The Social License: How to Keep Your Organization Legitimate

by John Morrison

Business and government leaders need to understand how they gain, and how they might lose, legitimacy, in order to operate in the emerging economies and new forms of democracy of tomorrow.

Based on thirty years of first-hand experience, this distinctive and direct guide to legitimacy in business focuses on the new benchmark of a 'Social License to Operate'. Drawing on examples of what is and isn't working in the field of corporate responsibility, including BP in the Gulf of Mexico, Shell in Nigeria, the leadership of The Body Shop, and the economic opening of Burma, readers will be offered an insight to how the social license to operate is transforming power relationships.

200 pages, Hardcover

First published August 27, 2014

About the author

After a long career as a foreign correspondent in Russia, Europe and Africa, John Morrison spent two years reporting at Westminster for Reuters and travelled to China, Japan and the United States. He is now an independent author, playwright and publisher.

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much like Leeora Black's book in the same subject, John Morrison does a good job here of introducing the important topic of the social license to operate to his readers. What differentiates the two works for me is that Morrison relies more on examples, where Black offers a solid theoretical framework. In this respect the two authors compliment one another very well.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an awesome book that discusses an important topic we all need to face into as a society. The premise of the book becomes more about not-for-profit and government, but the concepts even for these areas apply more holistically.

This is an area I am still personally exploring, what is social license? And how does it fit with community expectations, and then how does that fit with capitalism and allowing people to make mistakes.

For it is our mistakes as a society, that have helped us grow. Perhaps that is what is happening in us growing to social license as a key pillar of society.