Spin Doctors Examine "CSR"

Printer-friendly versionSend by email"Corporate social responsibility [CSR], and the role that communications plays within it, is a controversial subject. ... So when CSR agency Futerra Sustainability Communications teamed up with communications agency CTN, PRWeek and the IPR to run an online discussion on the issue on 12 November, more than 200 CSR practitioners and communication professionals signed in to express their opinions. ... The irony that one part of a communications business could pronounce on CSR while another division represented Third World dictators [See for example Burson-Marsteller.] was not lost on participants. 'Like all good CSR, it starts internally,' said one debater. 'It's very difficult to have a robust, defensible and enforceable CSR policy in PR if your job is to make big dirty, corporate cock-ups look less bad,' another added. [See for example Ketchum.] A further question was whether CSR was merely a fashion or whether a strong business case had been made that would ensure the field would continue to develop. Sceptics were concerned that companies might soon move onto a new fashion, leaving specialist practitioners looking at an unfriendly job market."