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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...

It is now for more than a month that we read about the horse meat scandal in Europe – or the ‘2013 meat adulteration scandal’, as it is referred to on its own Wikipedia  page. Today we learned that the scope of the issue is by no means just linked to some obscure Romanian supplier. High street brands such as Nestlé and Birds Eye are now implicated and there is little hope that this will die down any time soon. Scandals around food, and in particular meat production, are anything but new. The seminal event here is still the BSE scandal nearly two decades ago. But there are some remarkable differences with this latest one. Initially, it is worth noting that the BSE scandal was around meat that was potentially harmful; BSE infected meat can cause Creutzfeld-Jakob disease which until 2009 has killed 166 in the UK (the then centre of the epidemic). Horsemeat as such is not harmful to health (though some contaminants have been discovered from medication horses were given to enhance perfo...

Everyone knows that getting employees engaged in sustainability initiatives is tough. This fun little video shows why so many efforts go wrong and how "green jujitsu" offers green champions a better way forward. It's not saying anything new to anyone that has been in the field a while, but it gets the message across really well in less than two minutes ... and its great advice for getting started in employment engagement. As Gareth Kane from Terra Infirma , who put the video together says, "It's deliberately lightweight, but it carries an important message - ditch the eco-cliches and put yourself in your colleagues' shoes."    Here's the original link on Youtube which tells you a little more about the green jujitsu approach - essentially using your employees strengths, habits and interests as an opportunity rather than a threat.  

Over the past two days, we've had the good fortune to hear up close what Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever, has to say about responsible capitalism and the role of Unilever in making the world a better place. Polman has been in Toronto speaking in the Bata Lecture Series on Responsible Capitalism hosted by the Schulich School of Business. And from what we've heard, Polman is in a different league to most of the other identi-kit CEOs out there. He really gets that business has to do things differently if its to succeed and prosper in the future. And so far, he's been backing that vision up with real progress. That's not to say that Unilever is anywhere close yet to being a truly sustainable company, but few CEOs of global multinationals can match Polman's grasp of the challenges ahead. And more importantly, few can match his visioning of where he wants to get to. Polman says that what we need to do is change the conversation about social responsibility from one about a ...