The Dinner. 3/7

You are invited to dinner.

Whatever your field of expertise: strategy, public relations, law, industry, energy, environment, consulting, 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.

????? 1/7 - Mise en bouche

????? 2/7 - émincé d’histoire

3/7 - Steak Holder with seasonal flavours

?

As we have seen, if an organisation's activity is to be socially acceptable, it must integrate a societal vision of its impacts into its governance.

Here we make a quick incursion into the neighbouring field of CSR and the triple bottom line, defined in 1997 as people, planet, profit. The idea is that by combining its commercial imperatives with social and environmental issues, a company can contribute to the sustainable development of its business and the consolidation of its social acceptability.

Until now, the externalities generated by production activities (polluting gases, consumption of resources, working conditions, fluctuations in employment, various nuisances, etc.) were recorded more as costs than as investments by companies, whose performance was measured primarily in terms of the creation of wealth for their shareholders.

?So, it was a debate between two forces, between two seemingly contradictory demands, that company directors sought to reconcile in their strategic choices.

- On the one hand, there are the shareholders, investors and shareholders who are primarily looking for an optimised and rapid return on their investments. However, over the last twenty years or so, the shareholder compass has ceased to focus solely on maximising short-term gains.

Finance has gradually gone green, for example with SRI (socially responsible investment) labelled funds in 2016, then with the more restrictive SFDR (sustainable finance disclosure regulation) standard created by Europe in 2021. I'll come back to this later.

- On the other side are stakeholders other than shareholders, who make up the company's stakeholders: employees, suppliers, customers, local authorities, communities, local residents, etc. They have their own expectations but cannot focus solely on societal and environmental issues; profit creation remains essential to finance, for example, a company's energy transition programme towards sustainability.

Perhaps the reconciliation of these two forces can be summed up in the concept of a company's raison d'être, which emphasises its contribution to society and its environment, both through and beyond the creation of profits. Or as formulated in the Notat-Sénard report of 2018: The company as an objective of collective interest.

?

It may be useful to remember here that while CSR actively contributes to social acceptability, it does not replace it. Responsible does not mean acceptable.

In other words, if the company's extra-financial performance declaration shows a strategy that is mindful of social and environmental impacts and that is in line with the 2017 Ordinance and the 2019 Pact Law, we can talk about responsible and legal activity.

But gaining social acceptability (SLO), i.e. validating its social licence to operate, means setting a second criterion alongside the law, that of opinion.

Depending on its sector of activity, its size, and the way it is perceived by public opinion, a company can make itself socially unacceptable, even if it has legal authorisation to operate (LTO).

For example, oil & gas groups are considered by many to be socially unacceptable because their continued polluting activities are exacerbating the climate crisis. Air transport companies are regularly criticised for the CO2 emissions they generate. The ethical failings of online retailers are condemned for the working conditions of their employees and the (not always illegal) tax avoidance they practise. Financial institutions are criticised for encouraging excessive speculation, financing controversial projects (as in the extractive industries) or lack of transparency. The pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries are also criticised...

?

The opinion can be "the way of thinking of the majority of the social body(1)" or "the empire of the judgement of others(2)", or even "the source of reputation and public esteem, the moral sanction of immoral or unseemly actions(3)".

?And even if it is primarily made up of opinions, judgements, beliefs or prejudices that are not based on facts or rational knowledge, it is nonetheless an actor in the social contract that binds the organisation to the world around it.

As such, opinion has become an essential stakeholder, one that is polymorphous, fluctuating and evolving, carried by multiple relays (media, social networks, KOLs, etc.) and whose influence on the life of the company must be analysed and dealt with carefully.

In our next service, we'll be talking about audience analysis and AI.

See you soon!

?

?

?

(1) Dictionary Le Larousse

(2) Rousseau?Jean-Jacques?-?Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750)

(3) Baker, Keith Michael?- Politics and public opinion under the Ancien Régime -??jan.-feb. 1987?-?p41-71

?