Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management Corp. Soc. Responsib. Environ. Mgmt.

16, 289299 (2009) Published online 27 July 2009 in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/csr.211

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ISO-lating Corporate Social Responsibility in the Organizational Context: A Dissenting Interpretation of ISO 26000
Birgitta Schwartz and Karina Tilling*

Mlardalen University, School of Sustainable Development of Society and Technology, Vsters, Sweden

ABSTRACT Sustainable development is frequently an object of standardization, and over 100 000 organizations hold ISO 14001 certicates proving they have legitimate environmental management systems. Guidelines for social responsibility are now the object of standardization, resulting in the upcoming ISO 26000 standard. This paper examines the rationale behind developing ISO 26000, highlighting the tendency to decouple complex CSR issues in the organizational context. This is relevant to current problems of poor working conditions, weak regulatory compliance, and corruption often encountered in the production context in low-income countries. In addition, existing codes of conduct are frequently decoupled from actual organizational performance. We highlight how CSR standardization risks isolating complex and contested social issues, more radical attempts at change conicting with striving for legitimacy. Like the decontexualizing tendency proceeding from the standardized treatment of complex sustainable development issues in organizations, CSR issues also risk becoming decontextualized with the application of standardized approaches such as the ISO 26000 standard. Copyright 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

Received 11 October 2007; revised 26 February 2009; accepted 9 March 2009

Keywords: standardization; ISO 26000; corporate social responsibility; low-income countries; sustainable development;

decoupling; legitimacy; contextualizing

Introduction

USTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT1 IS DEFINED AS BUILDING ON THE THREE PILLARS OF ECONOMIC, ENVIRONMENTAL, AND social development. Sustainability management in the organizational context has largely focused on environmental issues, resulting in an increasing number of organizations implementing standardized environmental management systems. Debate on sustainable development in the organizational management

context started with environmental issues in the face of demands for the business community to take more responsibility for environmentally damaging activities. These demands were mainly made by various actors, such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs), politicians, media, and customers. In response, environmental management standards such as the British BS 7750 standard, the European Union EMAS regulation, and the international ISO 14001 standard were developed. These generic2 standards have become popular models with which to handle environmental demands in both the private and public sectors (Tilling, 2006, 2008), and over 100 000 organizations in almost 140 countries have implemented and certied ISO 14001 systems (ISO World, 2007). In recent years, social responsibility has entered the organizational sustainable development debate due to globalization and NGO demands. These demands call for strengthening human rights in relation to the production sector in low-income countries such as those in Asia. In 1997, a voluntary international management standard on social accountability, SA8000, entered the scene, building on several international human rights conventions. Compliance with this standard is controlled by third-party verication (Social Accountability International, 2008). In the global economy, low-income countries can offer inducements such as low-paid employees, long working days, low taxes, and short delivery times. Meanwhile, poor working conditions in these countries have been highlighted by NGOs and media in the Western world, where Western companies have been criticized for exploiting employees to make larger prots and give consumers, likely in the Western world, cheap consumer goods. To meet demands for improved working conditions, several actors are now interested in the approach earlier used for environmental issues, namely, developing a new standard, ISO 26000. This social responsibility standard will be generic and voluntary like the ISO 14001 environmental standard and is said to lead to common guidance on concepts, denitions, and methods for evaluating social responsibility (ISO, 2008a). The ISO 26000 standard denes the issue simply as social responsibility, since this concept can be applied to all types of organizations not just companies. We will, however, discuss ISO 26000 mainly from a corporate perspective when considering experiences in developing countries, so we will dene the social issues and social responsibility of interest as corporate social issues and corporate social responsibility (CSR), respectively. ISO 14001 concerns the way an organization goes about its work . . . (ISO, 2007a), and therefore seeks to standardize organizational processes. ISO 26000, on the other hand, standardizes denitions of social responsibility issues in organizations. This means that, as we show in the paper, ISO 14001 and ISO 26000 standardize processes and denitions, respectively, rather than focusing on performance results in relation to sustainable development and CSR. This paper takes a critical approach to the emerging trend of standardizing sustainable development in the organizational context, based on a social constructionist view of reality (Berger and Luckmann, 1967; Burr, 2003). We examine the social construction of the standardization rationale, contrasting it to the contextualization rationale in relation to CSR issues, such as working conditions and human rights. Our critical approach is inspired by the lens metaphor (Alvesson and Deetz, 2000) used in comparing the standardization and contextualization rationales, emphasizing their different underlying logics and foci. Against the background of the standardization of sustainable development in terms of environmental management and experiences and the consequences of using ethical codes of conduct in industry, we highlight the ongoing process of developing standard CSR guidelines. The rationale underlying the ISO 26000 standard is the focus, based on arguments used by involved actors. In particular, we problematize the gap between legitimate management action and actual change in the production context in low-income countries. ISO standards for sustainable development, such as ISO 14001 and related standards for environmental management, as well as the upcoming ISO 26000 standard for CSR, may be seen as global codes and standards incorporating sustainable development ideas. Alternately, the standardization idea as such can be viewed as a powerful idea in itself, which inuences the development and application of sustainable development ideas. In the eld of social responsibility management at the organizational level, we nd it productive to add the latter perspective on the ongoing ISO 26000 development process. This lets us consider the inuence of the standardization, or one size ts all, rationale in relation to the development of the CSR concept and practice. This paper therefore aims to contrast some central ideas and images of sustainable development to the concept of CSR. We

* Correspondence to: Karina Tilling PhD, Mlardalen University, School of Sustainable Development of Society and Technology, P.O. Box 883, S-721 23, Vsters, Sweden. E-mail: karina.tilling@mdh.se 1 The term sustainable development is usually dened with reference to the 1987 report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (WCED, 1987), stating that future economic development must go hand in hand with long-term social and environmental development to be sustainable.

Generic in that these standards are intended to t all kinds of organizations, no matter the eld of activity.
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complete freedom at the other. We are looking for a golden middle way that promotes respect and responsibility based on known reference documents without stiing creativity and development. From a critical perspective, the standardized golden middle way as described by ISO may perhaps not only be golden. Let us briey review earlier experiences of standardizing sustainable development in terms of environmental management.

argue that these ideas and images are important for political and organizational strategies as well as CSR practice. The trend toward standardizing organizational sustainable development performance is examined by citing examples from research and reports on the experiences and consequences of environmental management and earlier CSR initiatives. Observations of public seminars, arranged by the Swedish Foreign Ministry, reporting on the ISO 26000 development process, as well as interviews and documents relating to the ISO 26000 process are also cited in discussing expectations of the upcoming standard. Thus the rationale underlying the ISO 26000 process, as expressed by the involved actors, becomes the focus of our study.

Standardization: Both a Popular and a Criticized Organizational Trend

Sustainable Development Becomes Formalized by the Standardization Rationale

Discussion of developing a new ISO standard for social responsibility guidelines started in 2002, and ISO started to develop the upcoming ISO 26000 standard in 2004 (ISO, 2007g). Several actors have been involved in developing the standard, and the working group contains 355 experts, 35 organizations, and 72 national representatives; the industry stakeholder group is the largest one involved in this process.3 ISO felt that organizations that wanted to gain credit both internally and from their stakeholders could uphold their social responsibility and demonstrate their engagement in society with the help of ISO standards (ISO, 2007e, 2007f). This standard development process is led by the member organizations of Sweden and Brazil.4 The ISO 26000 standard for organizational social responsibility guidelines should, according to the latest work item proposal (ISO, 2008b), accomplish the following: (1) assist organizations in addressing their social responsibilities while respecting cultural, societal, environmental and legal differences and economic development conditions; (2) provide practical guidance related to operationalizing social responsibility, identifying and engaging with stakeholders, and enhancing credibility of reports and claims made about social responsibility; (3) emphasize performance results and improvement; (4) increase condence and satisfaction in organizations among their customers and other stakeholders; (5) be consistent with and not in conict with existing documents, international treaties and conventions and existing ISO standards; (6) not be intended to reduce governments authority to address the social responsibility of organizations; (7) promote common terminology in the social responsibility eld; and (8) broaden awareness of social responsibility. ISO 26000 thus aims to help organizations organize and manage their social responsibility, helping to improve peoples working and living conditions and fostering better opportunities for comparing the social responsibility efforts of different organizations (Swedish Standards Institute, 2007). Regarding standardization as a rationale, let us start by dening what a standard is. According to ISO, a standard is a document, established by consensus and approved by a recognized body, that provides, for common and repeated use, rules, guidelines or characteristics for activities or their results, aimed at the achievement of the optimum degree of order in a given context (ISO, 2007d). Turning to the eld of organizational theory, standards can be seen as recipes for what should be done by their adopters, while the standardization process can be dened as the production of a specic kind of rules (Brunsson and Jacobsson, 2000). In terms of the ISO 26000 development process, ISO describes the upcoming standard as striving for a voluntary, common basis for organizational social responsibility: Our work will aim to encourage voluntary commitment to social responsibility and will lead to common guidance on concepts, denitions and methods of evaluation (ISO, 2007c). The need for sustainable development standards can be seen as arising from the complex nature of the issues, which involve many conicting interests. From that perspective, describing standardization as a drive to devise a one-size-ts-all tool is not far fetched. Since it is hard to agree on what CSR should be in practice, the focus of a standard like ISO 26000 is on what can be agreed on, i.e., the lowest common denominator. Describing the aims and scope of ISO 26000, ISO describes the upcoming standard as the golden middle way (ISO, 2007c, Internet): There is a range of many different opinions as to the right approach ranging from strict legislation at one end to
5

Generic environmental management standards, such as ISO 14001 EMAS and BS7750, all build on the assumption that standardization as such is both possible and positive in relation to sustainable development. The same goes for the social accountability standard, SA8000, which applies to working conditions. The above standards build on the organization implementing a management system complying with the requirements set in the standards. The management system builds on the logic of the PDCA or Deming cycle, including the four steps of planning, doing, checking, and acting in order to achieve continual improvement in performance. The management system in turn refers to the structure of managing processes, which are also what are veried in third-party certication, leading to recognition if all formal criteria are fullled. Standardization seems popular as both a rationale and practice in approaching environmental and social aspects of sustainable development in the organizational context. Alongside this popularity, other voices have criticized the effects of standardization. Brunsson (2002) says that by following a legitimate external standard, an organization can avoid having to make its own decisions on necessary actions. Orders and directives may also be more easily implemented with reference to standards. Implementing a standardized system in an organization can also be viewed as a symbolic action, according to Jacobsson (2000). Such action is primarily viewed as seeking legitimacy from the surrounding world rather than being the most effective tool for change, i.e., the focus is to implement the right procedures and produce the right documents, rather than whether they are actually doing something differently (Jacobsson, 2000, p. 45). The above view is also supported by Ammenberg (2003), who focuses on Swedish companies implementing environmental management systems, stating that it is fully possible to have an environmental management system implemented and certied without attaining important environmental improvements. That is, it is fully possible (and necessary) to set goals of ones own choice as long as the logic of ISO 14001 can be said to have been followed. Using ISO 14001, it is also difcult to judge whether one company is better than another in environmental performance, since ratios are just ratios: they are not contextualized and are therefore not really comparable. On the same theme, Rikhardsson and Welford (1997) argue that environmental strategies often exist outside the day-to-day running of a business, referring to the organizational environmental management developments of the late 1990s. At a societal level, the ISO 14001 standard can be seen as promoting business as usual rather than fundamentally challenging or rethinking environmental problems. Rikhardsson and Welford (1997) explain this in terms of the interest of business in setting the new environmental agenda by themselves, the desire to dene environmental problems as management problems solvable using environmental management systems such as ISO 14001.5 Similarly, Power (1997) describes the development of environmental issues in the organizational context in the 1990s in terms of normalization, shifting from viewing business as the problem in relation to environmental degradation to viewing it as part of the solution. According to Powers analysis, this development is facilitated by a managerial shift largely inspired by the established procedures for managing economic resources, including the use of standardized environmental management systems. At the organizational level, sustainable development issues become accounting and auditing issues, rather than issues entailing any actual change in regular activities. This development focusing on management techniques and related rituals, rather than on actual outcomes in terms of more responsible actions, in turn inuences the construction of what sustainable development is actually about. The accounting and audit rationale easily becomes the lter through which sustainability issues must pass

Foreign Ministry of Sweden (Utrikesdepartementet/Globalt Ansvar), Seminar, 27 February 2007, Stockholm: ISO 26000 Social responsibility kad samsyn mellan intressentgrupperna Aktuell rapport frn frhandlingarna i Sydney. 4 That is, the Brazilian Association of Technical Standards and the Swedish Standards Institute. Corp. Soc. Responsib. Environ. Mgmt. 16, 289299 (2009) DOI: 10.1002/csr

Referring to M. Hajer, Welford (1997) describes the ISO 14001 trend as part of the eco-modernization paradigm, focusing on environmental efciency in business as usual rather than challenging the dominant business logic that created the environmental problems in the rst place. The business establishment hijacks the environmental agenda, turning it into eco-modernization, since the alternatives would be too frightening for them.
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to qualify as legitimate management issues. Accounting and auditing thus not only measure and evaluate performance, but set the actual scene for what types of performance can be carried out and even examined (Power, 1997; Tilling, 2008). Summing up the critique, the results of environmental management systems can arguably be discussed in terms of levels of results and a focus on activities due to both the scope and the voluntariness of management standards. An organizations obtaining of an ISO 14001 certicate can be interpreted as a symbolic action, indicating a quest for legitimacy without necessary making any important changes in environmental performance.

Contextualization

standardization as such, although they wanted their own perspectives to be included in the standard content. The Ecpat representative stressed that an ISO standard was accorded legitimacy from all sectors of society.9 Taken together, we can regard these sentiments as reecting the demand side of management concepts, dening a legitimate action in relation to CSR. Representatives of the Swedish NGO Fair Trade Center (FTC) developed their thoughts regarding the positive aspects of the ISO 26000 standard in a follow-up interview after the seminar, stressing the possibilities offered by making social behavior measurable and accounting for it. Their experience was that results tend to be retained internally and are not published in any ofcial documents, making it difcult for stakeholders to follow up on companies own monitoring of their ethical codes. At the same time, the FTC feared that CSR standardization would not guarantee that companies would make progress. The risk of standardizing social issues could be that the focus would be on the standardization process itself instead of on actually improving the working conditions of the employees of suppliers in developing countries.10 The International Labour Organization (ILO), also involved in the ISO 26000 development process, argued for a guidance standard, since it saw difculties certifying organizations according to the standard. Many collective agreement processes already apply in organizations and companies, processes that differ between countries. Social responsibility is also seen by the ILO as a public responsibility including social and political processes; this distinguishes the ISO 26000 standardization work from other standardization work related to technical processes.11 The seminar referred to above came to circle around an agenda of legitimacy, addressed by various stakeholders from various perspectives represented in the ISO 26000 standardization process. Some actors highlighted the legitimacy gains accrued by society from using the ISO 26000 standard, whilst others stressed that radical changes in working conditions in developing countries would not necessarily occur in the wake of ISO 26000. Assuming that gaining legitimacy is the purpose and underlying agenda of the actors involved in developing ISO 26000, we now turn to the experiences and consequences of standardizing CSR.

Contextualizing can be seen as the contrasting rationale to standardization, the dominant trend in current organizational sustainability work. The standardization rationales of decontextualization and voluntariness are illustrated when ISO describes the aim of the ISO 26000 process and content: Our work will aim to encourage voluntary commitment to social responsibility and will lead to common guidance on concepts, denitions and methods of evaluation (ISO, 2007c). The terms voluntary and common, like the golden middle way cited above, are positive terms assuming consensus and freedom guiding CSR activities. However, it might not only be desirable to place the CSR work of an organization in a middle way, as indicated by ISO, since conicts and contextual aspects are not addressed. Turning again to organizational theories of standardization and focusing on a contrasting picture of why there is a need for standardization in the rst place, Brunsson (2000, p. 31) explains the popularity of standards in relation to the lack of other control instruments: The use of standardization is at least partly explainable by the need for it: if other instruments of control and co-ordination are not available, standards will be in demand. Against that background, it could be argued that ISO 26000 developed because nothing else could be agreed on, other than a voluntary standard for social responsibility, open to be freely lled with content of ones choice as long as it fulls the guidelines of the standard. ISO 26000 aims at providing guidelines for organizational social responsibility. It will be voluntary and is not intended for third-party certication.6 So what do the actors involved in developing the ISO 26000 standard expect of this new standard? This will be discussed in the next section, which presents the results of a seminar held in Stockholm in May 2005.

How do Ethical Codes of Conduct Work in Practice?

Actors Expectations of the ISO 26000 for Standardizing CSR

In Stockholm, on 24 May 2005, the Swedish Standards Institute arranged a seminar about work on the new ISO 26000 standard. At this seminar, several organizations involved in this work were represented, and they presented their views on the upcoming standard. One common opinion was that it was important that organizations apply only one standard: today there are several ethics standards, creating difculties for suppliers in developing countries. The ISO standard is also seen as the most attractive due to ISOs good reputation gained from corporate experience of the ISO 14001 environmental standard and the ISO 9000 quality standard. As a nancial investor representative said, ISO has a history and is a well-known standard; other standards are not so well known and are difcult to understand. The AB Volvo representative said that it would be good to have a common CSR standard, and that ISO is well known and lends credibility to an organization. She also claimed that multinational companies are forced to work on social issues that impinge on their brands, and that the mass media focuses on companies that mishandle these issues.7 At the seminar, it became clear that organizations are demanding a denition of what CSR in the organizational context is all about, and that they expect the new standard to supply such a denition. Organizations currently use various denitions of CSR, as exemplied by Volvo receiving many questionnaires on social issues from different organizations. The Volvo representative hoped that the ISO 26000 standard could be used in communicating with all stakeholders, saving time in these contacts.8 The NGOs represented seemed to be content with CSR
9

Corporate interest in ethical codes can be discussed from a contextual perspective. The idea of improving working conditions in the production sector in developing countries seems mainly driven by stakeholders such as NGOs and consumers in developed countries. The standardization idea that is the basis of ISO 26000 is institutionalized in developed countries, and the rules established in the standard are expected to be followed by organizations that implement the standard, even though the rules are voluntary. The differences between the contexts of the developed and developing countries are highlighted in some examples below, where ethical demands from Western companies are interpreted by suppliers in developing countries as additional demands subordinated to the overall dominant business model of prot maximization and lowest price. This makes the demands difcult for suppliers in developing countries to handle, and they are often the business partners who must solve contradictory demands. The experience of companies that have worked with ethical codes for several years indicates that it is not easy to change the circumstances of labor in developing countries. There is a discrepancy between what is called for in ethical codes and organizational CSR policies and what is done in practice. A report from Insight Investment Ltd and Acona Ltd (2004) notes that current supply chain management practices and the drive for ever-greater efciency exert pressure on suppliers, essentially forcing them to contravene certain ethical standards to meet buyer requirements. Some companies may be inadvertently pursuing a buying strategy that creates tension, or in some cases directly conicts, with their commitments to ethical sourcing. Such pressures are often exerted on suppliers needlessly, as they result from poor buying practices inefciencies, indecision, poorly designed incentives, and a lack of trusting business relationships.

10 11

Foreign Ministry of Sweden (2007) op. cit. Swedish Standards Institute, SIS/TK 478, Seminar, 24 May 2005, Stockholm: ISO 26000 Social Responsibility, Vad har man kommit fram till hittills? Hur ser arbetet ut framver? 8 Ibid. Corp. Soc. Responsib. Environ. Mgmt. 16, 289299 (2009) DOI: 10.1002/csr

Ibid. Fair Trade Center, Interview with two Project leaders [24 June 2005]. Swedish Standards Institute (2005) op. cit.
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Analysis: The Generic Form, Supposed to Fit all Organizations, Contexts, and Issues
I would like to buy four liters of medusin , Pippi told the pharmacist. What sort of medicine? the pharmacist asked impatiently. It would be best if it helped against disease, Pippi said. What sort of disease? the pharmacist responded. Well, I think I would like one that is for whooping-cough, chafed feet, stomach pain, rubella, and if you have caught a pea up your nose and such. It would also be good if you could polish furniture with it. A really proper medusin it should be. (Lindgren, 1992 (1946) p. 30, our translation). The above quotation from Pippi Longstocking illustrates how tempting it is to look for just one medusin to use Pippis own word to solve all kinds of different problems at the same time. That is, an all-in-one solution, so to speak. We argue that it is not all that far fetched to see the same rationale as Pippis underlying the emerging trend to standardizing organizational sustainable activities. Standardizing methods, for example, standardizing environmental management and social responsibility, as is done in ISO 14001 and ISO 26000, can be compared to Pippi Longstockings medusin, helping one regardless of the problem, or to be more correct, for all possible purposes. ISO labels the ISO 9000 (on quality) and 14000series standards, alike ISO 26000, as generic management standards, meaning that the same standards can be applied to any organization, large or small, whatever its product including whether its product is actually a service in any sector of activity, and whether it is a business enterprise, a public administration, or a government department (ISO, 2007b). From a critical perspective, this one management standard ts all organizations and contexts approach can be questioned, not only for its assumptions on organizational rationality but also for being slippery and more concerned with symbolic value than actual results.

It is not only the buying companies that decouple (Weick, 1976; Meyer and Rowan, 1977; Brunsson, 2002) their activities, but also the suppliers. A study by Egels-Zandn (2007) of the toy industry found that the Chinese suppliers had consciously developed methods for deceiving the organizations that monitor their activities to determine whether they were fullling the demands of buying companies. The formal system being monitored was decoupled from the suppliers actual operations, which led to few areas of non-compliance with the ethical codes being detected, though in practice there were multiple areas of non-compliance. For example, suppliers deceived monitoring organizations by instructing employees on what to say, offering compensation for correct answers, forging salary lists and timecards, hiding part of workforce, and forging employee contracts. The study found that the buying companies, the retailers, were surprised when this was pointed out to them, and they seemed unaware of their suppliers lack of compliance with their codes of conduct (Egels-Zandn, 2007). This tendency for decoupling between what was said and what was done was also exemplied in an interview with an experienced ethical nancial investor. When visiting Western companies, he often experienced problems nding convincing evidence of actual CSR results, especially regarding their production sites in developing countries. Instead, he was most often provided with many sustainable development and CSR policies stating the companies aims. These issues were also rarely understood by CEOs, reecting an add on approach rather than CSR being treated as integral to core business activities.12 Critical views have also been expressed by researchers, who point out that social and environmental sustainability today tend to get measured and presented in glossy reports, guided by nancial reporting traditions and aims, not focused on qualitative social improvements. (Norman and McDonald, 2004). Bjurling (2004) demonstrated that Chinese workers in the toy industry do not know the ethical codes or their legal rights, making it difcult to improve their conditions. The CSR approach has also met with criticism that its underlying assumptions are false, since voluntary reporting does not improve performance, voluntary codes and management systems do not actually change corporate behavior, the consumer will not drive change, and the investment industry cannot provide the strongest incentives for CSR (Doane, 2005). Bjurling (2004) found that some of the investigated companies that had not organized the ethical codes proved to have better working conditions than those that had. Another example is that of Levi Strauss, which started to use a supplier ethical code of conduct back in 1991. By 1996, the company had begun developing tools for use worldwide in factory social auditing. After some time, however, it realized that this model had inherent aws. The cost of Levis annual non-nancial audit is US$3.5 million, and it has proven to be ineffective when using traditional methods of checking factory compliance with the companys code of conduct. Levis is now more interested in the dialogue models pioneered by some trade unions, and stresses that it needs the participation of workers, NGOs, other companies, unions, and governments.13 The company notes the importance of brands giving up some control in the process to workers and to enlightened suppliers and that there is a need to collaborate with suppliers and stakeholder groups in these new approaches to raising supply chain standards (Ethical Corporation Magazine, 2004). The Levis example shows that to gain legitimacy and effectiveness in handling social issues, the purchasing company can chose another approach than auditing, which they found ineffective. In relation to this, the ISO way of including stakeholders in the ISO 26000 development process is important, but the question remains as to how the stakeholders will be involved when the guidelines are implemented locally in developing countries. For example, local actors often promoted different, and sometimes conicting, denitions of CSR and sustainable development, and tried to obstruct what they viewed as an infusion of values from outside partners (Egels-Zandn, 2007). We can conclude from the above examples that the good intentions embodied in ethical codes of conduct are not easy to full in practice. What will then happen with the social issues when they are standardized?

Legitimacy, Decoupling, and the Imaginary Results of Standards

12

13

Implementing management standards seems to be a process that places the standard itself in the spotlight, as a legitimizing symbol of responsible organizational action. As Power (1997) states regarding environmental management systems and auditing, the risk is that standards make abstraction from complex environments possible and the veriable assertion can be shifted away from these complexities. At the same time, the actual performance or doing is not questioned; in fact, evidence of practices not working could be overlooked since compliance with standard denitions and demands is the focus (Tilling, 2008). It is relevant to see the experiences cited earlier of inadequate application in companies paying lip service to CSR codes rather than actually changing things for the better. This could in turn be interpreted in the theoretic frame of decoupling and hypocrisy (Meyer and Rowan, 1977; Brunsson, 2002) as a logical consequence of organizations conicting agendas (social responsibility versus prot) and quest for legitimacy. Against that background, ISO 26000 can come to serve as a decoupling tool rather than a reforming force for social responsibility. It could also be argued, according to the view that the quest for legitimacy is a driving force, that ISO only includes NGOs and labor organizations in order to reach formal consensus in the ISO 26000 standard development process. At the same time, these organizations and their interests become hijacked when standardized. The FTC, however, said that even though it was positive regarding the focus on its issues, it would leave the cooperation if unsatised with the results.14
14

Banco Fonder, Interview with Head of Responsible Investing & Engagement [6 February 2007]. Levis is now trying out a participatory approach, with pilot projects and initial trials of a new worker-dialogue-based system to improve factory conditions. In a pilot project with one supplier, the parties jointly decided that meetings with workers were needed to hear worker concerns and give them more representation to factory management. Due to the large number of workers (500), they began to hold monthly meetings involving management, worker-elected representatives, and some 50 randomly selected workers. Corp. Soc. Responsib. Environ. Mgmt. 16, 289299 (2009) DOI: 10.1002/csr

Fair Trade Center, Interview with two Project leaders [24 June 2005].
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Standardization and the Complexity of CSR Issues

in a global context, in order to have at least some common basic rules of the game of business, as called for by former UN Secretary General Kof Annan. The ISO 26000 development process, aiming to dene guidelines for what constitutes CSR and how it should be understood at the organizational level, is built on consensus logic. In contrast, it could be argued that CSR is a construct that must be open to debate if it is to develop constructively in different societal contexts. An interesting question is whether ISO 26000 will bring about any change for people working under poor conditions in low-income countries, or whether it simply will grant companies in the highincome, Western world greater legitimacy and self-satisfaction. Remembering the words of Pippi, one wonders whether the upcoming ISO 26000 standard will truly be for curing, or just perhaps for making organizations feel cured.

As expressed by the Volvo representative in the earlier-cited ISO 26000 seminar, there is a need to dene and nd an appropriate approach to CSR because of its complexity and many interpretations. This is also the point made by ISO, as mentioned above, when espousing the benets of generic standards. In contrast, we would like to highlight the possible negative consequences of standardized ways of acting in relation to environmental and social issues in organizations. As Furusten (1995, p. 164f) argues regarding the inuence of what he calls the popular management discourse, local organizational discourses and language will be greatly inuenced by what is articulated in the popular management discourse. The upcoming ISO 26000 standard, like ISO 14001, can be seen as an expression of such a popular management discourse, inuencing the language and interpretation of the questions it addresses (Tilling, 2008). From a social constructionist point of view, the talk and actions linked to the work on management standards are constructs of the concepts of environmental and social responsibility.15 The appropriateness and legitimacy aspect of possible interpretations of environmental and social performance i.e., what is possible and impossible to say and do is now being institutionalized by the generic management approach. As we see it, management standards, generic though they may seem, come with specic assumptions that are more or less explicitly articulated but not addressed or problematized. At the same time as the standardized management approach is becoming institutionalized, context-specic, cultural-difference, political, and power-related issues are pushed out of the spotlight (Tilling, 2008). It is reasonable to argue that social and environmental sustainable development issues become apolitical at the same time as they become generic and manageable by standards. A risk, rarely discussed, in what the standardization of CSR actually does to promote sustainability can be identied: in dening sustainable development as inter-organizational, CSR standardization ignores the existence of socially and politically contested issues that challenge the structures of todays society. This should be especially highlighted in the production context of low-income countries, where it is closely connected with complexity in terms of, for example, poor working conditions, weak legislative compliance, and corruption. Earlier experiences reveal the decoupling tendency of ethical codes, which, though a legitimate way to acknowledge CSR at the organizational management level, still do not necessarily change actual conditions or performance in the production context.

References

Conclusions

What then does the upcoming ISO 26000 standard seek to address? The popularity of sustainable development standardization could also be problematized based on another contextual rationale, overlooked in the ISO 26000 attempt to standardize CSR based on consensus. An applicable perspective would be that of what will actually be changed in organizational practice and in society by ISO 26000, beyond the immediate purpose of providing legitimate proof of CSR compliance. This should also be seen in relation to the fact that standards spread very rapidly compared with norms, which develop by socialization processes, over long timeframes, and require particular social conditions to emerge at all (Brunsson and Jacobsson, 2000). Depending on whether we view socially responsible action as a xed state, able to be standardized, or as contextually dependent, we will regard CSR standardization quite differently. From a developing country perspective, CSR contextualization indicates that production conditions are strongly inuenced by prot maximization, often in contradiction to the contents of CSR policies and ethical codes of conduct. Whilst social norms are contextually dependent, the ISO 26000 standard is generic and will consist of voluntary guidelines. It will not necessarily challenge the business logic of prot maximization, which is what necessitated CSR initiatives in the rst place. Returning to the play on words in the title of this paper ISO-lating corporate social responsibility the isolation can be seen in the tendency, by standardizing CSR, to dene issues of social responsibility regardless of their specic organizational or cultural contexts. However, ISO 26000 could, like codes of conduct, arguably be justied

15 Our reasoning here is based on Berger and Luckmanns theory of externalization, objectication, and internalization, institutionalizing how we perceive and perform in society (adapted from Wenneberg, 2001, p. 70ff).

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Copyright 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

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Corp. Soc. Responsib. Environ. Mgmt. 16, 289299 (2009) DOI: 10.1002/csr