Hey everyone,
Attached you will find my analysis of ICA Gruppen's corporate citizenship using a model provided by the Boston College. ICA Gruppen is a Swedish retailer and owns Rimi. In the appendix, you can find a table with direct quotes from their website and CSR policies. Please let me know your thoughts!
It would be nice to have a discussion on how people would classify things differently :)
Corporate Social Responsibility Analysis ICA Gruppen
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As sustainable approaches to business become widely adopted, it is being treated as a continuum rather than binary. Meaning, we are interested in the EXTENT of your sustainability rather than checking if your business is sustainable or not. Problems arise when the extent of sustainability is expressed in the "outlook" a company has or the way they communicate. Communication and words are free, actions are hard. We are not talking about greenwashing anymore, it is greenER washing.
The comment in the conclusion is not judging whether ICA Gruppen is sustainable, it is asking if the forward striving language they use is reflected by the actions they take. The language often puts them in a stage where (in my opinion) they do not belong yet. This is more of a critical note towards the way the Boston College framework classifies and defines some of their stages. The model is not that forgiving for companies that strive to go to the next stage, but are not there yet.
Rob Tulder in his series "getting all motives right" looks at the motives behind companies and checks whether it is in line with their actions. The stages he uses are: passive, reactive, active, proactive. Furthermore, he analyzes intention and realization as separate and battling dimensions. Definitely an interesting read for people who are interested in jobs analyzing companies for their sustainability approaches, or interested in creating standardized frameworks. It is however less useful for finding connections between your social enterprise and larger companies :)