Your Comment? Porritt: CSR Won't Save Amoral Businesses

Fascinating interview with Jonathan Porritt, long-time environmental activist and outgoing environmental advisor to UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

I find this statement particularly worthy of discussion, and would love to hear what y’all think on this:

Still, he says there are also too many examples of corporate responsibility deployed by companies with fundamentally amoral business models that cannot stand up to scrutiny. He says a particularly stark example is the UK banking industry.

The corporate responsibility teams of UK banks have strong reputations, he says. “They were seen as extremely professional parts of those financial institutions … who used to win lots of awards.

“But the reality is they never, ever got close to the business model of those banks. They were never given access to the decisions being taken about changing the investment strategy, about rethinking approaches to risk, or about the balances of portfolio or a different approach to asset management.”