Guest editorial

Citation

Ketola, T. (2009), "Guest editorial", Management of Environmental Quality, Vol. 20 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/meq.2009.08320caa.001

Guest editorial

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Management of Environmental Quality: An International Journal, Volume 20, Issue 3

About the Guest Editor

Tarja Ketola is an Associate Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Vaasa, Finland, and Adjunct Professor of Environmental Management at the Turku School of Economics, Finland. She took her PhD at Imperial College, University of London, and worked at Brunel University before returning to Finland. Her research interests include corporate sustainability, strategic environmental management and responsible leadership psychology. She has written several books and published articles in a number of scientific journals.

This special issue of Management of Environmental Quality (MEQ) focuses on corporate responsibility and diversity and contains a set of papers presented as part of a Workshop held at the “Corporate Responsibility Research Conference” which took place in Belfast on 7-9 September 2008, The workshop has shown how diverse diversity really is in corporate responsibility (SCR). While genuine individual diversity, cultural diversity and biodiversity all have many aspects within themselves, we should also look into the false corporate claims for diversity leading to human exploitation and environmental degradation, actions towards homogeny in the name of diversity, true causes of diversity in CR between different companies, and the alternatives to the concept of CR leading to diversity in the levels of CR. The purpose of this special issue is to illustrate the diversity of diversity in CR.

There is even diversity in the terminology of CR. Some take an anthropocentric approach to CR, others either a biocentric or a plutocentric approach, and few try to accommodate different approaches. Those who use the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) to mean CR in socio-cultural and environmental issues, take an implicitly anthropocentric approach to business responsibility. Anthropocentric people believe that environmental issues should be relevant to companies only if society expects companies to pay attention to them. According to this view, the environment is not important per se but only if it happens to become one of the human stakeholders’ concerns. Most authors in this special issue have adopted this anthropocentric view.

A more objective approach takes a different view: only socio-cultural issues should be studied from the anthropocentric point of view; environmental issues should be studied from the biocentric point of view and economic issues from the plutocentric point of view – and the results should then be integrated. Hence: CR = corporate environmental responsibility + corporate socio-cultural responsibility + corporate economic responsibility. Few authors of this special issue (including yours truly) have adopted this objective view.

This special issue starts with Tarja Ketola’s critical analysis of individual, cultural and biodiversity of Europe’s largest forest companies. Her article “Corporate responsibility for individual, cultural and biodiversity” shows how CR could actually be utilized to enhance, manage and develop individual, cultural and biodiversity and turn them into business strategies.

Anna Blombäck and Caroline Wigren want to correct the common misunderstanding that the size of the company would explain the diversity in CSR between companies. Their article “Challenging the importance of size as determinant for CSR activities” finds other causes for diversity in CSR, such as local embeddedness, corporate governance and individual motivation.

Emmanuel Ndzibah illustrates graphically in his article “CSR in Ghana? Diversity should not mean dumping” how diversity claims are often used to exploit people and nature in African countries, and how this leads to social and environmental degradation. He suggests that the government and its regulatory bodies, which have absolute power to control trade dumping, should take action to prevent dumping business and to educate local inhabitants of its health and environmental hazards.

Abdirizak Mohamed and Jussi Leponiemi’s article “Immigrant worker’s induction training in Finland: case PETMO project”, implicitly reveals the ways in which induction programmes at workplaces aiming to enhance individual and cultural diversity tend to lead to pressures towards homogeny in their justified training of immigrants to adapt to Finnish customs.

Chamhuri Siwar and Md Tareq Hossain give an example of cultural diversity enhancing CSR. Their article “An analysis of Islamic CSR concept and the opinions of Malaysian managers” shows how the religious values of business managers can enhance CSR.

Another cultural diversity example of how cultural values could boost CSR is Manoj K. Sharma, Punam Agarwal and Tarja Ketola’s article “Hindu philosophy: bridging corporate governance and CSR”. Their empirical study in India discovered alarming gaps between corporate governance practices and CSR demands, which could be bridged by Hindi philosophy that otherwise already influences Indian business and society.

Diren Bulut and Ceren Bulut Yumrukaya investigate the status of culture and art in the CSR projects of companies in Turkey in their article “Corporate social responsibility in culture and art”. Government and corporations are main supporters of culture and art, which, however, are in a risk of losing their corporate funds to environmental and educational CSR projects and sport sponsorships. Instead of competition between different dimensions of CR – social, cultural and environmental – that leads to a zero sum game, all aspects of CSR should be valued.

Kumba Jallow’s article “Radicalism and corporate social responsibility: unlikely partners?” aims to find out whether a radical CSR position can affect change towards sustainability better than the forces of incrementalism that allow gentle resistance to the status quo. She maps some of the best-known models and concludes that radicalism seems to be a viable option.

Marc T. Jones’ article “Disrobing the emperor: mainstream CSR research and corporate hegemony” proposes radical action in CSR research. He deducts that the normative expectations of mainstream CSR scholarship lead to increased corporate hegemony. To avoid this, he suggests that more theoretically coherent and empirically precise terms, enlightened self-interest and corporate social irresponsibility, should be adopted, and future CSR research should be relocated outside business schools.

This diverse collection of articles on CR and diversity has one thing in common: instead of defending the prevailing state of CR, which does little to advance sustainability, they all point out its problems and recommend a novel approach to CR and Diversity that could genuinely enhance ecologically, socially and culturally sustainable development.

Tarja KetolaGuest Editor