Exclusive: How can companies engage on social justice issues in such partisan times? A new guide aims to help

Yet most business leaders understand that promoting human rights, stronger communities and equitable access is critical to their company’s survival. Employees demand it. Customers act on it. Shareholders want to verify it. And everyone—from regulators to competitors—increasingly measures it. 

Against this backdrop, BSR’s Center for Business & Social Justice today released Moving Beyond Crisis to Action: The Social Justice Guide for Business. It’s a fascinating document that provides an overview of how companies are currently defining and engaging on social issues—from so-called “socially subversive” practices, such as obscuring research or union-busting, to innovative strategies such as transforming supply chains or recruitment channels to reach underserved groups.

The guide lays out a corporate social justice framework based on four pillars—human rights, participation, access, and equality—suggesting a process, outcomes, and resources for each category. In human rights, for example, that includes identifying experts and stakeholders to codesign opportunities, power dynamics, and barriers to participation, among other things.  

This is the first time that BSR has published such a guide, no small thing for a network that launched in 1992 as Business for Social Responsibility and now boasts more than 300 member companies worldwide. BSR launched the Center in 2022 under co-directors Jen Stark and Jarrid Green to help companies shift from “performative to transformational actions with a focus on public policy engagement and influence.” 

BSR encourages corporate commitments to goals like paid family leave, workplace safety, diverse hiring, sustainable sourcing, inclusive marketing, and other practices that make companies a force for social good. Stark says the guide is designed to “put out a methodical approach for how business approaches social justice” based on research from academia, members, and other sources.

Green adds that the timing is no coincidence. “In the last year and a half, we’ve seen more noise around the challenges to CSR [corporate social responsibility],” he says. “Companies are still committed to doing the work, but they’re looking for way to do it more strategically.” 

Both argue that leaders are fooling themselves if they think that stakeholders no longer care, especially as Gen Z comes of age. Along with what Green describes as “a significant generational shift to leveraging the corporation in ways to address social justice,” there is a higher level of scrutiny and a higher bar for trust.

“Hypocrisy is high on their radar if the talk and the walk don’t match,” says Stark. “Empty turns make easy targets.”

Diane Brady
@dianebrady
diane.brady@fortune.com

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AROUND THE WATERCOOLER

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This edition of CEO Daily was curated by Nicholas Gordon.