Whether organisations are at the point of finding a new role at the senior level, namely the Chief Sustainability Officer, depends on how CSR and sustainability are being interpreted. In other words, ‘sustainability of what?’ Unfortunately, for too many Anglo-American corporations, CSR and sustainability is a marketing ploy. So in the Anglo-American model, I do not see any movement that will make real space for the CSO officer. However, not all societies approach CSR and sustainability from this same philanthropic platform, and I expect the role of this officer to be stronger in other countries that hold a different view of CSR.
The office of a CSO is unlikely to have the same meaning for an Anglo-American corporation against a major Danish firm, to a German firm, like BMW. The sustainability concern of Anglo-Americans is to identify the charities that basically add to commercial advantage or at [...]

The excerpt below is from a paper of ours which will be published in the Special Issue of the Corporate Governance Journal and presented at the 2011 colloquium of EABIS, the Academy of Business in Society .
We have co-authored the paper with Isaac Mostovicz .
The paper will be published on September 5th and looks at the core values which must underpin CSR programmes if they are to be effective.
On April 20th, 2010 an explosion on the Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Horizon oil rig exposed the United States to an historic ecological disaster.

This episode illustrates the limits of CSR programmes currently undertaken by global businesses. The logical rules and regulations which business and government leaders created did not work to exemplify the broadly shared social values that US society deemed to [...]

The article by Ian Wylie in the Financial Times, entitled “ From charity to teacher, Oxfam sets sights on MBAs ”, is indicative of the trend where business school training is now setting its sights on meeting some of the needs, challenges and concerns of third sector organisations. At the School for Leadership at Exeter University, a third sector MBA has virtually been created which tries to hit the whole of this sector in terms of providing business discipline application but with a stakeholder philosophy. The internships that MBA programmes traditionally try to pursue, particularly in financial services, are being balanced by offering work experience in third sector organisations with Oxfam being just one of them. The idea behind this is to see whether a more sustainable, green way of living and operating can be the way of the future.
I have mixed views on this. The [...]

In advance of the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference , I recently gave a presentation at Copenhagen Business School on Business Schools, Society and Climate Change. Here is a short video overview of my presentation: [...]

Recently both Andrew and I appeared (on different nights) on Phillip Adams’s Australian radio programme ‘ Late Night Live .’ Andrew discussed the financial crisis and our book The Elephant Hunters (you can download the podcast here ), while I was part of a panel discussing corporate social responsibility (available here ).
We both think that CSR in theory is a good thing, but often it manifests itself as government absolving itself of responsibiliy and foisting it on the private sector. The sentiment behind the Caux Principles at the beginning of the CSR movement was “Let’s do something socially responsible as businesses before government intervenes and forces us to do something.” Businesses do need to show that they’re sufficiently capable of acting responsibly (and if they want to be successful with their CSR, they need to entwine it in their company’s [...]