CSR and Sustainability – From the Margins to the Mainstream

New movements have emerged, often rooted in religious or ethnic identity. This shift is linked to the wider decline of progressive social movements, the loss of faith in universalist values, and the replacement of ideological politics with the politics of identity.

CSR and sustainability issues have travelled from the margins of society and business in the early 1990s to the mainstream today. So have my own interests in those issues. Let me explain—

My path was significantly shaped by the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.  My main interest at the time was in socio-economic issues. I had been working for the United Nations and was worried about two problems.  First, that the UN was doing great work with many highly skilled people, yet had failed to make a major impact on the big issues of our time. (I note that the great achievement to reach the Millennium Development Goals this year was mainly to do with the huge reduction of poverty in China—that, it is fair to say, had little or nothing to do with the UN). Second, my fear was that communism had fallen; good riddance to its harsh implementation in Russia and its satellite states, but what was to replace it?  Was it really Communism 0, Capitalism 1?  We needed unadulterated capitalism—itself having many tendencies similar to communism surprising as that may seem—as much as we needed a sore head with its concomitant exploitation of workers, its quest for profit at any cost, its use of power and corruption to override democratic processes and, as Marx had indeed warned, the eventual collapse of capitalism, too! 

Continue reading on CSRwire >>

Michael Hopkins is CEO of MHC International Ltd(MHCi) a research and advisory company on CSR and has held a number of professorships (Middlesex, Brunel, George Mason University).