An attempt to counteract ‘lazy thinking’ on CSR among academics and
business people is to be made by a UK business school and a global
supply chain management company.
The Saïd Business School and the Achilles Group say that poor research
and ill-informed debate is holding back development, and in consequence
businesses ‘are unclear about how best to apply [CSR] to day-to-day
operations, and business schools struggle to know how best to teach and
research it’.
The two have now established a working group ‘to raise the level of
discussion and to develop thinking relevant to practitioners’.
The group will organize three annual public lectures and four academic
seminars to provide a ‘forum for the exploration and testing of ideas’.
It will publish occasional ‘white papers’ to stimulate debate,
commission case studies to be presented at conferences and ‘made
available for the teaching of CSR globally’, and create online
discussion forums and blogs. Graham Baxter, BP’s corporate
responsibility vice-president, is giving the first lecture this month.
All events will be webcast.
Steve New, lecturer in operations management at Saïd Business School
and a member of the working group committee, told EP: ‘Much of the
current debate is locked into lazy thinking. A campaign group seizes
upon some perceived evil and stamps its feet demanding something should
be done. Then corporations respond by treating the issue as public
relations activity, and fill reports and audits with warm and
meaningless words.
‘Researchers can get cornered into a position that is implicitly either
“campaigning”, with corporations being portrayed as bad, or “corporate
advocacy”, where corporations are good’, New added.
Saïd Business School is at Oxford University and Achilles is
based near the city. Achilles will provide initial funding for two
years.
In a separate move, academic institutions have agreed to join forces
with the United Nations Global Compact to develop ‘Principles for
Responsible Business Education’ that will inform the teaching of CSR in
business schools. Among those that have agreed to take part are the
British Academy of Management, the European Academy of Business in
Society, Harvard University’s Social Enterprise Knowledge Network, and
the Caux Round Table.
The Global Compact Office will convene a 50-strong drafting group to
finalize the principles in time for the Global Compact Leaders Summit
to be held in Geneva in July 2007. A Global Council for Responsible
Business Education will then be created to carry them forward.
More
than three-quarters of north American MBA students believe classes in
CSR should be part of the core curriculum in MBA programmes. A poll of
2100 MBA students in Canada and the US carried out by the Net Impact
pressure group found 78 per cent would support such a move.
