مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

Throughout this special issue of Business Horizons, contributors have offered multiple insights as to how business might enhance peace building. Contributors have looked at the issue from a political perspective (Melin, 2016), from an academic assessment of the reasons for which businesses might engage in peace building (Rettberg, 2016), to propose empirical assessments specifying the relationship between business and peace (Trivedi, 2016), to create a hybridization of organizational models that can facilitate peace building (Kolk & Lenfant, 2016), and through a cybersecurity sense of peace building and business affairs (Shackelford, 2016). Other articles capture the perspective of business people themselves, from winners of the Oslo Award (Kanashiro & Starik, 2016; Katsos & Fort, 2016), to the experiences of Coca-Cola (Banks, 2016), to more strategic conceptions of corporations utilizing a sense of their own foreign policy (Hare, 2016). In reading these contributions, one cannot help but appreciate the bridges being built in this special issue between academics and business people.

This article continues that bridge building. It is our contention that enough research has been done for common threads and practices to be discerned concerning the ways in which businesses can foster peace. Thus, metrics can be developed to demonstrate to companies–—and to others looking at corporations–—whether or not corporate practices are, in fact, advancing peace building. With such metrics in place, companies can then seek to improve their conduct, be recognized for the good conduct they practice, and be held accountable by others for the work they do.

The development of such metrics would, of course, be helpful to a variety of parties which are interested in the conduct of business vis-a`-vis peace, but there is a potential, additional benefit as well in terms of motivating companies to more seriously pursue these aims. As a senior PR executive once argued to us, given the fact that business people are inherently competitive, a ranking or rating of companies would present a prize for which business leaders would compete. This kind of competition for a social good would, of course, have a beneficial impact on the conduct of business itself. He proposed an index that would measure companies’ actions against the research and tell us whether, and to what extent, the companies contribute to peace.