There is no denying the fact that in the modern world business has a huge influence on many aspects of human life. For instance, it creates workplaces for lots of people around the world, invents new products, and provides needed services for our society. In fact, corporations are the most powerful there due to the fact that they can afford expensive technologies and methods in order to achieve great profit and valuable position in the market. Many of them are well-known for most people nowadays because of huge advertising campaign and media. In addition, they developed special programs for students and recent graduates in order to prepare quality employees and future company’s leaders.
Taking into account all of these facts, I have to admit that such global influence on people’s lives demands to be responsible for many different situations and issues in the world. For instance, nowadays population has huge ecological, economic, and political problems such as different danger diseases, hunger, unemployment, pollutions as well as extremely hard working and living conditions. In other words, modern business giants must be aware of our society’s and planet’s future as well as provide all necessary actions in order to bring positive and valuable impact for everybody.
Truth be told, this is the core principle of the corporate social responsibility (CSR). But to be frank, companies do not always choose this path due to some philanthropic or civil positions. Many of them simply want to create a good reputation in order to attract more customers for their products. To my mind, this issue is much-debated one because it affects everyone. Therefore, the main aim of this paper if to examine the real level of CSR in many modern companies and its value on our future development.
In order to see this point clearly, the documentary The Corporation is presented in this paper. This movie was created in 2003 and became famous because of authors courage and fearless to highlight a lot of unpleasant and unsuitable topics of modern corporations and their reputation. Actually, filmmakers did a great research and studied topics that are presented in this film. Their main position is that corporations have a huge influence on our living conditions nowadays and they finally have to take responsibilities of their actions. In other words, they examined an importance of CSR to the solving problems of the modern society. Moreover, authors stated that these global commercial institutions often do not care about future generations and ordinary people from different parts of the world.
In order to prove this point of view, filmmakers put a lot of examples and interviewed different interesting people such as famous professors, social activists, former and current CEOs of huge and small companies as well as media representatives. Authors asked their professional opinion about many issues of the modern world economics, politics, and the role of corporations in a variety of society’s problems. For instance, they talked with trader, Carlton Brown about his work and how such people understand the main principles of business as well as their ethics. Authors also interviewed several professors and researchers from famous and respectable universities and business programs. In fact, all of these people make this documentary more valuable for skeptical persons. In addition, in order to support their arguments, they showed provocative and doubtful facts and interviews that help to understand that real picture of our reality has a lot of meanings and sides; therefore, people must evaluate all of them in order to find the truth.
Modern society lives and works in the world of corporations. People often rely on them more than on government due to their attractive compensation packages, advertisement and career perspective. Many students, researchers, and professionals consider work in corporations as a huge step in their careers. Therefore, there are strong human resource departments and training programs there. Furthermore, due to the huge advertising campaign people see such a giant company as a friend or give them a personality. For instance, users often divides into several group in order to defend their favorite product. In addition, corporations understand that customers will choose company that has a positive social impact for society. Thus, many of them create and implement a variety of CSR programs in order to become better for ordinary people and to make a difference in this world.
Truth be told, such position is a conventional wisdom in the most part of our planet. But to be frank, this story also has another side. This documentary breaks the rules of the conventional wisdom. It shows that corporations do not always follow the norms and rules properly. In addition, authors pointed out that in many cases CSR programs are created in order to hide the real face of the particular corporation. For example, this film includes the story about children from Indonesia that works for cents per hour. Meanwhile, product costs hundreds of U.S. dollars on the global market and advertisements tell to the audience that company send a small percent of their income for children’s needs. Without a doubt, such example breaks the ideal picture of the modern corporations and their values.
However, this documentary includes only negative aspects of the corporations and their value on our society. Authors’ critique of the real causes of implementing CSR programs does not include another factors that deserve some words here. Despite the fact that top managers create these ideas and perform them in order to create better reputation for their brands and for themselves, such behavior may lead to the different positive changes in the world. For instance, some companies make a real difference by creating scholarship programs for youth, planting trees, building public places, and paying huge compensations as a result of harmful consequences of corporation’s working process. All of these factors may lead to transformation of the real mission and vision of the company to the one that will be appropriate and helpful for society because of the several CSR programs. In other words, this is the way how a social contract may become a corporate citizenship.
Another negative point of this documentary is that authors did not leave a hope for better future for our society. According to this film, all corporations as well as the rest of companies are enemies of ordinary people. Therefore, viewers may feel personal inability to fix something in this world. Nowadays, there are a lot of startups that want to make a difference for a better living. Some of them have already become a huge corporations. Moreover, such companies are based on the CSR rules and values, and people have to know more about them.
Therefore from what has been discussed above, I may reach the conclusion that CSR has a huge importance to the modern business because of several reasons. First, it helps to create bigger income and to attract more customers. Second, such behavior teaches managers to look differ on some problems or technical issues. As a result, company chooses the building path and implements new and safer designs and practices.
But to be frank, the most valuable reason why CSR is important nowadays is that it includes economics needs inside the environmental once. As a result, people put profit lower than moral aspects and ecological influence. Therefore, CSR slowly drives our world to the new inventions that will be non-toxic and useful for all of us.
References
Abbott, J. & Achbar, M. (2003). The Corporation. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMNZXV7jOG0
