The Dinner. 1/7

You are invited to a special dinner.

Whatever your field of expertise: strategy, public relations, law, industry, energy, environment, finance... and whatever your missions, you are welcome.

?It's an informal but well-behaved dinner with a variety of inspiring guests: at the table, you'll be sitting alongside opinion and the media, opposite reputation and influence, close to positive law and its neighbour natural law, not far from case law and within fork's reach of artificial intelligence.

A dinner where you can share, discuss, question, reflect and make suggestions around the theme of the social acceptability of companies.

The menu is made up of 6 'moments' combining flavours on a twice-weekly basis. Here's a taste of what's in store.

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? What is Social Acceptability?

- The expression comes from the English social license to operate (SLO). It is the process by which a company seeks to obtain the broadest and most lasting possible agreement from its stakeholders to carry out its activity under conditions that are favourable to it.?

In French, the term “permis social d'opérer“ or “permis social d'exploitation“ is used.

- The Anglo-Saxons complete the concept with the license to operate (LTO), which mainly concerns the legal area of a company's activity.

In short, and to make it easy to digest before the rest of the dinner:

SLO + LTO = social acceptability.

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- Why this topic?

Because social acceptability is the strategic meeting point where a company's market logic (development, profitability, profit) encounters society's logic (laws, social responsibility, ethics, environment). The stakes are high.

If, for example, an organisation is planning to set up an industrial site in a given area, it will first have to convince its various external stakeholders of the relevance of its project and the interest it represents for the community: local elected representatives and officials, environmental and civic associations, and local residents are all an integral part of the operation.

In the same way, a group with a polluting activity, for example in a sector that emits a lot of CO2 such as transport, should preferably establish a relationship of dialogue and transparency with its internal (employees, partners, suppliers, investors) and external (NGOs, opinion leaders, the scientific community, regional and national authorities, etc.) publics in order to avoid or anticipate tensions.

Neglecting to build relationships with stakeholders would compromise the company's image (level of popularity) and reputation (level of trust), and even threaten its business.

?Complying with laws and regulations is not enough; a company must earn the social right to operate, and it cannot act without this permission, especially in a general context marked by people's sensitivity and moral demands on ecological, ethical and societal issues. What's more, this awareness is amplified by the media and social networks, which give it a powerful resonance.

So, for an organisation, working on social acceptability means managing its exposure to public opinion; co-constructing relationships with its audiences to get to know and understand itself; communicating about its behaviour; anticipating reputational risk to better control it; turning influencers into favourable relays; keeping abreast of changes in the law and regulatory texts affecting companies; using the exponential capacities of artificial intelligence to serve its public relations...

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We'll be talking about all this and, of course, the corresponding strategies.

The dinner has just started.

See you very soon.