Selling out

When I think of how Corporate Social Responsiblity got started, I start with the history my generation inherited from the 1960s - which is essentially a history of ineffectual activism. Sure, some protests accomplished their goals. Apartheid ended, civil rights for racial minorities improved, and women became much more equally represented in various esteemed professions. We also developed new problems - HIV/AIDS, increasing inequality and climate change, to name a few. Overall, the world doesn't seem to be significantly better off than it was, or to have benefitted very substantially from the hippie/free-love/activist mantras. "Don't trust anyone over 30" was a common expression then, but of course everyone who said it is either over 30 or dead now.

So when I was in college, in the late-1990s, my cohort was accused of being apathetic. I don't think we really *were* apathetic, but rather we didn't want to waste our time on ineffectual strategies. We were jaded, discouraged, and occasionally in denial - but we still cared. For many of us, myself included, the obvious step was to begin working within the "system" (business, government, etc.) to improve it, rather than fighting it blindly. This is the kernel at the center of CSR - the desire to co-opt businesses for the public good, rather than fighting them or wishing them gone. The latter strategy goes against forces that are bigger than all of us - forces like economics and human nature, and is therefore ineffectual.

But over the years, I've come to appreciate a strong activist challenge - because occasionally it does get noticed by the corporation or the government, and it becomes part of the calculus of what consumers, investors, and voters want. Then the system changes itself; cynically speaking, it changes to better exploit customers and voters based on a new understanding of what they want.

I've been thinking about these issues lately, because a theme is coming out in my various jobs. Each of them, in some way, has me wondering about the idea of "selling out."

• At Harvard, I am writing about a company that doesn't want to approve the final product, and I'm certain this is because we haven't portrayed the company exactly as it wants to be portrayed. (All interview-based cases at Harvard Business School must be approved by the subject company, so this is always an issue to some extent - but in this case more than others.)

• At BC's Center for Corporate Citizenship, I learned that my internal newsbrief serves a different function than the news summaries on the website; because the latter are public, and the Center is a membership-based organization, it would be inappropriate to put negative news and analysis there. I've also learned that another site with CSR news is not featured because it is seen as a competitor (whereas I'd naively assumed we were all tackling these problems together).
  

• In my project for the World Bank, a group of people within a certain company has tried hard to promote a socially-beneficial product, but the overall corporate strategy has not been as supportive as it could have been; nevertheless, the group does not want to invite criticism or instigate outside pressure on its management.

In the end, each of these situations seems in its own way to be inevitable. So my questions to myself are: Am I paranoid, and all these things are actually OK? Or am I selling out by continuing to preserve anonymity on my blog, and not fighting for greater transparency? Finally, and perhaps most relevantly, do these stories tell me that I'm not tackling the issues through the right mechanisms, and that I'll need a career change in order to adopt the honesty and transparency needed for my own integrity and for the advancement of the CSR field?

The only conclusion I've come to so far: writing this blog may not be much, but it's the one place I can be satisfied that I'm sharing information and opinions without selling out.

At least for this year.
Next year I turn 30.