University of Vaasa - Vaasan yliopisto

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In Germany the “green” issues have dominated political debates since 1970s.
Companies were always targeted by a NGO’s environmental campaign. However the
environmental movements in Germany were interestingly not connected with CSR.
Not only German companies but also NGOs ignored CSR debates (Habisch and
Wegner 2004). Honestly I do not know why NGOs did not take notice of CSR in
Germany, but imagine the German political institution hampered the development of
information disclosure, thus NGOs did not sufficiently trust companies as a
cooperative partners. Unlike the Japanese situation, the German government is
relative independent from industries. The Federation of German Industry (BDI) is a
strong player who is actively lobbying in the German politics, but the opportunity of
lobbying is relatively open for all actors. Thus NGOs are very active in Germany.
Their participation to German environmental policy has been already since 1980s
institutionalised. In fact, NGOs are in many questionnaires ranked as the second
important player with about 5 million participants. According to that, ‘Greenpeace’
got the third place of important institutions, following the German government and
the EU commission (Jänicke, Kunig, and Stitzel 2002). An important notion is that
the relationship between companies and NGOs was hostile due to a stiff competition
in lobbying. The BDI responded hostilely to every environmental movement and
tried to water down environmental laws. German companies did not disclose
information. I think they tried to avoid interference in their management strategies
from NGOs through closing information. The cost of politicisation of a target issue
was sometimes expensive for NGOs due to the small availability to information of a
company which they wanted to target.
At last both Japan and Germany argue that they have a long tradition of “Corporate
Citizenship”. Corporate Citizenship is connected with philanthropy and social
donation in Germany respectively. Since Japan imported CSR from USA, it is sure
that philanthropy has a strong influence on Japan’s CSR. In 1970s it was a boom
with in Japanese companies to establish a foundation in order to donate local
communities. A peak of this was establishment of 1% Club by the Federation of
Economic Organizations (Nippon Keindaren: Keidanren) 8 . Related to environmental
activities companies promoted protection of local environment, using their
employees. Waste-pick-up is a typical example of this. However the EU estimates
philanthropy as “not bad but not enough” activities (Fujii 2005). Typical examples of
German corporate citizenship include donation to a local sport club or environmental
organisations. In fact corporate citizenship is a subset of CSR however this must be
differentiated from CSR. Corporate Citizenship is persistently voluntary restoration
of their benefits, which does not need use of corporate competitiveness.
Interim Conclusion
Until 1990s the relationship between companies and government was in Japan very
close and in Germany relatively neutral respectively and that of companies and
NGOs was in Japan as weak as being likely not to exist and hostile in Germany. How
can this be understood? An important influential resource of a regulator is the
regulatory threat (Alberini and Segerson 2002; Lyon and Maxwell 2008; Segerson
8 Keidanren required the participants of 1% club to make a donation of 1% of their sales to local communities.