As you may know from reading this blog and other sources, activist groups love to rate companies on how “sustainable” those companies are. Their fascination with this process has increased since 2000.

Per a Business Week article entitled “The Race to Decide Who’s Greenest,” in 2000 there were 21 raters of companies’ sustainability levels. By 2011 the number of eco-rankers had increased to 108.

That’s quite an increase in a relatively short period of time, presenting an ever-expanding sea of data to and an increasingly difficult challenge for the average person to determine just which ranking is the true “arbiter of sustainability.”

Who is the real arbiter of sustainability? No one really knows. And that’s at least one thing that we all need to keep in mind when we read these rankings.

A couple days ago I finished a really great book, Contention and Corporate Social Responsibility by Sarah A. Soule. Although, I purchased this book while wanting to obtain more information about the structure of anti-corporate activism, I bought this book because I also wanted to get additional information on corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs, which are often a knee-jerk response to anti-corporate activist initiatives. Believing that this book was oriented more toward my CSR hunt, and not toward the anti-corporate activism anatomy search, I thought, “Well, I’ll buy this one now while I continue to hunt down more works on the anatomy of anti-corporate activism.”

After receiving this book and jumping into the first chapter or two, I was pleasantly surprised. This book concerns itself more with the structure and process of anti-corporate activism than it does with the response of CSR. To this point, here is an excerpt from a review I wrote about this book. (The full review appears on both Amazon.com and on my Reading List page in my LinkedIn.com profile.)

Although I would have chosen a different title, Sarah Soule turns in a great book here. In this work, Sarah contributes one of the first academic examinations on the structure of anti-corporate activism and its effects on corporate behaviors . . . Sarah examines activist initiatives in two time periods: 1960 to 1990 and then from 1990 to present day (2009). Her findings characterize activism, as it affects the corporation, into two different groupings each with historical context, creating a typology by which corporate analysts can categorize activist efforts and devise mechanisms for coping. This typology can be invaluable to corporate analysts attempting to devise various strategies in response to various anti-corporate activist initiatives.

So, in the end, I received that which I sought, but in an indirect manner due to the abstractness of the book’s title.

Generally, I liked everything I found in the book such as her approach and her argumentation process, but on page 154 I found a comment with which I must take umbrage.

In the section entitled “The Impact of Anticorporate Activism on Corporations,” Sarah talks about the key theme of her book being that anti-corporate movements do matter to corporations. As evidence of this assertion, she points to an earlier discussion in the book citing research into the effects of protest on company stock price, as well as other examples of activist influence on corporations as discussed in the book. Of this influence she says,

“This is good news for activists, of course. But it is also good news for corporations who can find that doing the right thing can actually make good business sense.”

Here comes the umbrage.

The right thing? Who says it’s the right thing? This is an attitude that I have found in much anti-corporatist literature, one which automatically assumes that any activist action against a corporation is “right.” Right is not always right. To quote Bill Clinton, it would depends on “what the meaning of ‘is’ is.”

“Right,” in

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