The researchers set out to determine if mandatory sustainability reporting (CSR) actually causes companies to make socially responsible improvements, or if it's just another PR exercise. Here's what they found:

The researchers show that mandatory sustainability reporting effectively promotes socially responsible managerial practices. Overall, supervision of managers by boards of directors improves, bribery and corruption decreases, and credibility of managers in society increases. In companies where sustainability reporting is a requirement, employee training becomes a higher priority, and corporate boards supervise management more effectively. These positive results are more pronounced in countries that have stronger law enforcement, countries where assurance of sustainability data is more frequent, and countries that are generally more developed.

Researchers Serafeim and Ioannou compared countries that require sustainability reporting with a sample of countries that don't. They then looked at a number of measures of CSR, including "social responsibility of business leaders, sustainable development, employee training, efficiency of corporate boards, ethical practices, and avoidance of bribery and corruption". Next they performed a time-series analysis to try to correct for variance in one country to the next (e.g. the possibility that countries which require CSR reporting are just inherently more conscientious about social issues). Upon analysis, they found that indeed countries requiring CSR reporting improve on the aforementioned categories significantly.

We've long talked about the importance of transparency, honesty, and that advertising must be coherent with reality. It's encouraging to know that when a brand or company publishes a CSR report, it's not just greenwashing, it actually works.

Good news: being nice is the key to accumulating power. Bad news: once power is attained, leaders become less ethical. Jonah Lehrer's recent weekend essay in the Wall Street Journal presents the paradox of power:

The very traits that helped leaders accumulate control in the first place all but disappear once they rise to power. Instead of being polite, honest and outgoing, they become impulsive, reckless and rude. In some cases, these new habits can help a leader be more decisive and single-minded, or more likely to make choices that will be profitable regardless of their popularity.

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The following map shows the flow of carbon emissions in traded goods, and which countries are major exporters and importers of carbon emissions.

As GOOD reports: “When someone in the States buys shoes that were made in China, the carbon emitted in their production gets added to China's tally, despite the fact that the shoes get exported.”

The visualization and study shows that looking only at domestic emissions is pretty misleading and doesn’t capture the true emissions caused by particular country’s total activity. It also makes a case for changing the way we think about allocating responsibility for products to consumers. Read the full story.

via the Independent

Google, famous for flying the corporate "do no evil" flag, is accused of -- and this is putting it mildly -- a lackluster commitment to practicing what they preach. Threat Level asserts that their regular claims to championing freedom of information (as evinced on Google's public policy blog among other places) are inconsistent with the "real facts".

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1. Lying Through Visualization?

An interesting bit of infoviz ethics here. AT&T is suing Verizon over a commercial which features a map comparing the two companies' 3G wireless coverage.

AT&T alleges that although the data may be accurate, the presentation is misleading. According to the complaint, although the map compares only 3G coverage (which Verizon has more of), the blank spacing in the map suggests that AT&T has no coverage of any kind in those areas.

I'm fairly certain legal action is the wrong play here. It only seems to validate Verizon's claims that AT&T is inferior. The map may be correct, but the message is not. AT&T has data coverage in those "blank" areas, just not 3G. AT&T should turn around and make an ad with a map comparing where iPhones work. Plenty of blank space for Verizon there.

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The Fall of Man, Lukas Cranach the Elder

Namely, it indicates that 67% of consumers believe it's important to buy ethically responsible products, and that 51% of them are willing to pay more for those products. What's more, 28% of consumers avoid buying products from companies whose political and social positions they disagree with, while 17% have told others to stop buying products from those companies.

While none of comes as a surprise, exactly, there's another interesting statistic that might: according to the survey, 23% of consumers say they have "no way of knowing" if a product does what it claims. To wit, there what appears to be a statistically verifiable "green trust gap." Now, why might that be the case?

Raphael Bemporad, co-founder of BBMG, says the findings mean that marketers need to better communicate with consumers and be more transparent. DLB's official response? Well, duh.

Sometimes in the history of this blog, design ethics has bled into business ethics. It's easy for this to happen, because design and business are so closely tied. Almost all design is undertaken for commercial purposes, and this means that business requirements are inherent in almost any design project. Because of the unfortunate character of business, though, these requirements are often unethical. Therefore, it has seemed natural for us in the past to suggest that ethical design meant either taking on only clients with highly ethical businesses (call this the Tibor Kalman approach) or else advocating for more ethical business practices with the clients we do have.

The big problem is that neither of these approaches is feasible for most working designers. The first case is untenable because (as of now) there just aren't enough ethical businesses to go around, and so most designers wouldn't have the option to practice ethically. This would mean that for most of us, the choice would be between an unethical practice or no practice at all.

In the second case, designers overstep their roles in their engagements. Our clients aren't paying us to audit their business practices, and overwhelmingly often, they're not interested in getting that service from us pro bono, either.

Detail from Rembrandt's The Abduction of Proserpina (c. 1630).

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