How philanthropy by the corporate elite acts as a façade to the malice behind?

Abstract

In the 21st century capitalist world, the idea of philanthropy and social good by the corporate elite has gained prominence. The accounting standards across the world have made Corporate Social Responsibility as a mandatory initiative by the companies. Further, we have come up with the ideas of social impact investing, triple bottom lines (social, environmental, financial), corporate think tanks, philanthrocapitalism, and others. However, the irony is that the above ideas are just acting as the façade to the global problems that the businesses have created. The above is not providing solutions or solving the exploitation that the businesses have done. Anand Giridharadas, an American author, argues that such efforts that purport to change the world, but actually keep it the same. In his book, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, he studies how the global elite’s efforts to change the world preserves the status quo and obscures their role in causing the problems they have created. One of the dimension of maintaining the status quo by elite is about awarding companies for their social responsibility initiatives or for good corporate citizenship. Such awards reinforce the beliefs that the corporates are doing the right thing. In a manner, the purpose of the awards has become to present the PR material. There are multiple corporate awards at the national and international level that recognize the CSR and corporate citizenship practices of companies. Such award functions also act as the forums for corporate elite and governments to discuss about the key economic issues in the nations. In much of the contexts, the awards are not only for the corporate houses, but also for the political leaders. The awards presented for CSR and corporate citizenship are more often instituted by the corporate media houses or the chambers of commerce and industries. The report is an effort to look into the independence of such corporate awards, the evaluation process, and similar considerations. For this purpose, the following report looks into the literature around Corporate Social responsibility, Corporate Citizenship, Illusion of CSR, and Corporate Awards. Further, case studies of four Indian corporate awards have been looked into to study the information about motivation of the award giving agencies for instituting the award, and to understanding the evaluation criteria for the awards. The cases also try to look into the Jury for such awards and raise certain questions. Certain key observations related to the corporate awards have been made in the discussion section. The limitations of the study have also been noted along with the possibilities for future avenues of the study related to what has been discussed in the report.