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This, in her own words , was one of director Margarethe von Trotta’s main challenge when shooting her 2012 movie ‘ Hannah Arendt ’, which will be released in North America this spring. Arendt, a German-Jewish intellectual who narrowly escaped concentration camp and survived the war in New York, became most famous in the early 1960s with her coverage of the Eichmann trials in Jerusalem for The New Yorker . It is on this period of her life that the movie mostly zooms in. The movie is mostly about what Hannah Arendt - as a person, lover, intellectual, friend, woman - went through while engaging with and covering the  Eichmann   trial. The film is a fantastically entertaining, at times even nail-biting-tense piece of cinema. Von Trotta has turned what in terms of plot could be a rather boring and uneventful story into a veritable thriller. Hence her quote above, which summarizes the challenge. We have commented earlier on this blog on some of Arendt’s intellectual heritage , and ...

The new second edition of our textbook, Corporate Social Responsibility: Readings and Cases in a Global Context is due out a little later this year. Above is a first look at the cover, featuring a shot by Lucas Schifres of workers crimping stones on silver in a jewelry factory in Panyu, Guangzhou Province, China. The photo is part of Schifres' Faces of Made in China series, which was featured on the New York Times "Lens" blog last year . The purpose of the series is to "consider the otherwise anonymous people who produce our essential possessions ...to put a face to labor in China". Whilst most of the photos in the series are simple portraits of Chinese workers, the cover shot shows more of the context in which Chinese-made goods are manufactured. Schifres didn't only photograph the workers but also interviewed them too. One of the more surprising things he found was, despite concerns from the West about the social responsibility issues evident in many Chin...

Monday’s  news from New York puts the topic of corporate responsibility and food back on the agenda. One of Mayor Bloomberg’s flagship projects, the ban to sell soda or sugary drinks in larger than 16oz (0.47 litres) servings was blocked by the Manhattan Supreme Court – just one day before it was supposed to go into effect. It puts an interesting spin on the debate on corporate responsibility of the food industry, which was a recent topic on our blog . Former business tycoon Bloomberg - in a rather non-business friendly manner – is obviously a strong believer in harsh, imperative, top-down governmental regulation when it comes to responsible business behavior. Whether this is just because he knows business in and out is an interesting question... Be that as it may, resorting to strict regulation in this area has always been more of a European approach – as the fallout from the horse meat scandal in the EU now also seems to suggest. Even more interesting it is now to see how differe...

Regular readers will know that we have a soft spot for corporate responsibility infographics . The one below, which recently crossed our desk courtesy of Accounting-degree.org , provides a nice overview of some of the big corporate accounting scandals of the last 15 years or so. The title may be misleading - it hardly seeks to capture the biggest scandals of "all time" - but it does give a good summary of those that have happened in recent memory. And the sources of the details they provide are cited - most of which (but not all) are pretty reliable. So if you want a five minute summary of all that's wrong in the world of accounting fraud, and you don't mind a strong US bias, this is a good place to start. One thing we particularly like are the "fun facts" accompanying each scandal. OK, so most of these are not really much fun at all - is anyone laughing about the introduction of Sarbanes-Oxley after the Worldcom and Enron scandals? - but they do point to so...