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Stakeholders, Identity and Reputation 65

reporting of organizations worldwide, ranked the Co-operative Bank as the absolute
number one in 2002: as a true ‘expert’ in stakeholder engagement. The Bank was
judged as an industry leader in setting CSR targets and being clear about how it has
performed against previous ones; in having its social report independently verified;
and in its discussion of financial exclusion that was seen as ‘a good example of
economic impacts well beyond the traditional understanding’.

Questions for reflection

1. What were, do you think, the motives for the Co-operative Bank to adopt its
ethical positioning strategy and place it at the heart of all its business operations?
Were these motives economic or rather moral in nature?
2. What aspects of the CSR strategy followed by the Co-operative Bank have led to
its success and acclaim in the business world? And what, in general, are sound
and just tactics in CSR behaviour and reporting?

For the above-mentioned reasons, many organizations have now started talking
19
about the ‘triple bottom line’:people,planet and profits. John Elkington introduced
the term and suggested that firms need to develop and report on CSR activities,
activities that include social (people) and ecological (planet) initiatives (see Box 3.2),
to meet their responsibilities beyond the generation of profits and healthy financial
accounts.‘People’ stands for all social and labour issues both inside and outside the
organization, including employee support and compensation, gender and ethnic
balance of the workforce, reduction of corruption and fraud, and more general codes
de sanitaire.‘Planet’ refers to the responsibility of organizations to integrate ecological
care into its business operations, such as the reduction of harmful waste and residues
and the development of ecologically friendly production processes. ‘Profit’ involves
the conventional bottom-line of manufacturing and selling products so as to generate
financial returns for the organization and its shareholders. This latter category of
responsibilities is often considered as a baseline or requisite before an organization
can even start considering meeting its social (people) and ecological (planet) respon-
sibilities. That is, these other responsibilities cannot be achieved in the absence of
economic performance (i.e. goods and services, jobs and profitability) – a bankrupt
firm will cease to operate. 20

Box 3.2 Management brief: corporate social
responsibility reporting 21
The founders of Ben & Jerry’s, the funky ice cream manufacturers now part of the
Unilever group, believe that business should give something back to the community
that supports it. But what makes Ben & Jerry’s unique and from a CSR perspective
interesting is that the company was one of the first organizations to acknowledge its