University of Vaasa - Vaasan yliopisto

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Such divergent views raise questions around the extent to which the CSR community
has made significant progress toward embedding CSR into business practices in the
mainstream. The recession is highlighting that CSR has not to any great extent
challenged the conventional business model, and it is predominantly when efficiency
gains are available, where CSR activities are fully embedded into business practices.
Companies are still concerned with the bottom line, not the triple bottom line, and
this is especially the case in times of economic downturn.
A further significant finding of this research relates to the language of CSR. Both
the document review and interviews suggest that throughout the recession, there has
been a shift in the language used, away from terms such as CSR and towards greater
use of terms such as sustainability and sustainable business practices. The focus of
business during the recession has been towards a need to demonstrate efficiency and
focus more markedly on their own durability and profit making ability. Terms such
as sustainability, as highlighted earlier, are perhaps appealing as they are generic
enough to imply support for a range of business goals and operations. This trend
seems likely to continue given a degree of convergence in use for the terms from all
quarters: Business press, CSR practitioners and other corporate actors on this matter
share some agreement and as a result CSR is perhaps becoming more about
operational efficiency, rather than broader CSR definitions and models.
These findings also raise significant questions over the implications for policy
making agendas; if the voluntary nature of CSR means that during times of economic
crisis, firms focus their activities on the easy CSR gains, such as efficiency gains or
reporting activities as these findings imply, what does that mean for policy and
agenda setting? The implication is that there is a risk that regulatory frameworks
will weaken and that policy making agendas become more corporate-centric. Within
a policy-making perspective we could witness decision-making moving back to
much more of the ecological modernisation tradition.
Conclusion
The main findings of this paper can be summarised by three points. Firstly the way
the media has reported on CSR has changed during the life cycle of the recession;
moving away from the death of CSR to CSR being a mechanism by which
companies can survive and come out ‘the other side’.
Secondly, to date there has not has been significant change in terms of CSR
operations; for the mainstream there has not been a great deal of progress towards
truly integrating holistic CSR practice, therefore there is no real need to change
operations relating to CSR Indeed the debate has re-opened around whether CSR is
relevant other than to support business as usual or in order to operationalise
efficiency gains.
Thirdly, the recession has made an impact on the way corporate actors talk about
CSR, with a shift to sustainable business and efficiency being witnessed. In this
sense the dominant language is one which still supports traditional business models