The Triple Bottom Line Blog

One of the most interesting new blogs is The Social Atom, produced by science writer Mark Buchanan. Although Buchanan is a physicist, his primary interest is in the social sciences.

This recent post is a typically interesting one. Buchanan is responding to a profile of Howard Gardner, the Harvard professor of cognition and education best known for his concept of "multiple intelligences," in Strategy + Business magazine. According to Buchanan, the profile, which focuses on the theme of corporate ethics, is both inspiring and depressing:

Here's a man [Gardner] who is immensely well motivated and clearly a force for the good; for decades he's been writing books and talking to corporate leaders, trying to bring ethics into the corporate world. Yet he's clearly been encountering a deeply held view that sees ethical behavior as an "expensive luxury." The received wisdom glorifies the business importance of "hard-nosed" decision-makers who focus only on "the bottom line," and who know that greed is ultimately good.

Why do business people who are probably well-meaning, ethical people in their personal lives sometimes engage in selfish, unethical behavior in their corporate lives? Probing for an answer to this question, Buchanan describes a number of experiments in which social scientists tested the mechanisms by which "the tragedy of the commons" tends to be enacted in settings where both competition and cooperation are possible.

As Buchanan describes them, the experiments show that, where self-interested behavior goes unnoticed and unpunished by the group, cooperative behavior that benefits everyone (such as voluntarily contibuting to a common investment pot) tends to be extinguished over time. (After all, who wants to be the only "sucker" who contributes to the common good?) But where the experimental conditions are altered so that everyone's actions are transparent and there is the possibility of social sanctions against those who behave selfishly, then cooperative, mutually beneficial behaviors are encouraged and appear to remain the norm indefinitely.

Of course, it's dangerous to directly apply the results of simple experiments to the complexities of life. But it may be that the real world in which Howard Gardner, Mark Buchanan, and the rest of us are operating--in which a significant number of well-intentioned people are trying to "do the right thing" while feeling undermined by others who advocate a "greed is good, to hell with the rest of you" philosophy--is in the process of morphing from one experimental condition to another.

That is, as modern communication technologies expand their speed, reach, and power, business behavior is becoming more and more transparent; and as transparency increases, the possibility of meaningful social sanctions against antisocial business behavior becomes greater. These sanctions may take the form of penalties meted out by government. But increasingly they are taking the form of media exposure, PR disaster, customer backlash, and value collapse in the stock market--a costly modern form of social stigmatization as applied to corporations.

Who knows?--Perhaps we are nearing a "tipping point" at which the number of business people who recognize the new "experimental conditions" and are prepared to adapt to them becomes so great that the overall norm shifts. It may be that, a generation from now, the kind of self-centered business behavior once taken for granted (despoiling the environment, exploiting workers, ravaging communities) will be largely unthinkable, simply because the social circumstances that once made it easy to get away with will have disappeared.

Labels: business ethics, Howard Gardner, Mark Buchanan, Personal Musings, Reporting and Transparency