The Good Citizen Organization and Social Responsibility

At the first symposium on corporate crime in America sponsored by the United States Sentencing Commission, Chairman Richard Conaboy encouraged businesses to create the "good citizen corporation." The commission’s message was clear—if corporations commit to high standards of integrity and carefully develop and implement policies that deter misconduct, then the government will not have to be as involved in regulation and enforcement. The commission’s mechanism for encouraging such citizenship was to codify into law incentives for organizations to take crime-deterring actions through the establishment of rigorous, effective internal compliance programs.

We believe that taking a purely legalistic approach to creating the good citizen organization will fail. Before they can achieve integrity, organizations must understand their culture, including employee ideas, daily patterns of behavior, and values that are used to cope with problems. Putting it another way, organizational culture is the glue that holds an organization together and expresses the values, ethical climate, social ideals, and the approaches members use to make ethical and legal decisions. So, an attempt to manage organizational culture by focusing on just legal compliance is incomplete. The socially responsible organization recognizes an obligation to maximize positive effects and minimize negative effects on society. The "good citizen corporation" should be unimpaired in contributing to society by exercising economic, legal, ethical, and, we hope, philanthropic responsibilities.

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