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Article

15 Feb 2009

Author:
Christopher Flavelle, Washington Post

Responsibility Is Still Good For Business

For American companies, the theme of the moment is retrenchment...Does that mean that the corporate social responsibility movement...will be jettisoned for the bottom line?... We decided on a simple test...[T]he Socially Responsible Investing Stock Screener... ranks 500 of the nation's largest companies according to five categories of behavior: gay and lesbian rights; environmental practices; labor and human rights; whether the company sells military equipment and weapons; and a category called "vice”...We called the three companies that ranked lowest on the list -- Eastman Chemical, Lockheed Martin, and ExxonMobil -- to see what they thought about CSR...[W]hatever these companies actually think about the norms entailed in CSR, they've decided they have no choice but to play along, recession or no recession.