Over the last several decades, the socially responsible investing, socially responsible consuming, and corporate social responsibility movements have undergone significant changes in both tactics and strategy. The earliest tactics involved confrontation with corporations over corporate practices that were seen as socially irresponsible. Investors used divestiture of a company's stock as a tactic, while socially concerned consumers used boycotts of a company's products or services.
Early examples included the 1985 Sullivan Principles for companies doing business in South Africa. If a company did not meet the standards set by the Principles, the stock would be divested from an individual's or institution's portfolio. Shortly thereafter, divestiture was expanded to include all U.S. companies doing business in apartheid South Africa. This tactic played a significant role in the collapse of that regime. An example of a world-wide consumer's boycott was INFACT's campaign against Nestle in the 1980s for selling infant formula in less developed nations. INFACT's current campaigns include the tobacco industry's marketing to young people and continuing efforts to promote breastfeeding rather than bottle feeding of infants.
In terms of strategy, the early divestiture and boycott movements focused upon fairly specific issues such as apartheid, infant formula, and animal rights. Codes and principles by which to measure corporate conduct were constructed and implemented by individuals and special interest groups with particular concerns. The Sullivan Principles were first suggested by The Reverand Leon Sullivan, who at that time was a Board member at General Motors. The Sierra Club and the Environmental Defense Fund focused upon environmental issues. The Nuclear Information and Resource Service concentrated upon the handling of toxic wastes.
By the 1990s, both tactics and strategy began to change, as reflected in the more recent principles and codes for corporate conduct. This was in response to the rapid appearance of transnational corporations -- companies with no identifiable national base and, therefore, no apparent responsibility to a specific constituency. The concerns of investors and consumers were becoming global in terms of social, political, and environmental issues. Therefore, the newer codes began to specifically identify a corporation's many constituencies (consumers, employees, community residents, the environment, different cultural contexts, suppliers, competitors, governments, shareholders) and drafted principles by which a corporation could respond to each of these constituencies in a just way on a global basis.
There was also a less confrontational character to the newer codes. Most were based upon the strategy of increasing the public's and the corporation's awareness about existing injustices and working with corporations to seek new and more just ways of conducting
a global business. Some of the newer codes, like the Principles for Global Corporate Responsibility, sought the widest and most diverse representation possible in the drafting of the codes and active citizen participation in the refining and implementing of them. Our page for Corporate Social Responsibility Principles & Codes has a list of the majors codes and principles developed over the years.
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