Frontier CSR

Two years ago, when traveling to Russia as part of a business school class, I received blank stares when I spoke of my professional interest in the CSR field. "Corporate social responsibility?" laughed one business student I met at an event. "That seems like an oxymoron!"

Yet over the past two years, the Ethical Corporation website has been sprinkled with a series of short pieces about CSR in Central and Eastern Europe. At least one of these articles cited Edelman's Trust Barometer, which found that 45% of Russians and 47% of Poles "trust business to do what is right". Strikingly, this was only slightly below the survey's global average. Apparently, residents of these countries have considerably more faith in industry than their counterparts in the U.S., Italy, Spain, Ireland, Germany, France, and Australia, yet considerably less so than their compatriots in Mexico, Brazil, China, and India--- all countries where the growth of industry is, understandably, especially welcomed.

People in Central and Eastern Europe display this trust despite the fact that CSR is in a nascent stage in the region. "In Central Europe CR has come to mean just philanthropy and charity." So explains an Ethical Corporation article by Robert Braun, a strategy consultant based in Hungary (see "Central and Eastern Europe - Better management focus means engagement not charity", posted on the EC website on January 12th, 2010). Mr. Braun goes on to posit that as the global economy puts the squeeze on corporate philanthropy spending in his part of the world, the time is ripe for companies in the region to start looking at CSR as an investment rather than as PR.

But is it? I ask readers of this article the following question: what is the value proposition for CSR in regionswhere trust in business is already reasonably high?