Antecedentes generales de la organización

Like the agents who are responsible for codes of conduct, and the content of codes of conduct, the procedures used to implement codes of conduct and the organizational form they take are not fixed. In terms of these procedures, there is an interesting blurring of the public and the private that occurs, which largely stems from the multiplicity of actors involved in the procedures. This section details the main procedures and organisational forms of codes of conduct.

Increasingly, corporations are using their annual reporting as a way of being seen to be implementing their own CSR policies. This is known as ―triple bottom line‖ reporting, which obliges corporations to report not just on profitability, but on social and environmental performance as well. This can be done by including social and environmental elements in their annual reports, or by allowing other companies to scrutinise their performance and then produce a report on them (see for example the McKinsey & Co report on the performance of companies who are part of the UN Global Compact; McKinsey & Co, 2004).

The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) is one of the most popular frameworks for reporting on social and environmental performance. To date, there are about 20,000 stakeholders from over 80 countries involved in the GRI. It operates as the collaborating centre of the United Nations Environmental Programme, and thus, the guidelines are offered as a free public good. In 2008, over 1000 companies had produced a report based on GRI guidelines (GRI, 2009b). The GRI is seen to be something of a partnership organisation to the Global Compact.

The Compact provides the framework of values that a corporation signs up to, while the GRI offers the practical guide on how to do this (see GRI, 2009a). One of the requirements of the Compact is that a corporation provides a Communication on Progress, and the GRI framework is promoted as the ―logical‖ way in which to do this (Kell, 2006: 45). There are also a variety of private consultancy agencies that offer similar guidelines, for example The Corporate Citizenship Company, but which lack the global public element of initiatives such as the GRI.

Like the GRI, standardisation bodies offer a means by which corporations can acquire internationally recognised endorsement of their operations in terms of social and environmental performance. ISO 9000 is becoming increasingly involved in the environmental and social concerns of the CSR agenda and sees this as one of its growth areas (see ISO, 2006). Social Accountability Standard (SA8000) on the other hand was set up specifically in 1998 for providing a way of standardising a corporation‘s operations in terms of social and environmental impact (see Social Accountability Standard, 2001). Another example is AccountAbility, a multi-stakeholder, membership-based organisation, involved in the promotion of responsible business practices, and the broader accountability of civil society and public organizations (see AccountAbility, 1999).

The guidelines these bodies offer are not strict codes of conduct, but offer uniform criteria by which different corporations‘ interpretation of the general principles can be judged. The drive for standardisation of principles is somewhat paradoxical in the context of the desire corporations seem to have had to

maintain control over CSR and to use self-regulation as a way of pre-empting public regulation. However, there are reasons for this move towards standardisation. In a world of competing codes of conduct, standardisation of principles offers both efficiency gains and competitive advantage (Ougaard, 2006: 245). Ougaard also points out that corporations are increasingly seeking out standards that have an official stamp of legitimacy from political authorities, thus indicating a move away from privatised self-regulation (as mentioned above) towards what Knill and Lehmkuhl call ―regulated self-regulation‖ (cited in Ougaard, 2006: 247).

Utting points out that the standardisation and reporting procedures outlined above can be limiting in the sense that they involve the collection and checking of a vast number of different principles, and the complexity of these procedures can hamper their feasibility and scaling up (Utting, 2002a: 63 and 2005b: 9). Complaints-based procedures can offer another way in which the behaviour of a corporation can be exposed and monitored. This can be done in a variety of different ways, such as consumer boycotts, shareholder activism, and transnational litigation, and can take on a variety of different institutional forms, such as through judicial and parliamentary procedures, global collective agreements between TNCs and trade unions, and NGO-watchdog bodies (Utting, 2002a: 63-4).

The Fair Labor Association (FLA)‘s Annual Report 2006 (see FLA, 2006: 22- 24) details a case-study in which a type of complaints based procedure was implemented following the dismissal of three workers for attempting to organise

a trade union branch in a Nike-affiliated factory in Thailand. The procedure centres on the multi-stakeholder body acting as a facilitator for dialogue between the dismissed workers, the factory management, Nike management, and Thai government officials, following a complaint being lodged with the FLA. In this particular case, the workers were reinstated, and the trade union branch was permitted, as well as the implementation of changes of some work practices. Similar to the point above about ―regulated self-regulation‖, Utting calls these types of procedures ―post-voluntarist‖ that are an indication of a move away from entirely voluntary and private approaches to CSR (Utting, 2005a: 384).

Procedurally, one of the most interesting things about codes of conduct and the multi-stakeholders that construct and implement them is the organizational form they take. Despite the fact that many of the participants are bureaucratic hierarchical institutions, involvement with such a multiplicity of actors necessitates an alternative organisational form. One of the most common features of many multi-stakeholder initiatives is their organisation into learning networks. It seems that the dissemination of knowledge between stakeholders is the preferred way in which participants learn about CSR. The Global Compact is an inter-organisational network (ION), in which various autonomous organisations (in this case, global corporations) come together in a shared conceptual system to achieve goals that they could not achieve alone; the knowledge generated by the pursuit of these goals is disseminated amongst other members of the network, thus providing a continuously evolving bank of information all of which should contribute to the wider aim of the promotion and adoption of the ten principles (Kell and Levin, 2003:155; Ruggie, 2002). There is no authoritative hierarchical

bureaucratic structure, with the Global Compact office acting as a facilitator of communication and partnership projects between participants (Kell and Levin, Ibid). In this way then, participants in the Compact not only have to report on their performance, but this performance is made available and shared amongst all members. Further details on the organisational nature of the Compact are given in chapter seven.

Furthermore, it seems that this dissemination of knowledge along such networks is making codes of conduct and CSR a form of governance that is more explicitly public, in the sense that a lot of the information regarding CSR is accessible to the wider public. A primary example in this regard is the organisation the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, an organisation set up in 2005 at the request of John Ruggie, in his capacity as the UN special representative on business and human rights. The purpose of this initiative is to make available, via a website, a vast array of documents in relation to business and human rights (See Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, 2009). Another example is CSRwire, a source of CSR and sustainability news, whose members are NGOs, companies, organisations and associations interested in the spread of knowledge and information about CSR (See CSRwire, 2009). Additionally, it is a requirement of the Global Compact that all participants make available what is known as their Communication on Progress; participants who do not do so after two years are labelled as ―inactive‖. The GRI, as detailed above, make all the reports submitted to them available for public use via their website.

This phenomenon is interesting from the point of view of governance, as it means that although many of the actors involved in this type of governance are essentially private, their participation is being made quite explicitly public. The existence of these sources of information means that the discourse of CSR becomes part of a public sphere of knowledge; the awareness this creates in terms of private global governance structures is important. This type of transparency and accessibility of information and decision-making procedures goes some way towards establishing a degree of accountability, or at least provoking further scrutiny that may lead to a form of accountability. In this sense, the ―opening up‖ of CSR to the public sphere creates some form of legitimacy for it. Similarly, by changing the way in which business is taught, CSR to a degree becomes normalised in the eyes of those who shape the business world. The publicity of rules and standards related to CSR is important for the argument that is made in chapter five, regarding distributive justice and corporations.