Across the Rubicon

We have been reading through lots of articles, discussions, and forums for professionals in fields like CSR (corporate social responsibility), ESG finance (environmental, social, and governance), sustainable development, and such. It’s striking just how many ways social is defined or measured. As anthropologists, reading these discussions brings on a curious mixture of empathy, humor, and frustration. There isn’t much about those definitions of social that would be overly familiar to anthropologists or other social scientists.

In recent years there has been an increased interest in social factors from businesses, policy makers, and the public. The effects of social media on public debate, the rise of influence and misinformation campaigns, environmental and social effects of industries, and conscientious financial investing have all raised interest and engagement in understanding the social consequences of economic and political activities. This is, in our opinion of course, to be encouraged.

The increased attention in professional fields are signals that both public and private sectors recognize that they’re in the same boat as the rest of the public. An increasing number of people are intentionally and strategically voting with their money, as well as their ballots, as an effective way to promote social change. We all do whether we realize it or not, but that’s a topic for another post. A large number of folks want a more socially responsible world, so organizations and institutions are evaluating social impacts.

The question is – how? Social is one of those words that everyone knows and uses, but rarely take the time to really think about. We all just know what “social” means, right?



Truth is that what social means is surprisingly hard to define precisely. There is a lot of academic literature (spanning hundreds of years) debating the nature of human societies and institutions, and even more trying to figure out just how it all works.

Unpacking the Social

What we’ve consistently found in the way the social is defined and discussed is a tendency to focus on specific actions and outcomes for particular communities and situations. They’re narrowly defined, discrete, and limited to direct and observable effects. This makes a certain sense from practical measurement and management perspectives but doesn’t really capture the breadth of social factors or scope of their consequences.

Obviously, we can’t distill everything into a short post like this. There are, however, a few key points that need more attention:

1. Everything that involves people is going to have a social aspect to it. All human activities are innately embedded within social contexts.
2. If it is social, then it is a network.
3. Effects will propagate through that network, often in unpredictable ways. Things that impact one part of a network can have consequences for another, even if seemingly unrelated.
4. It is often in the furthest connections or weakest links in a social network where the greatest effects are seen. This effect was noted by Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter in the 1970s, and has been hugely influential in the social sciences ever since.

People are inherently social, and not just in our connections with the people around us. Our sociality effects how we think, what we believe, and why we make our choices. Even when we’re not directly interacting with anyone, our social contexts imbue even our individual thoughts and actions. Our social behavior is the product of a myriad of experiences and interactions, each informed by our socially filtered information.

The foundations of that underlying sociality are communities of interacting individuals, each of which have their own collection of connections – e.g., the now-famous 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon (or, more formally, the “small-world” experiment). While the particulars have been debated (i.e., how many degrees, what counts as a connection, etc.), the network properties of social connections are firmly established in the social sciences.

Networks have some peculiar properties simply by their nature. Most especially, the propagation of effects through a network isn’t necessarily limited by how many connections any individual node may have. As long as there is at least one connection, there is a potential pathway. This makes determining the scope of social factors particularly difficult. It isn’t a simple matter to determine just how far effects may reach.

That brings us to our last point – i.e., Granovetter’s “weak ties” in social network problems. While it is natural to look first at direct connections and effects for social factors, it’s the indirect ones where things get complicated quickly. Identifying the scope and impact of social factors need to consider those distant connections and indirect effects through weak social ties. These are the ones that often escape notice and mark the difference between intentions and outcomes.

What this means for Social Responsibility

The practical upshot, at least as far as the professional world goes, is that part of the mismatch between the aspirations of ESG and other social impact fields is in an overly narrow concept of social. This is found not only in the disparities between ESG rating methods, but also in defining the scope of social responsibility and sustainability. The social aspect is pervasive, and its effects far-reaching. It is also, thankfully, a very well-studied problem.

We just need to get everyone studying it on the same page.