Werben mit sozialer Verantwortung

“Awards” und “Rankings” für CSR (Corperate Social Responsibility) sind beliebte Instrumente für Unternehmen, sich in der Öffentlichkeit in ein gutes Licht zu rücken. Beispiele:

Es gibt auch Kritik. Hier ein Beispiel zu RobecoSAM (Dow Jones Sustainability Yearbook), veröffentlicht von CINCS (Creating Intelligent Natural Capital Solutions): Sustainability Indices and Environmental Reporting, 2013-04-23
(http://cincs.com/dev/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/InFocus23.pdf):

“[…] Environmental-business analysts and investors have challenged the credibility of DJSI’s information source for some time. DJSI has four steps to follow in the evaluation process: 
[1] First, each participating company has to fill in an industry-specific company questionnaire distributed by RobecoSAM, which evaluates the overall social and environmental strategies of each company.
[2] After that, DJSI will analyze industry-relevant media reports, press releases, news articles, investor commentaries and employee feedback to get a comprehensive understanding of how the company is perceived by opinion leaders and stakeholders.
[3] Following this is the company documentation section, in which RobecoSAM will request sustainability reports, environmental reports, health and safety reports, social reports and annual financial reports from each company.
[4] The last part is the company contact, in which SAM will have discussions and phone conversations with corporation leaders.
Of these, three of them are based on companies’ self-provided reports, data, resources and articles. In that circumstance, data could be optimized or even manipulated to generate better evaluation scores. For example, in the company documentation section, there is no standard sustainability reporting regulation regarding how companies should file sustainability and environmental reports. Therefore, companies are able to polish and further dress these data to make them appear glorious and “trustworthy.”
[…]
Conclusions – With the growing awareness of and demand for sustainability assessment, DJSI is a great tool for companies who are dedicated to gaining ongoing financial growth while meeting high environmental and social standards. The major benefit of being listed in DJSI is that it will help companies to be more transparent for investors through a thoroughly planned and designed corporate sustainability ranking system. The two major deficiencies of DJSI and other similar indices are that they lack authenticity in their auditing process and use imbalanced inclusion. […]”

Imbalanced inclusion: Inclusion of pros only while neglecting cons. In advertising that is legitimate. However, a performance evaluation or an audit which allows imbalanced inclusion is not credible.