Free lecture on corporate social responsibility

Professor Dirk Matten will be presenting a Sydney Ideas lecture, titled The Enigma of the ‘Responsible’ Corporation, next week. The free lecture will be held on 18 February from 6-7.30 pm at the University of Sydney.

Professor Matten holds the Hewlett-Packard Chair in Corporate Social Responsibility and is a Professor of Strategy at the Schulich School of Business, York University, Toronto. He is in Australia as a visiting scholar at the University of Sydney Business School, his stay co-sponsored by the school’s Balanced Enterprise Research Network (BERN) and the Sydney Environment Institute.

“In their self-representations, corporations appear very concerned with their responsibility to society: their contribution to global warming, their impact on indigenous populations and a lot more issues,” said Professor Matten. “This contrasts with their initial remit of just making money. Corporations, which should just care about profits and economics, appear to have suddenly turned into do-gooders.”

Yet while most major firms claim a commitment to corporate social responsibility (CSR), Professor Matten says few have convinced the public that they are making a positive contribution to society. Indeed, he says, most of what companies do in the name of CSR has “never transcended the clear-cut profit motive of the firm”, pointing to last year’s Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh which claimed more than 1100 lives.

“Many brands and retailers who sourced from the Rana Plaza factory were active members in the church of CSR,” he said. “But this did not prevent them from having their products assembled in an abysmal sweatshop.”

Professor Matten said the lecture will examine the history of CSR and ask three questions:

• Why has it emerged?
• What has it really achieved?
• What is the future of corporate engagement with societal needs?

To attend the event, register here.