Corporate responsibility issues and contemporary practice

Corporate Social Responsibility Issues

Corporate responsibility in matters of social significance has taken a very public position over the past few years, due in large part to the major scandals and corruption related to Enron and other corporations. Two issues regarding corporate social responsibility will be highlighted in this paper, including corporate responsibility and e-commerce, and corporate responsibility vis-a-vis Internet Communications.

Corporate Responsibility Regarding Internet Communication

Is it ethical for an American corporation with a global reach to participate in censorship? That is the question that dogged the search and media giant Google recently. An article in the Journal of Internet Law (Cannici, 2009) points out that, as background to this problem, there has been, starting in 2006, controversy when U.S. technology firms acquiesce to the demands of foreign dictatorships. In fact there was outrage on an international level when Yahoo, an important and influential media company in the U.S., helped the Chinese government in "…identifying and eventually convicting Shi Tao," who was a reporter in China, and used U.S.-based email services, to ten years in prison.

Tao's "crime" if one could call it that, was so petty that the fact that Yahoo would in effect go into a shady arrangement with the Chinese communists and help convict a man doing his job as a journalist stirred anger internationally. When it turned out that Yahoo had cooperated with Chinese police in another case -- dissident Li Zhi, who wrote his political views online, a no-no to Chinese censors -- in jailing Zhi, more outrage could be heard from friends of democracy worldwide.

Google entered into the Chinese milieu of censorship in 2006, and shortly after cutting a deal with China, it became the second U.S. corporation to show indifference to corporate social responsibility by announcing its launch of "censored versions of news and search sites in China" (Cannici). Subsequent to that announcement, Google did negotiate with China on an attempt to relax the tough censorship laws, but what is known today is that Google did go for the potential enormous financial windfall from China's many Internet users, and ignored its corporate responsibility.

Corporate Responsibility in the e-commerce field is no less important than in Internet communications. In the Journal of Business Ethics the author, Stephen Chen points out that the corporations that sell online -- in particular on social network sites like Facebook and Twitter -- have a duty and responsibility to make sure that their supplies are not abusing online customers. Nike and Wal-Mart, in particular, have recently been held accountable for abuses their supplies have perpetrated on customers. When shoddy workmanship by suppliers of Nike products is not called into question, customers and Nike corporate management are hurt; the customer through less than quality clothing or shoes; Nike through the negative publicity (Chen, 2010).