The idea behind corporate social responsibility is that companies have multiple responsibilities to maintain. These responsibilities can be arranged in a pyramid, with basic responsibilities closer to the bottom. As a business meets lower-level responsibilities that obligate it to shareholders and the law, it can move on to the higher level responsibilities that benefit society.
Types
Bruce Stone, O.P. Dwivedi, and Joseph G. Jabbra list 8 types of accountability, namely: moral, administrative, political, managerial, market, legal/judicial, constituency relation, and professional. Leadership accountability cross cuts many of these distinctions.
Political
Political accountability is the accountability of the government, civil servants and politicians to the public and to legislative bodies such as a congress or a parliament.
In a few cases, recall elections can be used to revoke the office of an elected official. Generally, however, voters do not have any direct way of holding elected representatives to account during the term for which they have been elected. Additionally, some officials and legislators may be appointed rather than elected. Constitution, or statute, can empower a legislative body to hold their own members, the government, and government bodies to account. This can be through holding an internal or independent inquiry. Inquiries are usually held in response to an allegation of misconduct or corruption. The powers, procedures and sanctions vary from country to country. The legislature may have the power to impeach the individual, remove them, or suspend them from office for a period of time. The accused person might also decide to resign before trial. Impeachment in the United States has been used both for elected representatives and other civil offices, such as district court judges.
In parliamentary systems, the government relies on the support or parliament, which gives parliament power to hold the government to account. For example, some parliaments can pass a vote of no confidence in the government.
Researchers at the Overseas Development Institute found that empowering citizens in developing countries to be able to hold their domestic governments to account was incredibly complex in practice. However, by developing explicit processes that generate change from individuals, groups or communities (Theories of Change), and by fusing political economy analysis and outcome mapping tools, the complex state-citizen dynamics can be better understood. As such, more effective ways to achieve outcomes can hence be generated.
Within an organization, the principles and practices of ethical accountability aim to improve both the internal standard of individual and group conduct as well as external factors, such as sustainable economic and ecologic strategies. Also, ethical accountability plays a progressively important role in academic fields, such as laboratory experiments and field research. Debates around the practice of ethical accountability on the part of researchers in the social field -whether professional or others – have been thoroughly explored by Norma R.A. Romm in her work on Accountability in Social Research, including her book on New Racism: Revisiting Researcher Accountabilities, reviewed by Carole Truman in the journal Sociological Research Online. Here it is suggested that researcher accountability implies that researchers are cognizant of, and take some responsibility for, the potential impact of their ways of doing research – and of writing it up – on the social fields of which the research is part. That is, accountability is linked to considering carefully, and being open to challenge in relation to, one’s choices concerning how research agendas are framed and the styles in which write-ups of research “results” are created.
Ethical responsibilities are responsibilities that a company puts on itself because its owners believe it’s the right thing to do and not because they have an obligation to do so. Ethical responsibilities could include being environmentally friendly, paying fair wages or refusing to do business with oppressive countries, for example.
Most of the ethical corporate social responsibility programmes out there focus on fair treatment of employees, which includes employees that may not be directly working for the organisation. What this means is that ethical corporate social responsibility usually considers the entire supply chain. That means that some companies that source clothes from Asia have CSR programmes to make sure that the people that work to produce the clothes that they buy are treated fairly. This may include a minimum wage or certain standards to be met in the factories. Some of this can be quite difficult to enforce in the supply chain. Another example is that small farmers in developing countries that supply produce such as coffee, bananas or other crops are paid a fair price for their goods. Ethical corporate social responsibility is not just limited to making sure that people in less developed countries are treated fairly. It is also focused on making sure that all stakeholders receive fair treatment. This includes employees, but also customers, shareholders and other stakeholders that the company may impact through its activities.
One company that has made impressive strides with ethical CSR is Nestle. Nestle was ranked highly by KPMG in a study to see which companies were the most sustainable. This is a big turnaround for the organisation that was once criticised for the fact that its powdered milk products were leading to malnutrition in children in developing countries. Nestle was the only food and drink company in the top 10 rated companies for excellence in corporate social responsibility. Other organisations in the top 10 included BMW, Cisco Systems, Repsol, Siemens and Total.
