Goldman Sachs grapples with society's changing demands

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in simple terms is in response and has in turn seeded the wider agenda in society that there is more to business than just making money.  A business has a wider responsibility to its varied stakeholders not just returning money to its shareholders or paying large bonuses to its employees.  Now what happens when a company's culture is built entirely on making money - end of story.   That appears to be the case with Goldman Sachs according to many of the comments in a recent Financial Times article.

(Photo from FT.com)

The strength of the money making culture at Goldman Sachs would appear to have made it harder for them to understand the developing anger around the large profits made by the bank over the last year and the forthcoming bonuses for staff.  Note even the Wall Street Journal's Market Watch can do a piece on "5 reasons we hate Goldman Sachs".  

Goldman Sachs is trying and has announced a major initiative supporting small businesses in the USA and has said sorry in a somewhat ritualistic way.   But the PR team at Goldman Sachs need to read Prof. Jensen's 2001 paper on the public sphere and the role of the public sphere in developing organisational legitimacy and identity for an organisation.  The implications of this paper is that Goldman Sachs to achieve organisational legitimacy going forward will have to change its culture and that unbridled money making is no longer acceptable for such a large and influential organisation.  Did the Goldman Sachs partners think of that when they went public back in the 1990s?