AS THE British Petroleum oil well continues to spout hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude oil per day into the Gulf of Mexico, the world is seeing first hand the effects of corporate irresponsibility.
The events of the past recent months, while devastating on an unprecedented scale with regard to the sheer amount of pollution that has resulted, are fundamentally not new to BP’s operations.
According to a 2006 article in the Washington Post, written by Steven Mufson,
“The former head of BP Plc.’s program to combat corrosion in its Alaska pipelines invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer questions before a House subcommittee Thursday as lawmakers excoriated two other senior company executives for maintenance neglect that led to leaks and the closure of key oil pipelines last month.
“The top executives of BP’s North America and Alaska operations faced grilling under oath about why they had failed to prevent a leak, found in March, which spilled 210,000 gallons of crude oil on the northern Alaska tundra. They were also pressed on how they could have failed until last month to detect corrosion so severe that BP was forced to shut down half the output of Prudhoe Bay, the biggest U.S. oil field.”
I note the above to provide a frame of reference for this week’s topic, the issue of corporate civic responsibility and the share of that which is vested in the individual.  After all, a corporation is nothing if not a community of individual roles, skills and responsibilities.

Before I go ahead, I’d like to state for the record that – this being an opinion column – I have no scientific support for my arguments here, not even of the shaky science of management theory.  Secondly, while my focus is on the private sector in this article, much of it, I believe, is applicable to the public sector, that is, government and state entities.  The reason that I won’t refer to the public sector in this article, however, is that I believe that there is an inherent expectation or burden of responsibility when it comes to the public sector that is not that readily apparent in the private sector.  The Ministry of Health, for example, is expected to be responsible for the provision of effective health services to Guyanese, whereas a furniture manufacturer, to use a random example, can’t be said to be responsible in the same way for the provision of high-quality furniture at affordable prices to Guyanese householders.
The question is, with inherent responsibility absent, what are the parameters of responsibility that govern corporate behaviour?  Naturally, the first would be the statutory responsibilities that such entities are obligated to adhere to, particularly the Companies Act as well as other related legislation.
Another set of parameters of responsibility would be related specifically to the company, a mixture of an internal culture of operation, often partly codified in an official Code of Conduct, but also inclusive of traditional ways of doing things not specifically or often even generally documented.
The final type of parameter of responsibility is, in my view, the company’s sense of moral responsibility, its sense of obligation, duty and mode of interacting with the larger society. Closely tied to what I term moral responsibility, though not wholly interchangeable with it, is the company’s sense of civic duty.
With regard to the first type of responsibility (statutory responsibility or laws of Guyana), in my mind, the onus for adherence to the laws of any country lies primarily with those who are there to enforce those laws; otherwise, there wouldn’t be the need for those laws in the first place.
A company’s internal responsibilities are a totally different matter.  As someone who has had some experience with various entities, I have seen far too many Codes of Conduct serve no greater purpose than an academic one, in which they had no effect at all on the culture of the respective entities.  Just as how the government is responsible for ensuring that corporate citizens fulfill their obligations to statute, the responsibility for adhering to the Code of Conduct of an individual organization lies with the management of the particular company. Of course, it is the individual employee who needs to stick to that Code of Conduct.
The tricky area of responsibility for companies is the third area, that of moral or civic responsibility.  For a great many companies, the concept and practice of civic responsibility is often restricted to the annual donation to some charity or the other, a handout at the maximum.  Seen in the larger context of moral responsibility however, automatic charitable contributions don’t really cut it.  One of the initiatives that BP received a great deal of credit for is its Beyond Petroleum campaign, which saw the company investing billions of dollars into alternative energy sources – at an ideal level, this showed that an oil company was willing to invest in alternatives to its core business in the long term interests of the future.  Of course, in retrospect, the Beyond Petroleum campaign might be seen in the same light as the Phillip-Morris anti-smoking advertisements, but the point is, corporate civic/moral responsibility goes beyond charity.
The problem with defining corporate social civic responsibility is that it is so abstract, and often dependent on ad hoc principles of application, which is to say, no principle at all, that we often only get a chance for concrete definitions in moments of crisis, and often it is specific to the problem.
For example, to bring the topic a bit closer to home, and (in keeping with the tenets of reasonable disclosure) obviously my own work with the City Council, we can look at the issue of refuse disposal and the corporate citizens of Georgetown.  If we take it as a given that City Hall’s house is not completely in order in relation to service delivery at present, and that even with the best of programmes, the situation will only be rectified over a period, then we see Georgetown businesses faced with two options: Do nothing and let the garbage pile up and the situation worsen, or find ways of ensuring that the general development of the City is not stymied by a garbage disposal crisis.
The result of the first choice is obvious, so let’s turn to the latter.  My opinion is that a great opportunity lies within the various business associations to galvanize and support the implementation of a relevant and proactive model of corporate civic responsibility that would find a way of dealing with the garbage situation, for example, by pooling resources, or using a portion of membership dues to mitigate the effects of the City’s incapacity to deal effective with refuse disposal. However, such a system should be flexible enough, not only to deal with a crisis but also to enhance development equitably, to help raise all boats equally as they say.   [d1]Most importantly, however, I believe the biggest area in which umbrella business associations can assist their membership, and the public by extension, is education, in general, yes
, but also particularly as to their civic responsibility. Using the example cited above, education to facilitate positive anti-littering attitudes/behaviours would be extremely beneficial.
Alternatively, I believe systems could be put in place, outside of legal punitive channels, to penalize corporate citizens that shirk an agreed system of measurement of corporate civic responsibility.  A model that I have in mind is similar to (though not exactly like) the Better Business Bureau in the United States and Canada whose rating for businesses, while not legally relevant, provides an object system of rating businesses in terms of civic responsibility and customer service, among other criteria, which significantly influence customers using those businesses.  My point is, in the absence of any culture of encouraging corporate civic responsibility, some mechanism has to be put in place in the interim.
Next week, I wish to explore in full the issue of corporate civic responsibility, the issue of corporate civic responsibility when it comes to garbage disposal, since there are far more elements to this issue than I’ve touched on in the example above.  This should make for an interesting reading as it does writing.