Guest Blogger: Inga Gusarova
The day started with wistful glances at the windows. On my first visit to Montreal, theoretical presentations on business ethics had trouble competing with the lure of city streets. But as the CBERN Annual General Meeting fully kicked in, delivering on its mandate “to promote knowledge-sharing and partnerships” within the field, the feeling changed. I became consumed by a profound sense of being on the cusp of groundbreaking research. It was multi-dimensional and all encompassing; involving culture, policy frameworks, and systems of decision making… and of course, once properly analyzed, peer-reviewed, and disseminated, it just had to produce lasting social change. Because that’s what social science is about, right?
While basking in superiority, I came across a brief newspaper article. Half a page only (so different from the expanse of a PhD dissertation), it described several enthusiastic Canadians who went to Sudan to plant crops. They weren’t non-profit workers or academics but self-employed business people who knew how to get results – and results they got. A plenty. Delivering the entire projected harvest on 12 hectares instead of the originally planned 60 – and managing to distribute those, with eventual aim to create a self-sustaining local operation where their participation will no longer be needed.
I happened upon a Transition Towns conference in my own city of Calgary immediately after. (Contrary to the common perception, there is a ton of good things happening in the Cowtown – even the granola hippy types who escaped to BC or Nova Scotia decades ago are beginning to grudgingly acknowledge that they could enjoy living here.) The folk at that conference had one thing in common: they were doers. Non-profit, for-profit, or so-called “regular citizens” – they came together to share experiences and best practices, not waiting for textbooks to arrive before taking action. They went ahead, tried, succeeded, failed, learned, and failed again, and learned, and succeeded once more. They went into the field and got dirty.
That day I completed a personal paradigm shift. All my life, research seemed to be the cornerstone of results. As flawed and biased as experiments and correlations may be, I was an open worshipper of the scientific method as the closest thing humanity has to objectivity. But I eventually overlooked another key word to this principle: method. A method is a technique, a tool that needs to be applied in practice, a means to an end – but not an end in itself.
The Social Sciences Research Network in Canada contains 329 submissions with “corporate social responsibility” and 128 with “business ethics” in the title alone. Once search is expanded to abstract or keywords, these numbers become 955 and 832 respectively. They are good papers – a lot of human ingenuity went into writing them. And… who cares? How many business practitioners, corporate employers or employees have read any of them – or at least, reports or executive summaries based on those papers? In the modern times of ultra-specialization, research and practice often become separated into entirely different fields with a lot less communication between them than one might have hoped for. Peer-reviewed papers are not written with a time-starved company employee in mind – and an academic is caught between the rock and a hard place of “publish or perish” making it difficult to work outside of ivory towers. The company employee has too many surveys to answer while bound by the legal department’s gag to share real, down-to-earth answers on what their company is actually doing. This seems to lead to self-reinforcing circles of specialized knowledge contained within narrow populations, such as academics, company personnel, or industry associations.
A snake consuming its tail is a well-known ancient symbol – but it is a symbol of status-quo. If we actually mean it when we talk about social change, we need to shake up existing structures. For all its benefits and shortcomings, specialization has one serious implication: to move forward, we need many people from multiple fields together in one room. Researchers and practitioners, businesses and non-profits, producers and consumers. They need to learn to speak each others’ language, and give space, time, and respect to each others’ perspectives.
Easier said than done, of course. Convincing people to truly give space to different views could prove more challenging than gathering them together in the first place. Especially on a large scale. But as every practitioner discovers, we don’t need to start at a large scale: conversations at coffee breaks and little local events can indeed foster an avalanche, as long as they are happening everywhere – which seems to increasingly be the case. Even at the mostly academic CBERN conference, the question resonating from within the room was “How?” – how do we actually move from an idea to implementation and attract more practitioners to such events? Meanwhile, as people are nibbling on their little pieces of this puzzle, talking, arguing or in silent contemplation, I am left wondering if doing is the only ultimate best practice.
About Inga:
A native of Russia, Inga came to Canada to obtain her Bachelor of Commerce degree from Queen’s University. After graduation, she worked in personal insurance & finance before transitioning to freelance marketing, copywriting, and non-profit work, currently acting as a coordinator for Canadian Business Ethics Research Network Western Hub.
Tags: blog, bridges, business ethics, corporate integrity, social entrepreneurship