Philanthropy and altruism

I just came back from a master's thesis presentation on strategic corporate philanthropy. The thesis presented a case study done at Ericsson, investigating Ericsson Response, a unit set up to handle disaster relief by providing telecom assistance. Currently they have 2 people stationed in Pakistan.

According to the authors, Ericsson Response earlier got a full page coverage in Financial Times. Swedish journalists, when approached by Ericsson to report on the corpoporation's relief efforts, said that they didn't want to contribute to self-serving corporate advertising, and neglected to report.

You have to love Swedish media. Apparently, Swedish journalists think that only purely altruistic behavior on the part of corporations is worthy of reporting, when it comes to CSR. Only non-commercial behavior is "good". The fact that most helping behavior, either private or conducted through organization, is in fact reciprocal in nature, and that there is no inherent contradiction between self-serving behavior and behavior that is socially beneficial, seems a bit too difficult to comprehend.

The fact that altruistic behavior in actuality seldom is socially beneficial, I will leave to another post.