The announcement from Harvard University that it will launch a
new corporate responsibility course aimed at executives looks on the surface to be a sign that corporate responsibility is becoming mainstream. But the interest in corporate responsibility, even at such an elite level, may mean just the opposite.
It might be an indication that the concept of corporate responsibility is becoming serious when such an institution such as Harvard's Business School expects leading business executives to shell out $6,000 for a three-day course on the topic. If nothing else, this suggests there is a need for more expertise in the area and that companies are prepared to pay for it.
However, the details of the course and the nature of corporate responsibility education might temper any enthusiasm. According to the marketing blurb, Harvard's course seeks to "provide insights into achieving superior strategic corporate social responsibility and enhancing firm value". An appropriate goal, you might think, but hang on, isn't corporate responsibility really about something more than "value" and "strategy"?
A
report produced last year by Dirk Matten and Jeremy Moon from Nottingham University Business School into corporate responsibility education in Europe raises just such a question. They ponder "whether business schools are no more than brainwashing institutions educating their graduates only in relatively narrow shareholder value ideology".
They suggest there may be "an intellectual bias" against business ethics, the study of which “falls somewhere on the vector between ambivalence and disdain.”
Mainstreaming
What the Harvard course, and many others, might be accused of is introducing corporate responsibility as a bolt-on consideration in relation to nominally “standard” business practice. It is as if corporate responsibility were a bit of an optional strategic direction; more of a marketing matter than a corporate cultural one.
Matten and Moon cite arguments that corporate responsibility education has to be “mainstreamed” if it is to be effective. This means that issues such as business ethics and responsibility are incorporated into the core curriculum.
Another study into corporate responsibility education, part of a regular series produced by the Aspen Institute,
“Beyond Grey Pinstripes,” underlines the concerns. This report, looking into how well MBA students in the U.S. are being prepared to deal with corporate responsibility, claims: “The depth of coverage of [corporate responsibility] topics in MBA programs is severely limited in the core courses.”
Some critics go as far as to put the blame for such corporate calamities as Enron on business schools. London Business School professor Sumantra Ghoshal argued strongly that the characterization of business as a science to be taught (rather than perhaps a sense to be absorbed) tended to set a framework in the minds of students that worked more to “dumb-down” the practice of business.
This limited their understanding via the inculcation of what might be termed “anti-knowledge.” That is, graduates might be able to devise impressive management theories and plans, drawn from MBA text books and bull-sessions, but had little sense of what they were actually doing and would find it difficult to contextualize or anchor their ideas in reality.
Importantly, he argued, a sense of moral responsibility was anathema to such an approach.
Corporate Responsibility in the Lab
There is a growing wave of criticism, emerging as much from inside the education community as from outside it, that corporate responsibility courses may be a backward step for the development of the concept.
In Ghoshal's terms, seeing corporate responsibility as a science for the purposes of teaching it more easily might act as a means to under-play the understanding of ethics and responsibility by putting them in test tube, putting them over a flame, then handing them out in convenient case-study-sized samples. The substance and mindset behind the spread of corporate responsibility as an issue worth paying attention to may end up being fashioned into something that, well, makes it less worth paying attention to.
Part of the problem may be that, according to Matten and Moon's report, the major driving force for the introduction of “business ethics” courses in business schools is a given institution’s own faculty members. Business organizations, as drivers, were ranked only slightly higher than “not important” for education institutions in devising corporate-responsibility-related courses.
This may work to over-intellectualize the study of corporate responsibility and suggests that a closer working relationship with the business sector and corporate stakeholders might give many courses a more practical balance.
To be fair to Harvard, the institution has a very close relationship with the private sector and is noted for cultivating such ties. Moreover it ranked one of only six “cutting edge” institutions in teaching social and environmental impact management in the Aspen Institute survey. Even so, focusing on value-adding strategies may still skew its latest corporate responsibility program to the point where is relevance is questionable.
It may pay prospective students to study not just the course outlines but also the epistemology behind it. Bottom line? Homework always pays.
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This column has been reprinted courtesy of Ethical Corporation. It was first published on Sept. 15, 2005.
James Rose is Ethical Corporation’s Asia-Pacific editor.
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