The reader can take this book two ways: as the latest airport buy for the next management fashion we will be communicating, or as a critical text on the current management fashion.
As a guide to the future, the authors want business to embrace a new “big idea” – corporate social leadership. An example is One2One teaming up with the Leonard Cheshire charity to get disabled actors and models into “slice of normal life” adverts (pp. 184‐90). As a possible example, they see BP giving coupons for public transport or for bike buying when motorists buy petrol (p. 108).
As a guide to current fashion, the book is a fulsome statement on the whys and wherefores of corporate social responsibility (CSR) but also a regret on how it has been implemented so far. You can read it to be a convert or to become a sceptic.
The connection between these two fashions is the authors’ view that CSR is getting mired in show rather than substance, in dubious audits and in slick brochures, and so losing its potential for business to do social good. Milton Friedman would disapprove of the authors’ zeal for businesses as social reformers but he would perhaps admire how they blend opposites into the sort of pragmatism most business people operate on. Their argument is a defensive and a self‐interested one, with instrumental benefit from any good done along the way. If you can defeat the anti‐capitalists, make more money, and help the needy with corporate social leadership, it is an idea and practice with ideological, material and moral benefits.
Capitalism is extremely adaptive. Corporate communicators must look out for its next adjustment to a changing environment.
