While international corporate social responsibility (CSR) platforms have provided companies a list of standards in economic, legal, ethical and philanthropic areas, implementing them in real-life situations can still be a challenge, especially for global companies operating across cultures. Issues between corporations like Apple or Wal-Mart and their Chinese suppliers over working conditions and wages are […]
CSR Special: The Seven Core Values of Global CSR Standards
The Financial Crisis of 2007-08 exposed one of the biggest failings of modern business: the lack of a moral and ethical compass. Financial institutions obsessed over short-term goals, such as getting the stock price up and delivering quarterly profits, no matter what the cost. Few of them really worried about the impact their irresponsibility would […]
Sustainability and Inclusiveness Primer: Doing Good through Strategic Philanthropy
Giving to a worthy cause used to be as simple as signing a check and mailing it to a charity. As the idea of philanthropy continues to gain traction, buzzwords such as ‘impact investing’, ‘venture philanthropy’, ‘social venture capital’ etc., have emerged. All of these belong to a broader umbrella concept called ‘strategic philanthropy’ and […]
Sustainability and Inclusiveness Primer: CSR Guidelines for Chinese Companies Going Global
Chinese companies going global have key projects in developing nations, yet they often pay scant attention to corporate social responsibility (CSR) guidelines. For future success, CSR is indispensable. China has attracted a large amount of inward foreign direct investment (FDI) for the past decade or so, and in the recent past it has started to […]
Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild on Reinventing Capitalism
Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, CEO of E.L. Rothschild and Co-Chair of the Henry Jackson Initiative for Inclusive Capitalism, believes that capitalism is not a lost cause. It only needs long-term thinking and a more human face Can capitalism be fixed? Ever since the financial crisis, scholars and academics have been pondering over this vexing question. […]
Sustainability and Inclusiveness Primer: ESG Issues in Business
How are environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues adressed in business in China? Most companies don’t bother to look beyond the typical metrics that define success or failure of a business, such as sales, revenues and profitability. But that is beginning to change now as an increasing number of institutional investors have also started looking into […]
Sir Tom Hunter and his Idea of Venture Philanthropy
An interview with Sir Tom Hunter, noted entrepreneur, philanthropist and Scotland’s first billionaire. Sir Tom Hunter’s story is an inspiring one. The son of a grocer in a small mining village in Scotland, he started a business selling sneakers from the back of a van. From humble beginnings, he went on to create sportswear retail […]
Liao Jianwen on Social Innovation
In recent years, a handful of Chinese entrepreneurs have set up companies that use legitimate business models to tackle some of the country’s most vexing problems — and also turn in a profit. As these early experiments show, social innovation — or using business models to solve social and environmental problems — requires a fundamentally […]
Microsteps
Wang Keqin’s office is not the polished workplace you might expect from a major Chinese charity. The space is borrowed, the furniture donated. As Wang expounds on China’s social problems, he whips out a tissue and scrapes a thick coating of dust from his desktop. And yet, thanks to Wang’s fresh approach to online fundraising, […]
CSR in China: Domestic enterprises outshine MNCs
Globalization has increased awareness of, and controversy over, corporate social responsibility (CSR) around the world. China is certainly no exception. Encouraged by the country’s economic reform in 1978, and later, by its accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, multinational corporations (MNCs) flooded into the Chinese market. With them, they brought not only […]
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