The Business Ethics Blog

Everyone agrees that business should “do what’s right,” even if they disagree over what the right thing is. One significant barrier to even talking about doing the right thing is vocabulary. The vocabulary applied to “doing the right thing” is messy and varied. Here’s a brief critical guide to the most common terminology:

• Business Ethics. This is the most general term, and the one that can be defined more or less uncontroversially. As a field of study, business ethics can be defined as the critical, structured examination of how people & institutions should behave in the world of commerce. There are two problems with the term. One is that the word is too often associated with scandal. I once had a business group ask me to come speak to its members, but could I please not use the word “ethics.” The second problem is that people sometimes (wrongly) associate the word “ethics” with a narrow range of questions about personal integrity, or about professional standards.
• Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). This is an incredibly popular term, but generally poorly defined. Most definitions you’ll find don’t actually look like definitions. If you look around online, you’ll find that CSR is generally thought to have something to do with giving back to the community, and making a social contribution. But it’s too narrow a term to cover the full range of issues involved in doing the right thing in business. Not all businesses are corporations. Not all business obligations are social ones. And we’re interested not just in the responsibilities of business, but also permissions, duties, rights, entitlements, and so on.
• Sustainability. The word “sustainability” has roots in environmentalism, where it nicely picks out the issue of how we as a society can continue to make use of resources in a way that makes sure there continues to be enough, especially for enjoyment by future generations. But the term is badly abused in the world of business. Sometimes it just refers to the ability to sustain profits, which is pretty far from its original meaning. Other people try to pack too much into the word. I recently had a sustainability consultant tell me that the word “sustainability” no longer means, you know, sustainability…it just means “all the good stuff.” But lots of “good stuff” in business has nothing to do with sustaining anything. It takes tortured logic and wishful thinking to say that all matters of doing the right thing in business can simply be boiled down to sustainability.
• Corporate Citizenship. Citizenship is essentially a political notion, having to do with the relationship between the individual and the state. The term “corporate citizenship” is evocative. It reminds us that businesses aren’t free-floating; they exist in a social and political context, and that context brings obligations. But just as all of your obligations are not citizenship obligations, not all of a corporation’s obligations are obligations of corporate citizenship.
• Triple Bottom Line. Luckily, this one seems to be dying out. The Triple Bottom Line (3BL) is rooted in the very sane idea that business managers should manage not just the financial performance of their companies, but also their social and environmental performance. Unfortunately, the term implies something much bolder, namely that each of those areas of performance can be boiled down to a “bottom line.” And that’s simply not true. (Just try asking a company what their social “bottom line” was last year.) The result is that the term sounds tough-minded, but usually ends up being just the opposite. For more about the problems with 3BL, see here.

So choose your words wisely. We shouldn’t be scared off by the varied terminology. But we ought to recognize that each of these terms has its problems. Different constituencies will find different vocabularies attractive, and perhaps congenial to their interests. And also keep in mind that each of these terminologies is promoted by a different set of consultants and gurus, all eager to tell you that thinking in terms of their favourite vocabulary is the key.