please register by sending a mail to grb@cbs.dk

Date and time: January 18, 2017, 14.00-17.00 

Location: Copenhagen Business School, Porcelænshaven 18A, PHS.023, 2000 Frederiksberg

Why Transparency May Not Be Best in Facilitating Corporate responsibility

By Patrick Haack & Dennis Schoeneborn.

Corporate Responsibility (CR) has become an increasingly important issue for business firms across the globe. Yet, implementing and embedding CR tends to be costly. Accordingly, it is tempting for firms to “greenwash” existing business practices with CR policies, reports, and fancy brochures – but without adopting these policies in a substantive way (i.e. what would mean an in-depth implementation in business practices and procedures).

In the same context, corporate transparency is typically seen as the key to make sure that firms would adopt CR practices in substantive form. In contrast, other scholars have argued that a certain degree of intransparency (or opacity) can be beneficial for the adoption of organizational practices. The argument here is that freedom from scrutiny provides space for decision makers to experiment with new CR practices and consider how to implement those practices. This leeway for experimentation, in turn, can then lead to a substantive institutionalization of CR practices – if compared to a more strict transparency regime (that would impede the occurrence of such dynamics to begin with).

In a recent simulation-based study (as part of a larger research project with Dr. Dirk Martignoni, University of Lugano), we demonstrate that a certain degree of hypocrisy and greenwashing, counter-intuitively, can be beneficial to the industry-wide adoption of CR practices. In our study, we explain differences in the ceremonial (i.e. superficial) vs. substantive (i.e. in-depth) adoption of CR practices in an industry with changes of “evaluation regimes” (i.e. degree to which implementation of CR practices are visible to outsiders).
In particular, we look at two evaluation regimes – transparency and opacity – and three levels of adoption – non-adoption, ceremonial adoption, and or substantive adoption. We assume that the evaluation regime can remain stable or switch, due to regulatory changes or industry dynamics. Of the four different possible sequences of evaluation regimes, we pay particular attention to the situation where there is little visibility at first (opacity) followed by greater visibility (transparency), and explore the conditions under which this particular sequence maximizes the prospects of substantive adoption.

Our study’s findings challenge conventional views that a coercive approach focused on the strict enforcement of transparency and accountability would be most effective to the institutionalization of CR practices. To the contrary, our study suggests that, given certain conditions, an initial period of opacity followed by a switch to a more transparent regime can maximize the in-depth adoption of CR practices.
One important practical implication for non-governmental organizations and other critical observers of corporate actions is that a certain degree of greenwashing, at least in the beginning of a CR implementation and learning process, should not be condemned prematurely. Instead, it would be conducive to the institutionalization of CR to steadily maintain and slowly increase pressure towards more transparency – in order to facilitate “ratcheting up” effects toward more substantive CR adoption among players in the same industry.

Please find here a more extensive summary of the article.

Read the original paper:
The paper has won the 2015 Best Paper Award of the Social Issues in Management Division of the Academy of Management. While the paper is currently in a review process, a shorter version can be accessed here. Haack, P. & Schoeneborn D. (2015). Exploring the Institutionalization of Corporate Responsibility: A Formal Modeling Approach. Academy of Management Proceedings, doi: 10.5465/AMBPP.2015.141


Patrick is an Assistant Professor of Business Ethics in the Strategy Department at HEC Lausanne, Switzerland. Dennis is Professor at the Department of Intercultural Communication and Management at Copenhagen Business School.
Pic by Pexels

Towards More Humanly Sustainable Workplaces

By Dr. Blagoy Blagoev.

There are more and more prominent voices calling for management research and practice to focus on the ‘grand challenges’ faced by society. Undoubtedly, one of those grand challenges most talked about is sustainability. Usually, sustainability is thought about in ecological terms. Indeed, a plethora of well-known issues exist at the interface between business and the natural environment, such as CO2 emissions or water pollution to name but a few. Increasingly, corporations are faced with pressing social demands to manage and organize in sustainable ways in order to prevent such problems from happening in the first place. Yet, another, much less talked about dimension is the human side of sustainability.

Breaking the extra-long hours regime in management consulting

The human side of business sustainability refers us to the problems at the interface between organizations and people, in particular, to the potentially harmful impact certain management practices can have on employees and their families. One, especially harmful development in many workplaces concerns the proliferation of extra-long hours regimes among highly qualified professional and knowledge workers. Many such workers seemingly voluntarily accept to work between 60 and 120 hours a week, remain connected to work through smartphones and laptops, and continue to do so even after experiencing severe work-induced bodily breakdowns. Such ‘extreme’ working time regimes have been shown to be detrimental to both individuals and their organizations: they harm employees’ health, productivity and creativity; reproduce gender inequality; and generate higher employee turnover rates and increasing cost for attracting and retaining highly qualified personnel. In short, in the long term, they create an unsustainable workplace environment. Yet, despite such well-known drawbacks, little progress has been made with dismantling extra-long hours regimes and building more humanly sustainable workplaces. Most work-life balance and family friendliness initiatives do not work.

Extra-long hours regimes persist. Why so?

In my doctoral dissertation, I studied the genesis and historical evolution of an extra-long working hours regime at an elite management consulting firm in Germany in order to answer this question. My empirical investigation demonstrated the historical contingency of the extra-long hours regime: Rather than being pre-given, it only emerged out of a strategic shift at the firm that occurred in the late 1980s. I discovered that the main reason underlying the persistence of long working hours at this firm could be found within the distinct self-reinforcing dynamics triggered by this shift. Over time, these dynamics had constituted and continued to maintain an ecology of complementary and mutually reinforcing management practices, business strategies and cultural norms that were all adjusted to and reinforced the extra-long hours regime. The dynamic spread throughout the entire organization and even beyond: It entangled the consulting firm’s clients too.

The way forward: re-thinking the „work-life balance“ approach

The results of my research imply that the dominant ‘work-life balance’ approach of dealing with such problems of human sustainability needs to be fundamentally reconsidered in at least two ways.

First, building humanly sustainable workplaces is a matter of radical and strategic rather than incremental and operative change. At least in the case of consulting firms, the extra-long working hours pattern cannot be isolated from the plethora of organizational practices, cultural norms and the overarching strategy that have historically co-evolved with it. Simply providing work-life initiatives, such as part-time work of flexible working hours, without attempting to change the entire organizational ecology intertwined with reproducing the extra-long hours regime is not likely to achieve much success. Understanding and breaking the logic of the dynamics that maintain this ecology is crucial for change initiatives to succeed.

Second, and related, we need to widen the traditional focus on internal organizational change. In my research, the dynamics in question went beyond the boundaries of the single firm and entangled client organizations as well. This implies that changing the extra-long working hours regime would also require shifts in the interaction pattern between professional service providers and their clients and the various expectations that structure these interactions.

Key is to change the reproducing dynamics of unsustainable workplaces

Dismantling persistent regimes of extra-long working hours remains one of the key challenges for building humanly sustainable workplaces. Whereas previous research has focuses on criticizing such regimes and suggesting alternatives, we are only now beginning to understand the actual mechanisms that are at work to maintain extra-long working hours. The emergent research findings clearly demonstrate that human sustainability cannot be achieved by providing work-life benefits to compensate for an otherwise humanly unsustainable workplace environment. Rather, the key lies in changing the entire web of interdependent organizational practices, norms and strategies and the dynamics that reproduce such workplace environments.


Blagoy is a post-doctoral scholar at the Department of Management, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany and research fellow at  the Governing Responsible Business Research Environment at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. In his doctoral thesis, he employed a path-dependence lens to study the mechanisms underlying the persistence of excessive working hours regimes in management consulting firms. His research focuses on overwork in professional service firms, organizational change and persistence, and time and temporality in organizations.

Pic by Quinn Dombrowski, Flickr

The Dark Side of Transparency

By Lars Thøger Christensen.

Transparency is essentially about creating insight into organizational and institutional practices in order to allow for critique, stimulate improvement and hold politicians and decision makers accountable. As such, transparency is an essential dimension of a rational, open and democratic society. Without transparency, there is great potential for manipulation, negligence and fraud. Yet, transparency may itself be manipulative. Even when the intention is to disclose and stimulate insight, the results may be less benign. Whenever something is illuminated and pulled out for further inspection, something else remains in the dark.

Any serious pursuit of transparency needs to consider what the pursuit itself is doing to public insight, what it “hides” so to speak and what remains out of view.

Part of this problem resides in the way we understand transparency. While openness and insight may be the ultimate goals, it is commonplace to define transparency in more prosaic terms, for example as information provision. With oceans of information available at our fingertips, the world certainly appears far more transparent than ever before. Yet, accurate information about complex issues, such as sustainability or social responsibility, is usually not easy to digest. Most information about such matters, thus, is often accessible only to experts. And whenever it is made accessible to lay people, it has been subjected to multiple processes of editing and simplification.

No information speaks for itself and attempts to make it “speak” hide as much as it disclose.

Another problem concerns the organizational behavior we hope to see and understand better through practices of transparency. If we think that organizations and decision makers continue to conduct business as usual when subjected to increased transparency, we are utterly wrong. Transparency is not a neutral tool that simply illuminates a preexisting world. When people in organizations know that their talk, decisions and actions are publicly accessible, they are less inclined to experiment, take chances, share ideas, or talk freely about their accomplishments, ideals, assessments and aspirations. This is the case in numerous organizational processes, including meetings, bargaining games, conflict resolutions, idea generation, etc. where the need to withhold some information and protect identities or strategic positions are often important concerns. In such cases, the willingness to share complete and accurate information may be limited and replaced by a desire to “send the right signals” or make the right impressions.

Transparency may cause organizational members to hold back or otherwise adjust behavior.

As a result, we may see less than we think. Even when transparency is enforced by rules and regulations, like for example social responsibility reporting in some countries, participants have a tendency to alter and edit their behaviours in ways that conform to social norms and expectations (i.e. by creating a “front”). Organizational behaviour is certainly not unaffected by increased transparency demands. Thus, we know that organisations carefully select, simplify, and summarize data before they are revealed, that they selectively disclose or leak information, for example through competitive signalling and they shrewdly manage the timing of disclosure, sometimes with the intention of deflecting critique or handling potential issues. Moreover, producers and custodians of data often shift the medium, the classification scheme, or the level of comparisons when forced to share information that used to be confidential.

Demands for more transparency are likely to be handled strategically by organizations.

None of this is to suggest that transparency should be avoided or reduced. Quite the contrary. But it is a reminder that transparency ideals and practices are shaping organizations in dramatic ways and that our desire for more transparency needs to include a desire to know its limitations.


Lars Thøger Christensen is Professor of Communication and Organization at the Department of Intercultural Communication and Management at Copenhagen Business School.

Pics by Roland Molnár and I Want a Poster, Flickr

America, what now? Drawing Up a New Social Contract

By Thomas A. Kochan.

The recent US election exposed two major intersecting fault lines in America: the deep divisions across racial, ethnic, and gender groups and the feeling of being left behind by the economic forces at work resulted in pervasive anger and frustration and gave room for hate crimes across the country. If left neglected, this situation could soon shift to produce an era of social and economic turmoil that could make the Arab Spring look mild in comparison.

The key to break the pattern, as this article will explore, is in mobilizing all sectors of society  to create good quality jobs and get wages moving upward again for all groups. In short, America needs a new social contract attuned to the needs of today’s workforce and economy that is, once again, based on mutual respect.

America’s social contract broke down in the 1980s and the failure to replace it is a root cause of the wage stagnation, anger, and political divisions the election campaigns brought to the fore. With the election of Donald Trump and a Republican majority in Congress, we should suffer no illusions that the process of building a new one will be led from Washington, reaching for the goal to ‚Make America Great Again‘.

Laboratories for Democracy

However, this does not mean progress can’t be made via a different route. Indeed, history shows that most social and economic shifts don’t begin with a national policy, as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously indicated: When treating stated as our “laboratories for democracy”, they function as places where innovations and social movements are born and tested for their ability to address emerging tensions. Ideally, those tensions turn into national policies before they escalade and explode.

In fact, groundwork to America’s last social contract was laid by workers themselves. In the first few decades of the 20th century, Sidney Hillman, then the leader of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union, organized immigrants and developed the basic principles of collective bargaining. Around the same time, women like Susan B. Anthony and Carrie Chapman Catt led the suffragettes movement to get women the right to vote.

With the help of Professor John R. Commons, who has been called the intellectual father of the New Deal, and his students of the University of Wisconsin, state level innovations had been shaped, leading to states like Wisconsin, Massachusetts, and New York enact unemployment insurance, minimum wages, and overtime protections. He and his students went to Washington to assist President Roosevelt write the innovations into the national laws that helped end the Great Depression. In turn, that laid the foundation to spread new wage norms through collective bargaining that succeeded in moving wages up in tandem with productivity to achieve an expanding middle class.

Now that the old social contract ultimately broke down, it is time to begin the long process of building a new one fitted to today’s economy, workforce, and society.  The good news is we are once again seeing substantial innovations in workplaces, local and state government, businesses and education settings that, if accelerated and expanded, could identify the key features of a new social contract.

The Workforce is leading the way

Grassroots initiatives are on the rise, and with the help of labor organizations, community coalitions, and what we might call worker centered entrepreneurs, achievements like the “Fight for 15″ are made possible. In this labor movement, the Service Employees International Union and a community coalition in Seattle have now induced another eighteen states to increase their minimum wages by varying degrees.

These developments pressured low wage companies like Walmart, McDonalds, and the Gap to increase entry level wages above the required minimum. IKEA has even gone a step further in committing to meeting objective standards for paying a “living wage” in all its locations.

Other new worker advocacy groups like Coworkers.org are using information campaigns and social media and other technology-aided apps to induce companies like Starbucks to reform scheduling practices to provide more advance notice and certainty over work schedules.

Unions and worker centers around the country are working together with immigrant groups to enforce their labor rights and protest wage theft (failure to pay minimum wages or overtime) while opening up their apprenticeships to more women, minorities, and immigrants and supporting efforts to promote “common sense” economic strategies that provide good entry level jobs and career ladders.

Lastly, a number of entrepreneurial tech-ventures are starting up around the country. One of those is Workers’ lab, a start-up incubator helping workers to leverage technology and platform-based strategies as a means to build bargaining power. Out of these and yet to be invented strategies might just come the next generation tech-savvy, grass roots labor movement.

How can business help?

Business leaders are slowly beginning to get the message that the era of prioritizing shareholders over all else may be coming to an end. The intense focus on maximizing short term shareholder value might account for one of the principle reasons the old Social Contract broke down.

The good news is there is growing consensus that this needs to change. No one less than J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said last summer that he would raise his employees’ wages because doing so is a good long term investment. He and his peers should apply the same logic advising their clients. By encouraging long-term investing, they could help end the short-termism that has held back corporations from investing in the workforce training and research and development that are so essential to job creation.

Wall Street could also help lead the way and perhaps in concert with labor by creating infrastructure funds that will generate a good rate of return for their investors and for the economy. Business, labor, economists and President-elect Trump, recognize the need and value of repairing the nation’s infrastructure. This constitutes a perfect opportunity to demonstrate the power of bipartisanship, public-private partnerships, and business-labor cooperation.

Some main street business leaders are already doing their part by competing on the basis of high productivity and high wage strategy. Research evidences both good profits and the creation and support of good jobs for American workers. This type of employers emphasise the importance of collaborating with labor and workforce partners.

The role of education

In today’s knowledge based economy, education leaders need to be counted as among the key stakeholders critical to building and sustaining a new social contract.

They and some philanthropic leaders active in funding education innovations are embracing what evidence tells us: There is nothing more important to educational attainment than a good teacher.  And in states as Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Illinois, teacher unions and education leaders are working together as partners to expand learning time, support teacher development, encourage online courses and helping workers refresh their skills in a fast-changing wold. These efforts should be extended across the country.

If knowledge is power, then these educational innovations will equip today and tomorrow’s workforce with the tools they need to meet the challenges they are bound to experience over the course of their careers.

Seeds of a new social contract

What’s needed next is to bring these different stakeholder groups together to learn about what is working and how successful innovations can inform national policy makers.

Here at MIT, we are doing exactly that. Our efforts are meant unite innovation leaders and stimulate research, share experience and come up with solutions based on learning that are meant to be diffused.
Together with the Hitachi Foundation, we have started a “Good Companies-Good Jobs Initiative” that is supporting efforts to improve relations and better manage and resolve workplace conflicts.  As we expand our efforts, we hope to serve as a catalyst for further innovation that will show the nation’s leaders what a new social contract might look like.

But more than anything else, we all should continue to encourage local activism, protest, and innovation. It may take a serious eruption of the now visible fissures to generate positive action in Washington.


Thomas A. Kochan is a Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Co-Director of the Institute for Work and Employment Research where he teaches an online course on the future of work. He is author of Shaping the Future of Work:  What Future Worker, Business, Government and Education Leaders Need to do for all to Prosper. He is on Twitter.

Pic by Annette Bernhardt, Flickr

The Impact of Impact: Learning experience from the UK

By Mark Learmonth.

Who are we talking to when we write our articles?  Does our research make any difference to the world ‘out there’, or are we talking exclusively to fellow academics? The UK government has taken the line that too often academics have simply been talking to one another in their research papers. So they are actively encouraging us to try and make our work matter outside academia, and now measure the impact of our work officially. In this measurement exercise, impact is defined as: “an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia.” Indeed, institutions are now being rewarded (both in cash and in increased reputation) for being able to demonstrate this kind of impact on the world. Here’s my own personal take on some of the key debates.

The Research Excellence Framework

Impact was measured for the first time as part of the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF), the UK-wide system for assessing the quality of research in UK higher education institutions. The REF is an assessment which: “provides accountability for public investment in research and produces evidence of the benefits of this investment … [it also provides] benchmarking information and establishes reputational yardsticks, for use within the higher education sector and for public information”. This means, among other things, that the quality of the research conducted in each institution – and within their different schools and departments – can all be ranked against one another using a common metric. My business school in Durham, for instance, came 20th out of the 100 and odd business schools in the UK. In other words, REF matters, and it matters a lot! Impact was a significant factor – counting for 20% of our overall score. One of the implications of REF mattering so much is that everything must be officially defined in great detail – including what counts as impact.

The impact of red-tape

I won’t bore you with the minutiae of the regulations.  It’s enough to say that the way impact was measured was through schools producing case studies that had to be written according to pre-defined criteria. A key issue was to be able to demonstrate convincingly that the “effect change or benefit” we were claiming for our research was in fact linked directly to the research. This was no easy task, given how multi-faceted any such change is likely to be. Even when, in common-sense terms, research had clearly had an impact, we could not always make out story fit into the formal requirements set out for impact case studies.

The impact of impact

It is interesting to reflect on the cultural changes that the UK’s experiment with impact (and there are certainly no plans to abandon it) may have brought about. The worst effects of the nay-sayers have not come to pass.  Even though impact counts for 20% of overall REF scores, the case study format (for all its faults) has at least meant that, in practice, only a relatively small handful of research articles need to have had impact in order for schools still to score highly. So, at least as far as the REF is concerned, blue-skies research can continue much as before.  Furthermore, the recent Stern Review, an evaluation of REF 2014, has recommended significantly broadening the criteria used to measure impact in order to address some of the acknowledged difficulties with the current approach.  And although some academics remain cynical about the whole issue, most of us are buying in to the agenda, at least to some extent.  After all, does anyone really want to conduct research that never influences anything (other than, perhaps, getting a handful of other academics to agree with us)? I, along with most of my colleagues, now have a section on our curriculum vitae headed “impact” in which we suggest how our research might matter to the wider world.

Would I recommend “impact” for Denmark?   

Personally, I’ve changed my views about impact since 2009. Like a lot of other academics, I’m naturally suspicious of governments imposing anything on us. Still, overall, I am now pretty positive about the impact of impact. The doomsday scenarios about the end of blue-skies work and neo-liberal appropriation have not come about. And on a more positive note, the impact agenda has helpfully raised the question of why we do the work we do, and made us think about who might be interested in it. I now find myself turning some of my academic articles into blogs for a general audience, in part, as a potential “pathway” to impact. Here’s an example. So, as long as it’s done sensitively and in consultation with the academic community, I don’t think you have much to fear about the impact of impact were something similar ever to be introduced in Denmark.


Mark Learmonth is Professor of Organisation Studies/Deputy Dean (Research) at Durham University Business School. He spent the first 17 years of his career in management posts within the British National Health Service. Prior to taking up his post in Durham he has worked at the universities of Nottingham and York. You can follow him on Twitter.

Pic: own

The CEO President

By Dan Kärreman.

President Trump is going to be different. So far most of the commentary has been focused on him as a trailblazer for white nationalism and populism, and for his unique personal qualities. This is understandable, since the marriage between white nationalism and populism was dissolved in 1964 in the USA when the Democratic party finally took a long hard look on its racist past and decided to become the party of civil rights, thus fracturing the mix of white supremacy and New Deal policies that had ruled the South since the implementation of the New Deal. And as for president Trumps personal qualities… let’s say that we can expect unorthodox and colorful commentary on that front for the next four years.

Can Trump’s business habitus compensate for a lack of experience in government & politics?

One aspect of Trump that has been overlooked is that he has no previous experience of government and politics. To the extent it has been an issue, Trump has largely managed to make this a point that has worked to his advantage as it has given him credibility in claiming that he is not part of the (corrupt) establishment. His celebrity has also compensated for the lack of name recognition that normally would hamstring the outsider candidate. But his lack of experience of government and politics is likely to have a profound effect on how he will operate as a president.

On the other hand, Trump has considerable experience of being a business president. He has worked a business executive for more than 35 years. In Bourdieuan terms, this is his habitus. Being a business executive is different (but not completely different) from being a politician. It is worthwhile to have a closer look on what we can expect from a business executive.

Authoritarian, KPI-driven and delegating responsibility

First, executives run on hierarchy. As an executive, it is a given that you have say-so in your domain. Operationally, this is perhaps not different from politicians who also mostly work in hierarchical arrangements. However, as a politician in a liberal democracy you must internalize the idea that you represent a constituency and at least pay lip service to the fact that power comes from the people. Not so for an executive, where power comes from the guy above you in the hierarchy. Fact is that executives are not only comfortable in authoritarian set-ups, they thrive on it. The authoritarian aspect of Trump’s persona is perhaps the most grating one for the political class, where such tendencies are expected to be suppressed. They are unlikely to be troubling for most of the electorate though, since most people interact more frequently and more comfortably with executives than with politicians in everyday life.

Second, executives are driven by a narrow set of key performance indicators. The indicators can be played to some extent but they are also real in the sense that they operate as grading mechanisms for performance. Expect Trump to identify a narrow set of deliverables that he will insist to be evaluated upon. The most likely candidates are immigration (or rather deportation), trade, nominating socially conservative judges for the supreme court and infrastructure spending. Having said that, Trump is probably open for negotiation on this point. He does not appear to be particularly ideological (apparently, he has changed his party affiliation 5 times the last 15 years) but he would insist to have indicators that makes it possible to claim success. Success is very important for executives.

Third, executives delegate. This goes beyond the idea of the fact that it is impossible to be experts on everything. Executives are strong believers in the division of labor, in fact the whole idea of an executive is built on division of labor, and are comfortable in pushing out responsibility to subordinates. Delegation offers possibility for subordinates to prove themselves and to further their careers, thus creating bonds of loyalty between executives and subordinates. Politicians delegate too, but the career aspect of delegation is less pronounced. Politicians delegate to increase representativeness and to invite expert commentary. Put bluntly, executives delegate for reasons of expediency while politicians delegate for reasons of deliberation.

A Business presidency

Overall, we can expect a presidency that will work more like a business presidency than the typical political presidency. The authoritarian aspects of the business president are likely to be an ongoing source of frustration, since the US presidency in actual reality is a weak office with a lot of checks and balances (foreign policy is an exception but Trump does not seem very interested in this area). The importance of projecting success is likely to make the Trump presidency prone to unpredictable policy shifts. Finally, the promotion of expediency will open for a lot of semi-scandals and crypto-grafting since it promotes a potent but problematic mix of loyalty, initiative and patronage, qualities that sits uneasily with the ethos of public government.


Dan Kärreman is Professor in Organization and Management Studies at the Department of Intercultural Communication and Management at Copenhagen Business School. He is on Twitter.

Pic by Steve Baker, Flickr

UN Global Compact Silently Expels More than 2,300 Non-Business Participants

By Andreas Rasche.

The UN Global Compact continues to “clean up” its participant base. The initiative reported to have 5,332 non-business participants (e.g., global and local NGOs and associations) in its October Bulletin, while its November Bulletin lists 2,983 active non-business participants. Hence, the Compact seems to have expelled more than 2,300 non-business participants for failure to submit the required “Communication on Engagement” report in the beginning of November. This is almost 43% of all non-business participants.

Non-Business Participants Delisted After Three Years

According to the Compact’s own “Communication on Engagement” policy, all non-business participants must submit a report every two years. The policy came into effect 31 October 2013. If participants do not submit such a report, they are labeled as “non-communicating” participants for another year. In other words, non-business participants that fail to submit a report are delisted after three years.

The Compact understands itself as a business-driven initiative, which, however, has clear links to NGOs, associations and also labor organizations. Non-business participants are vital actors, especially when considering the role of partnerships (SDG 17) and the general need for collaboration between business and society. Expelling more than 2,300 participants significantly undercuts the ability of the Compact to initiate and sustain such partnerships on a broader level.

Delisting as an Opportunity and a Problem

The delisting of non-communicating NGOs is a welcome move. It shows that the Compact takes its own integrity measures seriously and hence strengthens the accountability of the initiative. In the long run, the Compact will only thrive if businesses, NGOs, and, most of all, governments, trust it. And trust, as we all know, is not cheap; it must be earned over time.

However, this massive delisting also points to a significant problem: The Compact seems to rely too much on “growth by numbers.” Simply having over 5,300 non-business participants is useless, if 2,300 of them do not even dare to submit a rather basic report that outlines their activities in support of the initiative. I have said it before, and I will say it again: The Compact is too good of an idea to simply throw away. However, the value proposition of the initiative seems to remain opaque to most participants. The high number of delisted business participants (now reaching 7,500) and the impressive number of 2,300 delisted non-business participants (most of them being NGOs) question the “business model” that underlies the initiative. It may be time to rethink this model.

What Bothers Me Most is…

What bothers me most about all of this is: the Compact itself has not yet mentioned this massive delisting with a single word in its News section (as of 21 November 2016). Is such a massive loss of participants not a newsworthy event? We can read about all sorts of success stories in the News section, but the fact that the initiative expelled more than 2,300 non-business participants is not mentioned with a single word. The Compact itself promotes transparency (e.g. through Principle 10 on anti-corruption) and it should live up to its own ambitions by painting a fair and timely picture of the initiative. There is no reason to be ashamed of having to delist a high number of non-business participants, if the Compact learns the right lessons from this. No initiative is perfect and the Compact has come a long way. It has helped to mainstream corporate responsibility and sustainability, but it may also be in need of rethinking what value it creates for its participants…


Andreas Rasche is Professor at Copenhagen Business School and Director of CBS’s World Class Research Environment Governing Responsible Business. He has collaborated with the UN Global Compact on different projects and served on the initiative’s LEAD Steering Committee from 2012 to 2015. More information on: www.arasche.com

Pic by emilydickinsonridesabmx

Sustainable Business Model Research –Time to Leave the Twilight Zone

By Dr. Florian Lüdeke-Freund.

Research on sustainable business models, or “business models for sustainability (BMfS)”, is still a niche topic in both the business model and sustainability communities. BMfS researchers often find themselves in a twilight zone, not knowing whom to address with or involve in their research. After one decade of BMfS research, it is time to develop a joint agenda to strengthen and shape this interdisciplinary field.

Leaving the Twilight Zone

Looking at seminal articles, we see that early work on BMfS deals with organisational and cultural preconditions of business models that contribute to corporate sustainability. Analysing business models is also seen as a means to overcome the technology bias of traditional eco-innovation approaches and move towards system level innovation, e.g. through product-service systems. Others see business models as tools to re-scale and re-localise monolithic industrial infrastructures, while again others investigate the links between business models and business success through corporate sustainability. Research on BMfS is often rooted in ecological sustainability, but some scholars see BMfS also as a means to address social issues.

These perspectives and topics clearly show that we need multiple disciplines, theories and methods to properly study BMfS. But reviewing the BMfS literature, which we have done in different projects and articles (Boons & Lüdeke-Freund, 2013; Schaltegger et al., 2016; Lüdeke-Freund et al., 2016), shows that we, as BMfS researchers, tend to talk to our “sustainability peers” only, in terms of how we frame and work on research problems and the journals we publish in. At the same time we are sitting somewhere in between. We are neither pure management scholars nor ecological economics veterans. We are in a twilight zone.

After one decade of BMfS research, it is time to step back and reflect on the topics we have studied, the theories we have used and developed, and the methods we have applied. We should ask ourselves, who – from outside our community – could help with the problems we are studying? Obviously, this is a multi- and interdisciplinary effort. Therefore, a joint, multi- and interdisciplinary research agenda and mutual exchange are required.

Towards a Joint Research Agenda

Our recent Organization & Environment special issue on BMfS covers a broad range of entrepreneurial, managerial and innovation issues. However, a lot remains to be done with regard to theory development and management support. Here, the original business model and the diverse sustainability communities could and should work together, develop projects and write articles that contribute to theory development and management support and are acceptable to their various audiences – including their respective journals.

The following exemplary research problems were identified in the editorial article of our special issue and could serve as a starting point for a joint research agenda for the original and the sustainability-oriented business model communities:

Theory development

  • How can theories on the organisational level (e.g. dynamic capabilities), individual level (e.g. responsible leadership) or on both levels (e.g. organizational learning) help explain green and social business model transformations?
  • How do BMfS co-evolve and trigger industry transformations both via market interaction and system transitions (e.g. evolutionary economics)?
  • Which learning-action networks and collaborations, but also power struggles between stakeholder groups, are involved in the creation of BMfS (e.g. stakeholder theory)?

Management support

  • Which management frameworks and instruments enable the management of and transition to BMfS (e.g. change management)?
  • Which frameworks and instruments can support innovation (e.g. design thinking, The Natural Step) and strategy implementation (e.g. Business Model Canvas) for BMfS?
  • How can performance and societal impacts be measured and managed on the business model level (e.g. balanced scorecard)?

These are just a few exemplary topics. But it is a starting point. It is also, or even much more, an open invitation to scholars from fields such as entrepreneurship, innovation, design, policy, and transition research, and many more, to develop a joint agenda that allows for true multi- and interdisciplinary BMfS research.

Our dynamically growing communities – e.g. Business Model Community, Sustainable Business Model Blog, Strongly Sustainable Business Model Group, Sustainability Transitions Research Network, Inno4SD – could benefit from such an agenda to progress in a more synergistic way, combining the best of these worlds: up-to-date knowledge about business model and sustainability research.

Such an agenda would shed some light on the twilight zone of BMfS research and would help to establish it as a research field in its own right.

Let’s start the conversation – now.


Florian Lüdeke-Freund is a senior research associate at the University of Hamburg, Germany. He is a research fellow at the Centre for Sustainability Management (CSM), Leuphana University, and the Governing Responsible Business Research Environment at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. His research deals with sustainable entrepreneurship, sustainable business models, and innovation. Florian founded www.SustainableBusinessModel.org as an international research hub addressing sustainability, business model, and innovation topics.

Pic by Rod Serling’s classic anthology, The Twilight Zone (1959 – 1961)

CSR as Power in Global Governance. The Anti-corruption policy of Danish Companies in China

On Tuesday 29 November 2016 Anestis Keremis will give his first WIP seminar with the title:

CSR as Power in Global Governance. The Anti-corruption policy of Danish Companies in China

When: Tuesday 29 November 2016 from 10:00 – 12:00

Where: Porcelænshaven 1, 1.04, 2000 Frederiksberg

Discussants:

Professor Hans Krause Hansen, Head of OMS, Department of Intercultural Communication and Management, CBS

Associate Professor Steen Valentin, Department of Management Politics, and Philosophy, CBS

Supervisors:

Associate Professor Antje Vetterlein, Department of Business and Politics, CBS

Professor Jeremy Moon, Department of Intercultural Communication and Management, CBS

If you would like a copy of the paper to be presented, please e-mail Anestis Keremis ( ake.dbp@cbs.dk ).


pic by baaghi

Sustainability Lecture Series invites: Dr. Bob Massie

Invitation: Join the Sustainability Lecture at Copenhagen University with Dr. Bob Massie on the topic “Divestment from fossil fuels and the implications for the Paris Agreement”

The Sustainability Science Centre of Copenhagen University is hosting a Sustainability Lecture series and invites you to attend the next sustainability lecture on 21 November 2016 by Dr. Bob Massie from the Sustainable Solutions lab, University of Massachusetts, Boston. He will talk on divestment from fossil fuels and the implications for the Paris Agreement. Katherine Richardson, Leader of the Sustainability Science Centre, will moderate the talk.

When: 21 November 2016, 15:00 – 16:00

Where: Aud – A1-01.01, (1-01 Festauditoriet, Bülowsvej 17, 2000 Frederiksberg

Read more here

Admission is free of charge, but please make sure to sign up for the event.

See you there!

Information on the event:

Bob Massie has been working on business, finance, governance, and sustainability for more than thirty years. Dr. Massie received his A.B. magna cum laude from Princeton University in 1978, a master’s degree in social and theological ethics from Yale Divinity School in 1982, and a doctorate in business policy and corporate strategy from Harvard Business School in 1989.

In 1993, as a senior Fulbright Scholar, he was visiting member of the faculty of the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business. His definitive history of the U.S. anti-apartheid movement “Loosing the Bonds: The United States and South Africa in the Apartheid Years” was published in 1998 by Doubleday. It received the Lionel Gelber Prize, the largest non-fiction prize in the world, given for the best book in English on foreign relations.

From 1996 to 2003, Massie served as the executive director of Ceres, a powerful coalition of institutional investors and environmental and public interest groups in the United States. From 1998 to 2005 he was the co-founder and first chair of the Global Reporting Initiative, a sustainability disclosure standard now in use by nearly 10,000 global multinationals.

In 2002 he conceived of the first Institutional Investor Summit on Climate Risk at United Nations headquarters, which led in 2003 to the formation to the Investor Network on Climate Risk (www.incr.com). INCR is an active alliance of 100 U.S. pension funds worth more than $11 trillion who have moved dozens of major utilities, insurance companies, investment banks, and other key industries to assess the financial costs of climate change.

From 2012 to 2014 Dr. Massie was the president of the New Economy Coalition, an organization of more than 120 US, English, and Canadian organizations interested in new models of business and economics to achieve a just and sustainable world.

In November 2015 he became the executive director of the Sustainable Solutions Lab (SSL) at UMass Boston, a new entity created jointly by the School for the Environment, the College of Management, the College of Liberal Arts, and the McCormack Graduate School for Policy and Global Studies. SSL focuses on intersection of climate change and social justice in Boston and other coastal cities in the United States.

Democracy Trumped – Understanding Trump’s Propaganda

By W. Lance Bennett.

How did a brand magnate reality TV star with a vindictive style and no political experience become president of the United States? Why did so many people vote to ignore climate change, pull back from the global economy, and disrupt North Atlantic relations?

A few years back I asked a colleague in Italy to explain Berlusconi. He pointed to a corrupted and dysfunctional political system that angered voters enough to throw a bomb into government. Never mind that Trump, like Berlusconi, oozes a special corruption all his own. Most of the press and party elites missed the scale of angry emotion aimed at them by white working and middle class Americans. Indeed, the cosmopolitan press had long rendered these folk nearly invisible, brushing off the early warning signs of the Tea Party as a minor disturbance. And so, most media experts and party insiders engaged in knowing discussions of how impossible it would be for anyone to be elected with Trump’s combination of inexperience, shady business dealings, and inability to manage his emotions and stay on script.

Winning votes through Marketing: emotio, not ratio

Meanwhile, Trump found and fed the white anger with simple, emotional messages, such as the promise to “drain the swamp” in Washington. He branded “Crooked Hillary” as the ultimate insider, with close ties to the banks, a trail of (largely manufactured) scandals, and trouble drawing a line between official business, the Clinton Foundation, and her ties to Wall Street. Despite the baggage that Clinton carried through the campaign, she did win the popular vote, and might have won the election had the (Republican) FBI director not renewed an investigation of her handling of official emails as Secretary of State.

This was the “October surprise” that sent many undecided voters, including a majority of white women, to Trump. Clinton tried in vain to get policy messages into the news, but Trump dominated the daily media spectacle with tirades against immigrants, government corruption, establishment politicians from both parties, the press, and the global economy. His clarion call at rallies was “I am your voice.” When he mentioned Clinton, the crowds ritualistically chanted “lock her up,” which he promised to do. Reporters were herded like cattle into fenced pens at rallies, and crowds shook their fists and chanted at them when Trump  denounced the lying, biased media. Reporters needed Secret Service protection at these events.

A radical right social movement against the Establishment

Through his deft use of social and conventional media and relentless appearances at rallies, Trump created a movement that revealed, like Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries that selected Clinton, the emptiness of the US party system. The Trump revolt echoes the rise of the radical right sweeping European democracies. Traditional parties have become “hollowed out,” in Peter Mair’s term, uninterested in engaging voters beyond crude marketing campaigns at election time. The British felt this shock with the Brexit vote, and no fewer than 28 countries in Europe have radical right parties on the rise, or already in power and threatening basic democratic values. Even though the radical left is as numerous and angry as the right, it is burdened with identity politics and the romance of deliberative democracy, which undermines conventional party organization, leadership, and the capacity to generate appealing ideas that travel via simple emotional messages.

How cosmopolitan arrogance lost the election

The specter haunting democracy today is the legacy of centrist neoliberal elites, and the press organizations that cover them. The core democratic institutions of press and politics have failed to engage white working class populations that have been economic casualties of globalization. Perhaps even more troubling is the failure of the center left and right to engage white middle classes who are more the symbolic casualties of globalization. These are the god fearing Christians for whom racial and patriarchal privilege once offered social identity and status, and who now feel threatened by multiculturalism, immigration and Islam. Yet, neoliberal politicians from Tony Blair to Barack Obama have told them that globalization is irreversible, so get over it. Clinton’s message of “stronger together” surely felt wrong to those who lived in Trump’s America and wanted to make their nation great again – in their own image.

Popumisms  greatest weapon is propaganda supported by social media

Beyond the lying mainstream press, which Trump helped his followers deconstruct every day, Trump’s coded messages of resurgent white nationalism circulated through the alternative or “Alt” right media system in the US. This network includes radio talk personalities such as Rush Limbaugh, with 13 million listeners, who issued daily defenses of Trump’s many miscues in the final months of the campaign. Among hundreds of Alt right websites is Breitbart with 19 million unique monthly visitors.

Late in the summer, when struggling with self-inflicted damage in the establishment press, Trump picked Breitbart publisher Steve Bannon to head his campaign. The campaign media team was soon joined by Roger Ailes, who began his political career reinventing Richard Nixon for the television age, and later headed Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News channel until he was driven out by a sexual harassment scandal. Bannon and Ailes have visions of consolidating their victory by forging a Trump media network that will serve as a surrogate party organization, and bypass the mainstream press in keeping Trump propaganda flowing to supporters.

A new order?

In light of these trends, it is time to ask: What is the future of democracy given the imbalance between left and right, and the disdain shown by many victorious right politicians for civil liberties, moral tolerance, racial, sexual, and religious diversity, press freedom, and basic civility? Those of us who benefit from cosmopolitan societies and global economies have failed to notice that democratic institutions of press and parties have withered, while a new and more ominous political and communication order has emerged in our midst.


Lance Bennett is professor of political science and Ruddick C. Lawrence Professor of Communication at University of Washington, Seattle USA. His most recent book is News: The Politics of Illusion (10th Edition, University of Chicago Press). He is also founder and director of the Center for Communication and Civic Engagement. and is on Twitter.

pic by aux

Rising Inequality and Political Backlash

By Kate Grosser.

Widening income inequality has become the defining challenges of our time. Not only has this issue been highlighted in recent years by the IMF, the OECD, and the Economic Policy Institute, Washington, among others, but it is at the centre of much analyses of the causes of Trump’s US election victory, including Dirk Matten’s great blog on this site last week. The gap between the rich and poor is reportedly at its highest level in decades in advanced economies. While this trend has been more mixed in emerging markets and developing countries, pervasive inequities remain, and it is increasingly recognized that inequality impacts negatively upon growth, sustainability and political stability.

Contesting the Equality and Gendered Value of “Creating Shared Value” is an urgent task

So what does this tell us about our success in ‘Creating Shared Value’? It would seem we urgently need to pay a lot more attention to what we mean by ‘shared’ and, in particular, to how corporate practices impact upon inequality at all levels of society, across all stakeholder domains, and in the wider economy and polity. Notably the IMF confirms that gender inequality is strongly associated with income inequality and that this holds for countries across all levels of development. Thus we live in particularly challenging times for gender equality. How are we going to address these challenges more effectively?

Corporations have been shown to rely on gender and other forms of inequality as a resource, exploiting women’s low pay globally, and especially in supply chains in developing countries for example, and relying upon invisible and unpaid care work, done mostly by women, to sustain workers and organizations. However, it is also true that business has the power to make changes that can impact huge numbers of women, as well as men, in positive ways through new business models and new approaches to responsible business. Yet, corporate claims to be advancing equality MUST be investigated and evaluated by feminist scholars, and others working on different forms of inequality, in collaboration with the so called ‘beneficiaries’ of CSR, to assess progress in this regard.

Emerging research on CSR, gender, and other forms of inequality – what are we learning?

Among the growing research outputs on inequality issues and CSR, including those addressing gender, development, and indigenous studies, many have raised questions about the nature of shared value. They have also frequently suggested ways forward on this issue, including the need to listen to, and act upon, knowledge that comes from the ‘margins’ of our field, and of mainstream society. However, while such research in CSR is more critical than ever, the impact of this work, in terms of research and practice, will depend to a large extent on levels of interest among CSR scholars in addressing inequality in our midst. A quick review of feminist scholarship for example, reveals that this routinely develops alongside, rather than as part of, mainstream theory and research, such that it is effectively ignored, its implications overlooked and its insights missed (e.g. Shanley and Pateman, 1991). In our own field Janet Borgerson (2007) finds that feminist ethics has been consistently overlooked, misunderstood, and improperly applied within business ethics. In our new edited collection on Gender and Responsible Business: Expanding CSR Horizons (Editors: Kate Grosser, Lauren McCarthy and Maureen Kilgour, Greenleaf 2016), Laura Spence points to low citations of feminist research, even that by the leading professors in our field such as Ed Freeman. Craig Prichard (2013) proposes that ‘uncitation’ does not prove that a paper is of poor quality, but rather that it is separated from the ‘dominant co-citational coalitions’ of a particular group of powerful scholars and journals. He suggests we seek out uncited papers to find new areas of importance to our field. In sum, advancing CSR research on gender and other forms of inequality will require all of us to:

  • Support and mentor those who write from the margins of our field, including women academics from a variety of backgrounds and parts of the world
  • Explore, support and cite scholarship on inequality and CSR, including feminist research;
  • Contribute to investigation of how masculinity dominates CSR research, discourse, organization and practice; and how inequality and neo-colonialism shape our field.
  • Bring the issue of rising inequality centre stage in business and society research of ALL kind

New voices on inequality and CSR

Our new book forms part of the growing literature which aims to bring new voices and perspectives to CSR. Contributions come from people in business, NGOs, as well as academia. Many chapters bring to the foreground the intersection of gender inequality with race and class inequality in global value chains and production networks. One of the strengths of these contributions is that they not only reflect feminist critiques, but also feminist engagement with CSR, including examples as to how we can do more to interrogate and improve CSR impacts with respect to equality. For example, Sofie Tornhill’s chapter provides a rare glimpse into on the ground experiences of the women ‘beneficiaries’ of corporate women’s empowerment programs. She ‘asks what do corporations do when they “empower” women?’, and finds much to be desired in the lived experiences of the women ‘entrepreneurs’ in a South African township enrolled on Coca-Cola’s 5by20 initiative.  The women in this research help us identify how we might better support gender and CSR program recipients in the future. Felicity Butler and Catherine Hoskyns report on a fair trade partnership between The Body Shop and a local sesame producer cooperative in Nicaragua that paid for care work done in the home to support the business, resulting in demonstrable benefits for women involved, and for gender equality, despite the wider institutional challenges. Elizabeth Prugl’s chapter explores how we might challenge the rise of neoliberal feminism via CSR, with its focus on individuals, and return our attention to the pressing questions of structural inequality. In line with a new focus on wellbeing inequality, as opposed to just economic inequality, other chapters extend the boundaries of CSR to interrogate Corporate Sexual Responsibility (relating to the use of strip clubs and pornography as part of business transactions, or on business travel), hegemonic masculinity, sexist culture in the gaming industry, reproductive technologies, and corporate philanthropy supporting work on violence against women. Issues of sexual harassment, such as that boasted about by Trump, perpetuate inequality and are key to a CSR agenda that extends to human rights.

Beyond the myth of “shared value”

To avoid wasting the crisis of Trump presidency as Dirk Matten suggests, we must move beyond our comfort zones and ‘business as usual’. Significantly more research is needed that specifically addresses the relationship between CSR and rising inequality in advanced economies, as well as globally. Focusing here has the potential to increase the relevance and usefulness of our field. In addition to challenging the role of private corporations in the governance of society, and the advance of privatization, we might focus more on: corporate taxation; investing much more in social infrastructure and the care economy, and fostering new forms of democracy in our own field, to name just a few. While, growing inequality is by no means the only cause of the current political backlash in the US and elsewhere, not for the first time in history, this comes with rising levels of explicit sexism, racism and xenophobia. If language is performative we are in danger of things getting worse for many people, and the myth of shared value, presented as a positive outcome for all, must be interrogated, contested and exposed more widely than Crane et al. (2014) suggest, because the data on inequality globally testify to the fact that the current system is not sharing value so much as it is extracting it. Moreover, this extraction is gendered (as well as racialised and classed) in important ways. The US election result reveals that we ignore this challenge at our peril.


Kate Grosser is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Management at RMIT University in Melbourne, and a Visiting Fellow in 2016 with the VELUX Chair in Corporate Sustainability, Copenhagen Business School. She researches gender and CSR, feminist organization theory, political CSR, feminist movements and CSR, culture and sustainability. She is on Twitter @KateGrosser and recently published a collection on Gender and Responsible Business: Expanding CSR Horizons (Editors: Kate Grosser, Lauren McCarthy and Maureen Kilgour, Greenleaf 2016).

pic by Greenleaf.

Let’s not waste the crisis of a Trump Presidency

By Dirk Matten

Last Tuesday’s election in the US has left the world in shock. As entertaining, astonishing, at times surely revolting, the Trump performance has been during the campaign – I do not know anybody that would have predicted him actually making it into the Oval Office. But that is history now.
I found myself always harboring rather ambiguous thoughts and sentiments regarding Trump’s ascent. But being surrounded by folks where even the slightest empathy with Trump made myself look like a total moron  – I learned to keep my feelings to myself, not at least in the hope I somehow got this wrong.

To begin with, I was not at all surprised to see Trump win the election. In some ways, this outcome is the logical conclusion of more than three decades of neoliberalism in the US. It did not help that his opponent had virtually nothing to offer to counter the very anxieties that carried Trump over every however unlikely hurdle during the campaign.

With all the shock and depression now seeping through the mainstream media there is one thing I really cherish and find extraordinary about this election: Trump won this election as an, albeit wealthy, outsider – against the united front of the media, the political class and the moneyed elites in the US and beyond. It helped that he is wealthy but that is not the main point. Even fairly balanced media outlets, such as the New York Times or the The New Yorker, over the last months just read as thinly disguised pro-Hilary propaganda; out of 55 main newspapers in the US, only one (1!) endorsed Trump. And yet he won the election. This should give other forces in many liberal democracies something to ponder. It is possible to beat ‘the system’, and in some way I am a little confused why this enormous victory of bottom-up democracy is not celebrated for what it is.

Trump is a symptom

Of course the main problem with Trump is Trump-the-person. He did all but help himself in giving fodder to the public to embark on an almost two-year project of character assassination. But again, I happen to have a different take on this. Did he tell a lot of lies? Of course. But then let’s not forget why Bush and Blair started the Iraq war. Lying is an integral part of US politics (and I am not even talking about his opponent’s husband when dealing with his White House romance). Trump said preposterous things about women. But in some way he just bragged about things that actually no one enacted more by the book then his opponent’s husband – covered up and tacitly supported by her for decades. Did he say racist things about Mexicans? Yes, but then let’s have a look at the 2.5m ‘aliens’ the Obama administration deported between 2009 and 2015. Did he say absurd things about Muslims? He sure did, but again, what he expressed is already social consensus in the US. Just think of the many people bumped off airplanes in the US recently just because they ‘looked’ or ‘spoke’ like Muslims (i.e. terrorists). Oh, and he has no experience in political office, right? Have we all forgotten that the same was said – on good grounds, at that – of his predecessor? Yes, he was talking about ‘bombing the sh** out of ISIS’. But wasn’t that exactly what his Nobel Peace price winning predecessor actually did for eight years by chaperoning a global drone war that killed almost 5,000 (incl. ca. 500 civilians)?

All I am saying then is that the media still tries to paint him as ‘unamerican’, as against the current political culture, as a pariah. The truth is, however, that he just unapologetically verbalised what is common practice all long. The United States – and I am talking about the political and economic system, as well as about half of the population – are an inherently racist, bigoted, violent and unfair country these days. As much as one may reject Trump as president – I think that his presidency just tells the true and accurate story about the moral morass the country has gotten into over the last three decades. It is ugly, but it is nonetheless not just attributable to one symbolic person.

Which leads to a big, often ignored or belittled core question. Trump did win the election because about half of the American electorate agrees with him. The real question we have to ask is what happened to the oldest democracy, a country that – 70 years ago – pacified Europe and gave the continent a new political setup based on enlightenment values. We just have to acknowledge that these United States are history now and that the country has been indeed on a steep decline in cherishing some of the core values which made it the world’s only superpower in the second half of the 20th century.

The America today is the America of ‘Dogville’, ‘Manderlay’ (as my Danish readers would appreciate) or ‘A History of Violence’, rather than ‘Independence Day’ or ‘Forrest Gump’. Trump’s majority is not just angry white men, as some want to make us believe. He represents a much wider fraction of American society as some of the poll’s analyses now painfully unveil.

So, what is the agenda then?

So do we have to be afraid of a Trump administration? On balance, I would be rather relaxed here. Not that I am not worried about some aspects. The main of which would be that many of the things he said during the campaign – as much as I am convinced he said them just as a good marketer and with an eye on his target constituency – can have rather ugly effects on common people. He legitimised racist and violent language, and it is no surprise that we have, for instance, seen hate crimes rising. If what I hear from friends in the US just these last two days is anything to go by, his words have legitimised and empowered views and behaviours which for a long time were at least publicly suppressed. He has opened a pandora’s box, for sure. And whether this spirit can be put back remains indeed an open question.

Beyond that, I feel very much reminded of Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. I remember people saying back then that ‘Reagan is a 2nd rate actor, delivering a 1st rate performance at playing a 3rd rate president’ and stuff like that. Reagan was initially a joke and a lot of what he said (‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’) wasn’t political correct or even sane at the time. I would really doubt if a three times divorced New York socialite will actually embark on some of the socially conservative projects (with regard to race, immigration or women’s rights) which popped up so frequently in his campaign.

In some way the crucial litmus test of his presidency will be if he will be able to actually address the social and economic worries of his core constituencies. These issues are somewhat similar to the Sanders agenda, and the agendas of many other left wing political movements throughout the world. Will Trump be able to substantially improve the living conditions of middle- and working class Americans, regarding income, access to healthcare, education and other welfare state features? It is here where he has a real chance to become ‘Reaganesque’ – albeit in mostly reversing many of the political changes Reagan initiated in America and which ultimately brought the country to this dismal place.

So what to watch then in the business-society context?

So like any good paper, I should finally make the sharp turn on this blog to what editors tend to call the ‘managerial implications’ ☺ (I hope you get the joke…).

Actually, there are a few. My main point here is really that as much as Trump’s presidency can be seen as a disaster, it is just a brutally espoused symptom of a failed economic and social experiment. What really puts me off is that even now post election many smart minds seem to run away from that conclusion and rather engage in a lament of the candidate’s horrible character (as much as I agree, watching him and his lot on the stage Wednesday early morning was ugly- but that’s a distraction).

It takes the sleazy, ‘bridge and tunnel person’ (as Manhattan establishment figures still derogatorily refer to him) from Queens to defeat a political system that is largely in the pocket of the moneyed elites, using corporations to make sure their class interests are dominating American politics. It is here that Hillary’s defeat makes me happy indeed. With hers and her husband’s massive obligations to the corporate world, we would just have continued the same system over and over again, behind the veil of the wonderful advancement of a woman president (btw, exactly the same thing we have seen with Obama, just replace ‘woman’ by ‘black’).

Trump’s victory then spells out one simple fact. Capitalism (in the form we have cultivated it in the US and globally for the last four decades) and democracy are just not compatible. Democracy is more than just giving people a vote every four years. As T.H. Marshall has posited ‘the fullest expression of citizenship requires a democratic welfare state’. Democracy only works if the electorate has some basic provision of a dignified life, a basic sense of participation in determining their material living conditions, as well as the basic education that allows informed and critical political choices.

It is fair to say that the neoliberal project has infringed, if not abolished, these basic elements of a vibrant democracy. Let’s not forget, the ascent of the US as a superpower in the second half of the last century was built on the New Deal, on the idea that a vibrant democracy (in the face of the rise of fascism and communism in other parts of the world) needs a basic welfare state with the result of what we have come to know as a ‘middle class’. The people that elected Trump all represent the part of American society that no longer enjoys these pivotal elements of a democratic community. That is why they fall for simple answers (be them racist, bigoted, religious, misogynist or otherwise).

One of the main driving forces behind these shifts has been the interests of capital, the interests of the wealthy elites, enacted through their control of private corporations. Culminating in the Citizens United ruling of the Supreme Court, we have witnessed the creeping and dominant interests of private corporations capturing the political process in the US over the last four decades.

It is indeed the pivotal role of private corporations which in my view is one core problem that the Trump victory epitomises. I am actually not pinning too much hope on the Trump administration itself to change anything substantial here. After all, with a republican controlled congress, and a democratic ‘opposition’ which is largely in the pockets of the corporate world, I don’t see any hope for substantial change. The Obama administration was probably trying the hardest in recent history to move the agenda, be it in consumer protection, access to healthcare or regulating the financial sector – and we all know how well that went. The Affordable Care Act was a healthcare reform, that did not substantially infringe corporate interests and control. It very well might ultimately be considered as one of the key drivers that energized Trump’s base – given the substantial rises in premiums during this last year.

No, I would, first of all, urge any scholar, any public commentator, anybody able to make a contribution to the debate we have to have here, to, first, not just dismiss this week’s election as an outlier and something that can mostly be attributed to one crazy person. It is of the essence to see this election result as part of a fundamental crisis of western democracies – and the US is just again the showcase here. Brexit and the rise of the far right in Europe is just another symptom of the same problem.

What is the underlying problem here?

The core problem is the role of private corporations in the governance of society. On a macro level this implies re-thinking the big questions about regulating markets, most notably financial markets and labor markets. It also involves re-thinking basic institutions of welfare provision. This might also include a debate on new forms of division of labor between the private and the public sector. Since for technological and (geo-)political reasons it will not be able to just turn the clock back to the 1950s new forms of non-employment based welfare models need to be discussed and developed, including things like basic income and other new institutional arrangements. We basically have to invent new – or reinvigorate to some degree old – forms of income redistribution, through intelligent new forms of taxation and other ways of addressing the vast inequalities. Mind you, the urge to change our current model of capitalism is no longer some sort of leftist or anti-corporate agenda. It is meanwhile becoming more and more clear also to business leaders that the current capitalist system, and particularly the role of corporations within it, is no longer sustainable. As some of those CEOs, such as Dominic Barton (McKinsey), Paul Polman (Unilever) or Ratan Tata (Tata Sons) argue, we have to ‘re-imagine’ capitalism in substantial ways (see Kipping/Barton/Horvath 2016).

On a meso level, we need more thorough work on a re-conceputalised role of the corporation, and its essentially political nature. As Robert Reich outlined time and again, the corporation in the US is just dominated by two interest: ultimately by shareholders, i.e. capital, and on a more instrumental level, by consumers. And this is still the accepted model, more or less, in business school academia and teaching. Not that we have not seen efforts recently to change this (see for instance Baars/Spicer 2017). This effort though has to be sustained, broadened and conducted in a more interdisciplinary mindset.
Ultimately, on a micro level, the relation between corporate management – across all disciplines – and the public good has to be re-introduced as a legitimate field of inquiry. So far, most of the business school research never really transcends the traditional management model of corporations being just economic actors. That even applies to the subfield on which one might pin the highest hopes: research in corporate (social) responsibility, ethics or sustainability. But even this subfield is largely constrained by a thinking in business cases and even new offshoots, such as the debate on ‘political CSR’ never quite embraces a political role of business beyond these constraints.

For a short blog such as this one, there remains of course a lot more to say. I just wanted to put some thought triggers together. Quite often – and in my view quite falsely – commentators have evoked the comparison with Germany 1933 when evaluating Trump’s rise to the presidency. Donald is no Adolf, sorry, and Washington 2016 is nothing like Weimar 1933. But if you twist my arm, I would allow one parallel here. The historically most successful reaction to the depression of the late 1920s still is the New Deal. While I am also aware that Trump is no FDR, this situation of apparent crisis should, first of all, enable a more open and honest discussion about the reasons for Trump’s ascent. And we can all agree that this IS a crisis indeed. But we should capitalise on this crisis to develop new ideas around the way we have organised social and economic life in liberal democracies. The one certainty we can take away from this is then that the role, functions and impact of private corporations is at the heart of such a debate.
Exciting times then for business related scholarship!

References

Baars, G. & Spicer, A. (Eds.), The Corporation: A Critical, Interdisciplinary Handbook. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press

Barton, D., Horvath, D. & Kipping, M. (Eds.), Re-Imagining Capitalism : Building a responsible, long-term model. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press


Dirk Matten is Hewlett Packard-Chair in Corporate Social Responsibility and Professor of Strategy at Schulich School of Business, York University, Toronto. Since 2015, he visits CBS as a research fellow. You can visit his website and drop a tweet @dirkmatten .

Pic by The Economic Times

Merken

How Could the Democrats Get it so Wrong?

By Jette Steen Knudsen.

Today I heard Hillary Clinton give her concession speech after one of the most surprising electoral results in US history.  Mrs. Clinton was poised, calm and calling for her supporters to give Donald Trump a chance to lead for the good of the USA.  The facial expressions of her supporters said it all – they looked stunned, disappointed and many were in tears.

It should have been an easy win for Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton was supposed to have won the election by a solid margin.  Her polling figures were strong even after F.B.I. Director Mr. Comey just days before the election announced that the F.B.I. had discovered new emails that might be relevant to its investigation of her, which ended in July this year with no charges.  Mrs. Clinton was a strong and knowledgeable candidate on the campaign trail.  In contrast Trump time and time again looked like he did not know what he was doing, which made him an easy target for Saturday Night Live or other comedy shows.  Many well-known Republicans also refused to support Donald Trump’s candidacy.  The Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan refused to campaign with or defend Donald Trump during his presidential campaign.   Former Republican Presidents George W. Bush and George W.H. Bush refused to endorse Trump, as did Colin Powell, the former Joint Chiefs of Staff and a well-known Republican. It should therefore have been a walk in the park for Hillary Clinton.  As her ally Senator Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts said on Election Day on local television: “Thankfully soon we will no longer have to care about what Donald Trump has to say”.  But Mr. Trump won the election carrying several states that traditionally vote for the Democratic candidate.  What went wrong for Mrs. Clinton?

This Country is More Divided Than We Thought

In her concession speech Hillary Clinton concluded with a somewhat surprised look on her face “this country is more divided than we thought”.  In contrast while her campaign may not have understood the extent of the polarization of the American electorate, Donald Trump clearly understood the strong discontent and feeling of exclusion among especially white non-college educated men.  Back in July the filmmaker and social critic Michael Moore wrote that Trump needed only to focus on the blue states Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania and noted his theory of “The Last Stand of the Angry White Man.”  “There is a sense that the power has slipped out of their hands, that their way of doing things is no longer how things are done,” Moore wrote.

What’s the Matter with Kansas?

But why do so many Americans seemingly vote against their interest?  In 2004 the journalist Thomas Frank published a book with the title “What’s the Matter with Kansas? – How Conservatives Won the Heart of America”.  Mr. Frank asks why poor people in the heartland of America vote Republican when – at least for people of the East and West coasts of the US – the Democrats are the party for workers, the poor and the weak.  In other words, why do so many Americans vote against their economic and social interests?  Mr. Frank answers this question by examining his home state Kansas and reveals how conservatism, formerly a market of class privilege, became the creed of ordinary Americans.  This conservatism has mobilized voters with explosive social issues such as busing, un-Christian art and abortion and these issues then get married to pro-business economic policies. Add to this that in states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania traditional manufacturing jobs have been lost as factories or mines have closed downs.  Service sector jobs don’t pay as well as manufacturing jobs.  For example Wal-Mart or Dunkin Donut pay the minimum wage, which in Michigan is $8,50 /hour and in Pennsylvania only $7,25/hour.  At the same time health care costs and college tuition have soared in America. It is no wonder that white unskilled workers feel left out of the American Dream.  Mr. Trump’s promise to “Make America Great Again” resonates well in the American Heartland.

Democrats on the Coasts

Well-educated high earning Americans live in the coastal areas in cities such as Boston, San Francisco or Los Angeles – and they overwhelmingly vote Democratic. The Democratic Party also made great attempts to include Blacks and Latinos but as a commentator in the New York Times (which had endorsed Mrs. Clinton) conceded this past Sunday, Trump has done one thing right – he has acknowledged that Blacks have not gained much economic or civil rights advances in recent years and that he understands their frustration.  East and West Coast liberals have simply failed to understand the frustration of Middle America – and the majority of Clinton’s campaign staff hails from the coasts.  The Democratic campaign has probably underestimated the frustration of Blacks and Latinos because although Clinton got more votes from these two groups than Mr. Trump, she got significantly less votes from these groups than President Obama did in 2012.

Midterm Exam Postponed for Teens Mentally Disturbed by the Election Result

The Democrats on the US coasts do not understand Mr. Trump’s supporters and sometimes live in a “bubble”.  For example my son’s great public high school in Cambridge in Massachusetts is one such bubble.  Cambridge is one of the most liberal cities in the US and is also known as “The People’s Republic of Cambridge”. Students at the high school expected a Clinton victory and almost all students supported her.  After the election result came in today, many students were grieving.  Many were crying and today’s midterm exams were postponed because too many students were psychologically distraught.  This small example illustrates how far the East Coast liberal segment is from Trump’s Middle America. 

To unify America will be a long and difficult process.


Jette Steen Knudsen is Shelby Collum Davis Professor at Tufts University near Boston and a Visiting Fellow of the Velux Endowed Chair of Corporate Sustainability at Copenhagen Business School. She resides in Cambridge MA with her teenage son.

pic by Heat Street

The F-Word in Denmark

By Lauren McCarthy.

The proposed subtitle for this blog was ‘Why is it more acceptable to say ‘f**k’ in the classroom than ‘feminist?’’ but I thought it might be a bit too strong for most of your inboxes! But indeed, after some time working here in Copenhagen as an assistant professor, and living as a self-professed feminist, it is a question that has continued to perplex me.

No, the swearing doesn’t bother me, although many non-Danes find the embrace of swearing in the classroom, at work, on the radio and in adverts either hilarious, or offensive (by way of glorious coincidence, see the striking poster from Kvindemuseet (The Women’s Museum). Rather, I have on various occasions been told that using the other ‘f-word’, feminism, is taboo. Especially in the classroom. What’s interesting is that a warning over dropping the f-bomb in front of students usually comes from older friends and colleagues, both men and women. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not walking into a lecture theatre ranting about women’s rights, when what is scheduled is a session on corporate governance. But I AM researching and teaching about corporate social responsibility and sustainability, both topics that are inherently gendered and political. Sometimes it makes sense to mention the dreaded F-word in those contexts. And I think the fear of feminism as something we might talk about in business education comes from two places: a misunderstanding of what feminism is; and perhaps complacency about its need in modern Denmark.

Everyday Feminism

The word ‘feminism’ often provokes expressions of mild horror. It conjures up grainy photos from the 1970s of women, living au natural in communes, ‘hating men’ (as one of my students put it). Others have suggested that being feminist involves rejecting high-heels, or make-up, or the desire to be a mother. When you put all that together (witchy, bra-less, slightly-wild single woman in a homemade dress?) I’ve no wonder my sessions on feminist theory might sound alarming!

For many people worldwide, this stereotype persists. Yet if we tone-down this characterisation, at it’s most basic, feminism is the fight for human beings to live their lives without their gender or sex hindering them from achieving what they wish to. This fight is hundreds of years old. Feminism is political, economic and social. It involves governments, international organisations, businesses, NGOs, and most crucially ‘normal’ people going about their everyday business: calling out that off-colour joke at lunch; tweeting about overly sexualised advertising; writing about online abuse or raising their children unconfined to gender roles. And yes, all whilst wearing make-up, or getting married, or being a feminist man- if one chooses to.

A feminist utopia?

So that’s my take on feminism. Perhaps my surprise at the rejection of feminism was because I assumed that in one of the world’s most gender equitable countries everyone would be a feminist. But perhaps because Denmark is perceived in this way, the need for feminism appears to be over. Unfortunately this doesn’t quite seem to be the case.

Last week Denmark fell another four places down the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gapratings, from 14th to 19th place. Sweden, Finland, Norway and Iceland take the top four places, but their Nordic neighbour Denmark continues to lag behind. In 2014 an EU survey revealed that Denmark has amongst the highest prevalence of domestic violence within the EU. Yet these surveys reveal only part of the story. The fantastic Everyday Sexism Denmark post testimonies from women experiencing (you guessed it) everyday sexism, often in their workplace or school. All of this suggests that whilst on paper things often look good for women (for example, in excellent parental leave policies, and a growing number of women in senior roles), the reality is that men and women are often held to differing standards, and that this become so normalised, so ingrained, that we might assume everything is fine. Activists such as Emma Holten are pointing out that things aren’t equal, or equitable, and that perhaps Denmark has become disillusioned in this regard: “Our idea that everything is great and fine in terms of human rights and respectful discourse is actively combating our ability to progress in these areas.”

The feminist future

Emma Holten is symbolic of young Danish feminists using their own experiences, often with wit and humour, to reignite a conversation about gender equality. Slowly there’s been a resurgence in feminism in the last few years (albeit a lot slower than in the UK and USA), facilitated by social media. Facebook pages and Twitter accounts such as Everyday SexismOverheard Sexism in DenmarkYoung Feministsand others collect thousands of likes, post and shares. I’m happy to report that closer to home Copenhagen Business School now has a feminist society enthusiastically run by students. Online lives spill into our offline lives, and within my classroom there is a genuine interest in discussing the role of feminism today- in politics, in the media and in business.

Feminist responsible business education

Some might argue we need a new term for the fight for gender equality, or that feminism excludes other, equally important social injustices. But the F-Word isn’t going away, it’s getting louder. Feminist theory offers lenses into understanding how social change happens, and continues to happen. The history of feminist activism demonstrates the politics of the everyday. And feminism is a living, breathing phenomenon that is being adopted once again- by people as diverse as Beyonce, Ban Ki Moon and Muhtar Kent (CEO of Coca-Cola). What does it mean when these people use the word? What does it mean for business? For feminism? If we’re going to teach and research how we might lead, manage and create responsible businesses, let’s throw out the stereotypes and explore modern feminism in 2016.


Lauren McCarthy is Assistant Professor of Sustainability and Governance in the Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility, Copenhagen Business School. She researches and teaches about gender and CSR in organisations and their global value chains. She is currently exploring online feminist activism in the UK. You can follow her updates @genderCSR .

Pic by kvindemuseet.

The Ecosystem of Shared Value – Unoriginal, But Still Likely to Make an Impact

by Andreas Rasche.

The October 2016 issue of the Harvard Business Review contains an article by Mark Kramer and Marc Pfitzer called “The Ecosystem of Shared Value.” Positioned as a follow-up to Porter and Kramer’s very successful essay on “Creating Shared Value” (CSV), the authors suggest that to “advance shared value efforts […] businesses must foster and participate in multisector coalitions—and for that they need a new framework. Governments, NGOs, companies, and community members all have essential roles to play, yet they work more often in opposition than in alignment.” This new framework has a nice new label – Collective Impact.

A big (but unoriginal) idea… 

My claim here is that this new concept – Collective Impact – is oversimplifying and rather unoriginal (but nevertheless will be successful, at least in terms of corporations trying to reproduce the label and academics citing the paper). Much like its predecessor CSV, Collective Impact is old wine in new bottles; a new label for something we have known, studied, and practiced for many years. Talking about Collective Impact ignores the multi-stakeholder nature of many initiatives and partnerships within the field of sustainability and CSR. For instance, multi-stakeholder initiatives, such as the Forest Stewardship Council and the Fair Labor Association, have practiced collective impact for many years.

Also, partnership-based organizations like the Oxford Health Alliance have practiced many of the elements of what Kramer and Pfitzer call Collective Impact (e.g. a common agenda and mutually reinforcing activities). Even most quite simple NGO-business partnerships have these characteristics. Overall, it is hard to disagree with what Kramer and Pfitzer are writing, but it is equally hard to see any groundbreaking new idea here…

Collective Impact is also unoriginal in another way. My colleagues Andy Crane, Guido Palazzo, Laura Spence and Dirk Matten have convincingly argued in an article in the California Management Review a while ago, that CSV is an unoriginal concept and that its core premises have many similarities with well-known ideas in the CSR discourse (e.g., strategic CSR). They also showed that one of the core avenues for CSV – local cluster development – is neither new nor in any way surprising. Local clusters – which essentially are just a way to create collective impact – have been part and parcel of debates around sustainability in academia and practice. Understood in this way, Collective Impact just reiterates a part of the CSV story (which was unoriginal in the first place).

Why will the idea still be successful?

Considering all this, the important question seems to be: Why can concepts such as Collective Impact or CSV still make such an impact, despite their vague and unoriginal nature? One possible answer to this question relates to the so-called Matthew Effect in science. Robert K. Merton (1968) first observed this effect. The main claim is this: the credit for scientific work is distributed unequally. If similar research findings are communicated by a well-known, prestigious scholar and by one who is less widely known, it is the first who usually gets recognition. In other words, scientists with an existing good reputation receive greater increments of recognition, while the contributions of unknown scholars are rendered less visible. This makes science a “sticky”, path-dependent and self-reinforcing business…

Collective Impact and CSV (as well as other management fashions) are not successful because they offer new and innovative solutions. Rather, a significant part of their success can be attributed:

(a) to the already existing reputation of the people who promote the concept (in the case of Collective Impact we can assume positive legitimacy spillover effects of Porter’s work on CSV),
(b) to the perceived legitimacy of the outlet that the idea is published in (in this sense the Matthew Effect would not only be applicable to people but also to outlets), and
(c) to the short and simplifying nature of the message that is being sent.

All of this is not to say that Collective Impact, as framed by Kramer and Pfitzer, is totally useless or that it should not be published. Nobody has a patent on the idea of multi-stakeholder collaboration. It is even likely to spark interesting discussions among practitioners and will (hopefully) motivate more partnership-based initiatives. What I find worrying is that packing well-established ideas into such simplifying concepts may curb the advancement of knowledge in our field.


Andreas Rasche is Professor of Business in Society at Copenhagen Business School and directs CBS World-Class Research Environment “Governing Responsible Business”. More information at: http://www.arasche.com

pic by interactioninstitute

On CSR in ship recycling and textile sector supply chain management

By Karin Buhmann.

Dansk version nedenfor/Danish version below

Over the past weeks, news has emerged that Maersk, the world’s largest shipping company, which is based in Denmark, is having some of its container ships scrapped (cut up for materials to be recycled) under sub-standard conditions at beaches in India and Bangladesh. While Danish media have paid considerable attention to this and investors are asking critical questions of Maersk’s alignment between its CSR policies and practices, much less attention was paid to a case of severe critique of a Danish textile company that sourced from a supplier in the Rana Plaza building around the time of the building’s collapse.

What do these two cases have in common? More than one might expect, judging from the way they have been treated by media and business association statements. This applies with regard to business practices as well as research. But whereas one company’s understanding of due diligence appears very weak, the other displays a due diligence understanding that holds bigger promise for the longer term.

Company challenges in relation to risk-based due diligence

Both cases concern businesses’ exercise of risk-based due diligence. This is a process for businesses to avoid causing social or environmental harm. According to OECD’s Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, enterprises should carry out due diligence to identify, prevent and mitigate actual and potential adverse impacts on human rights, industrial issues including labour standards, the environment etc. Enterprises should also carry out due diligence in relation to their suppliers and other business relations, to seek to prevent or mitigate adverse impact that is directly linked to their operations, products or services. This applies to yards scrapping ships as well as factories sewing clothing to be sold in stores in Denmark or elsewhere.

The Maersk case is an example of company that has problems walking its own CSR talk. But it is also an example of a company that has paid attention to the risks caused by its decision to scrap ships in India and taken certain steps to prevent such damage from occurring, suggesting due diligence has been exercised to a certain extent. However, the information that has emerged in recent weeks suggests that the due diligence process has not been adequately carried through from beginning to end of the activity in question. The textile case concerns a company that did not adequately carry out core due diligence elements in regard to its supplier in Bangladesh, where the prevalence of severe building safety issues was well-known already prior to the Rana Plaza collapse.

NCP: severe critique of Danish textile producer sourcing from Rana Plaza 

On October 17, 2016, the Danish National Contact Point (NCP) under OECD’s Guidelines issued a statement following a complaint concerning the practices of a Danish textile company in relation to, amongst others, occupational health and safety standards at the supplier in Rana Plaza. The NCP statement severely criticized the due diligence processes of the Danish company. Amongst others, the statement noted that the company neglected to make adequate requirements of the supplier in relation to a CSR policy; neglected to require the supplier to perform self-evaluation; and neglected to monitor and follow up on such self-evaluations.

This is the first time not only in Denmark but internationally that a public institution with expertise in CSR states specific critique of the due diligence processes of a company supplying from Rana Plaza. In view of the large number of casualties resulting from the collapse on 24 April 2013 and the subsequent attention that the tragedy has generated with media and consumers, one wonders why the critique of the Danish company has received such limited attention.

Press releases from business associations and the organization that lodged the complaint have highlighted the fact that the NCP did not pronounce the company accountable for the collapse (in some cases mistakenly communicated as ‘liability’ rather than accountability). Notwithstanding that the NCP’s powers do not enable it to attribute legal liability and the fact that the NCP made its assessment on the basis of documentation that it has been presented with or was able to investigate, that part of the statement has been allowed to dominate. The critique and the lessons on the importance of due diligence that the statement holds for Danish (and other) companies has received much less attention. Apart from the critique of the specific company, the NCP statement also underscores that it follows from OECD’s Guidelines that companies should require suppliers to protect their employees’ occupational health and safety, and that this responsibility today includes risk assessment in relation to building safety and integrity. From a research perspective it is surprising that business associations, despite differences in the way they have covered the issue, have not make more of an effort to explain the significance to their members.

Complexity and context

Ensuring responsible business conduct in chains of business relations is often complex. Turning talk (or policies) into walk (or practice) is frequently challenging in view of the conditions in some of the countries from which Danish companies supply textiles, or where ships are scrapped. Poverty and local socio-economic conditions lead to employees accepting salaries and working condition far below international standards. Unfortunately, these problems are rarely solved overnight. Implementing norms for occupational health and safety does not just require the relevant rules to be in place, but also that they are communicated and explained to employees and managers, and that qualified training and monitoring takes place. Changing dangerous working methods or buildings requires not just investment, but also time and attention. And as in other fields, perfection requires practice.

Outlook

Maersk has a CSR problem because its ship scrapping practices are not in accordance with the company’s own standards. Yet, Maersk has also demonstrated awareness of risks. When Maersk decided to have ships scrapped at the Alang beach in India, it was also decided to take on three employees to monitor the observance of Maersk’s standards. This suggests a degree of due diligence.  However, due diligence is a continuous process. The Alang-case demonstrates that having employees in place to monitor observance of standards is not sufficient, if this is not followed by processes to ensure that the monitoring identifies the problems it is intended to find. The related case of ships previously owned by Maersk now being scrapped on beaches in Bangladesh demonstrates the significance of also incorporating risk-based due diligence in relation to economic stipulations incorporated into contracts.  However, the Maersk case also offers an example of a company that is working on practicing to walk its talk. The commitment to improve and to internal learning expressed by Maersk in follow-up to the media reports and investor critique raises more hope for the implementation of due diligence than does the reception of the critique of the textile company.


Om samfundsansvar i skibsophugning, tekstilsektoren, og om at tage ansvar alvorligt og øve sig

I ugen med efterårsferien meldte investorer sig med spørgsmål om ophugningen af udtjente Mærsk-skibe på strande i Indien og Bangladesh, og mediernes interesse for sagen fortsatte. Derimod fik en alvorlig kritik, som er blevet udtalt over en dansk tekstilvirksomhed, der fik syet tøj hos en leverandør i Rana Plaza bygningen omkring tidspunktet for bygningens sammenstyrtning i 2013, ganske begrænset opmærksomhed i pressen.

Hvad har de to sager til fælles? Mere end man skulle tro fra den måde, de er blevet behandlet i medier og meddelelser fra erhvervsorganisationer. Det gælder både praktisk og forskningsmæssigt.

Begge sager handler om virksomheders risikobaserede due diligence (på dansk somme tider oversat ’nødvendig omhu’, som ikke skal forveksles med ’rettidig omhu’). Risikobaseret due diligence er en proces til at sikre, at en virksomhed undgår at forvolde skader på mennesker og miljø. Ifølge OECDs retningslinjer for multinationale virksomheder, som Danmark har tiltrådt, skal virksomheder udføre risikobaseret due diligence for at undgå og modvirke skade på miljø, menneskerettigheder, arbejdstagerrettigheder mv. Virksomheder skal også udøve due diligence i forhold til deres leverandører og andre forretningsforbindelser. Det gælder både værfter, der hugger skibe op, og systuer, der laver tøj til danske herretøjsbutikker.

Mærsk-sagen viser en virksomhed, som har haft problemer med et leve op til sine egne standarder og politikker om CSR. Men det viser også en virksomhed, som har været opmærksom på sin mulige skadesrisiko og taget skridt til at modvirke det. Det er udtryk for due diligence. De oplysninger, som er kommet frem de seneste uger tyder på, at virksomhedens due diligence ikke har været ført tilstrækkeligt igennem. Mere om det senere. Tekstilsagen handler om en virksomhed, som ikke løftede en række centrale elementer i due diligence i forhold til sin leverandør i Bangladesh, hvor det allerede inden Rana Plaza styrtede sammen var kendt, at der var alvorlige problemer med bygningssikkerhed og ansattes arbejdsforhold.

Det danske nationale kontaktpunkt for OECDs retningslinjer for multinationale virksomheder offentliggjorde mandag i uge 42 en udtalelse på baggrund af en klage over en dansk producent af herretøjs håndtering af bl.a. sundheds og sikkerhed på arbejdspladsen hos virksomhedens leverandør i Rana Plaza. Kontaktpunktet (som på dansk kaldes Mæglings- og Klageinstitutionen for Ansvarlig Virksomhedsadfærd eller bare MKI) udtalte alvorlig kritik af den danske virksomheds processer for risiko-baseret due diligence. Det blev bl.a. kritiseret, at virksomheden ikke i tilstrækkelig grad stillede krav til leverandøren i form af en CSR-politik; og ikke i tilstrækkelig grad anmodede leverandøren om selvevaluering og gennemgik selvevalueringer med henblik på at fastslå, hvad der skulle kontrolleres og følges op på.

Det er ikke bare i dansk sammenhæng men også internationalt første gang, at en offentlig autoritet med ekspertise inden for CSR-feltet udtaler konkret kritik af en virksomhed, der fik produceret på Rana Plaza. I betragtning af det store antal mennesker, der omkom eller kom til skade, da bygningen styrtede sammen den 24. april 2013 og i betragtning af den interesse, som Rana Plaza-tragedien har haft blandt medier og forbrugere kan det undre, at kritikken af den danske virksomheds due diligence fik så lidt opmærksomhed.

Pressemeddelelser fra erhvervsorganisationer og den organisation, der indgav klagen, har i stedet fremhævet, at kontaktpunktet ikke fandt virksomheden ansvarlig for sammenstyrtningen. Uden skelen til, at kontaktpunktet ikke har kompetence til at pålægge juridisk ansvar og kun har forholdt sig til de oplysninger, det har fået dokumenteret eller haft mulighed for at undersøge ift hvad en kontrol kunne have vist, har denne del af udtalelsen fået lov at dominere. Det, som danske virksomheder bør skrive sig bag øret om krav om due diligence, har fået meget mindre opmærksomhed. Udover den alvorlige kritik af tekstilvirksomheden fastslår udtalelsen også, at virksomheder for at leve op til principperne i OECD’s retningslinjer bl.a. skal stille krav til leverandører til at sikre sundhed og sikkerhed på arbejdspladserne. Denne forpligtelse omfatter i dag også risikoafdækning af bygningskonstruktioners sikkerhed. Selv om der er forskelle i dækningen fra forskellige organisationer, er det fra en forskningsmæssig CSR-betragtning tankevækkende, at erhvervslivets organisationer ikke i højere grad har grebet muligheden for at forklare deres medlemmer, hvor vigtigt dette er.
Ansvarlig virksomhedsadfærd i kæden af en virksomheds forretningsforbindelser er ofte komplekst. Der kan være langt fra idealer og politikker til den praktiske virkelighed, der gælder i lande, hvor danske virksomheder får produceret tekstiler, eller hvor skibe ophugges. Fattigdom og lokale samfundsøkonomiske forhold er ofte årsagen til, at mennesker sælger deres arbejdskraft for løn og arbejdsbetingelser, der ligger langt fra internationale standarder. Problemerne kan desværre sjældent løses fra den ene dag til den anden. At gennemføre normer for sundhed og sikkerhed på arbejdspladsen kræver ikke bare, at regler findes, men også at de formidles til de ansatte og deres ledere, og at der foregår en solid oplæring og kontrol. At ændre farlige arbejdsmetoder eller bygninger kræver ikke bare investeringer, men også tid og opmærksomhed. Og som ved andre vanskelige opgaver kræver perfektion øvelse.

Mærsk har et problem med manglende overensstemmelse mellem sine egne standarder og deres gennemførelse. Men Mærsk har også vist, at man er er opmærksom på at udvise due diligence. Da Mærsk besluttede at få skibe ophugget på Alang-stranden i Indien, besluttede man samtidig at ansætte folk til at kontrollere, at Mærsks standarder blev overholdt. Det er udtryk for due diligence. Men risikobaseret due diligence er en løbende proces. Alang-sagen viser, at det ikke er nok at placere kontrollører, hvis man ikke også har processer for at checke, at kontrollerne fanger de problemer, som de skal. Sagen om ophugning af tidligere Mærsk-skibe på strande i Bangladesh viser, at due diligence også bør gennemsyre en virksomheds økonomiske betingelser, der indgår i kontrakter. Men Mærsk-sagen viser også en virksomhed, som kan siges at være i gang med at øve sig. Den vilje til forbedring og intern læring, som Mærsk har givet udtryk for, giver grund til større håb for gennemførelse af risikobaseret due diligence end den, som tekstilsagen er blevet modtaget med.

Karin Buhmann har fornylig været på TV2 for at diskutere Mærsks kontroversielle skrot politik og CSR.


Karin Buhmann is Professor (mso) in Business & Human Rights at the Department of Intercultural Communication and Management at Copenhagen Business School.

pic by by Mike Hettwer,  National Geographic

Trump, Anti-Intellectualism and the New Role for Business

By Erin Leitheiser.

For anyone who pays even vague attention to the news it is clear that this year’s U.S. election is not only continuous, but perhaps exemplifies the growing divide between truth (facts) and lies (fabrications).  Politicians have a long track record of twisting and distorting facts to support their position, but Donald Trump has taken this to a new level.  In just the past week he blatantly misrepresented academic findings about voter fraud, continued to promote a debunked rumor about $6 billion in missing funds from the State Department under Clinton, and has sworn to question the results of the election if he doesn’t win.  Herein we see a dangerous disregard (at best) or rejection (at worst) of the truth.

Notions of Trust are Changing

Trump may indeed personify the growing divide between who and what information is trusted by the general public.  Every year the PR firm Edelman publishes their annual Trust Barometer, a worldwide study which, among other things, tracks the credibility and influence of various categories of “spokespeople” (such as CEOs, NGO reps, and the like).  Some of the related findings include:

  • There is no clear voice of authority.  When asked who they would trust to provide news and information about business, about half would find a CEO credible (49%) but only about one-third (35%) would trust the government.  NGOs are trusted about half the time (48%), and academics and technical experts fared a bit better with credibility rankings around two-thirds (64% and 67%, respectively).  When asked about how much each institution could be trusted to address social issues, government scored even lower than business – 15% versus 26%.
  • Increasingly, respondents trust their peers as much or more than anyone else.  Nearly two-thirds of respondents (63%) would trust information about a business given to them by “a person like yourself”.  This is up from less than half just five years ago (43% in 2011).  This trend is reinforced by rising rates of news consumption through social media.
  • Business is increasingly expected to take on a bigger role in promoting the public good.  In 2015, 74% of respondents indicated that “a company can take specific actions that both increase profits and improve the economic and social conditions in the community where it operates”.  This number rose to 80% in 2016.

What do these trends mean for business? 

With fact-fighting figures like Trump looming over the world of politics, it is not surprising that trust in government is low.  What may be somewhat surprising, however, is the ever-growing expectation for business to take on a role in tackling societal issues.

Business thus far has risen to the occasion in a variety of ways, be it philanthropic donations to communities, like Target’s 5% give-back commitment; cause-brand alliances, like the NFL’s longstanding partnership to promote breast cancer awareness; partnerships with nonprofits to enhance the sustainability of business practices, like IKEA’s work with the WWF to better manage environmental resources; a self-regulatory role by adopting voluntary standards, like certifying timber products with the Forest Stewardship Council; or any other number of efforts.  Indeed, we have entered a new era for business.

Edelman’s Trust Barometer results and several academic studies also point to instrumental benefits for business who engage in societal issues.  Employees at companies engaged in societal issues report much higher levels of motivation, commitment and confidence in the company, and have lower turnover.  When supply chains are closely managed, reputational and operational risks go down, like the ones we saw with the horrific 2013 garment factory collapse in Bangladesh.  And, if that’s not enough, research has shown that socially responsible companies perform better financially in competitive markets than do irresponsible ones.

Takeaway

Trust is shifting and expectations of business are changing as the public’s confidence in governments and politics dwindles.  The time is ripe for business to step up to the plate to take a swing at their new role.  In addition to societal benefits, business can expect to see positive impacts to its performance, too.


Erin Leitheiser is a PhD Fellow in Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability at Copenhagen Business School.  Her research interests revolve around the changing role and expectations of business in society.  Prior to pursuing her PhD she worked as a CSR manager in a U.S. Fortune-50 company, as well as a public policy consultant with a focus on convening and facilitating of multi-stakeholder initiatives.  She is supported by the Velux Foundation and is on Twitter.  

pic by cbsnews

The Global Compact – Building Bridges, or Barriers?

By Marianne Prytz and Margrete Eilertsen.

One of the main purposes of the UN Global Compact (GC) is to include the private sector in the development agenda. However, is the initiative truly inclusive, or is it yet another contributing factor dividing the North and the South?

Being stronger together – leveraging local network effects

From its official launch in 2000, the UN Global Compact (GC) has developed to become the world’s largest corporate sustainability initiative, currently comprising of more than 12,000 signatories. Local Networks (LN’s) are clusters of GC participants who voluntarily form country- or region- based groups, with the aim of advancing the GC and its principles in a specific geographic context. Due to the possible positive effects LNs can have on promoting sustainable business practices on a local level, especially in developing countries, we wanted to explore the topic further. In our Master’s thesis, we investigated possible enabling and restricting factors affecting a Local Network’s (LN) operational capacity, using the Uganda LN as our case study.

Based on our research, we found the most important enabling factors for the Uganda LN to be:

  • A strong hosting organization;
  • An effective governance system;
  • Indications that personal trust has developed within the Uganda LN over time.

Sufficient funding is crucial for a local network to develop

Regardless of the enabling factors supporting the Uganda LN, we found that the network is currently struggling. The main reason for these problems was the low level of financial resources within the LN. This severely restricts the operational capacity of the LN in the following ways:

  • Lack of Human Resources;
  • Few events and activities;
  • Lack of LN Uganda webpage;
  • High reliance on the focal point organization, the Federation of Uganda Employers.

These factors limit the networks opportunities to operate effectively and make a lasting impact on the Uganda Business Society.

As of today, each GCLN is supposed to be self-sufficient in terms of financial resources, and mainly source these resources locally. Thus, the LNs do not receive any direct funding from the GC Office or Foundation in New York. This in itself is not a problem. However, where both governments and MNCs in developed countries have been more willing to fund their LNs, companies and governments in developing countries have not been able to support their LNs to the same extent. This is what we are witnessing in the Uganda LN.

Is the Global Compact’s bottom-up strategy only working in theory?

Based on the GC’s 2014 Africa Strategy report called“ Partners in Change”, we found that several of the African LNs are struggling with similar issues as we experienced in Uganda. If it is so that LNs from developing countries in general have less financial resources compared to their Western counterparts, this might arguably increase the existing financial divide between Northern and Southern countries.

The GC emphasizes that their approach is bottom up, and builds on locally adopted strategies, which in theory is a refreshing and original approach in comparison to traditional development and sustainability practices. However, what we have noticed exemplified in the case of the Uganda LN, is that unless the status quo is challenged, the GC might develop into a new forum for separating developed and developing countries.

As we believe the GC has an important role to play in today’s globalized society, we hope the initiative chooses to focus on evening out this divide, in order to fully reach its potential in developing countries.


Marianne Prytz and Margrete Eilertsen have just graduated from the Department of Business, language and culture at CBS. They are now proud holders of the Degree Cand. merc. Int. in business and development studies. In their Master thesis on the UN Global Compact, they researched sustainable business practices.

pic by pexels-foto

Corporate Governance and Corporate Social Responsibility

By Jeremy Moon, Velux Professor of Corporate Sustainability, CBS —

The relationship between corporate governance (CG) and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is a vexed, yet a vital, one for each of these regulatory logics.  Accordingly, it is a key issue for the business of society.

It seems to me that CSR and CG are not the same thing; nor different things; nor the other side of the same coin.  Rather, they are overlapping; inter-related; potentially mutually tempering or reinforcing.  CG emphasizes external regulation and internal control of the firm by legal means and assumes that the monitoring function is controlled by the board of directors and senior managers.  CSR is about how the firm regulates its own behavior with reference to social norms; now including external, mainly ‘soft’, governance systems (e.g. multi-actor, private codes of conducts, commitments, partnerships, associations).   Yet CG is often at odds with, or pitted against, CSR, notwithstanding their overlaps.  This is true in all business systems, but particularly in the Anglo—American systems.

Here CSR is sometimes seen as a threat to the agent-principal relationship in which the ‘agents’ (managers) should simply serve the assumed priority of their ‘principals’ (shareholders) for short-run profits.  But it seems to me that the agent-principal relationship is itself misguided and misrepresents proper governance of the company.   In short, key corporate governance documents, company law, other regulations pertaining to company responsibility and judicial history confirm that companies do have wider purposes than shareholder’s quarterly profits alone.  The interests of the company itself, of other stakeholders and of society at large have been recognized as appropriate points of managers’ responsibility.  Moreover, there is plenty of evidence that not all shareholders are motivated by quarterly returns.  Many prize long-term stability, and many recognized the company benefits of CSR investments, not least in the face of social and environmental risks.  The voluminous literature on the relationship between financial and social performance finds a modestly positive relationship between the two.   So, I conclude that CSR and CG in Anglo-American systems are not incompatible.

Indeed they are related as many of the CSR innovations in these countries tend to be more likely to reflect market actors and imperatives than CSR in say continental and Scandinavian Europe.  For example, many UK and US CSR initiatives reflect consumer concerns (e.g. fair and ethical trade systems) or investor interests (e.g. the FTSE4Good and Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes, the new stock exchange regulations of the Sarbanes-Oxely and Dodd-Frank Acts).  This contrasts with the CG – CSR links in coordinated market economies (e.g. Denmark, Germany) which yield both greater attention to the labour stakeholders and the collective interest in environmental sustainability.   It also contrasts with the CSR in state-led market economies (e.g. France, Korea) which tend to reflect a CG focus on national development.  It contrasts with CSR in emerging and developing economies which tends to reflect a community orientation reflecting the features of high inter-personal trust and low institutional trust underlying the CG arrangements in many such countries.

But notwithstanding the ways in which CSR has emerged as a feature of business as usual complementary with their respective CG systems, it seems to me that there are often deficits in company level governance of CSR.  CSR is often removed from ‘governance’ departments (in HR, marketing); apart from main business (e.g. financial institutions & crisis); CSR accounting is often in parallel with, rather than integrated with, other management accounting; and there is little measurement of social impacts.

However, CSR commitments increase the imperatives for more conspicuous governance of sourcing, contracts, production, employment, wastes, consumption and so forth.  The challenges here are considerable, including the integration of CG measures for CSR across MNCs whose business units operate under very different CG systems; and particularly for SMEs in emerging and developing countries which have underdeveloped CG systems to start with.

But CSR does not only reflect CG structures it can also shape them.  Thus the fact that an increasing number of companies now fall under new reporting requirements such as come with stock exchange listing (e.g. in the USA, South Africa, China), or with operation in business systems which specify responsibility requirements (e.g. Danish and Swedish non-financial reporting regulations, UK board responsibilities for their companies environmental, social and governance impacts), or sign up to CSR principles and standards should be regarded as a CG opportunity as well as a challenge.  These developments provide precisely the opportunity for CG to reconnect and support its underlying base in social responsibility.

This blog entry is based on a talk I gave on ‘CSR and corporate governance’ at the workshop on ‘Governance, CSR and SMEs in emerging/developing economies’ in the ESRC ‘CSR and SME’ series on 19th November, 8.30-13.00 at ACCA (Association of Chartered Certified Accountants), London.