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CSR will make more progress when business schools and companies work better together, says Peter Lacy
Business schools sit on an uncomfortable fault line between the academic and business worlds. They must achieve academic legitimacy, often through quantifiable analysis and scientific precision, while helping companies solve complex real-world management problems. These two audiences sometimes pull in different directions.
Fortunately, business schools are now responding to this challenge by providing innovative new courses and seminars, consulting services and teaching networks, as well as new academic research. But balancing the needs of the business world for insights and solutions with traditional academic research cycles is difficult.
Business schools, like companies, need to take more account of responsible business practice in their core activities. Yet they still face many challenges in integrating teaching on corporate responsibility into the mainstream curriculum. Where such teaching does occur, it tends to be stand-alone, often interpreted by a single specialist professor who ‘owns’ the subject within an institution. As such, corporate responsibility in business schools has often been viewed as a fringe subject, not really worthy of serious consideration in management education.
This is not just a source of frustration for companies. More and more academics themselves are demanding that business schools take corporate responsibility seriously, as are policy-makers and business students (although, interestingly, civil society is still largely absent from the debate). As long as the business school system remains within its own entrenched boundaries there are real challenges to making corporate responsibility a legitimate, and publishable, area of research and teaching.
However, reforming business education cannot happen in academic isolation. There needs to be help and interest from the business world. Companies can provide business educators with real-life dilemmas that should be part of teaching and research programmes. Educators can provide companies with MBA programmes and executive training courses that build their managers’ knowledge and skills in the field of corporate responsibility. And perhaps more importantly, business and academics can collaborate in knowledge development to shape theory and practice.
If academics and business can bridge the gap by working together more closely, for example on collaborative research and on training programmes, companies and business schools will be better able to use their respective strengths to create new forms of learning that are more relevant to corporate responsibility. Progress is being made, but there is still a long way to go.
Peter Lacy is executive director of the European Academy of Business in Society.
Business schools sit on an uncomfortable fault line between the academic and business worlds. They must achieve academic legitimacy, often through quantifiable analysis and scientific precision, while helping companies solve complex real-world management problems. These two audiences sometimes pull in different directions.
Fortunately, business schools are now responding to this challenge by providing innovative new courses and seminars, consulting services and teaching networks, as well as new academic research. But balancing the needs of the business world for insights and solutions with traditional academic research cycles is difficult.
Business schools, like companies, need to take more account of responsible business practice in their core activities. Yet they still face many challenges in integrating teaching on corporate responsibility into the mainstream curriculum. Where such teaching does occur, it tends to be stand-alone, often interpreted by a single specialist professor who ‘owns’ the subject within an institution. As such, corporate responsibility in business schools has often been viewed as a fringe subject, not really worthy of serious consideration in management education.
This is not just a source of frustration for companies. More and more academics themselves are demanding that business schools take corporate responsibility seriously, as are policy-makers and business students (although, interestingly, civil society is still largely absent from the debate). As long as the business school system remains within its own entrenched boundaries there are real challenges to making corporate responsibility a legitimate, and publishable, area of research and teaching.
However, reforming business education cannot happen in academic isolation. There needs to be help and interest from the business world. Companies can provide business educators with real-life dilemmas that should be part of teaching and research programmes. Educators can provide companies with MBA programmes and executive training courses that build their managers’ knowledge and skills in the field of corporate responsibility. And perhaps more importantly, business and academics can collaborate in knowledge development to shape theory and practice.
If academics and business can bridge the gap by working together more closely, for example on collaborative research and on training programmes, companies and business schools will be better able to use their respective strengths to create new forms of learning that are more relevant to corporate responsibility. Progress is being made, but there is still a long way to go.
Peter Lacy is executive director of the European Academy of Business in Society.
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