Anthropology, Ethics, and Corporate Social Responsibility in Australia and the Southwest Pacific
John Burton, Resource Management in Asia-Pacific Program, Australian National University
When a doctor writes a prescription, he or she expertly encodes a message, sends the message along with the patient to the pharmacy, where the pharmacist expertly decodes the message and supplies the patient with the remedy. The margin of error is acceptably small and the knowledge that the pharmacist will face sanctions if the wrong remedy is supplied, or supplied with incorrect instructions, offers a considerable degree of assurance that the doctor’s correct diagnosis will not have killed the patient. When an anthropologist, another kind of professional, creates an expert report, the messaging system starts off in the same way – information is expertly created – but the ‘patient’, perhaps a commercial enterprise or a Native Title body, can well be left to decode the prescription, mix the medicine and then dose itself with the result. On the face of it, the process offers few safeguards for the reputation of the anthropologist – indeed of anthropology in general – should something go wrong. The last decade, however, has seen the rise of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) principles and many commercial enterprises have signed up to social and environmental ‘responsibility’ and ‘sustainability’ initiatives and compacts. These can mean that the anthropologist is given more protection against the disregarding of expert findings in commercial work than when the client is a civil organisation that has not considered it necessary to sign up to an equivalent code of practice or statement of principle. This paper examines the safeguards that CSR has the potential to offer anthropologists engaging with corporations, and how this might inform our own codes of ethics, with reference to cases from Australia and the Southwest Pacific.
