Can Business Save The World?

I get these daily emails from a group called Charity Focus called "Daily Good" emails. They have stories and news articles across a wide spectrum of topics, but all of them fit the theme of some kind of "good" in the world. Some of the articles tend to catch my eye over others.

This morning I opened my email box to see today's Daily Good topic: "How Business can save the world". In a society that focuses so much on 'business' at times, it's difficult to see how it can be used as a tool or a means to accomplish widespread social change, especially when many businesses may not view this as their primary goal.

The article focuses on the concept of "worker empowerment" and how empowered workers are more capable of resolving both personal and community conflicts. The purveyor of this idea was an author named Gretchen Spreitzer. She analyzed data collected over a 20 year period from 1981 to 2001 from employee workplaces in 65 countries across the world, asking questions about the amount of freedom and power they had to make decisions in their offices. She found that countries with workplaces reporting lower levels of freedom and power in decision-making had higher levels of civil unrest, and that as workplace satisfaction improved, indications of better civic life increased.

It's a bit hard to prove by itself because you can't know what other factors have played into the increased happiness in civic life or the worsened civil unrest. The article itself points out the difficulty in verifying this idea, and poses additional questions:

"Do participatory management practices result in open societies, or are the businesses that use them simply more abundant in healthy, peaceable communities? And do positive changes in society reflect enlightened business practice or the impact of politically motivated changes induced by organized labor and other social movements?"

And as is the case, I believe, in many organizations, it's far easier to learn and hone positive conflict-resolution and community building skills when your leader fosters these things. The article ends on a less optimistic note, lamenting that it may be far more difficult to get CEOs to "practice virtue in factory and community" than workers themselves.

The use of business-like practices and models has dramatically risen in the charitable sector in the past decade and spawned the use of new terms such as "social enterprise". So we can argue that business has altered the world for the better by providing new, innovative, effective ways to create social change. And I personally can agree that there are benefits of "empowering" people - in workplaces and in the community - to take charge and make things better. The questions I would ask are: What other ways can businesses be/become the bearers of positive community and social changes? What internal/structural changes would need to be made within businesses to make them model institutions? And what external things - what ways that our society and culture currently functions - would need to change to be accepting of a newer, more philanthropic corporate citizen?