40+ Images and captions explaining a brief history of 500 years of CSR and Corporate Sustainability in pictures. A presentation used at Nottingham University Business School on March 13 2013.

1. Tobywebb.blogspot.com
Corporate Responsibility:
CR history, modern times
and the media, in
Pictures
1720 - 2013

2. See:
http://www.historytoday.com/j
ohn-d-pelzer/coffee-houses-
augustan-london

3. Isaac Newton lost £20,000 on the
South Sea Company Bubble in 1720.

4. Newspapers of the 1720s were
similar to UK tabloids today:
Reporting gossip and rumour
as well as trade numbers.
Journalistic standards were low.
Have we come full circle today?

5. First consumer
boycott: 1770's
UK Slave Trade

6. Middle class objections to slave labour conditions in
West Indian Sugar began in the 1760s/1770s

7. Saltaire: Victorian morality/productivity
concerns rose in the 19th Century

8. Cadbury's Bourneville site attempted to
improve worker lives, and was reported
on in UK media in 19th Century

9. Ida Tarbell, the original “muck raker”
journalist, blew the lid on the
monopolistic / oligopolistic strategies of
the Rockefellers.
This lead to the era of “Trust Busting”
around the turn of the 20th Century, and
changed how Governments looked at
markets and controls forever….

10. Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle”
(1906) investigated labour
conditions in Chicago
Slaughter houses.
The book helped create a
groundswell of public
indignation about worker
exploitation.
As a result of his campaigning
journalism and incidents such
factory fires, some of the first
modern health and safety
legislation – and enforcement
– came about in early 20th
Century USA.

12. Rachel Carson’s 1962 book created a
media storm and societal debate about
what new “miracle” chemicals may be
doing to the environment.
Silent Spring is cited by academics and
environmentalists as a turning point in
how citizens began to think about the
downsides of rapid industrial
development and pesticide use (DDT).

13. Friedman Picture
Friedman’s 1970 New York Times
Magazine essay on the “business of
business” is still highly controversial,
and still debated today…

14. Ralph Nader was a major
campaigning force in the 1960s
and 1970s.
His investigation into the “cost
benefit” analyses undertaken by
US automarkers when considering
the recall of cars they knew may
explode, was a seminal moment
for the car industry, for media
coverage, law suits and regulators.

15. Barry Commoner, the first
environmentalist to be featured
on the cover of a best selling
magazine?
Earth Day 1970 was a major
media moment.
Concerns about chemicals, wars,
resources, agricultural
productivity and population
growth were front page news in
the early 1970s.

16. As suggested by academics and others in the early 1970's

17. Formed in 1971 over nuclear testing, Greenpeace has been front page news ever since

18. THE iconic photograph of the 1970s: Dow and DuPont were blamed

19. The Union Carbide Bhopal Explosion in 1984 killed thousands. Dow later bought Carbide

20. The Exxon Valdez disaster in
1989. An ecological disaster and
front page news around the
world. It changed the way oil
was shipped.

21. The 1992 Rio Earth Summit. Packed with
Presidents and Prime Ministers. A major media
event.

22. 1990’s: Anita Roddick: Garnered press headlines for Body Shop’s “ethical” approach.

23. Nike: The accidental poster child of
globalisation and it’s negatives.
The company, along with Gap and a
few others, became an iconic symbol
of the 1990’s anti-globalisation
movement.
Even though university professors
earned more in its factories than they
did in teaching, the company became
a symbol of exploitation and uncaring
capitalism.
To this day, the media loves nothing
better than a big brand sweatshop or
child labour story.
Today Nike leads the apparel industry
in sustainability, partly as a result.

24. Brent Spar Oil Storage
Plaftform, 1995.
Shell wanted to dump it at
sea. Greenpeace objected
over precedent setting.
Left, Shell water cannons
versus Greenpeace
inflatables.
Shell stood no chance in the
court of public opinion.
A media storm ensured.
Shell struggled to hire
research chemists for some
years afterwards.

25. Also in 1995-96, Nigeria’s
Sani Abacha executes
activist Ken Saro-wiwa.
Shell is blamed. The
media jumps on board. A
Seminal period for CSR.

26. Andrew Fastow, Enron CFO. Enron went
from being 7th largest Fortune 100
company to bankruptcy in months
during 2001. Fortune magazine built up
Enron, then tore it down when they
realised they had been duped.

27. The early “noughties” saw China
rise, and so did the sweatshop stories
In the press, and reputational risks for
companies.

29. The first run on a
British bank in decades
was fuelled by a media
storm in 2007.

30. Corporations and
indigenous peoples always
made media headlines.

31. The Occupy Movement
led to a long media
debate about what kind
of system we wanted.
But did anything
change?

33. Macondo 2010. The
Deepwater Horizon
disaster, forensically
explored and covered by
media, changed the oil
industry and public
attitudes.

34. Rupert and Rebecca: Golden media careers brought low as the media ended the "Conspiracy of Silence" in 2011

35. And the eventual result of phone hacking was...

36. The 2012 poster child for consumer brand
tax avoidance

37. A changing media - The Observer: By 2013, only THREE newsroom journalists remained...

38. Twitter: Dangerous new journalism, kind of...

39. New types of
activists emerge.
Media loves to
tear down icons
Such as Apple.

40. Where 30 million followers can be normal…

41. 1989: Tanks. 2011: CSR in the Chinese Police?

42. 2013: India’s new generation of investigative journalists begin to shake things up.

43. Further resources:
www.ethicalcorp.com
tobywebb.blogspot.com
www.slideshare.net/tobiaswebb
www.stakeholderintel.com
Toby.Webb@stakeholderintel.com