Examining Flip Side Of A Firm’s Social Responsibility Record

NPR:

Goldman Sachs has given hundreds of millions of dollars to charity in recent years. In part, its effort to do good has been shaped by the battering its reputation took during the financial meltdown in 2008 when Goldman traders were accused of misleading investors.

The efforts of companies to look good in the public eye may seem positive but there is also a disturbing side of doing good work, as NPR’s social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam tells our own Steve Inskeep.

…

I’m not going to tell you it’s a bad idea, Steve. But I will say that it comes at a risk. I spoke with Elaine Wong. She’s a marketing professor at the University of California, Riverside, and along with her colleague, Margaret Ormiston, she’s analyzed the behavior of dozens of Fortune 500 companies. These are companies like IBM and Nike and Pepsi, and she’s looked at that corporate social responsibility behavior. So this is everything from their philanthropy to their environmental stewardship, how well they treat their employees. I asked her whether there was a relationship between corporate social responsibility and its evil twin, corporate social irresponsibility. Here’s what she told me.

Read the whole story: NPR