Ever since Kathy Lee Gifford cried on national television while her husband Frank Gifford handed out $100 bills to random workers in a sweatshop producing garments for Kathy’s clothing line, “corporate social responsibility†has been all the rage.
“CSR†has become a huge cottage industry — especially in Europe — with scores of corporations adopting “corporate codes of conduct†and establishing “CSR compliance†departments. Other companies outsource “social audits†of their own and contractors’ factories to “third-party†auditors including giant transnational accounting firms. CSR is the subject of several dozen annual conferences worldwide, and there is a not-so-small library of monthly magazines, annual corporate CSR reports, academic and how-to books, and a score of web sites on the subject.