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Strategic CSR & Social Accounting
NiSource: A Transitioned Company
NiSource is a corporation that seeks to be the premier regulated energy company that provides customer-focused energy solutions, investment-driven growth opportunities, and sustainable value for our customers, investors and employees in the US according to their website’s “About Us” description. This Fortune 500 Company is well known and has been rewarded for its excelling citizenship practices. Although it seems that its primary focus is sustainability due to their reputation and self-presentation, their CSR goes far beyond only sustainability.
NiSource has managed to go beyond CSR by using strategy to create opportunity, competitive advantage, and innovation rather than merely a charitable deed, cost, or constraint while promoting a better society for all. It is a prime example for demonstrating shared value. Instead of using ethics, reputation, sustainability, and license to operate as arguments that focus on the tensions between business and society, NiSource has managed to use them strategically by focusing on the interdependence between business and society. By incorporating these inside-out and outside-in linkages, it has accomplished strategic CSR, which is further detailed below.
Addressing Social Issues
NiSource is one of few corporations that publish sustainability reports. The company’s 2012 sustainability report details the current year’s sustainability success highlights, environmental stewardship, shareholder value, etc. The list of NiSource’s 2012 Sustainability Success Highlights allows several things to be concluded about NiSource:
- It promotes sustainability;
- It attempts to fulfill moral obligation;
- It has the license to operate;
- It has a good reputation.
NiSource’s actions clearly display a prioritization of social issues as well as setting the company’s objectives with social expectations.
Corporate Social Agenda
NiSource uses a balanced, forward-looking strategy that includes long-term modernization of their energy assets, reformations in customer programs and services, stakeholder engagement, and community involvements to progress toward its vision. Its vision is to be the premier company in the industry that provides customer-focused energy solutions, investment-driven growth opportunities, and sustainable value for its customers, investors, and employees through safety and reliability, collaborative stakeholder relationships, inclusive and engaging work environments, strong governance and transparency, and forward-looking environmental practices and stewardship. This goes beyond meeting society’s expectations to opportunities that can accomplish both social and economic benefits and does more than ease potential harms by finding different ways to meet its strategy through advancing social conditions. It will continue to utilize its value chain to make social impacts; the diagram to the right provides a general idea of how this works. However, NiSource will continue to excel beyond Responsive CSR practices.
NiSource has chosen a focus in sustainability as its unique position since its operations are more closely associated with that, which allows them to have better opportunity to leverage its resources to promote a better society. Choosing this position allows NiSource to choose a small number of initiatives that result in epic benefits for both business and society that are large and distinctive. The company continues to move toward making it difficult to establish the difference between its day-to-day operations and CSR; it has added a social dimension to its value proposition.