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diagnostic checklist of psychopathic traits (italicized Page 57 below) to the corporation's institutional character, he found there was a close match. The corporation is irresponsible, Dr. Hare continue doing what they did before anyway. And in fact in many cases the fines and the penalties paid by the organization are trivial compared to the profits that they rake in."56 Finally, according to Dr. Hare, corporations relate to others superficially -"their whole goal is to present themselves to the public in a way that is appealing to the public [but] in fact may not be representative of what th[e] organization is really like." Human psychopaths are notorious for their ability to use charm as a mask to hide their dangerously self-obsessed personalities. For corporations, social responsibility may play the same role. Through it they can present themselves as compassionate and concerned about others when, in fact, they lack the ability to care about anyone or anything but themselves. S7 Take the large and well-known energy company that once was a paragon of social responsibility and corporate philanthropy. Each year the company produced a Corporate Responsibility Annual Report; the most recent one, unfortunately its last, vowed to cut greenhouse-gas emissions and support multilateral agreements to help stop climate change. The company pledged further to put human rights, the environment, health and safety issues, biodiversity , indigenous rights, and transparency at the core of its business operations, and it created a well-staffed corporate social responsibility Page 58 JOEL BAKAN task force to monitor and implement its social responsibility programs . The company boasted of its development of alternative energy sources and the fact it had helped start the Business Council for Sustainable Energy. It apologized for a 29,000-barrel oil spill in South America, promised it would never happen again, and reported that it had formed partnerships with environmental NGOs to help monitor its operations. It described the generous support it had provided communities in the cities where it operated, funding arts organizations, museums, educational institutions, environmental groups, and various causes throughout the world. The company, which was consistently ranked as one of the best places to work in America, strongly promoted diversity in the workplace. "We believe," said the report, "that corporate leadership should set the example for community service."58 Unfortunately, this paragon of corporate social responsibility, Enron, was unable to continue its good works after it collapsed under the weight of its executives' greed, hubris, and criminality. Enron's story shows just how wide a gap can exist between a company's cleverly crafted do-gooder image and its actual operations and suggests, at a minimum, that skepticism about corporate social responsibility is well warranted. There is, however, a larger lesson to be drawn from Enron's demise than the importance of being skeptical about corporate social responsibility. Though the company is now notorious for its arrogance and ethically challenged executives, the underlying reasons for its collapse can be traced to characteristics common to all corporations : obsession with profits and share prices, greed, lack of concern for others, and a penchant for breaking legal rules. These traits are, in turn, rooted in an institutional culture, the corporation's, that valorizes self-interest and invalidates moral concern. No doubt Enron took such characteristics to their limits-indeed, to the point of self- destruction-and the company is now notorious for that. It was not, Page 59 THE CORPORATION 59 however, unusual for the fact it had those characteristics in the first place. Rather, Enron's collapse is best understood as showing what can happen when the characteristics we normally accept and take for granted in a corporation are pushed to the extreme. It was not, in other words, a "very isolated incident," as Pfizer's Hank McKinnell described it and as many commentators seem to believe, but rather a symptom of the corporation's flawed institutional character." Page 60 s The Externalizing Machine As a psychopathic creature, the corporation can neither recognize nor act upon moral reasons to refrain from harming others. Nothing in its legal makeup limits what it can do to others in pursuit of its selfish ends, and it is compelled to cause harm when the benefits of doing so outweigh the costs. Only pragmatic concern for its own interests and the laws of the land constrain the corporation 's predatory instincts, and often that is not enough to stop it from destroying lives, damaging communities, and endangering the planet as a whole. Enron's implosion, and the corporate scandals that followed, were, ironically, violations of corporations' own self- interest, as it was shareholders, the very people-indeed, the only people-corporations are legally obliged to serve, who were chief among its victims. Far less exceptional in the world of the corporation are the routine and regular harms caused to others-workers, consumers, communities, the environment-by corporations' psychopathic tendencies. These tend to be viewed as inevitable and acceptable consequences of corporate [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |