Alan Murray is one of my favorite WSJ columnists, but I have to call him out on today's column on corporate social responsibility. Murray starts out okay:
The last time I wrote skeptically about corporate social responsibility, I received a curt email from my mother. "So," she wrote, "corporations shouldn't be socially responsible?"
Let me try again. The question isn't whether corporations have social responsibilities. The question is: Who gets to decide what those responsibilities are? Increasingly, clever activist groups, which have failed to achieve their goals through legitimate political means, are using the social-responsibility mantra to try to impose their will on companies. All too often, beleaguered companies are caving.
So far so good. I yield to no one in as a defender of the shareholder wealth maximization norm. I also agree with Murray's observation that CSR advocates are trying to pressure corporations to advance aspects of the activists' political agenda that they have been unable to acheive through the legislative process. Finally, I agree that spineless managers caving to CSR pressure is a problem.
But then Murray segues into a discussion of how fringe CSR groups who activities verge on eco-terrorism pressured the NYSE into refusing to list a company that does animal experiments. Obviously, I have no truck with these animal rights extremists, but Murray's flat statement that "The New York Stock Exchange is the latest example" of how companies cave to CSR advocates arguably could be read as tarring mainstream CSR activists with the eco-terrorist brush. A clear statement by Murray that he recognizes the difference would have been appropriate.
There is no slippery slope between conventional CSR and the sort of extremism Murray appropriately condemns. Hence, he could have condemned the latter without opening his column with a suggestion that he was talking about CSR in general.