Abstract
Corporate social responsibility has a somewhat unique character in The Netherlands due to the characteristics of the Netherlands’ culture and business climate. Still many developments are comparable to what happened in other Western European countries. The development of CSR, despite its roots in the early twentieth century, largely took off in the 1970s and gained momentum with the development of the sustainability movement in the 1990s. Societal developments and trends in the business world were the main contributors to this. For different types of organisations, the awareness of CSR manifested itself in different ways. This was strengthened by the activities of NGOs, which are exceptionally receiving support from Netherlands’ society, and by the active involvement of the Netherlands government, which founded and kept supporting a separate organisation for the encouraging CSR in the Netherlands business community.
The following text is divided into ten sections, which diverge in length due to the nature of their contents. After the introduction, Section 2 discusses what ‘CSR’ means in The Netherlands, after which Section 3 describes relevant characteristics of The Netherlands and Section 4 gives historical developments behind the reality of CSR in The Netherlands. Then, Section 5 discusses global developments that have been relevant to CSR in The Netherlands, with specific attention to these developments; in Section 6 the chapter explores developments around Codes of Conduct and Corporate Values Statements. Section 7 focuses on political and societal developments that have impacted on how companies’ responsibilities are perceived in The Netherlands. In Section 8 is the largest chapter which consists of case studies on a number of companies, ranging from cooperatives to family-owned businesses, from SMEs to large multinationals. This largest section is devoted to Royal Dutch/Shell, as this is a company that lends itself to many interesting lessons. The next Section 9 is much smaller, discussing issues like the roles of academia and of the NGOs. Finally, Section 10 concludes the chapter.
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Notes
- 1.
To give only one example: Vodafone Netherlands presents its stakeholder activities on its website, but then specifically links them to sustainability issues (http://over.vodafone.nl/duurzaam/strategie-management/stakeholder-betrokkenheid).
- 2.
This aspect of Dutch culture is called ‘verzuiling’ (dividing society into ‘pillars’, or ‘zuilen’). It meant that for most of the twentieth century there were Protestant, Catholic, Socialist and neutral ‘pillars’, next to a few smaller ones, such as the Jewish ‘pillar’. Each ‘pillar’ had its own sportsclubs, housing societies, charities, hospitals, schools, unions and sometimes also businesses. This meant that until the late twentieth century, most people in The Netherlands did not so much relate to society as such, but to his or her own ‘pillar’ of society. These days, the main ‘pillars’ are gone, leaving only a small Jewish ‘pillar’ and a growing Muslim ‘pillar’, which do not have the same impact as what we saw in the past, when each ‘pillar’ almost locked its part of society in a situation of near-segregation.
- 3.
Kolk/Van Tulder (p. 8) call this the “stewardship principle”, which they together with the “charity principle” see as the roots of CSR in the early twentieth century.
- 4.
There was an energy crisis shortly after the Yom Kippoer war in 1973 in the Middle East, when The Netherlands government proclaimed its solidarity with Israēl and certain Arab countries then decreased the supply of oil.
- 5.
Supported by internet and modern logistics, a multinational company does not have to big in size and scope. For instance, many relatively small companies in the flower industry in The Netherlands have set up facilities in tropical countries, such as Tanzania. As a result, the largest flower auction in the country, in Aalsmeer, located just outside of Schiphol/Amsterdam Airport, has developed into an international hub for flowers.
- 6.
In a working class neighborhood of Amsterdam there was a yearly event, in which teams from different streets were fighting over a live eel hanging from a rope over a canal, which caused concern amongst the middle classes, after which the city government banned the event and the working class population revolted (Moelker, p. 177).
- 7.
Not to be confused with the ‘PPP’ of marketing: Product, Placement, Price. An important example of a company adopting the ‘P, P, P’ of sustainability is Shell: see: corporateregister.com.
- 8.
The UN committee World Commission on Environment and Development became groundbraking with its report “Our Common Future” of 1987. Brundtland/Starke (1990).
- 9.
One of the causes of the decline of Dutch commercial power after the “golden age” of the seventeenth century was the fact that the government was weak and offered little support to business, certainly compared to what was the case in France and the UK; this was largely the wish of the Dutch business community (e.g. Indonesia became a kind of colony of a commercial entity, the East Indies Company, and only came under control of the Netherlands’ government in the early nineteenth century).
- 10.
Shortly thereafter, The Netherlands government drafted Guidelines for CSR Reporting (see: Reporting CSR).
- 11.
Officially they were supposed to each bid on a project in secret, after which the government body, such as the ministry of public works (“Ministerie van Verkeer en Waterstaat”), would choose the various offers, whereby often the cost-aspects are the determining factor. This gave the construction companies some risk, as they all had to invest into designing detailed proposals, while only one of them would see a return on that investment. What the companies did in response is meet before sending in their proposals and deciding by themselves who would get the deal, after which they would make the other proposals so unattractive that their candidate was certain to win the bid. The victim of this arrangement was the government, and thereby the public, as many large scale projects had become far more expensive, while quality standards could not be assured.
- 12.
In 2008 junior minister Van Heemskerk made an appeal to a meeting of pensionfund-boards to consider the CSR policies of the companies that they invest in W: Pensionfunds.
- 13.
For instance, in 2012 it was working with the Netherlands’ government on a project to stow CO2 in geological layers deep under the surface in an area near Rotterdam and it abandoned this plan when it became clear that the population in that part of the country could not be convinced about its safety.
- 14.
Originally, most codes of conduct were border codes, which were drafted as legal documents and clearly indicated which lines employees were not to cross. Alternatively, aspiration codes developed, expressing which ambitions employees were expected to honour. They are often seen as vague and for that reason ‘hybrid’ codes are these days more the norm.
- 15.
As Kolk/Van Tulder point out, it is essential for the implementation of a Code that it is monitored and that sanctions are imposed in the case of transgressions.
- 16.
After the corporate scandals of the later 1990s, such as those involving Worldcom and Enron, the US senator Paul Sarbanes and representative Michael G. Oxley initiated and got accepted by US Congress a law regulating the behaviors of public companies and their executives. It applies not only to US companies, but also to all companies doing business with the US, which gives it a near global reach.
- 17.
Fifka divides the bulk of the case in a “bipolar phase” and a “multipolar phase”, because initially the issue was largely between Shell UK and its most important stakeholder, the UK government, while later other parts of Shell became involved and many other stakeholders had also become involved.
- 18.
As communicated by the press service of World Wildlife Fund Netherlands, of the five million members of WWF worldwide, 826,000 are in The Netherlands, which makes the Netherlands section the fourth largest (after the USA, the UK and Germany; countries with much larger populations; according to Indexmundi their populations are 316,668,567, 63,395,574 and 81,147,265 compaired to 16,805,037 for The Netherlands) and shows that compared to thesize of the population WWF is much more supported in The Netherlands than in most other countries.
- 19.
While Mathis (p. 10) points at research that seems to indicate that NGOs have relatively little influence on companies, it would seem that more and more companies like to treat them as having or acquiring a significant role.
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Remmé, J.H.M. (2015). Corporate Social Responsibility in the Netherlands. In: Idowu, S., Schmidpeter, R., Fifka, M. (eds) Corporate Social Responsibility in Europe. CSR, Sustainability, Ethics & Governance. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13566-3_6
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