A business briefing by Asda would normally be an occasion to whet the appetite of environmental analysts along with financial ones as the WalMart subsidiary has never passed up an opportunity to bang the drum about its latest green or sustainability initiative.
But at last week's trading update in the City, neither a 46-page strategy document nor an accompanying hour's talk from the chief executive, Andy Bond, brought a reference to the subject. The discussion was all about "profitable growth", "staff retention" and "customer focus".
BP, meanwhile, is digging up Canadian tar sands and considering the sale of its renewable-power business. The oil group says its priority is to get its profits and share price back on track.
This shift was mirrored on a grander scale at Davos in January. The World Economic Forum was meant to give a leading role to climate change but coverage of the events was completely dominated by discussions about what was happening on Wall Street.
Environmentalists and other campaigners fear that sustainability and wider corporate social responsibility (CSR) issues are falling off the boardroom agenda as businesses tighten their belts in the face of turbulent stockmarkets, the credit crunch and a looming economic slowdown. And they worry that CSR could be seen by business as a fad whose time has come and gone.
Hannah Griffiths, corporates campaigner at Friends of the Earth, says her organisation had always argued that regulation was needed because when the crunch came, profits would come first. "We always felt that companies do not take CSR as seriously as they claim to and voluntary action does not work."
Her concerns are supported by SustainAbility, a strategy consultant that specialises in this area. It says it is already seeing a squeeze on corporate responsibility budgets and expects this to continue for the next 12-24 months.
"But each time the sustainable development movement has been temporarily derailed, it has re-emerged on a new and more effective trajectory," says Maggie Brenneke, a director at SustainAbility. "We anticipate that companies will respond to this downturn with a honed emphasis on capturing opportunity space through innovation and entrepreneurship."
Rising sea levels
Others are also concerned that corporate social responsibility is coming under pressure just as it appeared to have won acceptance. Last night a seminar in London addressed the question of "how to keep climate change responses at the top of the corporate agenda" at an event due to be attended by representatives of companies from Shell to the BBC via Rio Tinto and Eurostar.
Serious companies will continue to pursue these issues but others may not, warns Professor David Grayson, chairman of the Doughty centre for corporate responsibility at Cranfield School of Management. "If companies still see their own CSR in terms of specific initiatives and have not embedded it into the fabric of the business then you might well see it cut back," he argues.
Craig Bennett, development director at Cambridge University's programme for industry, agrees. "There must be concerns that CSR will be squeezed in an economic downturn. But there is a strong argument that when times get hard that is just when CSR can help a company differentiate itself from competitors and thrive," he explains.
Previously scoffed at by many right-wing commentators, CSR has moved into the mainstream, partly because of climate change. The realisation that everyone is going to be affected by rising sea levels, unpredictable weather systems and government regulation triggered enormous interest in "sustainable" business models and CSR.
Financial scandals at Enron and WorldCom, alleged labour abuses at Nike and environmental abuses at Shell have all played into the hands of anti-corporate, human rights and green campaign groups. The outcry has also led politicians to initiate a blizzard of regulations, leaving companies adopting CSR as a strategy to manage risk as much as project a positive public image.
Measuring the value of such moves is hard but Christopher Satterthwaite, chief executive of the public relations firm Chime Communications, is willing to make a stab at it: "We reckon that 25%-30% of anyone's stock price is related to their reputation - how admired or not admired they are."
Chime has bought into the concept with a separate business called the Corporate Citizenship Company, a CSR consultancy that works for such companies as Unilever, Dyson, BP, Diageo, Vodafone, Sky and HSBC.
Criticism softens
For its part, Asda denied it had given up on its CSR agenda, saying its interest was highlighted by initiatives such as using more local suppliers than any other major supermarket. "We remain committed to the company's strategy of reducing energy consumption and sending zero waste to landfill," Bond said.
A BP spokesman said the oil group remained highly responsible even if it did not necessarily believe in CSR. "We have never used the term CSR and do not advocate that strategy of parcelling it up and hiving it off as a specific activity with its little office. We are interested in CR, corporate responsibility, which is essentially about running the whole of our business in a responsible way."
Tobias Webb, founding editor of Ethical Corporation magazine, believes firms may become more discerning. "I think what you will see are companies wanting more bang for their bucks."
One of the most important signs that CSR has truly arrived and will not be easily shifted is that its biggest critics have softened their position.
The Economist magazine used to be deeply sceptical about the whole concept but last month produced a 24-page supplement called "Just good business" and notes that its intelligence unit has just produced a survey showing that only 4% of respondents thought CSR was "a waste of time and money".
Martin Wolf, an associate editor of the Financial Times and a former high-profile critic of CSR, has mellowed on the subject too. He used to argue that CSR distorted the market by deflecting business from its primary role of profit generation but now says: "I'm not as against it as I was."
Wolf feared that CSR would force companies to seek social outcomes better left to government. But he says: "90% to 95% of CSR is just hot air. It is PR in the positive sense of internal PR that motivates staff and makes them feel good about the company they work for but that's all."
This is just the kind of thinking that has Friends of the Earth reaching for the green panic button.
Backstory
Corporate social responsibility - a commitment to looking after all "stakeholders" inside and outside a business - has risen fast up the boardroom agenda in recent years. Many of the initiatives have come from major corporations such as British American Tobacco and Shell after bruising encounters with non-governmental organisations. Shell realised it had to adopt a more enlightened policy after the 1995 conflict with Greenpeace over its attempt to dump the Brent Spar platform in the North Sea. But arguments have raged ever since about whether firms are engaged in "greenwash" - an attempt to divert criticism from their core businesses.
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