Defending corporate social responsibility: Myanmar and the lesser evil

Abstract

This article examines an enduring issue in human rights scholarship generally, through the perspective of my recent experiences of undertaking corporate social responsibility (CSR) training in Myanmar. The relationship between theory (in the form of conceptual reasoning and analysis) and practice (the legal and political application of human rights principles) is complex and, on occasion, contradictory and paradoxical. Conceptually a strong and critically coherent argument can be made against CSR as being fundamentally incompatible with the moral objectives of human rights. In many ways, I share the view that, conceptually, CSR and human rights are incompatible. The implication of this standpoint is to refrain from undertaking any forms of CSR promotion and training and thereby remain consistent with one's intellectual principles. However, the human rights challenges in Myanmar caused me to suspend my intellectual objections to accepting an offer to provide CSR training there in 2012. Beginning with a conceptual analysis of the relationship between theory and practice within traditions of radical political philosophy, I proceed to evaluate my own apparent intellectual contradiction by reference to the notion of the lesser evil. By analysing a specific empirical instance I aim to outline a perspective upon human rights which seeks to reconcile apparent conflict between conceptual analysis and practical human rights action. In so doing, I aim to generate further discussion on the nature of the complex relationship between human rights theory as embodying a predominantly critical perspective upon existing economic realities and the unavoidably practical dimension of human rights as the ongoing attempt to transform those realities, which necessitates engaging with them.

Keywords:

• corporate social responsibility
• Myanmar
• business
• human rights theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Andrew Fagan is based within the Human Rights Centre and the School of Law at the University of Essex. He is currently Director of Undergraduate Studies in Human Rights.

Notes

1. How one refers to ‘Myanmar’ has long been a politicised issue. I opt for Myanmar throughout this article as this is typically how a wide variety of different ethnic communities who I have spent time with have referred to the country.

2. The full text of the ‘Guiding Principles’ is available here: http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Business/A-HRC-17-31_AEV.pdf

3. An understanding of human rights exemplified by Henry Shue, Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence and U.S. Foreign Policy, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).

4. Surprisingly little academic attention has been paid to the relationship between human rights as normative principles and various manifestations of capitalism as an economic set of relations. One volume which directly addresses this is Janet Dine and Andrew Fagan, eds, Human Rights and Capitalism: A Multidisciplinary Perspective upon Human Rights (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2006).

5. Milton Friedman, ‘The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits', New York Times Magazine, 13 September 1970.

6. A very similar argument was defended by Clive Crook, ‘The Good Company’, The Economist, 20 January 2005, http://www.economist.com/node/3555212

7. For a detailed analysis of the relationship between human rights and CSR see D. Cassel, ‘Human Rights Business Responsibilities in the Global Marketplace’, Business Ethics Quarterly 11, no. 2 (2001): 261–74.

8. European Commission, ‘Green Paper – Promoting a European Framework for Corporate Social Responsibility’, COM/2001/0366 final, 2001, 6–7.

9. See the introduction to A. Crane, D. Matten and L.J. Spence, eds, Corporate Social Responsibility: Readings and Cases in a Global Context (London: Routledge, 2008).

10. For more on this see http://www.ihrb.org/about/programmes/multi-year-project-in-myanmar.html

11. I was accompanied by Ms Tara Van Ho to whom I am indebted for the invaluable contribution she made to this project.

12. M. Blowfield and J.G. Frynas, ‘Setting New Agendas: Critical Perspectives on Corporate Social Responsibility in the Developing World’, International Affairs 81, no. 3 (2005): 499–513, 505.

13. See Crook, ‘The Good Company’.

14. D. Vogel, The Market for Virtue: the Potential and Limits of CSR (Washington, DC: Brookings Institute Press, 2005), 182.

15. J.D. Margolis and J.P. Walsh, People and Profits: The Search for a Link Between a Company's Social and Financial Performance (London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001).

16. Leslie Sklair, ‘Corporate Social Responsibility in the Era of Capitalist Globalization’, in Corporate Social Responsibility: Comparative Critiques, ed. K. Ravi Rahman and R.D. Lipschutz (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), 25–41.

17. Ibid., 33.

18. M. Tumin, ‘Business as a Social System’, Behavioural Science 9, no. 2 (1964): 120–30.

19. See Crane, Matten and Spence, Corporate Social Responsibility, 6.

20. For full text of the General Comment see United Nations Economic and Social Council, The Right to Water, E/C.12/2002/11 (General Comments), 2002, http://www.unhchr.ch/tbs/doc.nsf/0/a5458d1d1bbd713fc1256cc400389e94

21. In particular see Human Rights Watch, Without Rules: A Failed Approach to Corporate Accountability (2013), hrw.org/world-report/2013/essays/112459

22. UN data, 2012, http://www. http://data.un.org/CountryProfile.aspx?crName=MYANMAR

23. Myanmar Directorate of Investment and Company Administration, http://www.dica.gov.mm/dicagraph.htm. Suffice it to say that most commentators acknowledge the present limitations to obtaining reliable economic data on Myanmar.

24. R.H. Taylor, ‘Myanmar's “Pivot” Toward the Shibboleth of Democracy’, Asian Affairs 44, no. 3 (2013): 392–400, 399.

25. See The Irrawaddy, ‘Burma an “Extreme Risk” for Business and Rights Abuse’, 19 December 2011.

26. See EarthRights International, ‘Chinese Oil Company Linked to Human Rights Abuses in Burma (Myanmar)’, 9 December 2011; and Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, ‘Shwe Gas Movement Report’, September 2011.

27. See The Independent, ‘IKEA Airbrushes Women From its Saudi Catalogue’, 2 October 2012.

28. Report of the Special Representative of the Secretary General on the Issue of Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises, John Ruggie, 21 March 2011, 5.

29. M. Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 9.

30. Ibid.