faulker031

Imagine that you live in poverty. A chance arises for you to earn a year's salary in one day. All being well, no one will get hurt. In fact, what you're going to do will save someone's life. Sounds like quite a deal. Or at least it does until until you realize that what we're talking about here is selling one of your kidneys. And that it's illegal almost everywhere. The decision to sell an organ is a stark choice. It speaks so much of all that is wrong with our global inequities. It shouldn't be happening. But, like it or not, it does happen. For many people looking to get out of poverty, the sale of one of their organs is clearly a desperate choice ... but it is also a choice that they are sometimes willing to make. The illegal organ trade is not for the faint hearted. Sure, it saves lives, but it's an ugly business. Ric Esther Bienstock, the documentary-maker behind the award winning " Sex Slaves" documentary about global sex trafficking has tak...

The death of Baroness Thatcher is dominating today's news. Despite the euologic praises heaped now posthumously on the ‘iron lady’ one cannot overlook one common thread: ambiguity. Yes, she modernized Britain, but for whom? She was a war leader, but what was really gained in the Falklands? She battled constantly with her European friends, but to what avail? Yes, she was the first British female head of state, fairly unprecedented in many countries at the time – but did she leave a legacy to her sisterhood? “Well, yes, technically she was a woman...” was one of the funnier comments on Thatcher’s gender role I once heard. It is fair to say then that among her legacy is certainly one topic which is close to the interest of this blog. And we hasten to add, a legacy no less ambiguous than all her other ones. She certainly symbolizes and has pioneered many of the political changes which have given rise to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as a new business practice during the last t...

Today’s news that the Indian supreme court has effectively denied the Swiss multinational pharmaceutical company Novartis the patent protection for its ‘new’ blood cancer drug Glivec (Gleevec in North America) has been discussed controversially in the media. On the one hand, commentators sympathetic to the industry have pointed out that without patent protection a publicly owned company loses its incentive to develop new drugs. Pharmaceutical innovation, so the argument goes, is driven by the hope of future returns. Since development of new drugs is very costly, time consuming and competitive, companies can hardly justify investments when rulings such as today's kill their hopes of recouping the costs through future sales. In short, the Indian ruling " will hinder medical progress" ( Novartis press release) and thus  kills innovation. On the other hand, activists and other voices critical of the industry argue that this is a win for all those that have the interest of poo...

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...