Gem of the day

Another day, another ranking announcement. This time it's from our friends at Covalence, which produces annual ranking called 'EthicalQuote'. In their words, the ranking serves as:

"...a barometer of how multinationals are perceived in the ethical field”

Leaving aside the awkward use of the label 'ethical field'--since when is the way everyone should act, i.e. ethically, a 'field' rather than a standard for behaviour?--and the fact that its website appears to be little more than an empty shell spewing big news, the biggest issue with Covalence is its ranking methodology. Here's how they describe it:

"Inspired by stock quotes, EthicalQuote integrates thousands of positive and negative news items found among media, companies, blogs, NGOs and other online sources. The documents are coded, quantified and synthesized into curves and volumes. It is a barometer of how multinationals are perceived in the ethical field."

Basically, Covalence spends some time Googling the hell out of these big corporations, generating a bunch of random articles, and then weighing how the talking points to see if they have an 'ethical reputation' or not. And their treatment of the vast number of potential sources they could include in this calculation is as follows:

"Covalence does not see some sources as more reliable than others. Any source is considered equally. Covalence does not validate information sources, neither the content of information."

I'm hard-pressed to think of a more useless way to decide whether or not a company is 'perceived' as ethical, let alone whether it actually is acting in an ethical way (which I'm a lot more interested in). First of all, the ideal of an objective treatment of sources is impossible. The way data in itself becomes information is by giving it context and making it subjective in some way--otherwise it's just numbers.

More importantly today, there's an unprecedented wealth of clearly validated sources available on sustainable development. There are reams of consultants. There are increasing numbers of scientists who are good communicators on what should be done and when. Even major campaigning NGOs, such as Greenpeace, that were once loathe to come to the table are producing their own solutions specifically to benefit policymakers and corporates to make decisions on critical issues like deforestation, the future of our oceans, and our global energy supply.


To produce a ranking which gets picked up in the media as a measure of how companies are perceived, without giving any weight to sources which are so obviously available for comment, is not only inane. It's yet another barrier to pushing corporates to actually deliver on what they've committed to doing, let alone what they haven't committed to.


Productions like EthicalQuote aren't worth the paper they're printed on. They shouldn't be printed at all.