The specificity of the firms' impact on economic life will be addressed by analyzing the principles and practices covered by the field of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). CSR will be studied as a reflector of the modern firms' self-awareness process in terms of social responsibility and as a source of innovation in the face of today's challenges of competitiveness, sustainable development and world governance. This course is based on research and insights from diverse fields, including strategic management, organization theory, organizational behaviour, marketing, finance and business ethics. Finally, this course is also based on the idea that CSR activities are the responsibility of all managers in an organization.
The course is designed to develop competent and responsible practitioners. The final aim is to develop practitioners who are capable of using academic knowledge to analyse and understand problem-solving situations and who are capable of influencing change of companies and management towards sustainable and responsible organisations. Our ambition is clear: supporting young women and men as well as business practitioners ' eager to place responsible leadership, sustainable production and consumption at the heart of their vision, learning and attitudes.
At the end of the course, you should be able to:
1. Elicit critical thinking on ethical, social and environmental issues raised by contemporary organizations;
2. Gain a deep understanding of the nature of CSR, the theoretical concepts and frameworks used by adopting a critical point of view on the literature, on the one hand, and on managerial decisions, on the other.
3. Apply these theories and frameworks to analyse organizational challenges companies are facing, to diagnose critical situations and to evaluate different scenarios for the organization in practice, with a view to propose decisions for the organization.
4. Understand that many organizations face tensions and dilemmas where either/or approaches are insufficient or even inappropriate and conflicts may arise if paradoxical tensions are not proactively dealt with.
The contribution of this Teaching Unit to the development and command of the skills and learning outcomes of the programme(s) can be accessed at the end of this sheet, in the section entitled “Programmes/courses offering this Teaching Unit”.
- Group project and poster
- Individual paper ' personal manifesto
- Individual written exam
- General and interactive courses (implying direct contacts with practitioners) completed by compulsory readings;
- Teamwork and creation of a poster on a concrete CSR issue in collaboration with a company/organization or in the context of a fictive company or on a specific up-to-date CSR theme that concerns a lot of companies/organizations;
- Personal questioning periods developed by the students in terms of their own aspirations, perceptions and observations as citizens. All these elements foster personal change that in its turn conveys transformations within the chosen organizations.
The specificity of the firms' impact on economic life will be addressed by analyzing the principles and practices covered by the field of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). CSR will be studied as a reflector of the modern firms' self-awareness process in terms of social responsibility and as a source of innovation in the face of today's challenges of competitiveness, sustainable development and world governance. This course is based on research and insights from diverse fields, including strategic management, organization theory, organizational behaviour, marketing, finance and business ethics. Finally, this course is also based on the idea that CSR activities are the responsibility of all managers in an organization.
Link with the LSM competency framework :
Priority in this course is given to 1) corporate citizenship to enhance your ability to act consciously, aware of your responsibilities, placing human and ethical considerations at the very heart of your thinking and actions; 2) master a multidisciplinary body of knowledge (contents, methods, models and conceptual frameworks) related to CSR and sustainable development; and 3) personal development to enhance your self'knowledge and independence, to better prepare yourself to deal with ethical dilemmas common in the practices of organizations.
Secondary competences also developed in the course are 1) to manage a project by working in a team under conditions of resource constraints, to provide comprehensive analyses of challenging corporate situations related to the impact of companies/organizations on the natural environment or society at large; and 2) to communicate your analysis effectively to different stakeholders.
