In recent years, through experience and discussions in various projects and workshops dealing with urban development, this key question keeps returning:
How to best promote citizen engagement?
While citizen engagement is a large topic within urban development, so are entrepreneurship and grassroots movements. How do we perceive these various terms? In which ways do these forms of organization converge, where do they diverge? More importantly, could we change the civic engagement rates if this work would be perceived as steps towards further opportunity (gaining) instead of ‘volunteer work’ (giving)?
A known challenge within citizen engagement deals with age groups. It is not difficult to engage young children (up to 12 years old) and older citizens to take part in local actions, however it becomes a struggle to engage youth and young adults as they see little return in value as results tend to be intangible or unclear. Within this group, perception plays a big role in how ideas are sold (and consumed), so it might be time to possibly bring the concepts of civic engagement and entrepreneurship closer together. But where do we start?
A first point to consider is how these key concepts might be popularly understood. When mentioning citizen engagement, images of volunteers coming together to discuss, collaborate, work and vote on ideas come to mind. When talking about entrepreneurship, notions of highly driven visionaries or million dollar companies emerge.
Citizen engagement and entrepreneurship are rarely seen as equals. However, in both cases you find similarities. It is not uncommon for both groups to engage in a large amount of unpaid labour, long days, hard work and convincing people to join you and (most probably) gathering funds to execute whatever dream you may have.
Literature covering the concepts of social entrepreneurship or community-based entrepreneurship highlights distinct formats of social entrepreneurship, both of which are top-down. In the case of grassroots entrepreneurship initiatives, articles highlight movements that emerge from “acute socio-economic, institutional, and financial resource constraints, as well as out of local knowledge and a commitment to community”, such as the one seen recently during the Covid-19 pandemic (see blogpost). It is not necessarily about creating something new, but instead, something that works for the case in focus.
In these settings, co-creation has received a deserved attention as a method, and it has proven to be a valuable tool as it allows for diverse stakeholders to come together to develop and carry out ideas, creating shared agency. However, before that first co-creation session lies the true challenge in both user engagement and entrepreneurship: Creating momentum before the momentum, to make one person (or a few) motivated ‘out of thin air’.
Therefore, a second point to consider is the top-down setup of projects, inviting citizens to engage with a specific topic or local pre-defined issue. Although project results might impact locals’ everyday, the personal gain might be too dissolved into the hours spent, thus people refraining from engaging.
In order to challenge the current top-down scenario, the perception and format of these activities could be transformed to facilitating processes to let locals themselves suggest and carry the types of projects that interest them, seeing a clearer link to ‘what’s in it for me’. For unpaid efforts, the pay-off has to be visible and tangible.
Furthermore, associations, municipalities and other public institutions need to create means to replicate successful bottom-up initiatives. Some of these initiatives could then be linked to local businesses and related opportunities.
From a service design perspective, a way to bring this information into people’s households could be to use the existing information channels popular amongst the local community to allow for an initial knowledge entry point. For instance, as citizens receive a public waste sorting information sheet, one could attach a ‘waste project opportunity’ sheet. This initial touchpoint could be a it’s your turn blueprint, a step-by-step guide showing what to do to bring your ideas out into the world. So, a project idea invitation presented as an opportunity at your fingertips. The ‘hot themes’ in the current market should be highlighted while also offering inspirational examples. Programmes to support these initiatives should be in place, facilitating the citizen engagement startup process as a possible social ladder. Such a setup could transform current structures, making cities and citizens, not venture capitalists, the true cradle for entrepreneurship.
This blog was inspired by a recent participation in a workshop focusing on urban development, discussing visions for green and social meeting places in urban residential areas. During the discussion, a number of key questions were raised concerning how to best promote citizen engagement. The workshop was organized by Copenhagen University and VIVAPLAN, with presentations from VIVAPLAN, Urbanplanen Partnerskab, C40, KAB and Copenhagen Municipality. The visions discussed during the workshop are to feed into policy recommendations for sustainable and inclusive developments in Denmark and Sweden.
Isabel Fróes is a postdoc at MSC Department at Copenhagen Business School working in three EU projects (Cities-4-People, iPRODUCE and BECOOP). Isabel also has wide industry experience and has worked both as a user researcher and service design consultant for various companies in Denmark and internationally. For more detail please see her Linkedin profile.
This article is based on previously written piece for the Centre for Business and Development Studies. It focuses on the normative foundations, such as guidelines and legislation as well as some common features or practices for good stakeholder involvement in environmental and societal impact assessments. As a part of the blog-post series on Consultations, Public Participation and Meaningful Stakeholder Engagement, it considers various aspects of stakeholder involvement as an element in the planning and decision-making relating to renewable energy, mining, infrastructure etc.
These blog-posts disseminate preliminary results from project examining best practice in stakeholder engagement as part of impact assessment. The project partly builds on investigations and interviews in Greenland in August 2018 and Sápmi in June 2018. [Ref: NOS-HS project, ref. 2017-00061/NOS-HS, on Best practice for Impact Assessment of infrastructure projects in the Nordic Arctic: Popular participation and local needs, concerns and benefits, Principal Investigator: Karin Buhmann)].
Public requirements on consultations and corporate management of risk to society
Consultation of the public in the context of assessments of societal or environmental impacts is not only common but mandated by law in several countries. In many places mandatory environmental impact assessment goes back to the 1970s. Mandatory impact assessments of other issues, such as societal sustainability or human rights, is a more recent phenomenon that to an extent builds on experiences gained around environmental impact assessment.
Even when impact assessment is not mandatory, it may be wise for a company to reach out to the local community and other potentially or actually affected stakeholders in order to map societal risks. This may contribute to counteracting a loss of the corporate ‘social licence to operate’.
Recommendations on ’meaningful stakeholder engagement’ in societal impact assessments
It is a general expectation that companies conduct so-called ‘meaningful stakeholder engagement’ in order to identify potential or actual adverse impacts on, for example, the environment, labour conditions and human rights. This is a result of the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises – a detailed set of recommendations from OECD member states as well as several countries in Africa and Latin-America.
The recommendations target companies operating in or out of the relevant countries. Likewise, all companies (regardless of form and countries of registration or operation) engage meaningfully with affected stakeholders whose human rights are or may be harmed by a business activity, in order to understand and map the impact from the perspective of these affected.
The United Nations (UN) Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights, which were a source for the 2011 update of the OECD Guidelines, refer to meaningful stakeholder engagement in this context. The objective is that the impact assessment will be conducted in a manner that takes account of the affected stakeholders’ perception of risks or actual harm caused, that is, adopting a bottom-up perspective.
The company is expected to prevent risks and actual harm that it causes or contributes to. It can only do so if it understands the problems from the perspective of those who experience or fear the problems.
OECD has developed a detailed Guidance on Meaningful Stakeholder Engagement for the Extractive Industries. The guidance includes an annex particularly on engagement of indigenous people. A translation into the Sami language was introduced at a seminar taking place back-to-back with the assembly of the Sami Parliament in Northern Norway in June 2019.
Even so, at a meeting on mining and sustainability, which took place in Northern Sweden later in June 2019, we observed very limited awareness of the guidance and relevant global guidelines among local NGOs and other civil society organisations. In fact, awareness is higher with some companies. Lack of knowledge of the normative standards that apply to companies make it difficult for civil society to require that companies observe the norms.
The OECD Guidelines and the UN Guiding Principles are not binding but mark a tendency towards recognition of individual access to influence through making one’s views and concerns known, even if this may not take place through a formalized process.
Overall, the past 40 years have witnessed a development in international environmental and human rights law towards direct access for the individual to partake in decision-making on business activities affecting one’s life [Pring and Noé, 2002]. Rights of indigenous and tribal peoples to be involved in decision-making on mining and other forms of natural resource extraction are often highlighted in this context [Triggs, 2002]. Consultations can form one element among others in ensuring such participation.
Mandatory requirements
The Nordic countries, which include Arctic areas, have long mandated planning of specific types of activities to include assessments of the environment so that the information can form part of the authorities informed decision-making. In some Nordic countries environmental impact assessments include broader societal aspects, such as impacts on health, employment, traditions and business operations [Nenasheva et al. 2015].
Specific requirements of separate assessments of societal impacts are less common in a Nordic context. However, Greenland’s self-government has introduced explicit requirements in the Act on Raw Materials mandating social sustainability assessments of activities that are may have significant societal impacts. Greenland has also introduced rules enabling authorities to make permits conditional on the company contribution to society, for example through vocational capacity building, employment of local labor, or locally based processing of explored raw materials.
Our project has shown that there are diverse opinions of such ’Impact Benefit Agreements’ (IBAs) that are tailored to each specific project and local context. While IBAs offers opportunities to agree on specific local measures, limited transparency on the contents reduce opportunities to develop solutions across projects.
Authorities can introduce specific requirements on the consultation process through general or special legislation. While such demands vary between countries, involvement of local communities and other affected stakeholders is a general element [Vanclay and Esteves, 2012].
Common demands on a good consultation process
As regulations and levels of detail vary between countries and types of impact assessments, specific demands on the process will not be described here. However, general indications are given by the so-called Aarhus Convention [UN 1998], which fleshes out the implications of the political decisions from the 1992 Rio Summit concerning public participation in decision-making concerning projects with environmental impacts.
The convention also covers human health and safety, locations of cultural significance etc., provided the impacts have a connection to the environment.
The Aarhus Convention establishes that:
the public must be informed about an activity in the early stages of a decision-making process;
the information must, among other things, include the character of the activity; what permit is applied for; the responsible authorities, timeline, place and procedure for public consultations on the activity; and available information on the activity’s impacts on environment, health etc.;
the information must be free and provided as soon as it is available;
reasonable time should be set aside between different phases of the process, and therefore both to inform citizens and for citizens to prepare and actively participate in the decision-making process;
the applicant for a permit is encouraged to actively engage in dialogue and to contribute information on the project;
authorities are responsible for making relevant information accessible, for example on the location for the activity, impacts on the environment in a the above sense (inclusive of health and safety), what measures will be taken to prevent adverse impacts, and alternatives to the proposed plan;
a summary of the information must be provided in a non-technical form that can be understood without technical prerequisites;
the consultation process must provide citizens with opportunities to express comments, information, knowledge and views that they find relevant. Citizens or NGOs who perceived their rights to be infringed upon are to have access to remedy provided by a court of law or another independent institution.
The Aarhus Convention has been signed by most European countries, including the Nordic states, and a few Central-Asian states.
Obviously, participation in a consultation process should not require
participants to be familiar with the law, nor should the quality in principle
depend on participant’s awareness of the informing normative foundations. It is
possible, especially in countries with well-functioning public institutions, to
ask the relevant authority to explain the rules and requirements and their
implications. Elsewhere, civil society organisations are often able to provide
advice and guidance.
Consultations aim to create dialogue, not conflict
Even if participation in a consultation is not a claim to having one’s view win out, a consultation is ideally a dialogue between citizens and the authorities or companies that conduct the consultation.
Consultations build on an aim of exchanging knowledge, views, concerns and needs and thereby to provide the best possible informed foundation for decisions and for projects to be adapted and regulated in response to the concerns and needs that have been voiced or identified through the consultation.
Both process and outcome depend on the involved understanding and respecting that the process builds on a conversation which is not about identifying a winner and a loser, but rather a dialogue towards an adapted result which may be a compromise between the original project idea and the thoughts, concerns and views expressed during the consultation process.
Karin Buhmann is Professor at Copenhagen Business School, where she is charged with the emergent field of Business and Human Rights. Her research interests include what makes stakeholder engagement meaningful from the perspective of so-called affected stakeholders, such as communities, and the implications for companies and public organisations carrying out impact assessments.
Covid-19 has dominated policy thinking across the world for several months – highlighting our vulnerability to unexpected threats, the fundamental reality of global interdependence, the critical role of science and data, and the value of collaborative efforts in response to a common challenge. And when the short-term public health crisis abates, the middle-term focus will be on economic recovery. But we should think now about the longer term – and the need to build a sustainable society that steps up to another looming threat: the prospect of destabilizing climate change. Thus, as we rebuild our economy, we must do so in a way that moves us toward a clean and renewable energy future as well as addressing other pressing sustainability issues including air and water pollution, waste and chemicals management, and our depletion of natural resources.
To help launch the conversation about the pathways to a sustainable future, I offer below 10 key elements to consider. These concepts build on the ideas laid out in the recently released book,A Better Planet: 40 Big Ideas for a Sustainable Future, that emerged from a multi-year research and policy initiative at Yale University, where I teach. For more information on the Yale Environmental Dialogue, please see the website.
1 ) End of externalities
A sustainable future requires that we commit to an end of externalities as the foundational principle for environmental policy. This starting point would require that we implement the Polluter Pays Principle, which means that those who release air and water pollution or greenhouse gases would have to stop these harms or to pay for their pollution. Likewise, any user of public natural resources – including water for irrigation, forests for timber, grasslands for grazing, or public lands for the extraction of oil, natural gas, or minerals – would be required to pay full price for the resources they take.
To be clear, making companies pay for the harms they cause will expose some business models as fundamentally unsustainable and only profitable when externalities are not internalized. These enterprises will have to remake their business strategies or go under.
2 ) Change in systems thinking
We must acknowledge that we live in a highly integrated world, as COVID-19 has so painfully made clear. Complex human and ecological systems require moving beyond traditional siloes to systems thinking — and regulatory design that links energy, environmental, and economic policies. More fundamentally, we must accept the fact that we will need to pursue multiple goals simultaneously and learn to do so in an integrated way that accepts the reality that our goals will sometimes be in tension — and thus need to be traded off and balanced.
3 ) Top-down targets & bottom-up implementation
We must recognize that policy frameworks and structures require both top-down targets and bottom-up implementation. This lesson has become plainly evident in the climate change context, where it is now clear that presidents and prime ministers do not control all the levers of society that must be pulled to deeply decarbonize our economy.
To achieve a sustainable future, mayors, governors/premiers, and other subnational political leaders – who often control economic development, transportation systems, and other key points of policy leverage — must play a significant role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and building a more resilient society.
Likewise, business leaders – who also make day-to-day choices that profoundly shape the prospect for moving society onto a sustainable trajectory – must also be included in this conversation. Fortunately, both the 2015 Paris Climate Change Agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) expressly acknowledge the need for broader engagement of exactly this kind.
4 ) New economic model
New policy tools must replace the 20th Century command-and-control regulatory model with economic incentives and other market mechanisms. While the government mandates of the past have allowed us to dramatically reduce pollution levels compared to five decades ago, further progress depends on price signals and a commitment to making emitters pay for the harm they cause.
5 ) New roles & various actors
Environmental progress must recognize new roles for various critical actors. Specifically, in decades past, the business world was seen as the source of pollution problems. But today, most corporate leaders recognize the need to be good environmental stewards so as to maintain their company’s social license to operate. They recognize that old notions about the mission of corporations being centered on shareholder primary and the maximization of profits has given way to a stakeholder model in which businesses have responsibilities not only to shareholders, but also to their customers, suppliers, employees, and the communities in which they operate.
Individuals are also advancing sustainability in new and important ways that go well beyond their long-recognized role as voters. Specifically, individuals today can make a difference as green consumers who make choices every day about which products to buy and which companies are selling sustainable goods and services. Likewise, a growing set of sustainability-minded investors are tracking environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance metrics to ensure that their portfolios align with their values – and they hold shares in companies that are showing the way toward deep decarbonization and sustainability more generally.
And some impact investors are putting money directly into sustainability projects and enterprises with an expectation that their funds will make a difference in society as well as a financial return.
Finally, all of us with a smartphone can serve as watchdogs — capturing and sharing evidence of environmental wrongdoing on social media. We are also all positioned to offer comments and participate in public environmental debates in many places and ways that were not possible prior to the Internet era. This expanded access should deepen public participation and improve the diversity of perspectives that get factored into policy decisions.
6 ) Sustainable markets
We need sustainable markets that incorporate new lessons from various emerging fields of science and other emerging academic disciplines. Industrial ecology, for instance, offers new methodologies for mapping the flows of energy and materials across the economy. In this regard, as we rebuild business in the many sectors devastated by the Covid-19 pandemic, we should look sector-by-sector for opportunities to create closed loop production processes that generate zero waste. Such a system would focus on water recapture and the reuse and recycling of other materials.
We might, in this spirit, shift away from plastic packaging that generates greenhouse gas emissions as it is produced and too often accumulates after use in the ocean – and move toward fiber-based materials that can be more easily recycled or composted.
7 ) New tools & Big Data
Policymakers have a set of new tools at their disposal that can be deployed in support of a sustainable future. Big Data, in particular, has abundant applications that can help us to reduce environmental impacts – tracking emissions, identifying best practices in pollution control and natural resource management, and providing metrics that help us to identify policy leaders to emulate and laggards who should be spurred to do better. And while 21st information and communications technologies have transformed how sports teams pick players, businesses market to their customers, and all of us make purchases, technological solutions have done rather little to reshape the environmental realm. But recent advances in data analytics, genomics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning all show significant promise for having important environmental applications.
8 ) Ethical foundation
We must build an ethical foundation for 21st Century sustainability that captures the public’s evolving thinking about core values and fundamental principles. Most notably, the idea of environmental justice and concerns about equity and inequality make it clear that our policy programs must pay attention to who benefits from environmental commitments and who gets ignored.
Indeed, who pays for environmental inaction – including lead exposure from aging water pipes or asthma risk when urban air pollution is not abated – has become a fundamental question.
As we seek to “build back better” after COVID-19, climate change equity issues need to be given a more prominent role – both the intergenerational burden that the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere threatens to leave for today’s young people and the reality that movement toward a clean energy future will dislocate some communities, industries, and demographic groups in ways that will require transition assistance.
9 ) New ways of communication
We need a new approach to environmental communications and a commitment to translate expert guidance and science to the public in a manner that makes sense to everyday citizens. Tony Leiserowitz and the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication have demonstrated, for example, that political leaders must learn to distill and effectively translate scientific concepts and results to the public. And as Thomas Easley makes clear in his Better Planet essay “Hip Hop Sustainability,” we need new strategies that bring the climate change conversation to inner cities and other subsets of society in a way that engages those communities in their own language and on their own terms.
10 ) Innovation
Finally, a spirit of innovation must permeate the push toward a sustainable future. To create an environmental policy framework that is lighter, faster, and more effective than our regulatory programs of the past, we must harness the entrepreneurial capacity and creativity that exists all across the world. Innovation broadly-conceived has already brought us technology breakthroughs in wind, solar, tidal, wave, and fuel cell power. But we must seek innovation beyond the technology domain. We need to be equally committed to fresh thinking and new approaches to finance and investments in clean energy, government policies and incentives, public engagement strategies, and public-private partnerships.
Such innovation can reduce the cost of creating a sustainable future and diminish the perceived tradeoff between environmental progress and economic prosperity.
Despite recent challenges, the promise of a more sustainable society seems ever closer, but still just over the horizon. Progress thus depends on sustainability pioneers who are willing to run out front, innovate broadly, take on risks, accept failures (and redeploy resources quick when unsuccessful pathways are identified), and redouble their commitment to efforts that show promise.
This commentary builds on Dan Esty’s April 2020 virtual lecture at Copenhagen Business School and the University of Copenhagen.
About the author
Dan Esty is Hillhouse Professor of Environmental Law and Policy, Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and Yale Law School
More about Covid-19 pandemic on Business of Society blog:
Cities are hard and complex systems. With their defined policies, grids and routes, they offer limited space for experimentation, with a low threshold for any type of interference to their regular flow. To test and prototype [1] in the urban, besides dealing with regulatory procedures, require clear indications of the positive impact those tests might bring. Thus, any change in routine flows is disruptive and not necessarily welcomed by all.
Some of these difficulties have become explicit during the processes carried out by various cities in four EU funded neighbourhood projects, Cities-4-People, Sunrise, MUV and Metamorphosis [2]. These projects have brought together citizens and other key city stakeholders to identify and co-create mobility solutions and approaches to tackling local problems. Each project has had a distinct goal, but all are part of the CIVITAS initiative focusing on ‘sustainable neighbourhood mobility planning’ and have been running since 2017, with three of them to end in 2020 and another in 2021. In the case of the Cities-4-People project, running in the cities of Hamburg, Istanbul, Oxford, Trikala and Budapest, cities, citizens and transport authorities have worked closely together to co-create and implement solutions addressing congestion, bike parking, safe and new routes to reach public transportation, and more [3].
Primarily, one of the biggest difficulties in deploying urban prototypes deals with permissions, space sharing, closing parts of or an entire street, or pavement, changing traffic routes, etc.
Even when implementing aspects citizens see as valuable and beneficial, such as bike racks, paths, during construction, these processes tend to be perceived as a nuisance. Another aspect stems from the fact that, unless it is a whole new city or neighbourhood been planned, the city, as a canvas, is never blank. Therefore, cities are constantly bound to develop solutions, which are imposed over an existing and fixed grid with very little wiggle room. All true, until March 2020.
The pandemic, through lockdowns and other movement restrictions, has changed the flow of cities almost overnight. For the first time, since the widespread city development focusing on automobiles, cities have had a chance to look at their now empty public spaces and rethink their use and purposes. These changes have forced the neighbourhood projects into a sudden halt, as people’s engagement with urban spaces has been very limited. However, while physical workspaces, shops and many businesses closed their doors, with citizens mostly at home, cities have encountered an unprecedented opportunity to rethink their streets.
In two related mobility examples, Vilnius, Lithuanian capital, the city Mayor has opened up eighteen of the city’s public spaces, free of charge, to bars and restaurants, so they can run while keeping the required social distancing [4].
In Milan [5], over the summer, the city will engage in a large-scale urban prototype, deploying 35km of temporary biking lanes and enlarged pavement areas.
While the city slowly opens up, with most employees still working from home and not commuting as much, citizens, when going out, should have enough space to keep a safe distance, while also experimenting in environmental friendly modes, such as walking and biking.
When some of the neighbourhood projects, such as Cities-4-People, resume in a few months, their cities and citizens might have changed. However, instead of considering the data that has been collected in the projects prior to the lockdown as ‘outdated’ or no longer valid, these projects can consider repurposing this data, using it as a robust baseline to be compared with post lockdown. From a mobility perspective, this ‘new normal’ might prove itself a valuable mobility asset. As people return to their streets, they can experience these known spaces in new formats encountering novel mobility patterns, where people and businesses can repopulate streets differently, reconfiguring city flows.
Furthermore, some of these temporary changes might prove to be popular and become permanent, promoting not only better mobility, but also lower pollution and improved air quality [6], indirectly helping cities leapfrog into achieving some of their sustainable development goals (SDGs). The opportunity to reset busy urban centres is rare; however, as it has occurred and continues to run with the pandemic, more cities and citizens have the unique chance to engage and exploit their cities’ canvas in new ways to seize their days.
Isabel Fróes is a postdoc at MSC Department at Copenhagen Business School working in two EU projects (Cities-4-People and iPRODUCE) dealing with distinct aspects of urban services and sustainability. Her latest publications deal with urban planning and co-creation based on results from the Cities-4-People project. Isabel also has wide industry experience and has worked both as a user researcher and service design consultant for various companies in Denmark and internationally. For more detail please see her Linkedin profile
More about coronavirus pandemic on Business of Society blog:
This article is based on her previously written piece for the Centre for Business and Development Studies.
My first memory of the Corona virus, before we became politicized enough to refer to it as COVID-19, or the “new” Corona virus—or for some special politicians, the “Wuhan” virus—was in Tanzania. Enjoying the evening breeze from the Indian ocean in the public area of our workshop hotel, I sat with a couple of our research team members catching up on life via apps on the smartphone. I came across a small shitstorm on my social media about our Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen. Technically speaking, she is not ‘my’ Prime Minister as my citizenship application was denied last year on the grounds of having spent too much time living outside of the country in South Africa, Italy and the US during the past 20 years. The “Wuhan virus” bleach-your-lungs guy, is actually the current head of the nation where I vote.
Yet, our Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen was in the media adamantly refusing to issue a public apology for a Danish cartoon that had been published on January 27th by Jyllands-Posten, a second-rate, nationally distributed newspaper, infamous for publishing the 2005 “Muhammed cartoons” which led to international violence, boycotts and around 200 deaths. The latest cartoon was a drawing of the Chinese flag with its five gold stars replaced by five virions of Corona. China’s embassy accused the cartoonist of insulting China and demanded an apology. The Danish Prime Minister refused and her response is on record as saying ‘we have freedom of expression in Denmark – also to draw.’
Most politicians and many Danes supported the cartoonist, attributing the outrage of many Chinese as ‘cultural difference.’ The newspaper editor defended that the publication was not ‘poking fun of the situation’ stating: ‘We cannot apologise for something we don’t think is wrong. We have no intention of being demeaning or to mock, nor do we think that the drawing does. As far as I can see, this here is about different forms of cultural understanding.’ When the Corona flag was published, 100 deaths from the virus had been documented in the Chinese city of Wuhan and ‘cultural’ understandings of right and wrong ways to portray the virus, to call its name, to recognize its symptoms, to document its death rates, to protect citizens within closed borders were just beginning.
But it was only January, and our international research team starting a five-year project on how people outside of the formal humanitarian sector respond to crises in Tanzania, had no idea the ways that this Coronavirus would come to affect us. We still don’t. We live quite specifically in Copenhagen, Dar es Salaam and London. But many of us are a bit of an Afropolitan/Cosmopolitan mish-mash by parentage— Chagga/Meru, British/Dane, American/Italian, Kenyan/Tanzanian and we have lived across various countries in Africa, Europe and Asia for work, studies, or by the accident of birth. We are all employed by the state in university jobs. For all of us, these are good jobs. We are comfortable. But, now, we are uncomfortable.
We are in different stages of our careers—from doctoral students to full professors—and these days, as the global pandemic settles over all of us in different and forcibly separate parts of the world, we feel differently the burdens of different responsibilities. One of our team wrote to me: ‘I work like hell while managing a family who is also sick and tired of being locked up… I’m trying to manage 200 staff members’ teaching, supervision and examination responsibilities, plus their externally funded research projects, their problems with spouses, kids and dogs… I want my life back…’
Another of us had to travel upcountry to Kilimanjaro to look after her ageing mother who lives alone on a farm. I imagine her weighing the risks of the transport, the confusing messages from the government about whether anyone should travel, or even leave their house, of whether the handful of cases that had been officially reported in Tanzania were exaggerated hyperbole or grossly under-reported with those of your own mother, and getting on the bus. I would have done the same.
But I am getting ahead of the story, back in January when we were planning how to study earthquakes and floods, refugee camps and their communities and perhaps locusts, we had no possible imagination of the new crisis that would consume us. We held our workshops, discussed the academic literature, planned the plans, drafted the MOUs, enjoyed our barbecue and good conversations and parted ways. Since January in Dar es Salaam, our team’s intellectual energy has become professional, intellectual, political and highly personal about whether to hoard supplies or wear medical masks, how much hand washing with which kind of water could be enough, how would people help each other when the most helpful thing they were told to do was to stay apart?
My flight went from Dar es Salaam to Istanbul. When I arrived in the crowded airport, something felt a little different to me, but I couldn’t quite figure it out. As I neared the gate for my connecting flight to Venice, I noticed that about half of the passengers were wearing medical masks. Thinking about our Danish Corona-flag incident, I remembered to check my cultural bias as I noticed the masks around me. Many appeared Asian and I know it is good hygiene to wear masks when in crowded public places, so I thought it mostly a sign of politeness. Yet, many were also Italians, headed on the plane with me. Not checking my cultural bias so effectively when considering a culture that I now also claim as my own, I remember thinking, ‘hysterical, over-reacting Italians.’
About the author
Lisa Ann Richey is a Professor in the Department of Management, Society and Communication at the Copenhagen Business School.
Insights into the concerns or needs of communities or individuals who may be affected by planned or proposed private or public energy projects or infrastructure projects is important for those who will eventually decide whether the project will be approved to make an informed decision. Such insights can be gained through consultations carried out as part of assessments of the environmental or societal impacts of projects.
This begs the question: what is a good process for stakeholder engagement of local communities and citizens in impact assessment processes? This is a global issue that in recent years has come to be high on the agenda in countries from the Arctic to the Global South.
Consultations as part of impact assessments
Consultations allowing for stakeholder involvement in impact assessments are common in regard to private projects concerning the establishment of mines, windfarms, sun-power farms and dams for hydro-power. The same applies to public infrastructure projects such as airports, roads and ports, which are often necessary for the transport of the products to be gained from private projects.
Societal impacts of projects are typically assessed through social impact assessment (SIA), environmental impact assessment (EIR), or human rights impact assessment (HRIA), or combined approaches such as ESIA or ESHRIA. All aim at identifying and preventing or mitigating adverse impacts and advance positive impacts, of planned projects or extension of existing ones. It is customary and often mandatory for the impact assessment to involve local stakeholders who are or may become affected by the project.
This typically takes place through consultations, which may take a variety of forms to enable public participation in the identification of the impacts of the planned activities. Consultations are organized by authorities or the organization having applied for a permit to engage in the new activity. In addition to environmental impacts, impact assessments often include the project’s effects on a range of broader societal issues, such as health and safety in the local areas, employment, local business and sources of income generation, etc.
The Nordics and many other countries have introduced mandatory consultations of local communities. Some international development banks, e.g. the World Bank, have made certain loans conditional on impact assessments.
Uncertainty about consultations
Despite the great significance of consultations for stakeholder involvement, there is often uncertainty with local communities and other groups of affected stakeholders in regard to what exactly a consultation is, what it entails and what to expect of the process. Moreover, even when consultations have taken place it is not infrequent that affected communities are unhappy with the process or the extent to which authorities take their concerns or needs into account.
For example, Sami groups living in the High North have complained to authorities in Norway and Sweden because they are concerned that windfarms disrupt the grazing areas of their reindeer and, as a consequence, the traditional way of life of the Sami. Authorities and business enterprises can also be unsure about what constitutes the proper process or ‘best practice’ for consultations with affected stakeholder.
Photo: Reindeer at Kvalsund, Norway/ K. Buhmann, 2019
What is a consultation?
Consultations on project activities are carried out to provide an informed foundation for decisions to be made. In providing access to participation in decision-making on activities that will affect one’s life at the everyday level, consultations contribute to a form of very direct democracy and can be argued to be part of the human right to public participation.
Consultations provide citizens with an opportunity to ask questions and express their views on a project. But as is the case for other democratic processes, one does not have a claim to seeing one’s views winning out. This is an important aspect for the appreciation of what to expect of a consultation; how to engage in a consultation process; and the information that authorities, companies and consultants must or should provide when conducting consultations.
It is not infrequent that consultations are conducted by a company involved in the project. A good consultation process marked by sincere dialogue and appreciation of local concerns can build understanding and acceptance of the final design of the project. A process that does not live up to local stakeholders’ expectations of influence can lead to the opposite result.
Accordingly, it is important for involved companies as well as authorities to ensure that stakeholders are given the information necessary to understand and assess how the project may affect them, what their rights are and what they can expect of the consultation process.
Local stakeholders’ expectations and understandings
Our investigations have demonstrated that it is not infrequent for actually or potentially affected stakeholders in a local community to be uncertainty of what a consultation entails or what to expect of the process and result. Others have shown that frustration results when authorities do not seem to take views made during a consultation into consideration in their decisions.
During meetings in northern Scandinavia in June 2019, we met with several inhabitants in Sápmi, who expressed frustration with consultation processes. Sápmi is the cultural region traditionally inhabited by the Sami people, an indigenous people who traditionally live from reindeer herding and fishing. Grazing areas on which the Sami’s reindeer depend are adversely affected by the establishment of windmills and mines.
Sami communities are involved and asked for their views through consultations, but they also see authorities granting permits to put up windfarms and new mines on contravention of the contesting views and concerns presented by the Sami during consultations. Authorities in Norway have granted permission to open a new copper mine in Northern Norway despite the opposing views submitted by the Sami Parliament (Sametinget). The motivation to engage actively in future consultations easily gets reduced, even with those who are aware that a consultation does not equal a claim to one’s views to be granted when central authorities are seen to make decisions affronting local democracy.
Some of our other meetings have shown that when English is a working language or the common ’lingua franca’ in an area that does not have English as its main language, mistranslations may occur and lead to misunderstandings about the process and objectives. For example, the Danish term for consultation, ‘høring’, often gets translated into English as ‘hearing’. This may give unintended associations to the conflict-oriented type of ‘hearing’ that takes place in courtrooms and it’s objective of determinations leading to a winner and a looser, thereby disrupting the understanding of the consultation’s objectives of dialogue and developing workable solutions. Our fieldwork in Greenland and elsewhere offers several examples of this mistranslation.
Consultations and the corporate ’social license to operate’
Consultations can contribute to risks of adverse impacts being identified and addressed before they develop into actual problems because consultations offer opportunities for local stakeholders, including those who are actually or potentially directly affected by the proposed project or project idea to express their concerns.
Because of this consultations not only matter to the longer-term well-being of the local community, but also to relations to the organization that is behind the project giving rise to the consultation.
For example, a consultation concerning a proposed mine matters not only for local stakeholders who are concerned with the mine’s impact on grazing areas or the quality of water, but also for the perception of the company that wants to carry out the project, and for trust in authorities who will be granting the permit or prescribe changes and conditions.
Authorities often delegate the task to conduct a consultation to the company that applies for an exploration or exploitation permit. One the one hand, this may strengthen the consultation process because the company conducting the process knows the project very well and is able to reply to questions of a technical character. On the other hand, participation in the consultation and trust in the process may suffer if local stakeholders, who are worried about contamination or other harmful effects, suspect that the consultation may be influenced by the company’s interests.
‘Fox in the henhouse’
Allowing the company that applies for a permit for the project to conduct the consultation can appear like letting the fox into the hen house.
However, if performed well, the company will obtain a better appreciation of the project’s impacts and will be able to make relevant adaptions. Likewise, authorities often lack both the necessary technical knowledge and other resources to conduct consultations. Companies lack knowledge, for example in regard to local issues are expected to purchase relevant expertise through consultant advice. The company thereby invests in establishing the necessary informed knowledge foundations for the permit to be granted by authorities.
When companies are given the responsibility to conduct consultations that may affect the decisions to be made by authorities, it is important that they carry out a correct and good consultation process that allows local stakeholders to participate at times suitable to them. If a consultation takes place during normal working hours many local stakeholders may decide to stay away because participating would mean a loss of income.
Likewise, participation may be limited if the consultation takes place in a location that requires long transport. Consultations conducted in another language than the local one reduces the opportunity for local stakeholders to engage in a dialogue. Unless technical or health-related issues are explained in a manner that matches the prerequisites of local stakeholders, risks arise that they will not obtain an adequate understanding of the impacts of the project. This will increase risks of misunderstandings and that relevant questions remain unasked, or that relevant concerns are not voiced.
Photo: Sheepfarm in Qassiarsuk, Narsaq area /K. Buhmann 2018
During field workshops in Southern Greenland in August 2018, we were given insights into a diversity of local experience of consultation processes and expectations. The point of departure for our meetings was a proposed mine in Kuannersuit (Kvanefjeld) by the town Narsaq. Greenland’s eight largest towns, Narsaq has a population of around 1,500 and is placed in an area with extensive sheep grazing and tourism based around ruins of the Norse settlers. The mine will produce diverse minerals and rare earth elements, with uranium as a by-product due to high uranium contents at this specific site.
Consultations have been conducted by the company. We met with several sheep-farmers and actors in the emergent tourism sector who expressed concern whether uranium dust from the mine would harm their business, income and human and animal health in the area. Several individuals were frustrated with the process of the consultation, such as meetings taking place at locations or times of the day or year that made it difficult for the sheep farmers to travel to the meetings and take part in them. Moreover, as the Sami noted above, several people in the Narsaq area were basically concerned that the authorities do not seem to take the concerns voiced into account. Several questioned whether the process is accordance with the ideals of a democratic society.
Ups and downs of consultations
When consultations work well they can contribute to a sense of common or including decision-making. Research shows that this underscores the acceptance of the resulting activity, related to what is sometimes referred to as the legitimacy of the activity.
When consultations do not work well they can have the opposite effect and undermine trust, not just in the specific project but also in the company or companies involved. This relates to what is sometimes referred to as the ‘social licence to operate’. The term ’social licence to operate’ relates to the risk of loss, that a company (or companies) run as a result of local protest or opposition to a project for which they have applied for a legal licence.
Even if a company has obtained a legal licence, for example, to undertake the exploration of minerals, local opposition may be present. There are indications that a weak social licence to operate is on the rise in Greenland, thereby affecting the local legitimacy of projects like the Kuannersuit mine in Narsaq (Bowles and MacPhail, 2019).
Greenland is a country based on the rule of law with strong institutions and regulation and traditionally a relatively high level of trust in authorities and their decisions. Observations that in such a society and despite formal requirements, there is lack of trust in consultations and arms-length between authorities and companies conducting the consultations, and that concerns voiced by local stakeholders during consultations are taken seriously and acted upon are severe indications that formal procedures are not sufficient for a good consultation process. Accordingly, it is important to understand what constitutes a good consultation process from the perspective of the individual stakeholder, even if there is still no claim to having one’s way in regard to the final decision.
References
Bowles, P & MacPhail, F (2019) Coming to the Surface: The Social Licence to Mine in Greenland. Paper submitted for international seminar ‘Problems and Perspectives of social responsibility in natural resources exploration, exploitation, and management’, Pskov State University, Pskov (Russia) 23-25 October 2019 (on file with lead author).
About the authors
Karin Buhmann is Professor at Copenhagen Business School, where she is charged with the emergent field of Business and Human Rights. Her research interests include what makes stakeholder engagement meaningful from the perspective of so-called affected stakeholders, such as communities, and the implications for companies and public organisations carrying out impact assessments.
Sanne Vammen Larsen is an expert in the field of environmental planning and impact assessment, with a focus on integration of climate change in Impact Assessment, local processes and social impacts, and dealing with risk and uncertainty. She is employed as an associate professor at The Danish Centre for Environmental Assessment at Aalborg University, Denmark.
Anna-Sofie Skjervedal is PhD from Ilisimatusarfik – the University of Greenland and Aalborg University, and special consultant in public participation within the Municipality of Sermersooq, Nuuk, Greenland. Anna-Sofie specializes in public participation within impact assessment processes in relation to extractive industry development in Greenland with a focus on meaningful youth engagement.
Sustainability – a concept that accompanies us every day: whether it is sustainable consumption, sustainable nutrition, sustainable traveling or sustainable management. What does sustainability actually mean and does it only serve as a means to an end?
Meet oikos Copenhagen
A big topic that concerns a student organization. Founded in 1987 in St. Gallen, oikos has ever since grown into an international student initiative with 50 local “chapters”, as we call it, on almost every continent in the world. With the underlying idea of integrating sustainability as one of the core topics in economics and business, this initiative has now been running for more than 30 years.
With its 48 active members, oikos Copenhagen is one of the largest chapters and contributes to the sustainability discussion at the Copenhagen Business School since 2012. By bringing students of different backgrounds together, the six projects are looking at the topic from various perspectives and are aiming at more sustainability in business and management education.
Image by oikos Copenhagen
The triple bottom line is at the center of our values. Future leaders should be empowered to take change into their own hands. Integrity is a central component of organizational DNA: members stand behind the core values and actively develop them further. For this, our members are in a constant dialogue with each other and deal critically with the topic.
We see ourselves as representatives of the sustainability movement and each fulfills the role of a moderator in discussions with social environments.
That’s the way it should be. On the way there, oikos regularly encounters hurdles. Not only in management issues but especially on a personal, cultural and financial level. Our core values reflect a way of thinking that is becoming more and more recognized but is still not adequately represented and acknowledged by our educational system. Is it even possible to combine sustainability and business at all or is a system change required first?
What if youcan make a change?
I started my time at oikos in 2018 as the Project Manager ofoikos Impact, one of the six projects of the Copenhagen chapter. The project objective is to improve sustainability on the CBS campus.
Our team was negatively surprised that a university in one of the sustainable Nordic countries does not recycle.
In May 2019, we launched a pilot project with two recycling stations on campus. Recently, the campus management decided to launch recycling stations inspired by oikos Copenhagen at every canteen.
A very central project of our organization – Curricular Transformation – deals with the integration of sustainability topics in the curricula of all degree programs. oikos Copenhagen does not intend to create separate study programs exclusively on the subject of sustainability.
We see sustainability as a relevant topic just like accounting, taxation, innovation, strategy and entrepreneurship.
Our team is in touch with the Dean of Education and would appreciate supporting departments, course coordinators and professors in the shift to a greener curriculum.
oikos Career reflects the typical cycle of a student preparing for a career in the sustainability scene. Initially, students are accompanied by the content design of the curriculum vitae. Afterwards, networking event participants have the opportunity to meet potentially attractive employers. With the Career Fair, we optimally made it easier for some students to enter sustainable businesses.
Social Pioneers offers companies, mostly start-ups but also established smaller companies, a platform to teach students that it is possible to profitably combine entrepreneurship and sustainability. Students gain insights into the day-to-day work of companies, find out which obstacles founders have encountered on their way and can clean up the assumption that one cannot be profitable in running a responsible business.
Image by oikos Copenhagen
As one of our most established projects, the annual GreenWeekmarks a week in which the CBS campus and teaching activities are focused exclusively on sustainability. Here we invite guest speakers, representatives of sustainable companies, experts, researchers, and generally interested people to discuss the topic together and to seek mutual exchange. In addition to lectures, keynotes, and panel discussions, we offer workshops on the topic. This year’s GreenWeek will take place from the 10th to the 12th of March 2020.
Since June 2019, I am sitting on the board of oikos Copenhagen with five other members and as the president and head of project management, I am leading the organization.
When requesting more support from decision-makers I often get asked about the competitive advantage the university could expect from oikos’ work. oikos Copenhagen stands for values that are hard to ‘sell’ as a business case.
The general opinion about sustainability is an important cultural barrier for oikos Copenhagen, as it is still considered an annoying side issue for ‘hippie’ students. The challenge is to build and maintain an exchange of ideas and communication about the relevance of the topic. I believe that business schools are an extreme example of this.
Meanwhile, several other organizations are being founded around the topic of sustainability and it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep track of the various initiatives. Questions like: ‘Who works on which topic?’, ‘How can we collaborate on solving the problem most efficiently?’ and ‘How do we communicate that we are working on something?’ pop up.
Another problem is the lacking overlap with other disciplines outside economics. Currently, our members are mainly CBS students. Although we offer room for students from other universities to be oikos members and to participate in the oikos Case Competition, this is not enough to recruit active members from other universities.
In my opinion, this interdisciplinarity is extremely relevant in all sustainability issues. In addition, it would help us to break away from the typical business thinking so present at CBS and to look at the challenge from several perspectives.
To achieve an effective transition towards a greener Copenhagen Business School, including a sustainable campus and direct as well as indirect education in sustainability for every CBS student, we want to be the bridge to bring all actors together to work on a solution.
You are also very welcome to contact me personally via e-mail: president@copenhagen.oikos-international.org.
About the author
Julia Köhler is the President of oikos Copenhagen and a student in the management of innovation and business development at Copenhagen Business School.
Romanticized management concepts often seem to fall short in capturing actual management practices in today’s corporate world. Experiences from other types of organisations may help deepen the understanding of the concepts and the phenomena they are trying to portray.
Romanticized concepts
The management literature is full of concepts, which indicate passion, engagement and community. Internally, terms like corporate culture, values, karma, spirituality, passion and even love and religion express a deep symbiosis between the individual and the organization. Externally, corporate communication is soaked in references to sustainability, citizenship, social responsibility, and community engagement.
If we are to believe the “About Us” sections, corporations today are more about benevolence than business.
There is a problem though.
What happens if you compare the rosy picture of business with harsh business realities? One illustrative example is the talk about management commitment. How does it go along with the fact that the average tenure of CEOs is steadily decreasing? And how do you combine talks about commitment with the recurrent discussions about bonus schemes? It seems like an awful waste of money to approve exorbitant compensation packages to CEOs if they were driven solely by an inner sense of duty and dedication to the job.
What all these management concepts have in common is that they try to give business personality, heart, spirit, and soul.
However, if we are interested in concepts like commitment, passion, and loyalty, today’s corporate world is perhaps not always the right place to look. Probably more than ever before, these concepts seem more meaningful in private life and collectives rooted in the local community.
Like community football…
As part of a survey among Danish football clubs (supported by a UEFA research grant), I asked club representatives a simple, open question: – What is the main reason to be engaged in the club? A few quotations are found at the bottom of the text and well illustrate some of the differences between the corporate world and community sport. A few examples:
Stickiness. Commitment means being in it for the long haul. It is not unusual that volunteers are members of football clubs for 20, 30, and 40 years. When managers drift from one company to another, it serves as proof that they are committed to their career. Not the organisation.
Obligation. The quotations from the survey indicate that commitment to community sport is often linked to an obligation to support the local community and paying back for own experiences as active players.
Community. In community sport, commitment has roots. You are committed to something: – the sport, the people, the club, and the community. It is probably no coincidence that local club names usually refer to a city or a region, whereas the corporate names are mostly faceless abstractions referring neither to activity nor geography.
The real motives
The point is not that club volunteers are all saints dedicated to the greater good of society. Most volunteers probably start off with instrumental motives when they become engaged in club life; either because they play themselves and/or have children in the club. However, for some volunteers club life gradually becomes part of one’s identity and network.
The question remains, however, why the management literature seems so eager to wrap business in romantic rhetoric about commitment, loyalty, authenticity etc. when these concepts often seem to reflect what has been lost rather than what can be found in today’s corporate world. Of course, part of the management vocabulary can be passed off as organizational bullshit, but even the disregard of truth may reveal some truths about our society.
Maybe the abundance of romantic management concepts reflects a dream about relationships in a market characterized by transactions.
A seek for passion in a highly professionalized work life. Longing for a community when people have all become individuals. Whatever the reason, a researcher should restrict the use of concepts to organisations where they have not yet become emptied of meaning.
Like community football…
Table 1: Respondents about the main reasons for being active members of the football club (Translation from Danish)
– ”Make a difference in my local community and support my interest in grassroot football. Jeg am a club person and believe voluntary work should be a ”citizen duty” (…)” – ”After a whole life as active in the club, also as trainer and board member, it was natural to continue (…) and give something back. I think it is fun to work with kids and people, who also give me a lot I can use in the work life”. – ”I like the social life in the club and want to help others in getting the same experience”. – ”I have played football from when I was a kid and had wonderful experiences that I like to hand over to the youth” – ”Because I love football and like to give something back for all the years when I was more on the field than outside. Moreover, it is important that somebody do something in the associations in our community”. – ”Because my kids play in the club and because I think you should make an effort in the associations in the city. And not least because I like to be part of making a difference in the local associations. – ”Have been an active football player all my youth, where I met engaged trainers and leaders. So it is probably to give something back” – ”Help our city in having a place where children, young and elderly can play football under good conditions” – ”Funny, I have asked myself the same question:-) I have been an active player from when I was 8-9 years old, to league player, to old boys – so it is simply paid back time for all the experiences (…) to all the people who made it possible.” – ”Always been involved in football. Somebody helped me when I was playing myself. Think that you have to give something back.” – ”Payback to the club which has given me a lot of good experiences. My contribution to Danish associations – the voluntary brigade!” – ”Lifestyle after more than 30 years of voluntary work. Help young athletes to get a good future. This has been my goal throughout the years and has given me a lot of good experiences” – ”Voluntary work helps in creating a well-functioning local community. For children, it is important to promote active living. And it is also developing you personally. Unity and identity” – ”For many years, I had children in the club and therefore I am involved in the work. I have enjoyed playing football and would like to give others the same experience. ” ”As a child, I experienced a lot of good things. Now when I have the opportunities, I feel obliged to give something back.” ”Have always been a volunteer in community sport and for more than 50 years. Nice to see things grow and do something good for a lot of people. Not least the social element of the club. And you get to know a lot of people and build some friendships for life”. – ”Have been involved in football for 45 years. Good friends and good network. Be part of making a difference on a voluntary basis”. – ”For 20 years, I have played football in the same club. To have a good club I also have to take responsibility” – ”The community and the joy of working with other people who love football”.”Football has always meant a lot to me and I think you have an obligation to contribute to the continuation of football. Every community needs a football club. Everyone should have an opportunity to do team sport which can also be a great foundation for your future life.”
Esben Rahbek Gjerdrum Pedersen is Professor at the Department of Intercultural Communication and Management at Copenhagen Business School. He researches CSR, Corporate Sustainability, Non-financial Performance Measurement, Supply Chain Management and Process Management.
Whenever we think about regulating sustainability problems, we usually think about the here and now or at least about the not too distant future. Even with regard to climate change, which clearly is a problem for future generations, regulators have a time horizon of not more than 30 or 40 years. The Paris Accord is a case in point – it sets targets for 2050. Also, the European Union’s climate strategy sets goals until 2050. But, what happens if regulators need to think about a very distant future?
Consider the example of nuclear waste. The challenge is not only to find a secure location to store the byproducts of burning uranium. The challenge is also, and maybe most of all, to prevent future generations to disturb the deep underground storage facilities, be it intentional or not. This requires “talking to” distant future generations. Chlorine-36 (one of the byproducts) has a half-life of approximately 300,000 years. Compare this to the roughly 40,000 years that the behavioral homo sapiens is supposed to be around – i.e. human beings which engaged in the development of language and early forms of religion – and you get an idea about the scope and scale of the underlying challenge.
Deep underground storage is, at least as of now, the only option to deal with nuclear waste. In the 1980s, some governments considered the idea of simply firing nuclear waste into space. This idea was rejected due to security concerns. Right now, there are few final repository sites for nuclear waste, such as the US-based Waste Isolation Plant in New Mexico.
>>How do we secure these sites from future human intervention? What is needed is a way to communicate with future generations. <<
By definition, the future is unknown and we do not know whether future generations may try to dig at the sites where nuclear waste is disposed. There are many reasons why such underground storage sites could be interesting for future generations, ranging from pure curiosity to a danger that they misread/misinterpret warning signs or other artifacts. What will be a symbol of danger in, say, 150,000 years from now? How does memory survive?
Governments around the world have developed different approaches to talk to the future. One possible US solution includes giant granite markers that are supposed to prevent human intervention (see picture). The US Department of Energy writes:
“Regulations require that waste disposal sites use markers and other controls to indicate dangers and locations of waste.”
One problem with these giant markers is exactly that they are giant and that they are supposed to signal fear and danger. What, however, if signals of fear and danger incite curiosity? The US facility will not be closed until 2050, so there is still time to decide otherwise.
Source: US Department of Energy (Concept: Mike Brill, Drawing: Safdar Abidi, Image courtesy of BOSTI)
If a written message were to be attached to any warning markers, how would such a message look like? One current proposal is to use the message (see below) which is then to be translated into every written UN language. Although there is no consensus on the content and nature of the message among members of the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA), it is clear that such a message needs to be developed.
“This place is a message… and part of a system of messages …pay attention to it! Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. This place is not a place of honor … no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger. The danger is in a particular location… it increases towards a center… the center of danger is here… of a particular size and shape, and below us. The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours. The danger is to the body, and it can kill. The form of the danger is an emanation of energy. The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.”
Trauth, K.M., Hora, S.C., & Guzowski, R.V. Expert judgment on markers to deter inadvertent human intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. United States. doi:10.2172/10117359, pp. F49-F50
Alternative?
An alternative solution would be to adopt a more evolutionary approach. Such an approach would not put the message into granite (or other materials). Rather, it would create “an enduring culture around the nuclear waste depositories.” (Financial Times, 14 July 2016) Keeping the memory alive, then, would be an accomplishment that is passed from generation to generation (e.g., via stories, exhibitions, songs, art). As language and symbols change over time, this evolutionary approach would adapt the message to the contextual particularities that evolve in the future. Such a community-based approach would then rely on locals, who live around a waste storage site, to warn others.
There are pros and cons for both approaches and it is uncertain what regulators will do. However, what this example shows is that thinking about regulating actions in the distant future requires drawing on insights from multiple disciplines, ranging from linguistics to nuclear scientists and anthropologists.
Does all of this have something to do with sustainability? Just think about a world in which we cannot securely seal nuclear waste…
About the Author
Andreas Rasche is Professor of Business in Society at CBS and Associate Dean for the CBS Full-Time MBA Program. He is also Visiting Professor at Stockholm School of Economics. More at: www.arasche.com.
Governments are increasingly being sued by citizens and NGOs for not living up to their sustainability ambitions.
Recently, for example, three German farmers along with Greenpeace arraigned Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government for failing to achieve its ambition to reduce Germany’s CO2 emission by 40 percent in 2020, as measured from 1990. Already last year, the government acknowledged that it would not be able to meet its goal. It expects to achieve a 32 percent reduction. The consequences for the farmers, the complainants argue, are dire in terms of long periods of drought and other extreme weather conditions that threaten to destroy their livelihood.
In other parts of the world – including USA, Peru, Colombia and Fiji – similar cases and complaints are arising. It is difficult not to sympathize with these complaints and their underlying concern for our shared planet.
>>It was therefore remarkable that the administrative court in Berlin rejected what was the first climate complaint against the German government.<<
The complainants, the court argued, have no basis for demanding a specific set of actions from the government whose climate protection program 2020 was described as a “political aspiration”. According to German media, the judge said that society needs to respect the executive power’s discretion and room for maneuvering. Understandably, this ruling has spawned lots of criticism.
Governments are currently not legally required to live up to their sustainability aspirations.
This case calls on us to discuss what it takes to make sure that sustainability aspirations are actually being fulfilled by governments as well as by corporations. First, however, we need to consider whether a different decision by the German court – a decision that backed the claims by the farmers and Greenpeace – would have ensured a faster and more certain goal fulfillment. In a short-term perspective, that is quite likely. Although such ruling probably would have been appealed, it would at the same time have applied immense pressure on the government to launch more intense climate initiatives here and now. The more wide-ranging effects of such ruling, however, might not have been in the interest of the sustainability agenda.
What happens if governments and corporations
are legally forced to walk their talk?
Without exonerating empty sustainability talk and lack of sufficient climate initiatives, it is important to acknowledge that governmental and corporate aspirations serve multiple functions in changing and improving existing practices. While sustainability aspirations may be used to impress and seduce voters and consumers, something that is often the case, they are simultaneously likely to shape expectations and mobilize stakeholders to apply pressure for action.
Here, the level of optimal pressure is crucial. If governments and corporations know that unfulfilled promises and aspirations will be met with damaging court cases that support their complainants, they will be less likely to announce ambitious goals, and more inclined to articulate ideals that they already, or almost already, live up to. In such cases, changes may happen slower than society may desire.
>>Conversely, lack of stakeholder pressure is likely to result in “aspirational inflation” or overbidding, thereby reducing the performative power of aspirational talk to instigate changes.<<
Under
which conditions should we expect governments and corporations to live up to
their own aspirations?
Obviously, the aspirations in question need to engage with salient social, political or environmental issues in order to attract external attention and interest. Most sustainability aspirations are likely to fulfill that criterion.
At the same time, aspirations need to be bold and challenging in order to mobilize conflicting opinions and critical comments.
Without visionary idea(l)s and without critical attention and interest from stakeholders, aspirations are likely to be soon forgotten or perhaps ignored. Lofty organizational aspirations define a collective horizon of excellence that empowers stakeholders – internal as well as external – to expect and demand better practices. To ensure that the aspirations are taken seriously by all parties, they simultaneously need to be announced in public media of high status. Public announcement communicates the formal status of the ambitions to external audiences but simultaneously signals their authority and truth-value to organizational members. Hereby, they have the potential to stimulate both internal and external involvement and activism. Without such conditions, the German climate protection program 2020 might not even have reached 32 percent of CO2 reduction.
Aspirations need to be visionary, bold and public to mobilize pressure for action.
Obviously, the emphasis on consistency between words and action is important in forcing organizations to take their own words seriously. At the same time, such emphasis might breed a growing fear of criticism – a fear that can lead organizations to restrain their announcement of ambitions in the hope of escaping public attention and scrutiny. This risk is important to keep in mind when deciding how to apply pressure on governments and organizations to honor their own words.
Suggestions for further readings:
Christensen, L.T.,
Morsing, M., & Thyssen, O. (2013). CSR as aspirational talk. Organization, 20(3), 372-393.
Font, X., Elgammal, I., & Lamond, I.
(2017). Greenhushing: the deliberate under communicating of sustainability
practices by tourism businesses. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 25(7), 1007-1023.
Girschik, V. (2018). Shared responsibility
for societal problems: The role of internal activists in reframing corporate
responsibility, Business & Society.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0007650318789867
Haack, P., Schoeneborn. D., & Wickert, C. (2012). Talking the talk, moral entrapment, creeping commitment? Exploring
narrative dynamics in corporate responsibility standardization. Organization Studies, 33(5-6), 815-845.
Kim, E-H., & Lyon, T. P. (2014). Greenwash vs. brownwash: Exaggeration and undue modesty in corporate sustainability disclosure. Organization Science, 26(3), 705-723.
About the Author
Lars Thøger Christensen is Professor of Communication and Organization at the Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Tourism is a key driver of development, particularly in areas with rich environmental or cultural resources. The United Nations declared 2017 as the year of Sustainable Tourism for Development, but how sustainable is ecotourism?
Setting off on a once-in-a-lifetime adventure on safari in East Africa for our summer holidays, my husband and I wanted to be as sustainable as possible. We carbon offset our flights, worked directly with locally owned and operated “eco-tour” providers, and engaged in both social and environmental eco-friendly activities. Yet, several moments throughout our trip made me question how eco-friendly and sustainable such travel really is or can be.
To start, what is “ecotourism”? The terms ecotourism, responsible travel, sustainable tourism, ethical tourism, green travel and more have arisen as of late to describe smaller-scale, lower-impact tourism that is qualitatively different from mass commercial tour operations. The term “ecotourism” has many definitions, most of which embody the key notions of supporting and experiencing local environments, wildlife and communities and while minimizing negative impacts. Activities may be environmental, like through small-scale tours of natural environments, or social or community-based – like our visit to a local women’s education and empowerment sewing collective in Rwanda. Tourism represents a major and increasing share of GDP in many developing countries. Indeed, such natural and cultural resources are increasingly being commodified and therefore used as justification for sustainability. According to one popular eco-travel blog,
“Elephants are worth 76 times more alive than dead. When you consider the revenue from wildlife photography tours, luxury safari camps, and other ecotourism offerings, a single Elephant is worth $1.3 million over the course of its lifetime!”
But – how sustainable are such ventures? While I have numerous examples from my two weeks of travels, anecdotes from each country I visited caused me to question how ecofriendly or sustainable these activities really are:
When nature disagrees with what is “eco-friendly”: chimpanzee tracking in Uganda (tourism=8% of GDP). After purchasing the proper permits (which help fund conservation activities), tourists are paired with a well-trained guide to track habituated chimp groups in the forest and are allowed to spend “at most an hour” with them once they’re found. Kibale Forest National Park states that “By going for chimpanzee tracking, you directly contribute to the conservation efforts.” My group got lucky and found one group of chimps within about 15 minutes, including a few on the ground which our guide had us follow through the forest. While I was happy to hang back and enjoy them at a distance, my guide – a fun but bossy, older sister type whom usually got her way – insisted that I get closer, at one point directing me ever closer a chimp lying on the ground. So, closer I went, even while in my head I was thinking “I’m too close!” In an instant, the chimp jumped up, clapped and yelled angrily, and picked up a large branch which he threw at me javelin-style! I jumped back and he moved away. I felt so conflicted, as this seemed to me a striking example of how nature (i.e. the chimp) didn’t agree with how “eco-friendly” the activity was. When I pushed back on other insistencies by our guide to get closer to the chimps, she rationalized that “If you don’t get close and get some good pictures, when you get home, you might not think it was worth it.”
Seemingly, our chimp tracking experience had a strong undercurrent of value-for-money, realized via pictures.
Wild animals may not be so wild: safari in Tanzania (tourism=12% of GDP). Departing a visitor’s center in Serengeti National Park in our safari vehicle, we – along with around two dozen other vehicles with tourists on safari – encountered a pride of lions out on a morning hunt. Large 4×4 vehicles lined the roadside, yet the lions seemed completely unperturbed by our presence, assessing the vehicles as non-threatening and navigating deftly between them. A couple of lions even used the vehicles (including mine) to hide between while they stalked their prey! This was striking to me, calling into question how “wild” these wild animals really are if they’re so used to human activity and presence that they have grown to utilize such intrusions for their own ends. Indeed, the vast numbers of vehicles in the parks and conservations areas seemed overwhelming at times, demonstrating clearly that the notions I had of “wild” animals and preserves as devoid of humans were romanticized at best or nearly inaccurate at worst.
Prioritizing tourists over locals: fast highways in Rwanda (tourism=15% of GDP). The country of Rwanda was striking to me for its cleanliness, orderliness, and structure. For example, the streets were clean (much cleaner than Copenhagen), motorbike taxis are safe and highly-regulated, the economy is booming, and the country has gradually begun to overcome its legacy of genocide to build a business-friendly, women-friendly, corruption-free future. One of the key developments has been infrastructure, including building fast highways linking major tourist destinations. While the speed at which we could travel was an undeniable benefit for us, I was constantly worried about the vast numbers of people (and in particular, children) walking, playing, and lounging by the roadside. The multitude of fast-moving vehicles posed clear safety issues to locals. Seemingly, the cultural and historical importance of roads in connecting communities and commerce had shaped both the orientation of villages (which stretched along the road, rather than deeper back or behind them) as well as how people interacted with them (as a place for playing, socializing, trading and the like). While such infrastructure improvements undoubtedly help communities transport and receive goods, foster tourism and the like, the stark replacement seemingly upended community and local norms and practices.
Sustainable tourism represents an important and apt opportunity to help contribute to sustainable and responsible development, particularly as opposed to antithetical activities popular throughout Africa such as trophy hunting (particularly “canned hunting”) and (irresponsible) mass tourism. Yet, throughout my travels I was struck by how many compromises (in my view) were being made for sustainability, be it the through taming of wildlife, prioritization of economic development at the expense of local customs, or many other examples. Others have expressed concerns too. Harvard hosts an International Sustainable Tourism Initiative, the Global Sustainable Tourism Council has set criteria and performance indicators around sustainable tourism, and an organization called the Travel Foundation has arisen to help bridge tourism with “greater benefits for people and the environment”.
Eco-tourism is undoubtedly a more responsible and sustainable option that many other tourism choices. But, let us not overly romanticize positive impacts of such travel, nor grow complacent over the trade-offs, compromises, and potentially negative impacts that it may have.
In 2015, thousands of refugees arrived in Europe. A recent paper by Kornberger and colleagues (2017) zooms in on the “Train of Hope”, a civil society organization that organically gained exclusive operational command at Vienna’s main train station during this refugee crisis. The paper is a critical reflection on much of the current sharing economy ‘hype’. In contrast to cases of “collaborative consumption”[1], where platform companies such as AirBnB or Uber offer (share?) other people’s resources, this is an exemplary case of engagement and sharing without expectations for direct individual return: a sharing of a concern for social well-being.[2] Sharing then becomes caring.
Hybridity everywhere
What is Train of Hope? It is probably something of a platform and social movement blend that combines various skills like first aid, translation and accommodation services. It is a hybrid organization – and such hybrids seem to pop up everywhere lately. These novel forms of organizing combine different logics, orders of worth, value spheres, organizational forms and/or identities – struggling for a value(s) synthesis.[3] I see incubators, social ventures, ateliers, fab labs struggling to organize, represent and scale – and find their diverse pursuits fascinating, enriching and complementary. They do hybrid organizing in and for society and are frequently novel, digital, flexible, fluid, cross-boundary, multi-jurisdictional, and temporary forms.
Grand challenges & novel forms of organizing
Why now? A potential answer may lie in the types of challenges our societies face. Scholars from the field of management and organization studies speak of “grand challenges”[4] that are complex, uncertain, and multi-jurisdictional phenomena.[5] They represent fundamental, global societal concerns of ecological or social nature that require coordinated and collective efforts of multiple actors, including business firms, governments, civil society, and academia – as well as new forms of (hybrid) organizing.
Together with Emilio Marti (Erasmus University Rotterdam), Hannah Trittin (Leuphana University Lüneburg), and Christopher Wickert (VU University Amsterdam), I have initiated a scientific network that will be funded by the German National Science Foundation (DFG). The network will zoom in over the next three years on the interrelationship between grand challenges and new forms of organizing. Such organizations attempt to tackle the various sustainable development goals from climate change, decent work and sustainable growth, gender equality, populism and racism, societal cohesion, responsible consumption and production, to sustainable cities and communities.
A Janus face
The scientific network takes the vantage point in the assumption that such new forms of organizing often have a Janus face. They are both potential cause and solution for certain grand societal challenges. On the one hand, social entrepreneurial ventures[6], online communities such as Wikipedia and Linux[7], crowd science projects like Foldit, Galaxy Zoo and Polymath[8], and social initiatives like “Train of Hope” promise novel means to tackle these challenges. On the other hand, they also create new ones. For example, crowdsourcing and other new forms of platform-organized work crafted along the surge of the digital economy[9] often fuel the proliferation of precarious, self-employed and low-paid work that undermines social welfare systems and thus endanger modern democracies.[10] Likewise, in her recent book “Weapons of Math Destruction”, O’Neil (2016) describes how the (ab)use of new, seemingly efficient big data management techniques can promote, rather than reduce, racism, inequality and discrimination. Clearly then, novel hybrid forms of organizing promise many opportunities to tackle grand challenges – yet also create new (grand) challenges for society.
Ali Aslan Gümüsay is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Hamburg and Research Fellow at Vienna University of Economics & Business. Twitter: @guemuesay
Bauer, R. M., & Gegenhuber, T. 2015. Crowdsourcing: Global search and the twisted roles of consumers and producers. Organization, 22(5): 661–681.
Boes, A., Kämpf, T., Langes, B., & Lühr, T. 2016. “Lean” und “agil” im Büro: Neue Formen der Organisation von Kopfarbeit in der digitalen Transformation, Working Paper Forschungsförderung. Düsseldorf: Hans-Böckler-Stiftung.
Botsman, R., & Rogers, R. 2010. Beyond zipcar: Collaborative consumption. Harvard Business Review, 88(10): 30.
Ferraro, F., Etzion, D., & Gehman, J. 2015. Tackling Grand Challenges Pragmatically: Robust Action Revisited. Organization Studies, 36(3): 363–390.
Franzoni, C., & Sauermann, H. 2014. Crowd science: The organization of scientific research in open collaborative projects. Research Policy, 43(1): 1–20.
Garud, R., Jain, S., & Tuertscher, P. 2008. Incomplete by Design and Designing for Incompleteness. Organization Studies, 29(3): 351–371.
George, G., Howard-Grenville, J., Joshi, A., & Tihanyi, L. 2016. Understanding and Tackling Societal Grand Challenges through Management Research. Academy of Management Journal, 59(6): 1880–1895.
Gümüsay, A. A. 2017. Unpacking entrepreneurial opportunities: an institutional logics perspective. Innovation: Organization & Management, 1–14.
Gümüsay, A. A. 2018. COMMENTARY: Sharing is caring: From material to socio-material sharing. Academy of Management Discoveries. [Forthcoming]
Kornberger, M., Leixnering, S., Meyer, R., & Hoellerer, M. 2017. Rethinking the Sharing Economy: The Nature and Organization of Sharing in the 2015 Refugee Crisis. Academy of Management Discoveries. https://doi.org/10.5465/amd.2016.0138.
Mair, J., & Martí, I. 2006. Social entrepreneurship research: A source of explanation, prediction, and delight. Journal of World Business, 41(1): 36–44.
O’Neil, C. 2016. Weapons of math destruction: how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. London: Allen Lane.
Few statist policy blueprints on matters pretty technical have captured our collective imagination as has the Chinese Social Credit System (SCS). Announced by China’s State Council on June 14, 2014, and building on experimentation with related mechanisms since the early 2000s, it sets out a hugely ambitious effort, officially described to instil societal trust, integrity and cohesion in a highly complex society. To get there it seeks to combine cutting-edge technology and vast amounts of data to create incredibly granular behavioural profiles of both companies and individuals. Good and bad behaviours are meant to be recorded in and through elaborate rating systems and blacklists, and made public on digital platforms. The expectation is that punishments and rewards will deter deviance and incentivise good conduct in close to any sphere of life.
But the scale, scope and level of invasiveness associated with the data collection effort currently emerging in China should not look so shockingly unprecedented to Western publics once they begin to scrutinize their own backyards. Take the use of social media in the policing of protests as an example. Here the UK government engages in the analysis of big data to predict, pre-empt and respond in real time to a range of issues, including public dissent. Take information on someone’s physical whereabouts as another example. As it turns out the exact location of cell phone owners in 95% of the US is being tracked with the help of all major carriers in close to real time (ok, with a 15 seconds delay) and related data is being available to nudge people’s behaviour for a wide variety of purposes, e.g. by sending them last-minute campaign pitches when they wait in line outside a particular polling station or anti-abortion messages when they are found to linger outside health clinics that carry out these procedures or by sending political messages when they wait in line outside a particular polling station.
Or take the most popular new media companies. They are collecting extremely granular dockets of what their users do, say and who they socialise with on their own platforms. But less in the spotlight they also track users and non-users alike across millions of other websites and across the bulk of the most popular mobile applications, recording anything from detailed surfing behaviour down to the modes of movement – is the user currently cycling or on the train? What’s more, they increasingly merge theses profiles with billions of data points collected by other parties. One leading new media company claims to have access to information on 70% of all credit card purchases and thus approximating a rather totalitarian 360 degree, 24/7 view of user conduct, all the way to – no kidding – the barometric pressure of the users’ environment.
Public and private entanglements
A special matter of concern in the West relating to SCS is its fusion of socialist government and private sector capabilities, technical affordances and interests that make such a system feasible in the first place.
However, long gone in the West are the times when governments were the main purveyors and guardians of data about their citizens. Even the holy grail of state information prowess, the census is not immune to private sector resources and influences. The UK government for example is exploring ways to make its census more cost-effective with the help of other big data sources and acknowledges that this will also have to include privately-held ones.
And there is also a proximity of big tech and political actors on a much more fundamental level. Tech companies evolved into some of the most vocal and most prolific donors and lobbyists on the political scene. An entirely legitimate democratic engagement, but it raises questions about outsize influence given the scale of these efforts. Yet, much more unnerving, the leading social media and tech companies in the US seconded staff as pro-bono experts to become part of the support teams of most presidential candidates in the run up to the 2016 presidential elections, giving them unique insights and connections into the affairs of some of the leading politicians in the country.
Subtle social sorting and weak institutional safeguards
A factor that explains the extraordinary attention that the SCS has received might pertain to the breadth of sanctions and consequences that these early uses have already resulted in. Bad social credit makes it more difficult for Chinese citizens to travel, find a home or get a job. Unfortunately, this is nothing new and happens all over the world. Under the label of risk- management citizens whose criminal record or financial credit history contains some irregularities have long been subjected to inferior treatment when renting a home, looking for a job or seeking insurance.
In principle, the protection of individual rights and limits on state over-reach and surveillance in most western countries relies on a host of elaborate institutional safeguards, checks and balances. While some of the egregious examples referenced above have actually been remedied when they were exposed, thus attesting to some degree of efficacy of legal and broader societal protections, other incidences have not been resolved and are somehow even seen as acceptable.
So shifting some of the attention and moral outrage that is being directed towards the Chinese SCS back to the home turf, and to investigate what troubling data practices and regulatory gaps that are germinating over here is more than warranted. In the wake of the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandals this has begun to happen and more commentators are noting the troublesome parallels between Chinese SCS and emergent data surveillance and discrimination issues in the West.
Enter the urgent business of business
And this is where business and its social responsibility comes in. Because one of the fundamental differences between the SCS and many issues in the West is that the disciplinary power, control functions and discriminatory implications of big data-driven social scoring are not primarily organised and instrumentalised through government, but deployed by the private sector and working their way into everyday lives.
Egged on by a growing populist Tech-lash, a whirlwind of new regulatory efforts and undoubtedly also in many cases by a deeper sense for doing no harm, the new tech companies have begun to take note, moving from denial to a gradual re-examination of some of their working principles, practices and normative anchoring.
Yet, the proof is still in the pudding whether this is a substantive change of minds and hearts. The Performance of the new tech sector on some standard measures of corporate integrity and transparency is still mediocre and lagging many other established industries.
The ways to a much more comprehensive, proactive and transformational integration of corporate social responsibilities into the strategy and practice of tech will have to coalesce around a broad band of issues, ranging from responsible stewardship of data, platform power and emergent artificial intelligence capabilities to bread and butter CSR issues such as responsible corporate political activity and supply chain and subsidiary integrity.
But a big tech embrace of a substantive and comprehensive notion of corporate social responsibility is urgently required to stave off the threat of an even more populist, illiberal, unequal, misogynistic and fragile future in which the tech industry is more part of the problem than a solution to it.
Dieter Zinnbauer is Governing Responsible Business Research Fellow at Copenhagen Business School in the Department of Management, Society and Communication.
Hans Krause Hansen is Professor at the Department of Management, Society and Communication at Copenhagen Business School. He teaches and researches about various aspects of public and private governance, including corruption, anti-corruption and transparency regimes in the global North and South.
In the second week of May 2018, the architectural and design worlds were abuzz with reviews of the new green glass giant looming over the Copenhagen harbour – BLOX. There have been critiques of design, urban planning, participation processes, and more, but perhaps less likely to emerge in your social media and news feeds is the nature of organizational development and experimentation designed into the very heart of BLOX.
Physical, organizational and cultural diversity under one roof
BLOX as a physical building is composed of various building elements but is also socially composed of diverse elements. The property is home to the old military storage buildings at Fæstningens Materialgård, still stunning with their yellow-washed walls and currently under renovation for becoming part of the BLOX family of offices and meeting spaces. The new building houses top-floor apartments, a large fitness centre, the Danish Architecture Center (DAC), the Danish Design Center (DDC), and last but not least, BLOXHUB, the new building industry innovation hub.
These last elements are where the organizational potential lies. Firstly, there are the yet-to-be woven together threads that draw across DAC, DDC, and BLOXHUB, opening up for potential co-conferences and exhibitions that not only blend spaces, but blend disciplines. Secondly, BLOXHUB is a non-profit organization of around 150 members (and anticipated to grow) aiming to stimulate innovation for sustainable building and urbanization by facilitating co-working, co-creation, and experimentation. Beyond the potential stemming from sharing working spaces, the hub supports the organization of seminars and conferences and offers access to labs that can serve as platforms for new products or services, including, for example, epiito’s virtual reality (VR) lab and UnderBroen’s maker-space equipment. And thirdly, nested in BLOXHUB is the Science Forum, hosting a suite of built environment researchers.
Smart Building research among industrial researchers
Now the Science Forum is one of my offices-away-from-the-office. Since the start of this year, we are a cluster of nine industrial researchers – seven PhDs and two postdocs – with projects concerning “Smart Buildings and Cities” (read here about the formation of the cluster). Launching from my postdoc project with VELUX and CBS on smart building business model innovation, we have already identified several crossovers and synthesis possibilities within the first months. This begs the question: what happens when you combine companies, universities, and industrial researchers into an innovation hub? How does this change how research, investment, and innovation are done? And how does this change how industry can relate to academia?
With user-friendly tech to better indoor climate
With VELUX, the starting point is smart device automation, but based on the people who live and work in buildings (read: all of us). But even if the indoor climate is ubiquitous and something we all experience, we also take it for granted and may not even notice how we are feeling unless something disturbs us. Even more importantly, the more serious health consequences of a poor indoor environment stem from factors that cannot necessarily be noticed just by paying attention, including for example, high CO2 levels from poor ventilation or off-gassing chemicals from unsustainable building materials. My research investigates both how smart devices can be designed based on an organization’s inquiry into the user experience, but also how the nature of these user-driven digital devices can change the way traditional manufacturing companies do business.
Much more to expect in the future of BLOX
The project has only been running a few months, and BLOXHUB has only been open not even a month – so there will be many more exciting developments and synergies to report in the future. In the meantime, swing by the great glass giant and experience the shifting landscape around Langebro. You can visit the most recent DAC Exhibition “Welcome Home” looking at how the meaning of home has shifted historically and continues to adapt in Denmark, and your kids can have a go at the new playground on the city-side of the building. A new bicycle and pedestrian bridge is planned for 2019, as well, and then the connections will go even further; from connecting industry and researchers to connecting the city on a level we all can meet.
Lara Anne Hale is an industrial postdoc fellow with VELUX and Copenhagen Business School’s Governing Responsible Business World Class Research Environment. The 3-year project is part of Realdania’s Smart Buildings & Cities cluster within BLOXHUB’s Science Forum. It builds upon her PhD work on experimental standards for sustainable building to look at the business model innovation process in organizations’ adaptation to the smart building business. Follow her on Twitter.
Social media has become a battleground where NGOs with global perspectives, corporations and new digital social movements all fight to shape public opinion in the pursuit of social change
Though often criticized for the low quality of online deliberation, social media has become one of the primary avenues for diffusion of information, and increasingly an embedded part of our infrastructure
This calls for more research on how social media is changing various aspects of our lives and how we, through collaborative efforts, may foster change
Approximate Reading Time: 2-3 min.
Social Media for Social Change? The impact of social media on the way we live our lives is undeniable. Recent statistics suggests that there are more than three billion active social media users. This makes social networking sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter some of the most influential contexts regarding diffusion of information and they are, to a certain extent and as many of us would admit, emotionally contagious. This has created a digitalized world where social media has ‘given a voice to the people’, as civil society can use social media to express concerns. However, the debate about whether expressing concerns through social media leads to any substantial change is only just at the beginning.
What is your take on this? Is social media cultivating global collaboration and facilitating a pursuit for a better world, or instead disrupting the debate by cultivating polarization and fragmentation? – And are these two arguments necessarily mutually exclusive? Join me as we explore these two sides a bit further to understand how social media might be the key to pursuing social change.
The two sides of the debate
On the one side of the debate, we have the argument that social media facilitates constructive, powerful and impactful digitally networked action to pursue social change, as for example seen with the Arab Spring and recently the #Metoo movement. This follows the argument that these online platforms are evolving from a tool for social interaction towards becoming an embedded part of our infrastructure and some of the primary contexts for collaborative efforts.
On the other side, we have the argument that simply enabling collaborative efforts is not enough to promote social change, as social media is argued to be “ripping apart the social fabric of how society works” (former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya. The challenge is that social media is heavily criticized for disrupting the pursuit for social change by cultivating echo-chambers, destructive polarization, fake-news and filter bubbles which hinder constructive online deliberation. This critique is further substantiated by critics arguing that social media cultivates non-committal activism (often referred to as slacktivism), which can thwart efforts to achieve social change, as ‘likes’ or ‘shares’ still can’t be eaten, and sharing or liking an image of a starving child doesn’t solve any issues by itself.
Why you shouldn’t disregard social media’s potential The keywords here are “by itself”, because while the isolated ability for social media to cultivate social change is questioned, social media’s ability to connect millions of disparate actors and facilitate engagement in collaborative efforts cannot be denied. Social media has the innate ability to link individual contributions and facilitate large-scale collaboration that leads to a better outcome than what each individual could have achieved on his or her own as for example illustrated by how Change.org and SumOfUs.org use social media to fight social injustice and socially irresponsible corporations. Fostering polarization might very well be destructive, but it can also be constructive and facilitate social change by inspiring stronger commitment within specific groups, which might help ‘fuel’ collaborative efforts towards more substantial change.
These two sides are thus not necessarily mutually exclusive, as the coherent large-scale collaboration potentially benefit from emerging through more polarized communities that can give a ‘voice’ to otherwise squelched and ‘minor’ opinions, as seen with the #BlackLivesMatter-movement and the #Metoo-movement. The key to using social media in the pursuit for social change is therefore to harness the ability for social media to link disparate like-minded actors and facilitate coherent large-scale collaboration, as illustrated by the Occupy Wall Street-movement as well as the Tunisian uprising that sparked the Arab Spring. The ability to connect globally disparate actors based on perceived shared values and some form of collective mind-set is thus one of the primary ways that social media is changing the pursuit for social change.
Social media has become a battleground These examples illuminate that social media has become a battleground where NGOs with global perspectives, corporations and new digital social movements all fight to shape public opinion on the pursuit for social change. The important thing to note is that we are seeing the beginning of change. Implications of business practices are becoming a matter of civic concern, as evidenced by how consumers use social media to express their concerns and continuously attempt to influence corporate behavior in the pursuit for a better world. Social media is thus at the core of pursuing social change, as consumers can circumvent the traditional ‘gate-keeping’ function of traditional media and directly interact with organizations, which to a certain extent have empowered the digitalized civil society.
The critique of social media should however not be disregarded. Echo-chambers can be highly destructive, and social networking sites can create personalized ‘bubbles’ where your exposure to information is determined by the platform, as illustrated by the recent Facebook-data leak suggesting that data was harvested and exploited in an attempt to reshape political deliberation.
However, using the strengths of social media to unite in numbers has undoubtedly created new opportunities for us as consumers to affect public opinion towards an increased emphasis on social responsibility and social change. The next question is then how these collaborative efforts lead to substantial change, potentially by influencing the behavior of organizations, which is something I will continue to investigate in my research going forwards.
Daniel Lundgaard is a PhD fellow at the CBS Governing Responsible Business Research Environment. His research is mainly focused on the impact of the digital transformation, in particular, how social media has ‘given a voice to the people’ as a way to challenge norms and dominating discourses, and thereby changed our world and influenced the relationship between business and society.
Can companies get CSR efforts “right” by engaging in dialogue with communities, thus improve relations and their impacts?
Reality shows that companies tend to engage with a few selected community leaders only (who normally receive certain benefits), which creates internal tensions
Indeed, consultations processes offer a platform for companies and governments to fragment and divide resistance to their projects
Approximate reading time: 3-4 minutes.
In this post I reflect on the past ten years of working as a practitioner and researcher on the issue of CSR, company – community relations and conflicts. Overall, it is striking to see the gap between the optimism held by practitioners and the pessimism of those affected in communities when it comes to the companies’ socio-economic and environmental impacts. A common response from those working in CSR is that the company’s intentions are good and sincere. Though I have little reason to doubt this point, unfortunately nice intentions from companies, governments, and NGOs carry little currency for communities affected by extractives and natural resources projects.
CSR, Dialogue and Engagement as solutions to territorial conflicts with business The term CSR has lost much credibility within business and practitioner circles, who these days tend to associate the term more with philanthropy. Instead, practitioners have shifted over to preferring terms like sustainable business, sustainability, community investment, shared value and even human rights and business to label their efforts with nearby communities. Nonetheless all these concepts have in common the aim to bring more good than harm whilst creating genuine win-win scenarios with the communities. A key concept, that cuts across all these terms of implementation is that of dialogue and engagement.
Dozens of well written guidebooks and manuals or toolkits have been published in recent years by multilateral institutions such as the UN and World Bank and governments on community engagement, dialogue and investment by business. The theory underpinning this is that by engaging in dialogue with communities, companies can then get it right, meaning improve relations and their impacts. It is this assumption that I have tried to interrogate over the past ten years whilst visiting 11 mining and four hydropower affected communities across Brazil, Chile and Peru in addition to multiple conversations with relevant officials from business, government, civil society and activism.
What does CSR and Engagement look like from those who are Engaged? In short these well intended policies are seen as decisive in nature by those on the receiving end. In every community I have visited the saddening common denominator so far has been the fragmentation of community fabric due to the arrival of these megaprojects armed with their well-meaning CSR strategies. The divisions take place mostly along the lines of those who are willing to accept and engage with the CSR and those who are outrightly opposed to the megaproject on the grounds of the impacts to their culture, spirituality, ecology and livelihoods.
At first communities often start out as collectively opposed to the siting of the project, however, exhaustion and fatigue set in over time as governments and companies stubbornly persist with imposing the project with an increasing number of CSR related carrots. As time passes the dejected phrase I often hear in communities is “we are tired, we just want the conflict to end and make the most of this bad situation. The company has the backing of the state, and we don’t seem to have the power to reject it.” Consequences of these community divisions have included the rupture of relations amongst nuclear family members, neighbours, the eviction of tenants from their rental accommodation and even threats of violence and to personal security.
Next I have found that the group that chooses to give the company a chance and engage with it soon loses its faith and trust in the process as the promised jobs and benefits do not materialize. The companies tend to engage with a few selected community leaders only (who normally receive certain benefits), which creates further internal tensions. I have felt these tensions and mistrust grow with each repeat visit to a community.
The companies are also keen to follow best practice community investment approaches as espoused by leading development practitioners. A key message from this group of professionals seem to be well captured by the mantra “give a man a fish and he eats for a day, but teach him to fish and he eats forever.” This has translated itself in practice into a plethora of training or capacity building courses delivered by companies to communities around entrepreneurship. Typical courses I have encountered include biscuit making, handcraft and beauty/hair salon courses, which community members found of limited worth. Residents stressed they all had immediate needs of having a fish for the day as well as learning how to fish, but that eating for the day mattered most and this is frowned upon by companies and CSR professionals. In short you can imagine the complex internal social and political struggles that now take place between and amongst community residents who are now divided into different groups that have no trust in one another.
What do companies say about this? The corporate response to the abovementioned critique has normally been to refute the level of internal divisions, stating it was worse before they arrived. Practitioners often claim that the CSR standards themselves are not at fault, but they just need to be better implemented. Poor implementation of CSR would explain the gap in its portrayal. Implicit in these responses is that the projects should always go ahead, but in a more responsible manner, one that satisfies all stakeholders. Perhaps it is time for business and authorities to assess whether their projects should be sited in communities where rejection is outright from the beginning.
So what’s the solution? That’s what counts! This is the question I am slapped in the face with by practitioners in the CSR field. The implication here is that, if one has no better solution then we should permit the lesser evil to continue. Of course the role of the state is fundamental in these situations and this cannot be done justice in a short blog post. My main nugget of advice to all those working with or studying CSR would be to view its implementation primarily from the perspective of affected actor. Taking a bottom-up approach will undoubtedly add more complexity for CSR professionals. However, it may also lessen the grievances experienced by communities and workers. In the case of indigenous peoples we should look to international legal instruments from the UN such as the Declaration on Indigenous Peoples from 2007. Here the UN state the importance of self-determination of communities and this affords them the right to veto certain projects in their territory. Unfortunately to date companies together with governments have been able to astutely maneuverer themselves around international indigenous peoples rights by imposing consultations on them where they have the perfect platform to fragment and divide resistance to their projects.
The complexities outlined above need to be taken into account by all those who wish to work and research CSR in the community in natural resource related contexts. I would like to emphasize that this post is not a dismissal of all CSR related attempts. However, I would like to raise the flag that in general the sentiment that CSR is used to manufacture consent is strengthening, and practitioners would be wise to consider real as opposed to reformatory changes to CSR. It would appear there are no more new bottles for the wine.
Rajiv Maher is Assistant Professor in Critical Management Studies at Université Paris-Dauphine and is a current research fellow at the Governing Responsible Business Research Environment, CBS. He researches the impacts of CSR related initiatives in communities affected by extractives and natural resources projects.
Pic by Rajiv Maher, edited by BOS. The community in Los Choros village, Chile are mostly fishermen, farmers or working with eco-tourism. They are highly opposed to the Dominga mine project. The community from Higuera however is very much in favour of the mine. Yet, earlier this year in August 2017, the government rejected the mine due to the impacts it would have on the marine reserve hotspot of Punta de Choros, where most of the worlds humboldt penguins spend time.
There is a much needed conversation on what stronger role business could and should take in the realm of open data
If business decides to put its powerful voice behind efforts to open up government data everyone could win
More effective accountability and democratic empowerment via open government/open data would make a lasting contribution to the common good, put corporate political engagement to work and reaffirm the readiness of business to live up to its role as good corporate citizen
Approximate reading time: 4-5 minutes.
Two worlds apart? Big excitement in the corporate world about big data is mirrored by big excitement in the NGO world about open data, the nearly world-wide move towards making data held by governments and the public sector more broadly available and usable. Big data is often described as the new oil, an essential commodity powering the economies of the near future. Quite similarly open data / and open government are celebrated as the new oil to lubricate and fuel democratic participation and accountability.
At first sight it looks like these two types of data-related euphoria should really complement each other and make business an enthusiastic proponent of open data. Yet, there still seems to be quite a substantial disconnect between these two spheres. The corporate world is primarily thinking about data in proprietary terms. The more exclusive, the more lucrative this asset class is going to be. The NGO world in contrast frames open data as a public good opportunity. The more freely available the more valuable it is – socially and politically. These contrasting world views are arguably one of the main reasons why interest by business to actively engage in the open government, open data movement appears to be rather tepid. At the same time, efforts by civil society to actively reach out to and proactively engage business are perhaps also not as enthusiastic or systematic as they could be.
Yet, I would suggest, that this narrative of an intrinsic antagonism between the business and open views of the new data era is a rather false and counter-productive one. It masks how interwoven both domains actually are, delays a much needed conversation on what stronger role business could and should take in the realm of open data.
Multiple inter-linkages So here just a set of observations to help soften and shake up this rigid narrative and to provide a flavor of the things to come with regard to the potential engagement of business on open data issues.
Public data has long been an important raw material for business. Commercial information brokers that build on, make more accessible and add further value to publicly available data have a long tradition (think phone books). And even in the early digital days before the enormous scale, scope and potential of open data had even appeared on the horizon the empirical picture was astounding: assessments for Europe, for example, put the overall commercial value of public sector information as input to economic activity at an amazing EUR 200 billion or 1.7% of total GDP fur the EU 27 (Vickery 2011).
Businesses have been early protagonists in the open data world. It is rarely explicitly appreciated that business also has a very active history of pushing open data boundaries. As it turns out it was companies that pioneered some of the food labeling and related data initiatives that helped establish new expectations and regulatory standards about what types of data should be collected and made openly available for food items, since consumer trust was essential for rapidly industrializing food industries and a competitive advantage could be gained by first movers on that front. (Schudson 2015).
Business are major users of open government mechanisms. It is companies –not journalist or citizen groups – that are by far the main user of freedom of information requests to help push more government held information into the open in the US (Kwoka 2016) – and turned these data trawls into lucrative trading opportunities (Gargano et al. 2016).
Where could this go next? All this bodes well for business to take a much stronger interest in and help advance the open data/open government agenda.
What could be priority areas for such an engagement that are both critical to the open government idea and also provide some tangible benefits to business? Here just two examples:
Open contracting and open procurement: two groups of information that are central planks of many open data/open government reforms and that can help provide a level playing field for market access, push out unfair collusion rackets and more broadly provide a much broader set of valuable market intelligence when interacting with and devising bids for government clients, something that can be of particular importance when operating outside the home market;
Data on beneficial ownership of companies/property/land, as well as disclosure of assets/income/interests by senior government officials: a major push is underway by open government advocates to press for more data collection and public disclosure in these two areas, which are also essential for companies and what is often very resource-intensive due diligence/compliance in vetting new clients, identify conflicts of interest, guard against self-dealing etc.
If business decides to put its powerful voice behind such efforts to open up government data everyone could win. First such a corporate commitment would amount to a step change in the momentum for deepening such initiatives and expanding them to more countries, now that the lower-hanging fruits have been picked. Secondly, it would provide opportunities for business to lower costs for market intelligence, risk-management and compliance, while yielding indirect benefits in terms of fairer competition and lower entry thresholds. Third, the opening of these new data troves makes it possible to build new business models that curate, re-combine and apply advanced analytics to these datasets and offer related information services. This in turn would help to mitigate the chicken and egg problem for open public data ecologies where public authorities are hesitant to commit over a longer horizon and invest steadily in open data as long as they cannot see widespread use, while companies are reluctant to invest in the use of these data sources as long as they do not expect reliable maintenance and sustainable upkeep (Jetzek 2017). Finally, a stronger business commitment to supporting the open government / open data movement and the concomitant impact on more effective accountability and democratic empowerment would make a lasting contribution to the common good, put corporate political engagement to work for both company as well as societal interests and reaffirm the readiness of business to live up to its role as good corporate citizen.
What do you think? So how to deepen this engagement? A good starting point is to unpack in a bit more detail where interests most strongly overlap, which types of open government and open data are most interesting for business. Any insights? What types of open data do you think are most useful for business? What is your company already doing in this area? I would love to hear your view on this, particularly if you are from the business world. You can take this 5min survey to share your opinion – and I will report back on aggregate findings in a later post.
Dieter Zinnbauer works on emerging policy issues and innovation for Transparency International (TI) and is a current research fellow at the Governing Responsible Business Research Environment, CBS. He has held various post-doctorate research fellow positions on technology, governance and development issues. Prior to joining TI Dieter worked for more than 10 years in Asia, Africa, North America and Europe as policy analyst and research manager for a variety of organizations in the field of development, democratization and ICT policy, including with UNDP, UNDESA, and the European Commission.
’Make Feminism Radical Again’ – An unlikely fashion choice in some quarters but, yes, a fellow passenger at Copenhagen airport was donning a T-shirt bearing just this slogan.
The wearing of political slogans always sets off questions in my mind, as I try to imagine what goes through the wearer’s mind.
‘What shall I wear today? Ah yes, I’m flying, I think that the fellow passengers need a dose of radicalization’. ‘Wednesday: shall it be women’s rights or animal rights?’
‘I need a white T shirt with these jeans. Ah well, this is the only clean one left in the drawer. It will do.’
Or maybe they are really committed and wear one of these shirts every day?
Or maybe they just don this shirt without a second thought?
The questions in my head wouldn’t stop.
‘When was feminism radical?’
‘What does she mean by radical?’
‘What would it mean for women?’
‘What would it mean for society?’
‘What would it mean for me?’
Gender – a salient concern in CSR and business ethics literatures? As it happens Kate Grosser, Julie Nelson and I had just put the finishing touches to an essay on the place of gender in the business ethics and corporate social responsibility academic literatures over the last quarter of a century.
So it was really great to see this topic that we had been weighing up in our usual academic ways was ‘out there on the streets’… or at least in the security check area…
Kate, Julie and I had found that the subject of gender had enjoyed some status in this literature (as measured by the number of articles published on the subject in the leading business ethics and corporate social responsibility journals).
The de-radicalization of feminist theory to an empirical variable On closer analysis we were struck that, whereas the original debates in these literatures about gender had been inspired by the core of feminism (notably the concerns with gender relations and gender equality) this focus had subsequently appeared to get weaker. Only 20% of the papers in our study focused on this feminist core, and the remainder used gender as a variable in studies of attitudes towards social, environmental or economic issues, or of ethical dilemmas.
Moreover, we were surprised that only 15% of the studies addressing gender issues in the business ethics /corporate social responsibility literature were theoretical papers (and the majority of these referenced theory from outwith feminism). While empirical papers are clearly a vital part of the literature, theorization is necessary for evaluation of empirical work, and for framing the way academic subjects, in this case feminism, are thought about and studied in the empirical work.
We also noted that the empirical literature was overwhelmingly focused on countries in the ‘Global North’ despite many of the greatest challenges in gender relations and equality being in the ‘Global South’.
Reflecting on our academic journey into feminism, I wondered if what my fellow passenger meant by wearing that slogan was … ’Make feminism radical again by focusing on gender relations and equality’. But when I had finally plucked up the courage to ask her… she had gone.
P.S. My friend Lauren tells me that there are other feminist T-shirts available
… but none are quite as to the point as that on my fellow traveller…
Malcolm McIntosh passed away on 7 June 2017. We lost, as Sandra Waddock recently remarked, an intellectual shaman – someone who cared deeply about the state of the world and who was thinking so wonderfully enthusiastic, “wild” and unconventional about corporate responsibility and sustainability.
I first met Malcolm at the 2ndPRME Global Forum in New York in 2010. Ever since we had many thought-provoking exchanges about academic and non-academic matters, most often around the importance of health and happiness. What always struck me was Malcolm’s desire to make a difference; he not only was an intellectual shaman but also an academic entrepreneur.
He belonged to the few of us who knew how to navigate the worlds of “practice” and “academia” (whatever these labels may mean). Malcolm recognized that good research is about creating an impact; it is about changing peoples’ behavior and making them think about whatever problem we address through our scholarly work. While the academic community has recently started to discuss impact (mostly instrumentally driven by the UK REF system), Malcolm more pragmatically engaged with impact in his own way. He founded the Journal of Corporate Citizenship which until today puts practical relevance and impact high on its agenda; he created one of the first research centers on what back then was coined “corporate citizenship” at the University of Warwick; and he collaborated early on with the UN Global Compact and thereby helped to enact a global action network dedicated to corporate sustainability.
Malcolm did all this because and despite of the omnipresent pressures that surround the academic system, such as publishing in “A” journals (which usually have a quite narrow definition of impact). He published many influential books and articles on different topics related to corporate responsibility and sustainability. He co-edited the first book on the UN Global Compact titled “Learning to Talk” (Greenleaf, 2004). The book captured very well the zeitgeist of the CSR/sustainability movement – back then, it was very much about different societal actors learning to engage in meaningful discussions. Later, Malcolm looked at macro-level change when publishing “SEE Change – Making the Transition to a Sustainable Enterprise Economy” (together with Sandra Waddock, Greenleaf, 2011). The book skillfully outlined how systems-level transformations can happen and what it takes to move from organizational-level efforts (like CSR) to a reform of the whole economic system.
Malcolm’s work lives on in the work of the many people he inspired throughout his life (including my own academic work). He worked relentlessly to open doors for new ideas to take shape. He will be missed but he won’t be forgotten, because every entrepreneur leaves a trace. Malcolm left many of them…
Andreas Rasche is Professor of Business in Society at Copenhagen Business School and Visiting Professor at the Stockholm School of Economics. He can be reached at: ar.msc@cbs.dk and @RascheAndreas
‘Have fun and laugh. I had a ball. Sorry to go early. Laugh a lot, it oxygenizes the brain just as well as yoga. Malcolm McIntosh
Malcolm McIntosh’s words, quoted in an announcement of his passing on June 7, 2017, sent out by his family, epitomize how he lived his life. I first met Malcolm in the late 1990s when he was forwarding the then-new conversation about corporate citizenship through conferences and a center at the University of Warwick and later at Coventry. He came to academia non-traditionally, through careers in TV production and journalism with the BBC, with a PhD and lifelong interest in peace research that spread out to understanding corporate responsibility and citizenship and, more recently, political economy. In the early 2000s, he founded the Journal of Corporate Citizenship and served as its editor multiple times over the years, including several stints as part of team of guest editors, guiding it to be an outlet for big ideas that bridge from theory to practice, from empiricism to thought leadership. He was the founding director and Professor at Griffith University’s Asia Pacific Centre for Sustainable Enterprise in, Brisbane, Australia, where he served for five years.
Malcolm was a wonderful thinker, a polymath who followed his own path towards making the world a better place. A global citizen of the first order, there was little that he didn’t know about—from music to philosophy to sustainability to how the world actually works. He was a true intellectual shaman, and a serial social entrepreneur, who was always thinking forward to the next big thing that could serve—or perhaps save—the world. He was a pioneer in the conversation about corporate citizenship, political economy, sustainability, and human rights, who pulled few punches in telling it like he saw it, yet always did so with the most amazing sense of human and personal insight.
Malcolm fully embodied the three tasks of the intellectual shaman: healing, connecting, and sensemaking the service of a better world. As a healer, he was profoundly concerned about the state of the world, ecological, politically, and socially, and worked tirelessly to make a difference through his teaching, writing, and consulting. As a connector and global citizen, he bridged across boundaries of all sort, bringing people together in conversations and convenings that informed and enlightened. As a sensemaker and prolific author of more than 25 books and numerous articles, he engaged ideas and shared his insights as a public intellectual. And all of this work aimed at making the world a better place for all.
Malcolm recognized early on the potential of the UN’s Global Compact and, later, the Principles for Responsible Management Education, as levers for positive change in the world, engaging with those initiatives in a variety of ways. He always ‘thought forward,’ systemically, and with a keen sense of the need to bring about change in the world for the better. He brought many of his ideas to fruition in two of his last books Thinking the Twenty-First Century, and The Good Society, which will be published posthumously by Greenleaf.
What I will most remember about him, I suspect, is his spirit, his sense of life, his philosophy that we should, as his website says, ‘Love life, love the plant.’ Most of all I will remember his sense of humor, his prototypical intelligent British wit, his ability to laugh at his own situation, including facing his illness over the last years of his life. He was not afraid to die and he approached that possibility with the same wit he approached everything else. He was not afraid to die because he lived fully and enjoyed every minute of it, including his long marriage to Lou and his wonderful daughters Cleo and Sophie, the work that he did, and his many, many friends around the world. I will miss his spirit, his energy, and his healing presence in our world and also know that the good work that he did will live on.
Words by Sandra Waddock, Boston College, June 2017
A recent article in The Washington Post informs us that Donald Trump is affectionate about the works of Ayn Rand (1905-1982), often referred to as the ‘high priestess of selfishness’. He shares this affection with several of his members of cabinet. These include Rex Tillerson, Secretary of State, Andy Puzder, Secretary of Labor, and Mike Pompeo, Director of the CIA. The speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, has also been an outspoken supporter of Rand, although he has recently distanced himself from her philosophy, citing its atheism as a fundamental concern (Rand famously viewed altruism as an evil form of self-sacrifice, and thus spoke against Christian values of giving and regard for others).
Trump has said that he identifies with Howard Roark, the main protagonist of Rand’s The Fountainhead, while Tillerson has listed Atlas Shrugged, Rand’s magnum opus, as his favorite book. The Fountainhead was made into a Hollywood movie in 1949, starring Gary Cooper as Roark, and this can of course lead one to speculate whether the president actually read the book or ‘just saw the movie’. This brand of speculation would, however, be typical of a tendency to ridicule rather than take Rand’s philosophy, its continued popularity and the influence it continues to have on the rich and the powerful seriously.
To name but a few examples of the ridicule: In 2009, the animated TV show The Simpsons had Lisa Simpson comment to her mother about The Fountainhead: “isn’t that the bible of right-wing losers?” In 2012, president Obama commented that Rand’s work is something that is picked up by teenagers that are “feeling mistunderstood”, and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver in 2014 dedicated a dismissive installment of “How is this still a thing?” to Rand’s work.
In popular treatments of her philosophy and the cult of personality that surrounded her, notions of ‘selfishness’, ‘greed’ and ‘objectivism’ are thrown around, but rarely with much argumentative depth. In scholarly circles, her work is often rejected as overly politicized ‘bad philosophy’, full of logical fallacies (and false distinctions), failing to constitute a coherent and closed system of thought (in spite of such pretense), and thus not deserving of more serious engagement. The literary form she uses in her major philosophical works also does not count in her favor among scholars. It can easily be dismissed as philosophical pulp fiction.
What I want to question here, however, is whether or how Rand’s work is deserving of more serious critical attention and treatment by those who are opposed to it. The idea is not to offer support or claim neutrality, but to lay bare the arguments presented in order to better understand and challenge their continued allure. In other words, Rand’s thinking continues to be an ideological force to be reckoned with, and we need to understand why and how it influences people, not least those in power.
Importantly, following Boltanski & Chiapello, the term ‘ideology’ should not be construed in the reductionist sense often suggested by Marxist uses, e.g., as a moralizing discourse intended to conceal material interests and constantly contradicted by practice, but rather as shared beliefs that are bound up with actions and hence anchored in reality. In other words, ideology must be considered as a practical concern with real effects (however loosely coupled with ideological precepts), not just as a mask veiling reality, a mode of deception or a sham.
Admittedly, Rand’s thinking is a hostile world to enter for non-believers. There are a number of reasons for this (apart from the endurance required to get through the 1100+ dogma-soaked pages of Atlas Shrugged). Objectivism is a closed philosophy, related to her mind’s work and reflecting her ideal world, a world that is often far removed from most people’s experience of the modern world. In spite of strong objectivist claims regarding Man’s mind and its relation to reality, her loyal followers often tend to ignore the obvious and to misrepresent reality when defending objectivist dogma. Objectivism is often associated with extreme/far-right political views, self-consciously flying in the face of political correctness and common morality and peddling the same sort of dystopian and polarizing view of the deterioration of American society that Trump campaigned on. However, the real ‘truth’ of Rand’s philosophy is to be found in her work, not in how various minions choose to carry her torch.
In Atlas Shrugged (1957), she creates a world in which industrialists, i.e., the prime movers, the makers, the traders, constitute a morally superior class of people. Opposed to these are the second handers, the takers, the looters, moochers, rotters of society. The industrialists represent everything that is good and capitalism everything that is proper in this world, but successful business people and proper market principles are persecuted by forces of envy and mediocrity operating under the flag of social responsibility. In Rand’s world, social responsibility is nothing but a battle cry for politically correct, collectivist-egalitarian and ultimately totalitarian schemes that are meant to keep great business people down by means of government interference and regulation. It is the way of the loser, who cannot make it in a man’s game of real market competition and who cannot cope with the innovative brilliance of the chosen few. Social responsibility and social welfare and progress are promoted by morally corrupt, hateful and obviously inferior people, whose actions are bereft of proper reason and any meaningful relation to reality.
In her depiction of an America that is falling apart due to lack of reason and totalitarianism, (and which in many ways more resembles her native Russia), Rand provides scathing critiques of the corrupted – and corrupting – forces of politics, government bureaucracy, science and media, the tyranny of public opinion and the lack of reason among the common people. Opposed to all this rot stands capitalism. To Rand, and her followers, capitalism pure and unadulterated is the solution to all imaginable ills of society. She offers a philosophy according to which selfishness and greed are virtues and nobody should ever feel ashamed about being successful.
We do not have to accept the claims of Rand’s philosophy or to sympathize with its underlying ideology to acknowledge that her dystopian world view has some resonance in regard to emla what we are living through right now. Besides, there is the matter of the continued influence of her thinking on the rich and the powerful. Atlas Shrugged portrays business people (the right kind) as innocent and by and large powerless victims of persecution and scapegoating perpetrated by a list of shameful characters ranging from government bureaucrats to spouses and family members. For one of the more extreme expressions of this message we can turn to a 1962 lecture where she asserted that: “In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessman” (quoted in Weiss, p. 53).
It is interesting how this perplexing narrative of persecution apparently continues to inspire extremely rich and successful people (the 1%) – in spite of all their success and all their well-documented power, and the fact that the societal view of business people and business as an institution has changed dramatically since Rand wrote her book.
In sum, Rand’s thinking is probably more a part of the problem than the solution to many of the crises we are facing, but it nevertheless call for more serious engagement – even by those radically opposed to her extreme view of the virtues of capitalism and everything that stands in its way. As the saying goes: keep your enemies closer …
Steen Vallentin is Director of the CBS Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility (cbsCSR) and Associate Professor in the Department of Management, Society and Communication at Copenhagen Business School.
I do not need to inform you about the major events of 2016: Devastation in Syria, Brexit, President-Elect Trump, drug wars in the Philippines, and so on. For a refresher, see The Guardian’s summary of 2016’s top global development stories. In the past month, news sources and social media alike have been flooded with tales of The Evil 2016, anthropomorphizing the entire year into a wicked, plotting villain. Curses, angry music, and obscene memes have been directed at the year. Certainly, as a sustainability researcher, I have been taken aback by the threats to environmental and political progress made thus far. But is it enough to leave these events in 2016 in hopes of a better 2017? Would we not have a better chance of a brighter 2017 if we considered our own opportunities for action rather than blaming an arbitrary bracket of time?
Activism for Sustainability
On the one hand, there was social sustainability progress in 2016. For example, it has become more socially and scientifically acceptable to link environmental disasters to the aggravation of political conflicts, such as in the case of extreme drought preceding the Syrian civil war. On the other hand, in some sense, I believe the essence of active citizenship in sustainability aims has been lost on us. In the groundwork definition of sustainable development, participation is highlighted as a founding pillar: political and financial equality is desirable for encouraging the participation of all citizens in development efforts; the broader participation of individuals, scientific bodies, and non-profit organizations improves societal knowledge and thus development; and local, community-driven citizen participation is needed to contextualize sustainable development. But say that you are a citizen who is relatively politically and financially privileged; has knowledge and a voice to express it; and is rooted in some form of community, be it urban, rural, or something in between: What does it mean to participate? To be active? Well, part of being an active participant is that you have the freedom and responsibility to determine for yourself the nature of your involvement. That said I would like to offer some considerations for 2017 and beyond, based on recent citizen engagement developments.
Nudge or Fudge?
The past several years have seen a rise in the design of choice architectures that encourage “good” — including sustainability-oriented — behaviours. In other words, organizations, including governments, are working to set up decision making scenarios in ways that nudge you to make decisions they consider best for society. General examples of nudges in choice architecture include signs at your work entrance gently reminding you that choosing the stairs over the elevator is better for your health, or more aggressive devices that are programmed to shut off your apartment’s electricity when you have exceeded a desired usage level. Default rules, another form of choice architecture, refer to which choice is set up automatically for you before you make any active interference: such as whether you are signed up for your company’s 401k plan, or whether you demand renewable energy sources (as opposed to fossil fuel) from your utility company. When these scenarios are designed to favor environmentally-friendly settings, they are referred to as green default rules. Nudges work by suggesting choices for you, and default rules work by setting the automatic choice for you. Note the theme “for you”. Organizations are becoming more sophisticated at understanding and developing these techniques, as can be seen in the 2011 report for the UK government on influencing behaviour through public policy.
Oh hold up! What do these people think they are doing influencing our choices?! Well, unfortunately we have a tendency to not choose as we intend to when left to our own devices. For example, the green gap is a disappointing consumption pattern referring to the disconnect between the environmentally-friendly products consumers testify they will buy and what they actually purchase. We are also victims to the status quo bias, the phenomenon wherein we are most likely to accept whatever we are already accustomed to (harking the idiom “go with the flow”, ironically born out of the hippie era). As such, there certainly have been successful choice architecture outcomes, including with health food and waste disposal. I would also, however, ask you to question the longer-term, larger-scale impacts of allowing yourself to be distracted from active participation. For example, there is already some question as to whether Trump’s election was in some part due to Clinton’s label as the “status quo” candidate, furthering the assumption that business would carry on as usual and triggering a drop in voter turnout, down 2% from 2012 and 5,6% from 2008. Rather, it is those disrupted in their lives who dislodge the status quo, crack the mold, and form a new playing field.
The surprising thing to me about the recent popularity of choice architecture is failure to acknowledge that the choices being offered are not born out of the blue, dreamed up in a peaceful organizational slumber. Nay, these sustainability visions come from the same kind of dedicated activists who have been breaking the mold (arguably in the “bad” way) in 2016. For example, it is brilliant to simply automatically sign up everyone in the neighborhood to order electricity from renewable sources. But without a vigorous citizen-driven activism driving renewable energy first after the Oil Crisis 1978-9 and again with increasing climate change awareness, there would be no renewable energy production sites, no technologies for their construction, no advancement of their efficiencies towards market competition. It took a lot of work to offer the transmission of solar power to our comfortable couch-side lamps and laptops. Or another example is nudging communities to plant their outdoor spaces as bio-diversity supporting, fresh-air and nutrition-producing urban gardens, or nudging consumers to purchase locally produced groceries. But without the desperation of food shortages and community-driven reorganization of food access post-World War II, the concept of urban gardens and community-supported agriculture (CCS) would not exist.
Break on Through to 2017
Not surprisingly, such sustainability activism exists in 2016 as well. Here in Denmark, prevention of food waste has reached the national agenda and promises to expand further. All this, triggered by the persistent activism of Selina Juul, founder of the organization Stop Spild af Mad (English: Stop Food Waste), and the joining of more activists, such as 17-year old Rasmus Erichsen, founder of the app Stop Spild Lokalt (English: Stop Waste Locally), in what can be considered a social movement. Looking back again on 2016, we have reason to feel disrupted, enough drive for action. Please continue to engage in social media and write up your own blog posts about it, but also find yourself a practical, positive action that you can take. For me, I’ve chosen to pursue academic research in sustainable building (not practical!), but also to volunteer for trash clean-ups in nature areas and reduce my hot water usage at home. You do not have to make it your career, but you can take action for 2017. You can use your participatory power and be an activist for creating different, better choices for all of us in 2017.5, 2020.3, 2046.7, and beyond.
Lara is a PHD Fellow at the Department of Intercultural Communication and Management at Copenhagen Business School. Her PHD research is part of the Marie Curie network Innovation for Sustainability (I4S), with VELUX as a partner organization.
The recent US election exposed two major intersecting fault lines in America: the deep divisions across racial, ethnic, and gender groups and the feeling of being left behind by the economic forces at work resulted in pervasive anger and frustration and gave room for hate crimes across the country. If left neglected, this situation could soon shift to produce an era of social and economic turmoil that could make the Arab Spring look mild in comparison.
The key to break the pattern, as this article will explore, is in mobilizing all sectors of society to create good quality jobs and get wages moving upward again for all groups. In short, America needs a new social contract attuned to the needs of today’s workforce and economy that is, once again, based on mutual respect.
America’s social contract broke down in the 1980s and the failure to replace it is a root cause of the wage stagnation, anger, and political divisions the election campaigns brought to the fore. With the election of Donald Trump and a Republican majority in Congress, we should suffer no illusions that the process of building a new one will be led from Washington, reaching for the goal to ‚Make America Great Again‘.
Laboratories for Democracy
However, this does not mean progress can’t be made via a different route. Indeed, history shows that most social and economic shifts don’t begin with a national policy, as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously indicated: When treating stated as our “laboratories for democracy”, they function as places where innovations and social movements are born and tested for their ability to address emerging tensions. Ideally, those tensions turn into national policies before they escalade and explode.
In fact, groundwork to America’s last social contract was laid by workers themselves. In the first few decades of the 20th century, Sidney Hillman, then the leader of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union, organized immigrants and developed the basic principles of collective bargaining. Around the same time, women like Susan B. Anthony and Carrie Chapman Catt led the suffragettes movement to get women the right to vote.
With the help of Professor John R. Commons, who has been called the intellectual father of the New Deal, and his students of the University of Wisconsin, state level innovations had been shaped, leading to states like Wisconsin, Massachusetts, and New York enact unemployment insurance, minimum wages, and overtime protections. He and his students went to Washington to assist President Roosevelt write the innovations into the national laws that helped end the Great Depression. In turn, that laid the foundation to spread new wage norms through collective bargaining that succeeded in moving wages up in tandem with productivity to achieve an expanding middle class.
Now that the old social contract ultimately broke down, it is time to begin the long process of building a new one fitted to today’s economy, workforce, and society. The good news is we are once again seeing substantial innovations in workplaces, local and state government, businesses and education settings that, if accelerated and expanded, could identify the key features of a new social contract.
The Workforce is leading the way
Grassroots initiatives are on the rise, and with the help of labor organizations, community coalitions, and what we might call worker centered entrepreneurs, achievements like the “Fight for 15″ are made possible. In this labor movement, the Service Employees International Union and a community coalition in Seattle have now induced another eighteen states to increase their minimum wages by varying degrees.
These developments pressured low wage companies like Walmart, McDonalds, and the Gap to increase entry level wages above the required minimum. IKEA has even gone a step further in committing to meeting objective standards for paying a “living wage” in all its locations.
Other new worker advocacy groups like Coworkers.org are using information campaigns and social media and other technology-aided apps to induce companies like Starbucks to reform scheduling practices to provide more advance notice and certainty over work schedules.
Unions and worker centers around the country are working together with immigrant groups to enforce their labor rights and protest wage theft (failure to pay minimum wages or overtime) while opening up their apprenticeships to more women, minorities, and immigrants and supporting efforts to promote “common sense” economic strategies that provide good entry level jobs and career ladders.
Lastly, a number of entrepreneurial tech-ventures are starting up around the country. One of those is Workers’ lab, a start-up incubator helping workers to leverage technology and platform-based strategies as a means to build bargaining power. Out of these and yet to be invented strategies might just come the next generation tech-savvy, grass roots labor movement.
How can business help?
Business leaders are slowly beginning to get the message that the era of prioritizing shareholders over all else may be coming to an end. The intense focus on maximizing short term shareholder value might account for one of the principle reasons the old Social Contract broke down.
The good news is there is growing consensus that this needs to change. No one less than J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said last summer that he would raise his employees’ wages because doing so is a good long term investment. He and his peers should apply the same logic advising their clients. By encouraging long-term investing, they could help end the short-termism that has held back corporations from investing in the workforce training and research and development that are so essential to job creation.
Wall Street could also help lead the way and perhaps in concert with labor by creating infrastructure funds that will generate a good rate of return for their investors and for the economy. Business, labor, economists and President-elect Trump, recognize the need and value of repairing the nation’s infrastructure. This constitutes a perfect opportunity to demonstrate the power of bipartisanship, public-private partnerships, and business-labor cooperation.
Some main street business leaders are already doing their part by competing on the basis of high productivity and high wage strategy. Research evidences both good profits and the creation and support of good jobs for American workers. This type of employers emphasise the importance of collaborating with labor and workforce partners.
The role of education
In today’s knowledge based economy, education leaders need to be counted as among the key stakeholders critical to building and sustaining a new social contract.
They and some philanthropic leaders active in funding education innovations are embracing what evidence tells us: There is nothing more important to educational attainment than a good teacher. And in states as Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Illinois, teacher unions and education leaders are working together as partners to expand learning time, support teacher development, encourage online courses and helping workers refresh their skills in a fast-changing wold. These efforts should be extended across the country.
If knowledge is power, then these educational innovations will equip today and tomorrow’s workforce with the tools they need to meet the challenges they are bound to experience over the course of their careers.
Seeds of a new social contract
What’s needed next is to bring these different stakeholder groups together to learn about what is working and how successful innovations can inform national policy makers.
Here at MIT, we are doing exactly that. Our efforts are meant unite innovation leaders and stimulate research, share experience and come up with solutions based on learning that are meant to be diffused.
Together with the Hitachi Foundation, we have started a “Good Companies-Good Jobs Initiative” that is supporting efforts to improve relations and better manage and resolve workplace conflicts. As we expand our efforts, we hope to serve as a catalyst for further innovation that will show the nation’s leaders what a new social contract might look like.
But more than anything else, we all should continue to encourage local activism, protest, and innovation. It may take a serious eruption of the now visible fissures to generate positive action in Washington.
Last Tuesday’s election in the US has left the world in shock. As entertaining, astonishing, at times surely revolting, the Trump performance has been during the campaign – I do not know anybody that would have predicted him actually making it into the Oval Office. But that is history now.
I found myself always harboring rather ambiguous thoughts and sentiments regarding Trump’s ascent. But being surrounded by folks where even the slightest empathy with Trump made myself look like a total moron – I learned to keep my feelings to myself, not at least in the hope I somehow got this wrong.
To begin with, I was not at all surprised to see Trump win the election. In some ways, this outcome is the logical conclusion of more than three decades of neoliberalism in the US. It did not help that his opponent had virtually nothing to offer to counter the very anxieties that carried Trump over every however unlikely hurdle during the campaign.
With all the shock and depression now seeping through the mainstream media there is one thing I really cherish and find extraordinary about this election: Trump won this election as an, albeit wealthy, outsider – against the united front of the media, the political class and the moneyed elites in the US and beyond. It helped that he is wealthy but that is not the main point. Even fairly balanced media outlets, such as the New York Times or the The New Yorker, over the last months just read as thinly disguised pro-Hilary propaganda; out of 55 main newspapers in the US, only one (1!) endorsed Trump. And yet he won the election. This should give other forces in many liberal democracies something to ponder. It is possible to beat ‘the system’, and in some way I am a little confused why this enormous victory of bottom-up democracy is not celebrated for what it is.
Trump is a symptom
Of course the main problem with Trump is Trump-the-person. He did all but help himself in giving fodder to the public to embark on an almost two-year project of character assassination. But again, I happen to have a different take on this. Did he tell a lot of lies? Of course. But then let’s not forget why Bush and Blair started the Iraq war. Lying is an integral part of US politics (and I am not even talking about his opponent’s husband when dealing with his White House romance). Trump said preposterous things about women. But in some way he just bragged about things that actually no one enacted more by the book then his opponent’s husband – covered up and tacitly supported by her for decades. Did he say racist things about Mexicans? Yes, but then let’s have a look at the 2.5m ‘aliens’ the Obama administration deported between 2009 and 2015. Did he say absurd things about Muslims? He sure did, but again, what he expressed is already social consensus in the US. Just think of the many people bumped off airplanes in the US recently just because they ‘looked’ or ‘spoke’ like Muslims (i.e. terrorists). Oh, and he has no experience in political office, right? Have we all forgotten that the same was said – on good grounds, at that – of his predecessor? Yes, he was talking about ‘bombing the sh** out of ISIS’. But wasn’t that exactly what his Nobel Peace price winning predecessor actually did for eight years by chaperoning a global drone war that killed almost 5,000 (incl. ca. 500 civilians)?
All I am saying then is that the media still tries to paint him as ‘unamerican’, as against the current political culture, as a pariah. The truth is, however, that he just unapologetically verbalised what is common practice all long. The United States – and I am talking about the political and economic system, as well as about half of the population – are an inherently racist, bigoted, violent and unfair country these days. As much as one may reject Trump as president – I think that his presidency just tells the true and accurate story about the moral morass the country has gotten into over the last three decades. It is ugly, but it is nonetheless not just attributable to one symbolic person.
Which leads to a big, often ignored or belittled core question. Trump did win the election because about half of the American electorate agrees with him. The real question we have to ask is what happened to the oldest democracy, a country that – 70 years ago – pacified Europe and gave the continent a new political setup based on enlightenment values. We just have to acknowledge that these United States are history now and that the country has been indeed on a steep decline in cherishing some of the core values which made it the world’s only superpower in the second half of the 20th century.
The America today is the America of ‘Dogville’, ‘Manderlay’ (as my Danish readers would appreciate) or ‘A History of Violence’, rather than ‘Independence Day’ or ‘Forrest Gump’. Trump’s majority is not just angry white men, as some want to make us believe. He represents a much wider fraction of American society as some of the poll’s analyses now painfully unveil.
So, what is the agenda then?
So do we have to be afraid of a Trump administration? On balance, I would be rather relaxed here. Not that I am not worried about some aspects. The main of which would be that many of the things he said during the campaign – as much as I am convinced he said them just as a good marketer and with an eye on his target constituency – can have rather ugly effects on common people. He legitimised racist and violent language, and it is no surprise that we have, for instance, seen hate crimes rising. If what I hear from friends in the US just these last two days is anything to go by, his words have legitimised and empowered views and behaviours which for a long time were at least publicly suppressed. He has opened a pandora’s box, for sure. And whether this spirit can be put back remains indeed an open question.
Beyond that, I feel very much reminded of Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. I remember people saying back then that ‘Reagan is a 2nd rate actor, delivering a 1st rate performance at playing a 3rd rate president’ and stuff like that. Reagan was initially a joke and a lot of what he said (‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’) wasn’t political correct or even sane at the time. I would really doubt if a three times divorced New York socialite will actually embark on some of the socially conservative projects (with regard to race, immigration or women’s rights) which popped up so frequently in his campaign.
In some way the crucial litmus test of his presidency will be if he will be able to actually address the social and economic worries of his core constituencies. These issues are somewhat similar to the Sanders agenda, and the agendas of many other left wing political movements throughout the world. Will Trump be able to substantially improve the living conditions of middle- and working class Americans, regarding income, access to healthcare, education and other welfare state features? It is here where he has a real chance to become ‘Reaganesque’ – albeit in mostly reversing many of the political changes Reagan initiated in America and which ultimately brought the country to this dismal place.
So what to watch then in the business-society context?
So like any good paper, I should finally make the sharp turn on this blog to what editors tend to call the ‘managerial implications’ ☺ (I hope you get the joke…).
Actually, there are a few. My main point here is really that as much as Trump’s presidency can be seen as a disaster, it is just a brutally espoused symptom of a failed economic and social experiment. What really puts me off is that even now post election many smart minds seem to run away from that conclusion and rather engage in a lament of the candidate’s horrible character (as much as I agree, watching him and his lot on the stage Wednesday early morning was ugly- but that’s a distraction).
It takes the sleazy, ‘bridge and tunnel person’ (as Manhattan establishment figures still derogatorily refer to him) from Queens to defeat a political system that is largely in the pocket of the moneyed elites, using corporations to make sure their class interests are dominating American politics. It is here that Hillary’s defeat makes me happy indeed. With hers and her husband’s massive obligations to the corporate world, we would just have continued the same system over and over again, behind the veil of the wonderful advancement of a woman president (btw, exactly the same thing we have seen with Obama, just replace ‘woman’ by ‘black’).
Trump’s victory then spells out one simple fact. Capitalism (in the form we have cultivated it in the US and globally for the last four decades) and democracy are just not compatible. Democracy is more than just giving people a vote every four years. As T.H. Marshall has posited ‘the fullest expression of citizenship requires a democratic welfare state’. Democracy only works if the electorate has some basic provision of a dignified life, a basic sense of participation in determining their material living conditions, as well as the basic education that allows informed and critical political choices.
It is fair to say that the neoliberal project has infringed, if not abolished, these basic elements of a vibrant democracy. Let’s not forget, the ascent of the US as a superpower in the second half of the last century was built on the New Deal, on the idea that a vibrant democracy (in the face of the rise of fascism and communism in other parts of the world) needs a basic welfare state with the result of what we have come to know as a ‘middle class’. The people that elected Trump all represent the part of American society that no longer enjoys these pivotal elements of a democratic community. That is why they fall for simple answers (be them racist, bigoted, religious, misogynist or otherwise).
One of the main driving forces behind these shifts has been the interests of capital, the interests of the wealthy elites, enacted through their control of private corporations. Culminating in the Citizens United ruling of the Supreme Court, we have witnessed the creeping and dominant interests of private corporations capturing the political process in the US over the last four decades.
It is indeed the pivotal role of private corporations which in my view is one core problem that the Trump victory epitomises. I am actually not pinning too much hope on the Trump administration itself to change anything substantial here. After all, with a republican controlled congress, and a democratic ‘opposition’ which is largely in the pockets of the corporate world, I don’t see any hope for substantial change. The Obama administration was probably trying the hardest in recent history to move the agenda, be it in consumer protection, access to healthcare or regulating the financial sector – and we all know how well that went. The Affordable Care Act was a healthcare reform, that did not substantially infringe corporate interests and control. It very well might ultimately be considered as one of the key drivers that energized Trump’s base – given the substantial rises in premiums during this last year.
No, I would, first of all, urge any scholar, any public commentator, anybody able to make a contribution to the debate we have to have here, to, first, not just dismiss this week’s election as an outlier and something that can mostly be attributed to one crazy person. It is of the essence to see this election result as part of a fundamental crisis of western democracies – and the US is just again the showcase here. Brexit and the rise of the far right in Europe is just another symptom of the same problem.
What is the underlying problem here?
The core problem is the role of private corporations in the governance of society. On a macro level this implies re-thinking the big questions about regulating markets, most notably financial markets and labor markets. It also involves re-thinking basic institutions of welfare provision. This might also include a debate on new forms of division of labor between the private and the public sector. Since for technological and (geo-)political reasons it will not be able to just turn the clock back to the 1950s new forms of non-employment based welfare models need to be discussed and developed, including things like basic income and other new institutional arrangements. We basically have to invent new – or reinvigorate to some degree old – forms of income redistribution, through intelligent new forms of taxation and other ways of addressing the vast inequalities. Mind you, the urge to change our current model of capitalism is no longer some sort of leftist or anti-corporate agenda. It is meanwhile becoming more and more clear also to business leaders that the current capitalist system, and particularly the role of corporations within it, is no longer sustainable. As some of those CEOs, such as Dominic Barton (McKinsey), Paul Polman (Unilever) or Ratan Tata (Tata Sons) argue, we have to ‘re-imagine’ capitalism in substantial ways (see Kipping/Barton/Horvath 2016).
On a meso level, we need more thorough work on a re-conceputalised role of the corporation, and its essentially political nature. As Robert Reich outlined time and again, the corporation in the US is just dominated by two interest: ultimately by shareholders, i.e. capital, and on a more instrumental level, by consumers. And this is still the accepted model, more or less, in business school academia and teaching. Not that we have not seen efforts recently to change this (see for instance Baars/Spicer 2017). This effort though has to be sustained, broadened and conducted in a more interdisciplinary mindset.
Ultimately, on a micro level, the relation between corporate management – across all disciplines – and the public good has to be re-introduced as a legitimate field of inquiry. So far, most of the business school research never really transcends the traditional management model of corporations being just economic actors. That even applies to the subfield on which one might pin the highest hopes: research in corporate (social) responsibility, ethics or sustainability. But even this subfield is largely constrained by a thinking in business cases and even new offshoots, such as the debate on ‘political CSR’ never quite embraces a political role of business beyond these constraints.
For a short blog such as this one, there remains of course a lot more to say. I just wanted to put some thought triggers together. Quite often – and in my view quite falsely – commentators have evoked the comparison with Germany 1933 when evaluating Trump’s rise to the presidency. Donald is no Adolf, sorry, and Washington 2016 is nothing like Weimar 1933. But if you twist my arm, I would allow one parallel here. The historically most successful reaction to the depression of the late 1920s still is the New Deal. While I am also aware that Trump is no FDR, this situation of apparent crisis should, first of all, enable a more open and honest discussion about the reasons for Trump’s ascent. And we can all agree that this IS a crisis indeed. But we should capitalise on this crisis to develop new ideas around the way we have organised social and economic life in liberal democracies. The one certainty we can take away from this is then that the role, functions and impact of private corporations is at the heart of such a debate.
Exciting times then for business related scholarship!
References
Baars, G. & Spicer, A. (Eds.), The Corporation: A Critical, Interdisciplinary Handbook. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press
Barton, D., Horvath, D. & Kipping, M. (Eds.), Re-Imagining Capitalism : Building a responsible, long-term model. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press
Dirk Matten is Hewlett Packard-Chair in Corporate Social Responsibility and Professor of Strategy at Schulich School of Business, York University, Toronto. Since 2015, he visits CBS as a research fellow. You can visit his website and drop a tweet @dirkmatten .
The proposed subtitle for this blog was ‘Why is it more acceptable to say ‘f**k’ in the classroom than ‘feminist?’’ but I thought it might be a bit too strong for most of your inboxes! But indeed, after some time working here in Copenhagen as an assistant professor, and living as a self-professed feminist, it is a question that has continued to perplex me.
No, the swearing doesn’t bother me, although many non-Danes find the embrace of swearing in the classroom, at work, on the radio and in adverts either hilarious, or offensive (by way of glorious coincidence, see the striking poster from Kvindemuseet (The Women’s Museum). Rather, I have on various occasions been told that using the other ‘f-word’, feminism, is taboo. Especially in the classroom. What’s interesting is that a warning over dropping the f-bomb in front of students usually comes from older friends and colleagues, both men and women. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not walking into a lecture theatre ranting about women’s rights, when what is scheduled is a session on corporate governance. But I AM researching and teaching about corporate social responsibility and sustainability, both topics that are inherently gendered and political. Sometimes it makes sense to mention the dreaded F-word in those contexts. And I think the fear of feminism as something we might talk about in business education comes from two places: a misunderstanding of what feminism is; and perhaps complacency about its need in modern Denmark.
Everyday Feminism
The word ‘feminism’ often provokes expressions of mild horror. It conjures up grainy photos from the 1970s of women, living au natural in communes, ‘hating men’ (as one of my students put it). Others have suggested that being feminist involves rejecting high-heels, or make-up, or the desire to be a mother. When you put all that together (witchy, bra-less, slightly-wild single woman in a homemade dress?) I’ve no wonder my sessions on feminist theory might sound alarming!
For many people worldwide, this stereotype persists. Yet if we tone-down this characterisation, at it’s most basic, feminism is the fight for human beings to live their lives without their gender or sex hindering them from achieving what they wish to. This fight is hundreds of years old. Feminism is political, economic and social. It involves governments, international organisations, businesses, NGOs, and most crucially ‘normal’ people going about their everyday business: calling out that off-colour joke at lunch; tweeting about overly sexualised advertising; writing about online abuse or raising their children unconfined to gender roles. And yes, all whilst wearing make-up, or getting married, or being a feminist man- if one chooses to.
A feminist utopia?
So that’s my take on feminism. Perhaps my surprise at the rejection of feminism was because I assumed that in one of the world’s most gender equitable countries everyone would be a feminist. But perhaps because Denmark is perceived in this way, the need for feminism appears to be over. Unfortunately this doesn’t quite seem to be the case.
Last week Denmark fell another four places down the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gapratings, from 14th to 19th place. Sweden, Finland, Norway and Iceland take the top four places, but their Nordic neighbour Denmark continues to lag behind. In 2014 an EU survey revealed that Denmark has amongst the highest prevalence of domestic violence within the EU. Yet these surveys reveal only part of the story. The fantastic Everyday Sexism Denmark post testimonies from women experiencing (you guessed it) everyday sexism, often in their workplace or school. All of this suggests that whilst on paper things often look good for women (for example, in excellent parental leave policies, and a growing number of women in senior roles), the reality is that men and women are often held to differing standards, and that this become so normalised, so ingrained, that we might assume everything is fine. Activists such as Emma Holten are pointing out that things aren’t equal, or equitable, and that perhaps Denmark has become disillusioned in this regard: “Our idea that everything is great and fine in terms of human rights and respectful discourse is actively combating our ability to progress in these areas.”
The feminist future
Emma Holten is symbolic of young Danish feminists using their own experiences, often with wit and humour, to reignite a conversation about gender equality. Slowly there’s been a resurgence in feminism in the last few years (albeit a lot slower than in the UK and USA), facilitated by social media. Facebook pages and Twitter accounts such as Everyday Sexism, Overheard Sexism in Denmark, Young Feministsand others collect thousands of likes, post and shares. I’m happy to report that closer to home Copenhagen Business School now has a feminist society enthusiastically run by students. Online lives spill into our offline lives, and within my classroom there is a genuine interest in discussing the role of feminism today- in politics, in the media and in business.
Feminist responsible business education
Some might argue we need a new term for the fight for gender equality, or that feminism excludes other, equally important social injustices. But the F-Word isn’t going away, it’s getting louder. Feminist theory offers lenses into understanding how social change happens, and continues to happen. The history of feminist activism demonstrates the politics of the everyday. And feminism is a living, breathing phenomenon that is being adopted once again- by people as diverse as Beyonce, Ban Ki Moon and Muhtar Kent (CEO of Coca-Cola). What does it mean when these people use the word? What does it mean for business? For feminism? If we’re going to teach and research how we might lead, manage and create responsible businesses, let’s throw out the stereotypes and explore modern feminism in 2016.
Lauren McCarthy is Assistant Professor of Sustainability and Governance in the Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility, Copenhagen Business School. She researches and teaches about gender and CSR in organisations and their global value chains. She is currently exploring online feminist activism in the UK. You can follow her updates @genderCSR .
By Kristjan Jespersen and Anne Marie Engtoft Larsen.
We live in times of change. Society is quickly evolving in every aspect, facing us with global ecological, economic, human and social challenges. To overcome these perils students must play a key role in formulating and developing the necessary solutions needed to curb these complex future challenges. Its is crucial that, during their studies, students are given the tools needed in a thriving, thought-provoking and ambitious framework in which they can question the status quo and develop world-class innovations with long lasting impact.
Why student engagement matters
The Copenhagen Business School (CBS) has a longstanding tradition of such student engagement. Students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels are actively engaged in various ways (internships, community service learning, entrepreneurship, student organisations, research, etc.) with many communities outside the campus. While many activities are formally initiated through university associations, the vast majority of activities are initiated independently. Students build upon the lessons learned in the classroom with such real-world experiences.
The quickly developing student initiative of creating the CBS Student and Innovation House (SIH) builds upon this already established momentum. Emerging from the vestiges of Frederiksberg’s old police station it wishes to solve the grand challenges of our time in a hitherto unseen collaboration between students, researchers, businesses and the public sector. It will challenge conventional thinking and give students the tools to translate their ideas into solutions while giving them the drive and courage needed to take responsibility for the positive transformation of the world we live in.
Central to the house is its engagement with sustainability as practices and outcomes. It aims to extend beyond narrow definitions and in the spirit of the house entail human and societal well being, as well as promoting sustainable practices in business, economics and society. It is intended to supplement existing activities with a set of specific programs to enable students to work with partners, to forge new initiatives and to inspire, support and promote sustainability activities both on and off campus.
The building
Names on the people in the picture are, from left to right, Anne Marie Larsen, Andreas Gjede, Jens Bonde, Christian Refshauge and Anne Katrine Vedstesen.
The foundation for the CBS Student and Innovation House is the 97 year old police station designed by the famous Danish architect Hack Kampmann’s, located in the heart of Copenhagen at Frederiksberg at Howitzvej 30. The building is a cultural and historical gem and forms part of an urban space with with a high architectural value. The building has more than 3,100 m2 plus an inward yard and large basement. The beautiful square with the water fountain and the two colonnades in front of the house creates a peaceful space and ceremonial welcome. From the outside the building represents the students’ great grandparents’ traditional Danish resource: craftsmanship, while on the inside the building will be a testimony of today’s proud Danish resource: creative and smart minds, who dares to think innovatively and challenge conventional thinking.
Building this vessel will be no small feat. The students have to-date raised 52.5 million DKK and they have framed the project as a living laboratory for sustainability.
SIH – an interconnecting test bed for sustainability and innovation
SIH will treat this deep-retrofit project as an opportunity to implement, test, research, and teach sustainability, and in that way contribute directly to the significant transitions required to reach a sustainable future. The unique focus of the SIH’s approach would be its emphasis on the behavioural and business dimensions of the sustainability components and innovative approach to collaboration between private and public stakeholders and students.
To this end, the students propose a retrofit project that supports its sustainability objectives by:
Produces a world-renowned building project, that
Operates at the frontier of sustainability,
Is net positive in both human-well-being and environmental outcomes,
Produces a world-renowned building project, that operates at the frontier of sustainability,
Is net positive in both human-well-being and environmental outcomes,
Contributes directly to the health, productivity and subjective wellbeing of everyone in the buildings, and that
Directly supports and is reflected in the social innovation and community engagement activities that go on in the building and the campus community, including
An ongoing monitoring and social science research program, that offers the opportunity to implement, test, and teach sustainability,
A specific focus on the analysis of behaviour change,
The encouragement of innovation for societal benefit,
A strong focus on breaking down silos between students, faculty and society,
Partnerships with firms and organizations interested in sustainable building and neighbourhoods, that offer the capacity to build a regional scale living lab that focuses on the role of the business sector in the sustainability transition.
Exploring possible ways for integrating students drive and commitment in more informal learning ways, such as extracurricular projects, informal collaboration with researchers along with the possibility of internships and for-credit engagement with both on-campus and off-campus partners.
Invitation for collaboration
This project, however, cannot happen without the vision and mission of forward thinking companies, civil society organizations and municipalities desiring to push the limits of sustainability. The SIH calls on the builders, the technology providers, the municipalities, the consultants, the green building civil-society, the innovators and the start-ups to come together and devise the most innovative retrofit solutions for a project that will have lasting and scalable building opportunities. The students place a challenge at the feet of these stakeholders and invite them onboard this transformative task.
For more info, contact Anne Marie Larsen: annemarie@studenthouse.dk
Kristjan Jespersen is Doctoral Fellow at the Dept. of Intercultural Communication and Management at CBS and Anne Marie Engtoft Larsen is Co-Founder of the CBS Student and Innovation House.
