Professor Tom Cannon; Managing Editor
The death of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, has deeply affected all of us involved in the Review. The loss of a person who could combine an awareness of the challenges and opportunities across the human rights agenda with the belief that positive change was possible is a loss for everyone. That he was killed with colleagues from across world who had come together to help the people of Iraq is doubly tragic.
Their loss is a challenge to all of those sharing his belief that good corporate citizenship “is not, and must not be, a mere public relations exercise … it is a platform for showing how markets can be made to serve the needs of society as a whole (and in doing so) reconcile the creative forces of private entrepreneurship with the needs of the disadvantaged and the requirements of future generations.”
Delivering this is a challenge to the corporate community to achieve and disseminate best practice. The academic community has a responsibility to review, scrutinise and apply the best research tools to shape, determine and communicate these standards. Public and voluntary sectors can and should create frameworks, policies and where necessary regulate to embed these practices while intermediary and advocacy bodies need to represent diverse interests and ensure sound distribution. Across all these communities and processes particular challenges exist to ensure that the standards of responsible action expected of others elsewhere are seen across the corporate social, ethical and sustainability agenda.

Leaders are few and followers many for a reason.
Anita Roddick
SMEs must develop greater knowledge of the different ways of creating positive relations with their stakeholders, as well as the positive effect that investment in CSR can have on company performance.
Mario Molteni
Migration has become a hot-button issue…
John Morrison
Seventy percent of the studies reviewed showed a positive and statistically significant relationship between CSR and financial performance.
Marina Martin Curran
As corporations buy the crop with the prevailing low world price, coffee farmers have begun to shift to other crops and some have chosen to sell off their lands.
Chairmaine Nuguid-Anden
For the neo-liberal, the market is so wise and so good that like God, the Invisible Hand can bring good out of apparent evil.
Susan George.

Guarding against ‘complicity’ in human rights abuses
 In theory, there are several possible layers of corporate complicity in human rights abuses, which might be characterised as ‘direct’, ‘indirect’ or ‘silent’.[i]  Companies feel that it is not clear what might be regarded as complicity and what might not. A company’s presence in any country where the government is unwilling or unable to uphold universal human rights standards must raise questions about possible indirect complicity. Yet only rarely is it  the appropriate solution for a business to withdraw from a country completely. In fact it can be argued that, accept for one or two cases, any business is likely to exert more influence by remaining in the country. The challenge for any initiative focused on business and human rights is to develop criteria and tools that can be applied effectively within the local and national operations of a company to guard against any possible complicity.[ii]
 An example of this is the recent interest in the nature of Host Government Agreements (HGAs) between international companies, in particular the extractive sector, and specific governments in areas of operations. The consortium of companies, led by British Petroleum, developing the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceylan pipeline have recently adapted their HGA in light of human rights concerns.[iii] The implication is that good corporate governance requires a respect for international human rights, protecting the interests of a range of societal actors, and these cannot be exempted through bilateral arrangements with national governments.

Dame Anita Roddick
Every real and good change of significance, every revolutionary idea, every heartfelt gesture that changes one life or a thousand, was once seen as eccentric. Leaders are few and followers many for a reason: Change requires bucking the status quo, and bucking the status quo requires a willingness to be perceived as crazy, dangerous, or ridiculous. Like entrepreneurs, revolutionaries, activists, and changemakers of every stripe lead because they cannot follow that with which they do not agree, or which limits their imaginations. They change the world because their passion and conviction will not allow them not to.

Corporate Social Responsibility in Italian SMEs Abstract
This article presents the results of a study on the state of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in Italian Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). It was carried out on a sample of 427 companies which employed from 20 to 250 workers and included seven technical areas: the relationship with personnel, corporate governance, the state of health, safety and respect for the environmental, relations with the community, the relationship with customers and suppliers, CSR instruments and CSR awareness. From many points of view the results were encouraging although there are some areas where SMEs have weak points. In particular there is strong concentration of decisional power in the hands of the company head, limited career possibilities for women, little interest in voluntary environmental projects, little knowledge about new forms of ‘partnership’ with the community and social marketing and little use of the typical instruments of CSR.
On the other hand, many areas show that social values are written into the DNA of Italian SMEs. This is shown above all by their personnel relationships, strong integration with the local community, and the importance given to the ethical control of the supply chain. In the final part of the article, we have made some suggestions of how to intensify the social responsibility of Italian SMEs, which are also relevant in a European context. Mario Molteni Full Professor of Management at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore