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On a rainy morning in October, a veteran oil executive named Jean-Noel Dairon showed up at the plush Hilton Hotel in Milan. Thanks to his 30 years at Total, now France's largest oil company, Dairon, 56, brought with him a vast store of knowledge about refining and marketing — but he wasn't there to drill down into it. Instead, he stood up in front of 100 managers of the company's Italian subsidiary and asked them some tough questions about the feel-good business trend of the year: corporate social responsibility. "Is this a new era of capitalism?" he asked. "Or is it hypocrisy in action, a cynical response to the company's critics?"

A lot of people — inside and outside business — are wondering the same thing. Welcome to Big Oil's latest innovation: the ethics road show. Total, one of the world's top five oil companies — formed by Total's 1999 merger with Belgium's Petrofina and then with French rival Elf Aquitaine — is bringing this traveling philosophy seminar to its subsidiaries in 35 countries across the world, from Angola to Belgium. (It will make a stop in the U.S. next year.) The goal is to drive home to managers everywhere that Total, with $122 billion in annual revenues, has a new goal besides making money: it wants to become a better corporate citizen. That means being more responsible and responsive in how it deals with the environment, with its employees, customers and vendors — and with the governments and peoples of the countries where it operates, including more than 40 in Africa.

Those might be obvious goals for many companies; at Total, they seem imperative. The company has been battered at home and abroad over the past four years by a series of scandals: a high-profile corruption trial that last month sent former top managers to jail, allegations that in the mid-'90s, the company used forced labor to build a gas pipeline in Burma (renamed Myanmar by the regime) — which Total vigorously denies — and the 1999 wreck of the tanker Erika, which created a devastating oil spill that polluted some of France's best-loved beaches. "They had a lot of dodgy relationships [with governments] and the whole system was opaque," says Gavin Hayman of U.K.-based Global Witness, a fierce critic of Big Oil's behavior in Africa.

But Total officials insist that they've changed their spots. So bribery and leaky old tankers are out; codes of conduct and wind energy are in. Instead of ignoring protest groups like Greenpeace, the company now tries to engage them in dialogue. In poor countries, it's funding projects designed to win over indigenous peoples. And it has even hired a consultant to conduct "ethical audits" of all its subsidiaries, to ensure they comply with a 67-point checklist of standards.

Droves of companies are adopting similar regimes these days, especially in Europe. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainable development are the buzzwords of the movement, and they have spawned a fast-growing industry of consultants, accountants and legal and p.r. specialists. All but six of the U.K.'s largest 100 companies now publish details of their environmental or social policies. Some firms, including Total's European rivals Shell and BP, are even making ethics a focal point of their marketing. "Profits. Principles. Or Both?" reads the tagline on a series of recent Shell ads. The big question, as Dairon suggested, is whether all this marks a tangible change in the way corporations behave, or whether it's simply "greenwash," a p.r. exercise designed to make firms appear sensitive to consumers concerned about the impact of globalization.

Why is Total's move toward corporate responsibility happening now? The main reason is that they're feeling pressure from investors, not just activists. There's a small but growing industry of politically attuned stock funds in Europe — with an estimated $40 billion under management — which only invest in companies they consider to be socially responsible. But there's also a far larger universe of mainstream institutional investors in both the U.S. and Europe who have started to look at corporate behavior post-Enron as part of their overall performance reviews. Total is playing to this crowd. "Investors want the best possible investment. Even if ethics is not their cup of tea, they consider companies that take into account good ethical principles to be well managed," says Jean-Pierre Cordier, the senior Total executive in charge of the ethics drive. A few years ago, Cordier says, many in the company would have viewed an ethics push as an unnecessary expense and a distraction. Now, he says, "everyone understands this is really a part of the business."

Even so, such efforts are unusual in the notoriously dirty oil business. Evidence of alleged bad behavior abounds: this year alone, a U.S. consultant and a former Exxon Mobil executive have been indicted in New York City, the chairman of Norway's Statoil resigned amid bribery charges and a former chief executive and two senior officials of France's Elf Aquitaine — now part of Total — were convicted in Paris, all for separate corruption-related offenses.

Unlike consumer-products companies such as Nike, which moved relatively quickly to deal with allegations of unethical labor practices in the mid-1990s, Big Oil long resisted calls to clean up its act. BP and Shell were the first to change. In Shell's case, the firm was shaken by two scandals in quick succession: the execution in 1995 of Nigerian poet Ken Saro-Wiwa, who vigorously contested Shell's oil operations in Nigeria, and the company's plans that same year to sink the Brent Spar oil rig in the North Sea. Both sparked huge international protests and boycott calls that led to a change of management and a complete revamp of Shell's ethical standards and operating behavior.

Disaster is also behind Total's ethical epiphany. In December 1999, when the oil tanker Erika sank off Brittany, spewing Total oil up and down the French Atlantic coast, French TV showed agonizing pictures of oil-drenched beaches and suffocating seabirds. For two long weeks, Total stood behind the thin excuse that the tanker did not belong to the company. "What we didn't know at the beginning was that we had a genuine catastrophe on our hands," said Thierry Desmarest, Total's chief executive, later.

To re-establish credibility, Desmarest put in place a high-level team charged with devising new standards of behavior and ensuring they are implemented. Cordier, 56, was appointed ethics czar and set up an ethics committee in 2001. He reports directly to Desmarest, and his committee has written a new code of conduct — with provisions that ban employees from getting involved in local politics or accepting large gifts — and initiated Dairon's ethics road show.

Another Total ethics warrior is Jean-Michel Gires, 46, who is responsible for the company's sustainable development efforts. They include ensuring Total is working with local communities around the world and developing new sources of energy, including wind. Gires is especially proud of a recent $4 billion project in Venezuela that produces and refines extra-heavy crude from the Orinoco basin that a decade ago would have been left in the ground. As part of its efforts to support people living in the area, Total not only built schools, medical facilities and roads but also employed experts to study public health issues there. After discovering that many local diseases were linked to water quality and the lack of sewage treatment, Total put in better safeguards to protect the water supply. The $2 million annual cost is part of an estimated $85 million Total spends on such societal projects annually, according to the company's first CSR report, published earlier this year (on recycled paper, naturally).

Total's biggest critics are watching, but not without skepticism. "It's good they are going through the motions," says Hayman, of Global Witness. "They are moving in the right direction, but nowhere near fast enough." For all his doubts, Hayman was pleasantly surprised earlier this year when Jean-Pierre Labbé dropped by Global Witness's London offices, saying: "I am here to listen." Labbé, 55, a former head of operations in Vietnam, has for the past two years served as Total's vice president for international public affairs — the point person for relations with often-hostile critics. Labbé says his job is to "translate the demands of civil society into a language my colleagues can understand." He also tries to identify relief organizations and other groups working in poor countries who could help smooth relations with local people. One such project is in the Niger delta, where the firm is funding a project by a Brazilian-French nongovernmental organization called Pro-Natura that's trying to help local communities set up democratic decision-making bodies and develop the economy. "They are not doing this to save the planet," says Guy F. Reinaud, Pro-Natura International's president, of Total's motives. "But they've understood that it's in their own interest."

Not everyone is won over. At London-based Henderson Global Investors, which manages about $160 billion in assets, fund managers think Total needs to do more. A September 2001 accident at a Total fertilizer plant in Toulouse that killed 30 people raised questions about the company's safety record, says Henderson's Nick Robins, and its continuing presence in Burma puts it off limits for inclusion in some of Henderson's socially responsible funds. "We're looking for consistent year-on-year improvements," Robins says. "We recognize Total is trying to change, but we need another two to three years" to ensure that it is.

Even internally, Total is still struggling with the implications of its new mission. Back in Milan, Dairon spends 45 minutes talking about Burma; a continuing black mark on the company's international reputation. Total insists it has done nothing wrong, but the taint of working with an especially despotic regime and allegations about forced labor raise difficult questions for the firm. "Can a company invest in a country that is considered not democratic?" Dairon asks. "Should it substitute for international organizations in judging a country in the first place?"

He opens up the floor for comments. "We need to flip the image in the media and publicize the more positive aspects of what we're doing there," says one Italian manager. Dairon concurs. "I agree one hundred percent," he says. "But we are a company of engineers. We are very rational. Perhaps we work too rationally." Changing culture, it seems, is easier said than done.

• PETER GUMBEL
• Battered by a series of scandals, the oil giant launches an ethics drive