This discipline is designed to equip participants with the knowledge and skills to comprehend, discuss, and implement responsible management policies and practices. These are crucial for organizations to navigate the complex landscape of sustainable development in the 21st century. We will explore the evolving relationship between Business and Society and how these changes impact organizations.
A second objective of the discipline is to introduce participants to the recent debate of shareholder primacy versus stakeholder approach. Is this dichotomy the best way of approaching value creation issues? As the stakeholder approach has gained more and more traction in the management field since 2019, it should be important to work at the intersection of stakeholder theory, shared value strategy, and strategic corporate social responsibility concepts. We will go through the Principles of Responsible Management. Hopefully, by the end of this debate, the participants will better understand how value is created and appropriated and to whom within the strategic management day-to-day perspective.
For that, we will review a firm’s value creation system, going from the foundations of value creation and corporate social responsibility concepts from an obligation to a strategic approach. The participants will be exposed to the following questions: (1) what does an organization stand for? (2) To whom is it responsible? (2) For what is it responsible? (3) How should organizations behave? (4) How is value created and appropriated, and (5) to whom? In other words, the discipline focus is how an organization creates and appropriates value for multiple stakeholders to achieve sustainable performance, facing the 21st century Grand Challenges.
For this debate, some concepts and their definitions are grounding: (1) Stakeholders are “persons or groups that have, or claim, ownership, rights, or interests in a corporation and its activities, past, present, or future (Clarkson, 1985 p.106) which in turn are “any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the achievement of an organization’s purpose in its activities” (Freeman, 1984 p.53). (2) The firm’s value creation system is composed of “resources and stakeholders, and the knowledge used to manage them” (Harrison, 2020 p.2). And (3) corporate social responsibility “encompasses the economic, legal, ethical, and discretionary expectations that society has of organizations at a given point in time” (Carroll, 1979, p. 500).
The course aims to be interactive. We will discuss corporate statements and business cases to identify challenges and opportunities raised by a strategic corporate social responsibility approach to create stakeholder value and achieve sustainable performance. There are readings to warm up participants’ debate. We encourage participants to grab over the texts. Their preparation and active participation are crucial to creating and harvesting the value of the discipline. By the end of the semester, the participants should be able to appropriate the key concepts and apply them in daily activities as desired.