Abstract
The call for a new holistic sense of responsibility in business (Corporate Social Responsibility) wants to break free from the constraints of short-termist, exploitative corporate strategies. It encourages enterprises to stop measuring their success solely in terms of the primacy of short-term financial return and to remember long-term sustainability. From this standpoint of sustainability, we are dealing with not one monetary bottom line, but the triple bottom line of economic, ecological, and social effects of our commercial and social life, as defined by section 8 of the Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable Development (A/CONF.199/20; http://www.un-documents.net/jburgdec.htm) and, in its wake, Elkington (1997) and Fisk (2010).
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Notes
- 1.
Using the definition of sustainability from the Brundtland report, the extremely vague term “needs” leaves us in the dark about the deeper meaning of sustainability: “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It contains within it two key concepts: the concept of ‘needs’, in particular the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs.” (Brundtland report: Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future, http://www.un-documents.net/our-common-future.pdf, p. 42). The additional clarification proposed by the World Bank economist Herman Daly also does not help with its distinction of three criteria in sustainable societies: “A sustainable society needs to meet three conditions: its rates of use of renewable resources should not exceed their rates of regeneration; its rates of use of non-renewable resources should not exceed the rate at which sustainable renewable substitutes are developed; and its rates of pollution emission should not exceed the assimilative capacity of the environment” (quoted in Elkington 1997, 55f). This again leaves undecided where, how, and with which means we could measure such sustainability—on the local level, in individual societies, or on a global level—and how any such measurement could link up with concrete commercial practice.
- 2.
In business management terms, success can be read in the figures in a company’s balance statements or P&L accounts or in the detailed indicators of EFQM or Balanced Score Card models (Kaplan and Norton 1996). For national economies, the relevant indicators can be the annual growth of the GDP (cf. Lepenies 2013) or national debt, employment figures, or the trade surplus.
- 3.
Following the logics of corporate governance, the state and business together define how companies should behave: “The German Corporate Governance Code (the “Code”) presents essential statutory regulations for the management and supervision (governance) of German listed companies and contains internationally and nationally recognized standards for good and responsible governance.” (Foreword of the German Corporate Governance Code, http://www.dcgk.de/en/code//foreword.html).
- 4.
“We look to regulatory policy to frame the market in a way that is as conducive as possible to life and to society; to make the price signals of the market and their incentives and disincentives on economic agents as harmless to humans and as socially and environmentally compatible as possible.” (Ulrich 2013, p. 4)
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Glauner, F. (2016). The CSR Rationale of Strategy Development: Responsibility. In: Future Viability, Business Models, and Values. CSR, Sustainability, Ethics & Governance. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-34030-2_4
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