In a comment article yesterday in Director Magazine, Jack Welch tried to help by clarifying where CSR should be prioritized during a downturn.

It makes depressing reading because here we have a business leader emeritus completely failing to understand what corporate social responsibility is.

CSR, according to Mr Welch, essentially comes down to "giving back" (what we used to simply call philanthropy) and to products that meet the demand for sustainable alternatives.

Such CSR, he continues, has to be toned down when the going gets tough.

My problem with his argument is twofold:

1/ CSR is first and foremost a management framework for enabling ethical decision making to take place within a short-term profit obsessed corporate culture. Mr Welch does not mention ethics once, nor does he indicate explicitly whether our ethics should take a back seat in tough times.

2/ Mr Welch's argument betrays the fundamental problem with the way that the bulk of the CSR industry chooses to present the case for doing the right thing (i.e. behaving ethically): that good companies reap financial rewards.  The flaw in relying on the profit motive as the driver for ensuring that your product range and manufacturing processes limit negative social and environmental impacts is clearly laid out by Mr Welch:

"When gas costs $4 per gallon, a hybrid Toyota Prius is an attractive value proposition. When gas is $2 per gallon, that's no longer the case. When most consumers have good jobs and feel secure in them, it makes sense to expect them to pay more for a product that's environmentally friendly. When bank accounts have been drained, that more expensive product is a very tough sell."

If corporate social responsibility has been robbed of any useful meaning, perhaps we should start encouraging business leaders like Mr Welch to give an opinion on their prioritization in times of crisis of, say, "ethics management" - a broad enough term to encompass the firm's approach to managing social and environmental impacts.

Mixing up CSR with good old philanthropy, public relations or product innovation and ignoring the ethical conduct of business is just shell gaming.