It's that time of the year. Yet again.

And now, for something work-related

[T]here is more to CSR than empty phrases and exotic conferences. Serious business gurus such as Michael Porter and the late C.K. Prahalad have lent their support to the movement. Most of the world’s big companies have entire divisions devoted to it. And CSR is evolving. Gone are the days when it was mainly about managing corporate reputations—or “greenwashing”, to its critics. It is now more about business fundamentals, such as how products are designed and how supply chains are managed.

The loudest CSR buzzword these days is “sustainability”. The proportion of managers who say they think that “sustainability” is a key to competitive success has risen from 55% in 2010 to 67% last year, according to an annual survey of 4,000 managers in 113 countries by the MIT Sloan Management Review and the Boston Consulting Group. Companies have been busy creating “chief sustainability officers”, founding “sustainability units” and employing “sustainability consultancies”...

Keep reading Good business; nice beaches on the Economist.

Some Week's End Reading

Critics of CSR ratings, such as Scott Nova, Executive Director of the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), argue that they give audiences a false sense of security regarding actual company progress on CSR in industries in which none of the companies is in compliance with minimum labour standards.
Others, such as Tim Connor, former Labour Rights Advocacy Coordinator of Oxfam Australia believe ratings can play a positive role, "More effective government regulation is critical, but voluntary efforts like ratings systems can still play some role in ratcheting up compliance with labour standards," says Connor.
Can CSR ratings help improve labour practices in global supply chains?, a new paper published by the Maquila Solidarity Network (MSN) and the Project on Organizing, Development, Education and Research (PODER), examines the potential of rating systems to drive improvements in supply chain labour practices. Through interviews with CSR experts, representatives from companies like Levi's, Gap and others that have been rated on supply chain labour issues, labour rights advocacy groups, and rating system developers, the paper highlights some key challenges facing rating systems and how some rating systems have tried to overcome, or at least minimize, those challenges.


The challenge of ratings in global supply chains

Although all rating systems struggle with finding appropriate indicators, weighting their results, making their process reliable and credible, and getting their message to the right people at the right time, ratings of labour practices have the additional challenge of capturing workplace realities in complex, global industries. While consumers and investors may assume that CSR rating systems measure actual corporate practice, including labour practices at the factory level, for the most part existing systems have limited access to reliable, timely and comprehensive data about labour practices in global supply chains.
"We are still a long way from getting systematized on-the-ground factory data," says Conrad MacKerron of As You Sow, which released its first ratings of apparel company supply chain labour practices in November 2010.

Read the full feature here or download the study here.