Does the public’s low opinion of business matter?
This was the subject of debate at yesterday’s Institute of Business Ethics annual discussion, at the very smart premises of the Royal Overseas Society. Four panellists, including Martin Le Jeune of Open Road, Robert Phillips, CEO of Edelman UK (Edelman is the world’s largest PR agency) and Sir Kevin Tebbit of Finmeccanica UK, spoke for 5 minutes each, followed by a Q&A session. The 38% figure, by the way, comes from Edelman’s 2010 Trust Barometer and represents a proportion of the ‘informed public’ (i.e. the richest and best educated quarter of the population) in the UK, France and Germany.
While most of the speakers defended business and business ethics as such, and agreed that public opinion does indeed matter, our panellist outlined the extent to which people might consider that it doesn’t.
‘The public’ is by definition an undifferentiated mass, the subject of polls. Nobody really thinks of themselves as ‘a member of the public’: it is an affectless, powerless and passive entity. Its opinion therefore doesn’t matter. Also, ‘the public’ is well known for lying, or for acting in contradiction its stated views.
When the undifferentiated public starts to resolve itself into interest groups, its views start to count. In pressing those overlapping and often conflicting interests – as employees, consumers, voters, activists, parents, children and so on – people cease to be ‘the public’. Their views still don’t impact on business as such, but they do have an effect on individual businesses. Workers withdraw their labour (or work harder), consumers boycott products (or buy them in a frenzy), activists campaign against companies, and so on – although notably, voters don’t get to vote for or against business as such, because democratic parties are in favour of it. China, where about 66% of the ‘informed public’ thinks that both business and government are trustworthy, has been experiencing a wave of strikes for the last three months.
Business – the pursuit of a return on capital, through trading – is always business, and in one sense all business is business as usual. It can do, or not do, anything it likes within the law. What it can’t do is fail to go after and make profits, and then make profits from the profits. This is true regardless of the motives and ethics of the people running businesses, be they worker co-ops, social enterprises, ethical cosmetics firms, oil companies or derivatives trading houses. The true ethic of business is that whatever is good for business is good. Other considerations fall by the wayside when the freedom to generate return on capital is threatened. So, it doesn’t matter what the public thinks about business, because in this respect business cannot change. Because we all depend on work and purchasing power to live, we find it hard to imagine a world without business.
There’s something in every business that would quite like not to have to deal with the public at all. In fact, some of the most innovative firms in recent years worked out a way of making money, and making money from money, without doing anything at all except trading money derivatives.
Of course, if the behaviour of business became truly egregious, public opinion might matter. If, for instance, business decided to loot the economy and then force ‘the public’ to foot the bill through big cuts in the social wage, ‘the public’ might turn green, rip its shirt and mutate into its alter ego, the mob – and withdraw its consent for business full stop. It’s happened before.
This post is a personal view from Sion Whellens
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