"When virtue has slept," the philosopher Nietzsche once quipped, "it will awake refreshed." His aphorism certainly applies to the public relations industry's current infatuation with "corporate responsibility," which has arisen precisely in response to the worst orgy of corporate
irresponsibility in at least the past half century.
In the 1990s, PR firms earned fat commissions spreading the "buzz" that inflated the dot-com bubble--a glorified pyramid scheme that drained the assets of everyday Americans for the benefit of Wall Street bankers, and encouraged "creative" accounting practices that are only now coming to light. Nowadays the same PR firms are helping Wall Street restore investor confidence by spreading the buzz about equally inflated claims that corporations are serious about policing themselves.
"Like a rock band making that big leap from cult following to global iconic status, corporate social responsibility (CSR) seems to have hit the business mainstream in the last 12 months," PR Week observed in May, citing British American Tobacco, McDonald's, Nike, Shell and ExxonMobil as examples of companies that have taken the CSR plunge. There is even an entire wire service--CSRwire.com--that specializes in distributing news releases about how responsibly companies are behaving.
PR Week noted that PR firms "have identified CSR as a major growth area for their businesses." Firms that have ramped up their CSR consulting include Burson-Marsteller, Edelman, Fleishman-Hillard, Hill & Knowlton, Ketchum and Weber Shandwick.
"All these agencies see CSR and PR not only as a natural fit for one another, but almost as one and the same," PR Week stated. But what PR Week sees as a virtue is precisely what the rest of us should recognize as the problem. Corporate responsibility is all too frequently mere PR designed to reassure the public, when in reality very little has changed.
PR firms want us to think corporate responsibility is something that will come voluntarily, because "doing the right thing" just happens to also improve profits. They are attempting to reinvent CSR in the mold of 18th-century economist Adam Smith's notion that the "invisible hand" of the market magically translates the pursuit of self-interest into a public benefit.
"That a company's pursuit of good corporate citizenship may not be motivated by morality, while lamentable, is irrelevant," says Gavin Power, a member of Ketchum's CSR team. "What is important is that out of self-interest companies can contribute to the improvement of our world. Adam Smith's invisible hand is not so harsh after all."
It is ironic, to say the least, that PR paeans like this to the redemptive nature of corporate profit-seeking are emerging precisely in response to the dot-com meltdown, Enron, WorldCom, Global Crossing, Vivendi, and a host of environmental and human disasters which have accompanied the rise of corporate globalization. If recent history teaches us anything, it is that the private pursuit of self-interest does not magically serve the common good. External pressure from activists and serious, enforceable government regulations are needed to ensure that corporate responsibility is more than "one and the same" as public relations.
