For the purpose of educating the public, Cloud Citizen is conducting, and about to publish, research about the likely climate and environmental impacts of Australia’s best-known department store retailer. This will be an investigation and conversation, shared socially over the internet, and contributed to by anyone has knowledge to bring to it.
The issues Cloud Citizen will address here are not fads such as the dismissal of an allegedly sexually errant chief executive, but are of deep, lasting and embedded organisational cultures that reflect the ways a company conducts its business. Old habits die hard, they say.
We inhabit what many economists and academics, such as Peter Senge, author of The Necessary Revolution (Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2008), say is an unsustainable economy and this company will be among the first to learn from a new kind of scrutiny to which all companies will soon be exposed. Its investors should look on this research as an opportunity. They will soon have the chance to make a better-informed decisions about the resilience of the company and its ability to deliver sustainable growth.
Why David Jones?
For the public, retail is where problems related to consumption of the planet’s resources begin and are most visible. There is also little point in investigating a company that no one has heard of, and David Jones is at the centre of an ecosystem of some of the world’s best-known brands and how they fit into Australia’s consumer society. Some of those brands’ own local sustainability undertakings will no doubt be found to be lacking in their commitment to the Australian environment.
The channel through which their goods pass to the point at which money changes hands is one in which culpability is easy to identify. Because factors that affect David Jones’ own reputation also pose potential reputational concerns for others in its ecosphere and its industry, pressure applied publicly to its managers’ decisions and actions can potentially lead to great and rapid positive change elsewhere.
If the actions of a company’s executive team and its suppliers are perceived as reckless and costly to the community and to the interests of its environment, the quicker such changes will take effect.
