The Business judgement rule and voluntary reporting

Some sectors of society wishing to see commerce adopt high standards of corporate citizenship may feel that those managers who do not enthusiastically embrace voluntary social or environmental reporting are trying to avoid their obligations to the broader community. This may be a naïve and unfair judgement. The job of the corporate manager is to use other people’s money to meet other people’s goals. With the role comes a moral and legal responsibility. A challenge for the responsible steward is to balance the private interest of the owners against the public desire for more information about corporate social performance. In this chapter, we explore the line between a narrow perspective on a manager’s legal responsibility to be frugal with corporate resources, and the growing expectation that management will spend some of these resources on corporate reporting that may in itself increase pressure on the corporation to spend further resources pursuing social ends.