Now it's shoppers who award points at the supermarket check-out counter

Cast your mind back to 1996 ­— the dying days of John Major’s government. England gave one of its best football performances in the European Championship that year. Less happily, there were IRA bombs in London’s Docklands and Manchester city centre. It was also the year of the Dunblane shootings and the divorce of the Prince and Princess of Wales.

More optimistically, the business world was preparing for New Labour, worrying about taxes and regulation but mostly looking forward to economic stability and a positive relationship with government.

Most boardrooms had barely heard of corporate (social) responsibility (CR). This was before the mass protests against the World Trade Organisation, before the dotcom boom and bust and the corporate scandals encapsulated in the Enron affair.

But the world had already begun to change. In the previous year (1995) Shell had its Brent Spar fiasco, when it failed to understand that public disapproval was more important than government approval for burying its oil platform in the ocean.

The Institute of Social and Ethical Accountability (now known as Accountability) was also formed in 1995, aiming to develop CSR theory, practice and skills.

Two signs of the coming times in 1996 were the birth of Dolly the sheep and the launch of genetically modified tomato paste in the UK. It was the year Monsanto faced its own ‘Brent Spar’, as its efforts to bring GM soya into Europe met similar popular resistance.

There were other rumblings in the background — exposés of Asian sweatshops supplying clothes to western consumers; calls for companies to pull out of Burma; campaigns by NGOs on chemicals in foods and packaging.

But ten years ago it would have been preposterous to suggest that a leading store chain such as Marks & Spencer would be advertising its responsibility claims in newspapers and its shop windows.

Yet that is what happened this year. M&S trumpeted its efforts to improve everything from salt in its food to chemicals in its knickers. The catch-line ‘Look behind the label’ would have been an NGO campaign slogan in 1996. Indeed it mimics a slogan from the Clean Clothes Campaign, which recently published a report attacking the sourcing practices behind British supermarkets’ cheap clothes.

Interestingly, that report (Who Pays for Cheap Clothes?) explicitly made the connection between cheap clothes and cheap food, saying: ‘The four companies this report focuses on ­— Asda, Tesco, Primark and Matalan — are to fashion what McDonalds and Burger King are to food: mass produced, hassle-free, fast, popular, and reliant on exploitation down the supply chain to keep things that way’.

This is a long way from the social and environmental concerns around oil and mining companies’ activities. While supply-chain issues are very important in most sectors, the other end of the chain is just as significant — that means what happens when consumers are finished with products. But it doesn’t stop there — CR covers the issues of exclusion — from financial or other services, and from high-impact products such as pharmaceuticals, most notably with HIV/Aids in Africa.

It also covers the impact of products on consumers who do use them. In finance, that means issues such as excess debt. In food, it means obesity — the issue which has grown furthest and fastest over the past few years.

In 1996 obesity would probably have only been an issue for governments, pressed to act in areas such as school meals, rules on food ingredients and advertising to children. Today, the food producers, retailers and advertisers are expected to act anyway. In most areas, companies are expected to take responsibility for how their operations, products and services affect people, even if there are no relevant laws or regulations.

It sometimes seems that the list of subjects companies have to worry about is growing as fast as the nation’s waistlines: in clothing, the pesticides used in growing cotton, in food, the effects of felling forests to grow soya; in general, the way companies use the tax system to their advantage, and whether they are responsible about investing what pension funds they have left.

Above all, there is climate change — embroiling every business from airlines to purveyors of bottled water.

In 1996, expectations that companies should do something about all this were restricted to a tiny minority. Now they are so widespread there is a danger that companies are expected to be able to solve all the world’s problems (almost literally, in the context of the Millennium Development Goals). Perhaps it is time businesses put pressure on governments to live up to their responsibilities — although that is not a natural thing for most business leaders, who prefer to be resisting pressure rather than applying it.

The fact that more and more consumers and investors are sharing such high expectations explains why companies such as Tesco and even Wal-Mart are responding, as well as M&S. Tesco promises to be a good neighbour and is investing heavily in improving its environmental performance. Wal-Mart has realised it needs to respond to what might be described as middle-class expectations (which are not just about price) if it is going to have much chance of penetrating middle-class neighbourhoods.

But it is ironic that expectations are so high partly because New Labour (and similar governments elsewhere) have been reluctant to act in areas where they would previously have jumped in. Governments have fuelled rising expectations on business, because expectations of government action have fallen. And there seems little sign of that changing under New Labour Mk II or the New Conservatives. The result is that there is more pressure on businesses to deliver social and environmental benefits as well as to reduce any negative impacts, and to demonstrate progress in doing that.

Roger Cowe is a director of the corporate responsibility consultancy Context. To contact email rogerc@econtext.co.uk