Something to Believe In

Creating Trust and Hope in Organisations: Stories of Transparency, Accountability and Governance

Rupesh Shah, David Murphy, Malcolm McIntosh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351281300
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

In a world where trust in politicians, corporations and the processes that determine our lives continues to dwindle, this innovative book brings together research, case studies and stories that begin to answer a central question for society: How we can create organisations, institutions, groups and societies that can nurture trusting relationships with one another and among individuals?Something to Believe In provides a fresh take on the corporate responsibility debate, based as it is on the work of key global thinkers on corporate social responsibility, along with a raft of work developed from collaborations between the New Academy of Business and the United Nations Volunteers, UK Department for International Development and TERI-Europe in countries such as Brazil, Nicaragua, Ghana, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Lebanon, Nigeria, the Philippines and South Africa. The focus is on business, and particularly how deeper, more systemic changes to current ways of understanding and undertaking business can and have been enacted in both developed countries and in nations where the Western concept of CSR means nothing. The market-based model of economic thinking-the increasingly distrusted globalisation project-which threatens to sweep all before it is challenged by many of the contributions to this book.The book tells stories such as the mobilization of civil society in Ghana to bring business to account; the reorientation of a business school to focus on values; the life-cycle of ethical chocolate; the accountability of the diamond business in a war zone; the need to reinvent codes of conduct for women workers in the plantations and factories of Nicaragua; a Philippine initiative to economically empower former Moslem liberation fighters; and the development of local governance practices in a South African eco-village.The book is split into four sections. "Through Some Looking Glasses" contains short, thought-provoking pieces about the issues of trust, belief and change from writers including Thabo Mbeki, Malcolm McIntosh and a reprinted piece from E.M. Forster. Section Two asks how it will be possible to believe in our corporations and provides new approaches from around the world on how space is being opened up to found businesses that are able to create trust. Section Three examines the role of auditing in fostering trust. Corporations continue to attempt to engender trust through their activities in philanthropy, reporting and voluntary programmes. But, post-Enron et al., even the most highly praised corporate mission statements are tarnished. Can social and environmental audits of corporate reports, codes and practices assuage our doubts about boardroom democracy? Section Four examines alternative forms of accountability, transparency and governance from around the world and offers some different ways of thinking about the practice of creating trust in society.Something to Believe In provides a host of fascinating suggestions about redefining and renewing the underlying deal between society and its organizations. It will become a key text for students, thinkers and practitioners in the field of corporate responsibility.

Part 1
Through some looking glasses

1
Something to have struggled for and now to believe in*

T.M. Mbeki
Then Vice-President of the Republic of South Africa

On an occasion such as this, we should, perhaps, start from the beginning.

So, let me begin.

I am an African.

I owe my being to the hills and the valleys, the mountains and the glades, the rivers, the deserts, the trees, the flowers, the seas and the ever-changing seasons that define the face of our native land.

My body has frozen in our frosts and in our latter-day snows. It has thawed in the warmth of our sunshine and melted in the heat of the midday sun. The crack and the rumble of the summer thunders, lashed by startling lightening, have been a cause both of trembling and of hope.

The fragrances of nature have been as pleasant to us as the sight of the wild blooms of the citizens of the veldt.

The dramatic shapes of the Drakensberg, the soil-coloured waters of the Lekoa, iGqili noThukela, and the sands of the Kgalagadi, have all been panels of the set on the natural stage on which we act out the foolish deeds of the theatre of our day.

At times, and in fear, I have wondered whether I should concede equal citizenship of our country to the leopard and the lion, the elephant and the springbok, the hyena, the black mamba and the pestilential mosquito.

A human presence among all these, a feature on the face of our native land thus defined, I know that none dare challenge me when I say—I am an African!

I owe my being to the Khoi and the San whose desolate souls haunt the great expanses of the beautiful Cape—they who fell victim to the most merciless genocide our native land has ever seen, they who were the first to lose their lives in the struggle to defend our freedom and dependence and they who, as a people, perished in the result.

Today, as a country, we keep an audible silence about these ancestors of the generations that live, fearful to admit the horror of a former deed, seeking to obliterate from our memories a cruel occurrence which, in its remembering, should teach us not and never to be inhuman again.

The constitution whose adoption we celebrate constitutes an unequivocal statement that we refuse to accept that our Africanness shall be defined by our race, colour, gender or historical origins.

It is a firm assertion made by ourselves that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white.

It seeks to create the situation in which all our people shall be free from fear, including the fear of the oppression of one national group by another, the fear of the disempowerment of one social echelon by another, the fear of the use of state power to deny anybody their fundamental human rights and the fear of tyranny.

But it seems to have happened that we looked at ourselves and said the time had come that we make a super-human effort to be other than human, to respond to the call to create for ourselves a glorious future, to remind ourselves of the Latin saying: Gloria est consequenda—Glory must be sought after!

Today it feels good to be an African.

* Statement of the then Deputy President, T.M. Mbeki, on behalf of the African National Congress, on the occasion of the adoption by the Constitutional Assembly of The Republic of South Africa Constitution Bill 1996, 8 May 1996. The full text of President Mbeki’s speech can be found at www.polity.org.za/html/govdocs/speeches/constmbeki. html.

2
PlanetHome

Malcolm McIntosh
Writer and teacher, UK

There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings . . . Along the roads, laurel, viburnum and alder, great ferns and wildflowers delighted the traveller’s eye through much of the year . . . Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community . . . Everywhere was a shadow of death (Carson 1962).

In 1962 Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, which heralded the rebirth of concern with the modernist project and the birth of the sustainability project. By referring to modernism and sustainability as projects I mean that they are both grand plans by humanity to manage their relationship with planet home. Carson’s concern was with the over-use of industrial chemicals in agriculture, which threatened the delicate balance of nature. The message of humanity’s failure to tread lightly on the earth was not new but, coming just a few years after the end of the Second World War and the great efforts at modernist reconstruction, her statement had a profound effect. It was a clearly articulated and scientifically supported argument for a revision of the grandest of projects—the development of humanity by managing and ordering social and natural conditions on planet Earth.

The modernist development project was restated by President Truman in 1949 as ‘a bold new programme for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas . . . What we envisage is a programme of development based on the concepts of democratic fair dealing’ (Esteva 1992: 6).

This programme has not delivered to 30% of the world’s people measured in terms of material affluence, and it has not taken into account the carrying capacity of planet Earth. At the beginning of the 21st century this has been referred to as ‘social deception’, having failed to deliver Keynes’s dream of humanity living ‘beyond scarcity’. The economist John Maynard Keynes thought that by the beginning of this century the love of money would be seen as a ‘one of those semi-pathological propensities which one hands over to the specialists in mental disease’ (John Maynard Keynes quoted in Brown and Lauder 2001: 197). In a similar vein Ivan Illich highlighted the love of money and the acquisitive society. Writing in 1992 he defined the transition of man from ‘bungling toiler’ to ‘needy addict’ through the development of the expectation of needs (Illich 1992: 89). In other words: Born to shop: I shop therefore I am; therefore I consume and produce endless waste.

Latitude 51.39° N; longitude 2.38° W. A February morning early in the 21st century. The morning is crisp and clear, the sun is peeping over the edge early, even if the temperature is barely nudging above −5°C. A buzzard circles overhead, casually lifting on the updraft. A lone buck scrapes the undergrowth for food. Radio and shower noises in the house signal that humans are stirring, too. I have a clear head and this world just waits to be embraced. It feels good to be alive. I feel no cynicism or doubt about the sensations that I am experiencing; I believe that what I am experiencing is real and true. I am in awe of the scene that presents itself; I am one with my surroundings.

I turn from the open window and re-enter a world of illusion, make-believe and ignorance. As I face the day there are so many things I do not know about my breakfast cereal, about the news item on Iraq, about the strength of the US dollar against the euro. Does it matter?

Into this naïve state babies are born unknowing. Truth and trust come naturally, unspoken and unthought, as small lips suck on the warm breast. In her seminal book Secrets, Sisella Bok (1986) wrote that parents have a natural responsibility to keep some secrets from their children. We do not want our children to know everything that is out there. But, as we grow up, like the buzzard circling on the updraft, just passing the time, ‘ignorance, error, and prejudice lead us astray; we compensate through rationalisation and denial of the factors we most need to take into account’ (Bok 1986: 104). So we find a way to survive, and we sometimes forget to stop and think—to be in awe of this Earth that we share. As the poet W.H. Davies wrote in ‘Leisure’: ‘What is this life, if full of care,/We have no time to stand and stare?/. . . No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,/And watch her feet, how they can dance’ (The Book of 1,000 Poems, 1994).

When we leave the world of innocence and beauty we must confront the horrors that we have wrought upon each other. How shall we face each and every day? Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who chaired the South African Justice and Truth Commission from 1996 to 1998, at the demise of the Apartheid regime in South Africa, was asked at the end of the hearings: ‘Most of us have given up all attempts to maintain our health, our spiritual lives, and our family routines. How are you coping?’

He answered:

If your day starts off wrong its stays skewed . . .I try to have two, three hours of quiet per day and even when I exercise, when I go on the treadmill for thirty minutes, I use that time for intercession. I try to have a map in my mind and I go round the world, continent by continent—only Africa I try to do in a little more detail—and I offer all that to God (Krog 1998).

What a good way to start the day with the right state of mind. E.M. Forster said: ‘Surely the only sound foundation for a civilisation is the sound state of mind.’ Speaking on the BBC World Service in 1941, at the start of the Second World War, he said: ‘ “Love is what is needed,” we chant, and then sit back and the world goes on as before.’ He called for tolerance as a more realistic strategy for this ‘over-crowded and overheated planet’, but that tolerance must not be thought of as weakness (see Chapter 5 for the full text of Forster’s speech). Tolerance may then be thought of as the realpolitik of love.

To believe in planet home represents the politics of tolerance, the politics of hope, the triumph of awe over mortality, and a desire to believe in something—not in just anything but in this shared home for humanity. The scene of buzzard, buck deer and clear bright morning that comforted me today is very local; it is outside my window.

In The Politics of Hope Trevor Blackwell and Jeremy Seabrook said:

The green myth is calling people for the first time to take responsibility for the planet: it is no longer enough to go about your business dutifully, and hope that Providence or the powers that be, or even the hidden hand [of Adam Smith] will deal with the larger questions . . . The great emancipation comes from recognising the connectedness between the daily round and the wheelings of the planets. The green myth demands more, but it also offers more—a vision and an enlightenment which dispel all the semi-voluntary ignorance, anxieties and fear in which our lives are passed (Blackwell and Seabrook 1988: 104).

So I believe in planet Earth as planet home; in the local and the global:

I believe in planet home

In the buzzard and the buck

In one world

In one sanctity

In reverence for our shared place

Twirling, turning, blue and fragile through space

One world or an understanding of planetary ecology could be the end of illusion and cynicism as we know it. It is the evolution of a shared ecologically based vision, of common principles for managing shared values and a sensitivity to and a celebration of the diversity of histories of the planet and people. Intercourse around ecology provides a platform for liberation that celebrates the ‘other’ within the confines of the physical carrying capacity of the Earth. This is what Ulrich Beck (1991) has called our ‘ecological enlightenment’.

It has been argued that the 19th century was concerned with entrepreneurialism, the 20th century with management theory and the 21st century will be the century of governance, particularly between people and people and between people and planet. The world could learn from the African notion of ubuntu—‘humanness’. As the South African King Commission report says: ‘The notion of sustainability and the characteristics of good corporate citizenship can be found within the concept of sound human relations in African societies.’ Or, as Gregory Bateson wrote in 1972: ‘The most important task today is to learn to think in a new way’ (Bateson 1972: 462).

There is a close link between trust, truth and love. One of the philosophical discussions of our age is that there are no truths, and therefore it is difficult to trust anything. Is this true? As philosopher Roger Scruton has said, ‘do not believe anyone who says there is no truth!’

In developing trust in, love of and belief in, planet home, it is useful to remember Barbara Ward’s (1979) Progress for a Small Planet in which she says that ‘the chief new insight of our century [the 20th]’ is an understanding of our ‘inescapable physical interdependence’. She wrote of humanity being in ‘this unsteady interregnum between imperial ages which may be dying and planetary society which struggles to be born’. With optimism she said that ‘no problem is insoluble in the creation of a balanced and conserving planet save humanity itself’. ‘We have a duty to hope’ (Ward 1979: 277).

In the early 21st century the struggle for planetary society continues through the old individualism of the only world superpower, the United States of America. This is contrasted by the European model which has learned from the conflicts of the 20th century that the future lies in negotiation, not war, in eco-efficiency, not profligate consumption, and in narrowing, not widening, global socioeconomic disparity as we know that this leads to war and inequality. The European model could represent a new modernism: a counter to an outdated imperial programme of Darwinian survival of the largest and fittest, the biggest bully.

There is seemingly an abject refusal of the super-affluent powerful peoples of the world to recognise the relationship between the individual, who must have rights, and the whole of humanity, who must have hope and order coupled with a sense of integrity and integration. We are confused, perhaps, by our densely populated urban spaces with the telecoms’ death of distance and the rattling of the metro; the contrast of aloneness and close comfort. Being pushed together may set us apart from each other.

David Bohm, a nuclear physicist, in Wholeness and the Implicate Order, taught us that what we see is explicable and what connects us is implicate, and that there is far more of the latter than the former. ‘All matter is constantly in motion and insubstantial. The notion that the world and our universe are made up of separate things is an illusion and leads to endless confusion’, he has said (in a conversation between Joseph Jaworksi, David Bohm and Francisco Varela reported in Jaworski 1996: 176).

Recent analysis by Princeton University of data received from a deep-space probe suggests that the cosmos is composed of 4% ‘ordinary matter’, 23% ‘dark matter’ and 73% ‘dark energy’ (anti-gravity that keeps the universe expanding) (Lemonick 2003). The planet, and each person, are dense and less dense areas of energy within infinity. As Francisco Varela, author of The Tree of Knowledge, says: ‘Once you appreciate that the nature of our world, our universe, is nonsubstantial, yet exists, then you immediately open up to the possibility of change. There is an enormous opening for possibilities—possibilities to create and to change’ (in a conversation between Joseph Jaworksi, David Bohm and Francisco Varela reported in Jaworski 1996: 177).

Something to believe in is you and me, the planet and the universe as one. This truism can otherwise be thought of as John Donne’s ‘No man is an island’. With our new knowledge of explicate and implicate order comes optimism that we will be able to see Earth as a shared home for humanity. We will be able to re-engage with the planet by re-seeing our world for the first time as ourselves; part of a set of ongoing relationships with matter, energy and conviviality rather than as territory, boundaries...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part 1: Through some looking glasses
• Part 2: How could it be possible to believe in our corporations?
• Part 3: Auditing for whom?
• Part 4: New initiatives
• Part 5: Conclusion
• List of abbreviations
• Index