CSR: Who Knew It’s Not New?

8/19/10 7:33 AM

CSR: Who Knew It’s Not New?

8/18/2010 By Pamela Babcock

Given the interest it has generated in the past decade, corporate social responsibility (CSR)
might seem like a trend or novel idea hatched in recent history.

But most scholars and practitioners say that the concept emerged in the 1930s and 1940s-—
some argue that it was even earlier—and was formalized in 1953 with the publication of “Social
Responsibilities of the Businessman,” a book by U.S. economist Howard Bowen.

Although the scope and definition of CSR has changed over the years, only a few scholars have
studied the evolution of CSR and early writings about things that today would fall into the realm
of CSR.

“Certainly the general public believes that CSR is a relatively recent phenomenon, and I think
that most business people think that CSR has only been a part of business practice for the last
20 years or so,” said Steve May, an associate professor of organizational communication in the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s (UNC-CH) Department of Communication Studies.

May, who teaches CSR and researches the topic, said that “most indications are that some
version of CSR has been around at least since industrialization and early iterations were around in
the teens and the ‘20s.

“There’s really a dearth of research on the history of this topic,” he stated. “But it helps us to
recognize that this age-old question of business and society has been with us for many, many
decades.”

A Turning Point

Gregory Unruh, professor of global business and director of the Lincoln Center for Ethics in Global
Management at Thunderbird School of Global Management in Glendale, Ariz., says it’s important
to trace CSR’s development.

“How we got to where we are is really important to a strategist, be it a businessperson or a

politician,” Unruh said. “If you’re going to craft a strategy for going forward, you have to
understand how it has happened in the past.”

Unruh said the key turning point for CSR was in the 1990s.

“If you could chose one date when this idea of CSR jelled, I’d pick 1995, which was the first time
a company decided to report on not just their financial results, but their social and environmental
performance and what they were going to do about it,” Unruh said. That company? The Body
Shop, a skin and hair care products company.

Other things happened that same year, including a crisis when the Nigerian government hanged
nine environmental activists for speaking out against exploitation by Royal Dutch Shell and a libel
lawsuit in London against two environmentalists who questioned McDonald’s practices. That suit
eventually made its way onto the fairly-nascent Internet for all to see. “Everything was
transparent, and suddenly everybody could see what McDonald’s was doing,” Unruh noted.

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“1995 was the year when this all came together and companies realized, for good or for bad, that
they were expected to take consideration of larger corporate social responsibility into what they
were doing,” Unruh said.

Recent Scholarship

Recently, a concern for social responsibility was traced to the 1920s in a research paper about
the work of Arthur W. Page, a former editor of the magazine The World’s Work and later an AT&T
public relations executive. David L. Remund, a Roy H. Park Fellow and instructor at the UNC-CH
School of Journalism and Mass Communication, said his paper fills a gap in research about social
responsibility in corporate communications and enriches understanding about the CSR movement.

“It’s interesting and relevant that, even though so many years have passed, people have cared
about a corporation’s responsibilities for decades and decades,” Remund said. “It has become
more formalized and systematic recently—with sustainability reports and metrics—but I still feel
we can learn from the past.”

In a research paper titled “The World’s Work: Arthur W. Page and the Movement Toward Social
Responsibility in Corporate Communications, 1913-1927,” Remund suggests that the magazine
and Page’s editorial vision reflected a trend toward CSR in the U.S. and might help scholars
“better understand early perspective on the role and responsibilities of business in society.”

In the 1920s, social responsibility wasn’t front and center in corporate management. But as
editor, Page echoed CSR-related themes when he called for sustainability in logging practices,
labor rights for African-American cotton workers, better safety measures for underground miners,
greater consumer education about investment banking, an end to child labor and more corporate
transparency, according to Remund.

Remund was a 2009-2010 Legacy Scholar with the Arthur W. Page Center for Integrity in Public
Communication at the Penn State College of Communications and is working on his Ph.D. in
corporate public relations at UNC-CH. He presented the paper at the International History of
Public Relations Conference in Bournemouth, England, in July 2010.

Study Interesting on Two Fronts

Remund examined nearly 180 issues of The World’s Work, as well as Page’s personal
correspondence, speeches and transcripts of oral interviews. While Remund doesn’t claim that
Page was the pioneer of CSR or that his magazine is the only early evidence of CSR messaging,
he said some of its content reflected a trend toward CSR in the nation.

May, who was not involved with Remund’s research, said the paper demonstrates that Page “was
certainly instrumental in the early stages of CSR’s formation in the United States.”

Remund found the look at Page interesting on two fronts. First, AT&T had a history “that was not
very pretty—it was a monopoly and had some shady practices from a PR perspective.” He asked
himself: “Why would they hire Arthur Page to be head of corporate PR when he hadn’t even
worked for another corporation?”

Page later became a pioneering and revered public relations practitioner and put some of his
deeds into action at AT&T. He joined the company in 1927 and was the first PR person to serve
on the executive management team of a major corporation, according to Remund.

Remund wrote that Page once said in a speech, “we, like all other companies, live by public
approval, and roughly speaking the more approval we have, the better we live. This is the
fundamental reason for seeking public approval. The fundamental way of getting it is to deserve

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it.”

Five CSR Themes Emerged

Page edited the pro-business publication from 1913 to 1927 during a period of rapid
industrialization and urbanization and amid a fundamental shift in how business happened in
America.

“It was a really interesting period of time, and the focus of the magazine was to really look at the
relationship between society as a whole and business and government,” Remund noted.

In the publication, five themes of corporate and social responsibility emerged: environmental
protection, labor rights, consumer protection and education, child welfare and corporate
transparency. Page and his team “started to percolate some of those messages in this magazine,”
Remund said.

Pamela Babcock is a freelance writer based in the New York City area.

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