Friday, March 16, 2012

CSR and Monopoly (The Board Game)

I recently came across an article title "Do Not Pass Go: What Monopoly Can Teach Us About Corporate Social Responsibility". I expected to read about all the good things that Monopoly has in it, I was quickly proven wrong. It seems that one of our beloved childhood board games has been teaching us to do everything opposite from CSR. Now there are ways in which to apply some concepts of CSR, but when we play we all just want to crush our opponents into the ground.

If you wanted to you could possibly goes as far as to say that monopolies are inherently evil and that everyone should have an equal share of the pie. It is not entirely possible for everyone to have an equal share because that we have set up our business system to hold unequal tendencies with the formation of things such as patents. Though yes patents were made for the fairness that the people who invent something can get a leg up on everyone because it was their discovery.

Now how could we teach our kids through a board game the ideas of CSR? We could change the rules of Monopoly to include fairness and have the idea of the game be for everyone to have financial success, but no one would want to play a board game with no winner and potentially no winner.

http://www.justmeans.com/Do-Not-Pass-Go-What-Monopoly-Can-Teach-Us-About-Corporate-Social-Responsibility/44012.html

Eric Westcott

No comments:

Post a Comment