Danone's CSR

    The political theories are perfectly illustrated in Danone’s Corporate Social Responsibility. We have to remind that political theories involves the power and position of a business and its responsibility in society.

    First, Danone is a famous brand and its products are sold worldwide, it relates to the fact that when you have a lot of power and impact on the society, you’re supposed to be more responsible. This responsibility is required because society will trust the company and is consuming their products so they have to adopt well-seen production methods, behavior and quality standards in order not to have a bad influence on the society.
Some companies will do everything to improve their business at any cost, but in Danone’s case, it’s more complicated because it has closer relations with society than smaller firms , there’s a kind of implicit social contract between Danone and the society that leads to a win-win relationship.

    Moreover, we can link Danone to the Corporate Citizenship in a limited view. Such a big company can take the role of the government in some cases. We’ve seen a video in class where Danone is fighting against malnutrition in less developed countries like Bangladesh, they give people opportunities to have a better alimentation. The firm is leading a kind of mission of sharing its life-sustaining knowledges and resources to less developed or fortuned countries. To deal with this mission, they made a partnership with Grameen Bank to provide micro-credits to farmers so that they can start up or extend their business and benefit from Danone’s knowledges and quality to produce products that will reduce malnutrition. This move really shows that Danone play an important role on social issues that are also considered by governments but in some cases, governments can’t solve the issues themselves so having firms like Danone which are sometimes taking its role can be very useful.
   We can also talk about their moves in order to ameliorate the farmers well-being, but not only in poorer countries; they think that they’re the key factor in sustainable agriculture so they try to improve their working conditions, giving them opportunities.
   These illustrations shows that Danone is acting like the government providing help, improving life conditions and having such importance and impact on our society. We can say that Danone is really improving those people’s life, even if it’s a win-win relationship; for example, helping people to fight against malnutrition will help Danone to have a new source of income and improving farmers well-being will help them to have products with better quality.

    Furthermore, we also studied macrosocial and microsocial contracts in political theories. Danone’s CSR can be represented by these concepts. Indeed, in one hand, they respect hyper norms, especially because it’s indispensable to be seen as a respectable company worldwide. It has intern policies that should be respected by every employee and during each process in order to guarantee the macrosocial contract. Some external rating agencies confirmed that Danone is one of the most respectful companies about hyper norms. In an other hand, they also try to do their best to also respect local norms, as we have seen on the Danone’s video in class, the company is adapting to the country where its implementing. They are aware that not every countries has the same expectations and norms and they try to go further than the hyper norms and to take initiatives in order to seduce more and more people and to be more profitable.

...