Did Corporate Social Responsibility or globalization kill Detroit?
For decades Ford, GM and other car manufacturers of Detroit, fought every piece of legislation that required building motors that were fuel efficient and environmental friendly. The lobbyists from the US auto industry in the 1980-90’s overdid their job so well that they brought about the miserable the downfall of Detroit.
The current corporate world is in more ways than one, unrecognisable from the historical viewpoint prior to the financial and credit crisis. The global corporate world is characterised by unprecedented levels of interconnectedness, interdependence and rapid changes.
Elaborate infrastructure for regulating global CSR
Therefore CSR and globalization must go hand in hand to transform globalization and to ensure that together the task of conceiving change and transformation as two constant factors is needed to build on the corporate stakeholder responsibility.
If the decision to bail out the industries was probably political, designed to appease unions, there are arguments to support that bank bail-outs that were based on systemic risk to the financial system; that is why we now have an even more elaborate infrastructure for regulating financial institutions and banks, but none for the global auto industry.
CSR is the nature of the corporate power and authority
Whereas the banks have paid their money back to the lenders with interest, dividends and capital appreciation, the most governments have actually taken a loss on the money it put into the industries during the crisis.
CSR must engage critically with the insights offered to develop a more robust understanding of the nature of the corporate operation of power and authority to the contemporary society.
Responding to high levels of change and transformation
In order to avoid deliberate misuse of the public's funds and trust and to make the most of future CSR actions to avoid major global meltdowns, let us for a moment look at the theories of Karl Polanyi ("The Great Transformation") for guiding societies since the changes of the industrial revolution to current day CSR.
The universal globality is further enhanced and connected by an extended degree of complexity, tension and possibilities that is beyond anybody's imagination. Gone are the traditional business and corporate ideas combined with the high transformation at all levels of the corporate world created by the cross border globalization.
CSR has a major role to play, a better understanding of transactions and transformation brought by globalization to the global society.
