Conflicts of interest and “the social nature of humans”

Private supply chain auditing continues to serve an increasingly important role in compliance and ethics efforts worldwide.  A recent working paper from the Harvard Business School  – “Monitoring the Monitors: How Social Factors Influence Supply Chain Auditors,” by  Jodi Short, Professor of Law at the University of California Hastings College of the Law; Michael Toffel of the Technology and Operations Management Unit at the Harvard Business School; and Andrea Hugill of the Strategy Unit at the Harvard Business School – examines various factors that impact the efficacy of such audits.  The paper can be downloaded from SSRN and a summary of it can be found on the Harvard Corporate Governance web site.

For this study, the authors conducted a review of “data for thousands of code-of-conduct audits conducted in over 60 countries between 2004 and 2009 by one of the world’s largest social auditing companies, …”  They found that “auditors’ decisions are shaped not only by the financial conflicts of interest that have been the focus of research to date, but also by social factors, including auditors’ experience, professional training, and gender; the gender diversity of their teams; and their repeated interactions with those whom they audit.”  The authors state that this  “finer-grained picture suggests that audit designers should moderate potential bias and increase audit reliability by considering the auditors’ characteristics and relationships that we found significantly influencing their decisions,” and also that these findings “should likewise inform the broader literature on private gatekeepers such as accountants and credit rating agencies.”

Indeed, and beyond the scope of the paper, a focus on social – and not just economic – ties may be key to assessing various  independence issues regarding boards of directors.  In an important decision from 2003 involving a derivative action brought by shareholders of Oracle Corp., then Vice Chancellor Leo Strine noted: “Delaware law should not be based on a reductionist view of human nature that simplifies human motivations on the lines of the least sophisticated notions of the law and economics movement.  Homo sapiens is not merely homo economicus.  We may be thankful that an array of other motivations exist that influence human behavior; not all are any better than greed or avarice, think of envy, to name just one.  But also think of motives like love, friendship, and collegiality, think of those among us who direct their behavior as best they can on a guiding creed or set of moral values,” adding, “[n]or should our law ignore the social nature of humans.”

Finally, thanks to friend of the blog Scott Killingsworth for recently reminding me of the Oracle decision;  here’s an earlier post about the Oracle case, albeit with a different focus; and here is a post briefly discussing (and linking to) a paper by Jon Haidt and colleagues about business ethics implications of a model of human nature called “Homo Duplex,”  a term coined by the sociologist/psychologist/philosopher Emile Durkheim, which posits that we operate on (or shift between) two levels: a lower one – which he deemed “the profane,” in which we largely pursue individual interests; and a higher – more group-focused – level, which he called “the sacred.”