A New Concept of Business

The demonstrations at the December World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Seattle focused press and public attention on the many "new" international business issues. They include a range of ethical considerations, including environmental effects, human rights, corruption, and the differences between labor standards and wages of industrialized and developing countries. These are matters that are affected by business behavior, but have often been overlooked or deliberately obscured as businesses have concentrated their attention exclusively on profit margins and as governments have protected their own national advantages. As public consciousness has consolidated and activists have emerged as major policy-shaping voices, the profile of these issues has been raised.

The effort to block the WTO meeting from even taking place reflected the absence of constructive dialogue on these issues and the frustrations engendered by a perceived inability to affect the policies, laws, and regulations which relate to them. Never mind that the views on these issues are sharply different among industrialized and developing countries. Never mind that the WTO is actually supposed to be the negotiating forum where governments come together to find some common ground among very different national positions. The very complexity of trying to find this common ground seems to have contributed to the frustration felt by the demonstrators. The fact is that these issues have neither easy solutions nor a world forum dedicated to resolving them. That is why organizations such as the Business-Humanitarian Forum have recently been created: dialogue between businesses and activists is needed.

Responsible businesses, however, have been well aware of these "new" factors for some time. In fact, many companies have been working hard to incorporate them in their business plans and to integrate them into their daily thinking on an equal basis with traditional business factors. The process requires adjustments for managers, directors, and shareholders and evolves neither easily nor consistently. This does not mean that solutions to these complex issues are around the corner, but they are being addressed at the real-world, company level.

Why a New Concept of Business Now?

What this gradual process of recognition of new responsibilities demonstrates, moreover, is that there is a whole new concept of business emerging in today's world. It is a concept of business as a responsible component of society as a whole. This new concept is destined to transform the way business is viewed, the way it views itself, and its place in the community in the twenty-first century.

This new concept of business is emerging in our time because of the confluence of a number of factors at the end of the twentieth century:

• The end of the Cold War made possible what is now virtually a worldwide consensus that free-market economies are the only practical basis for economic development and prosperity. This has brought universal acceptance that business is one of the basic and necessary components of any modern society.

• The globalization of the world economy is making the world increasingly into a single economic space, with business as an important part. As a result, business is now contributing to the development of less-prosperous regions as well as industrialized ones and taking on increased responsibility for the world's economic health. As United Nations (UN) Secretary General Kofi Annan put it in his message to the Business-Humanitarian Forum's conference last November, "With global power comes global responsibility."

• The rapid development of instant communications has spread information on both standards, and the success or failure of companies in complying with them, and has exposed company practices to public scrutiny in ways never seen before.

• Public expectations about the quality of life have evolved significantly, so that people throughout the world expect that the environment will be protected, that they have certain rights as human beings and workers, and that elementary human fairness requires the more fortunate to assist those who are in difficulty or distress.

Actively Reconsidering Business's...