Professor Olivier Delbard’s new book offers a fresh view on today’s CSR from both a historical and geographical perspective.
“Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become a buzzword in management today. And yet, skepticism often prevails, as CSR is often associated with traditional philanthropic practices enabling companies to greenwash their unethical social and environmental practices,” observes Professor of Social Sciences Olivier Delbard, who has been working on sustainability and CSR-related issues for the past 25 years, and is currently the Paris campus Academic Director of the MSc in International Sustainability Management and an active member of the Deloitte Chair in Circular Economy and Sustainable Business Models at ESCP, as well as the Scientific Director of the MBA at ESA Business School in Beirut (Lebanon).
Intended for business students (both undergraduate and postgraduate), academics and general public interested in CSR, The Corporate Social Responsibility Agenda: The Case for Sustainable and Responsible Business explores its roots and theoretical developments in the US, then focuses on how CSR has spread across the world, first in Europe and later in the developing world. An updated overview of today’s CSR agenda is provided with a focus on four key issues: stakeholder inclusion, employee engagement and social dialogue, human rights and environmental sustainability. Because as Nobel Prize in Economics Elinor Ostrom is quoted as saying, “we have a decade to act before the economic cost of current viable solutions becomes too high. Without action, we risk catastrophic and perhaps irreversible changes to our life-support system. Our primary goal must be to take planetary responsibility for this risk, rather than placing in jeopardy the welfare of future generations.”
The author admits having opted for a European perspective in this book because he was educated in Europe and has worked there most of his adult life, but he uses multiple cases and examples taken from various continents and industries to adopt a sustainability-driven perspective, based on the belief that the future of CSR lies in the strategic embeddedness of key issues into the company’s value chain. One of those is american carpet tile manufacturer Interface, about which he recently wrote an article on The Conversation (in French). “We are each part of the web of life — the continuum of humanity, sure, but to a larger sense, the web of life itself,” he also quotes Ray Anderson, its Founder and former CEO, as saying. “We have a choice to make during our brief visit to this beautiful blue and green living planet. We can hurt it or we can help it. For you, it is your choice.”
Finally, Olivier Delbard proposes a new terminology reflecting the current evolution of CSR: “Based on a few key assumptions, we will draw the contours of tomorrow’s CSR with a special focus on corporate sustainability as the promising ‘post-CSR’ approach, he explains in the introduction. In the second part of this chapter, we will stress how important it is for consumer citizens to put pressure on businesses to go further and scale new heights to devise genuine, efficient social responsibility strategies.” Clearly, the ball now is in your court…
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