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definition of the national interest in their field,
or they must at least persuade government
that the two are aligned. One policy maker
put the official search for the larger interest
this way: ‘The civil servant’s job is to understand
what is going on out there [in the nongovernmental
world] and the art really lies in
filtering out the naked self-interests in the
points that are being made because . . . that is
how policy is formulated’ (Moloney 1996:
125).
When governments talk of the national
interest, they often encourage some organizational
behaviours rather than others. Contemporary
UK governments, for example, support
ideas of corporate social responsibility by
business. The core idea here is that companies
defer immediate gains of, say, profit or cost
cutting in the short term in order to benefit
stakeholders: companies do this in the hope
that they will generate more sales or more
good reputation in the longer term. An example
is the former nationalized British Gas funding
village halls in areas where pipelines were
laid. The government has a junior minister for
corporate social responsibility (CSR) and it
supports the work of the promotional group
Business in the Community which in turn is
supported by the Prince of Wales and by
many blue chip UK companies. Whether CSR
is a proper business activity is argued by economic
liberals (Halfon, 1998; Henderson,
2001) in the tradition of Milton Friedman
(1962) who thought that diversions from
profit maximization were irresponsible. Hilton
and Gibbons (2002), on the other hand,
argue that CSR should be further developed
into corporate social leadership whereby business
gets involved with the delivery of social
services to the benefit of the larger community
and themselves. Whatever the merit, the
second point of prudence in approaching
government is that businesses seeking to
persuade government need to be aware of the
policy and value environments in which the
ruling political parties conduct their politics.
A detailed awareness of major policy
commitments is needed in order to frame
proposals so that they go with the grain
of government thinking. Such an awareness
is a necessary condition for successful communication
with those more powerful than
the message sender, whoever they are.
Governments should not be confronted or
confounded on their ideology, or their election
manifestos. Corporate proposals are persuasive
when they reinforce major policy,
making it more effective or steering it around
unforeseen difficulties. For example, New
Labour was committed in its 1997 manifesto
to increasing the representative rights of trade
unions in the workplace, and it won the election
that year with a House of Commons
majority of 187. Business interest groups were
not going to stop that legislation: instead the
Confederation of British Industry (CBI) made
its case against more rights in terms of the
threshold percentage of trade unionists in a
workplace required before representation
rights were granted. The implication was that
collective rights cannot be given unless there
is evidence of widespread support for them.
Thus, a technical proposal can sidestep political
confrontation and open up space for negotiating
an advantage. How this is done is a
valuable communication skill. US lobbyists for
Japanese car makers selling into the United
States showed it in abundance when they got
lightweight trucks reclassified as cars in 1989
and saved their clients $500m in tax per year
(Moloney, 1996: 16). Where you know that
your corporate interest is opposed by government,
discuss technical matters with senior
civil servants and ministers, especially when
© 2004 Sandra Oliver for editorial matter and selection;
individual chapters, the contributors