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Given their involvement in the global economy, it is essential that MBA students are exposed to Global Responsibility and Business Ethics issues. This is why MBA students address these issues through specific courses. For instance, a module on Global Responsibility is positioned very early in the MBA programme. A three-day Business Ethics seminar is scheduled at the very end of the programme to help students capitalize on all the knowledge they have acquired in light of social and environmental issues. MBA students are also strongly encouraged to participate in the various extracurricular events and student clubs related to issues of social and environmental responsibility. Our aim at Audencia is to train MBA participants to become leaders who understand the importance of acting in a socially and environmentally responsible manner.
Thanks to its Institute for Global Responsibility, Audencia Nantes has introduced many sustainable and responsible initiatives on its campus.
The school has signed an agreement to become the first French higher education provider to partner the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). This partnership means Audencia will work with the WWF to integrate the question of sustainability for all of its 3000 students. In this way, the aim is to produce HR managers, accountants, marketing directors, etc with the sustainability reflex rather than look to train specific heads of global responsibility.
On-campus events encourage the debate and promotion of globally responsible actions. Audencia recently organised its first Global Responsibility Day under the banner 'Innovation and Inspiration.' Jonas Haertle, Head of PRME at the UN, was guest of honour.
The WWF partnership also entails the school further reducing its carbon footprint. All offices now have paper recycling trays and guidelines on reducing paper trails are followed (double-sided printing, etc). All paper used at the school is certified FSC/PFC and so respects the environment and contributes to responsible forest management.
In terms of its computer system, the campus has now been converted to a Green IT network in order to reduce its energy consumption. This measure respects the WWF’s status as a member of the Climate Savers Computing Initiative.
Staff can benefit from a subsidy for their public transport passes and so profit from the newly-named ‘Audencia’ tram station 100 yards from the campus. The school has also installed an enlarged bicycle parking lot on its grounds for both staff and students.
All hot drinks served in the campus cafeteria are fair trade products.
This course’s targeted skills are to enhance the ability to master ethical dilemmas, to refine the knowledge of one’s value system and to connect the various levels of the ethical issue in management. In this way, students discover the importance of the role played by a manager’s ethics in business, review the US approach to business ethics, analyze new European approaches to the question and discuss a criticism of business ethics ideology.
This course will help you clarify your business idea and target your audience; formalise the project through several stages; and employ strategic competitive analysis to enhance the chance of success. The objectives of this course are to:
- understand what your target audience needs to know and how to present it to them
- conduct an analysis of customers, suppliers, barriers to entry, substitutes and competitors, and the necessary internal capabilities and organisation.
- incorporate key success factors and financial projections into your business plans
- and learn from an entrepreneur who launched a CO2 audit consulting firm in Audencia’s incubator.
This course is designed to give the student an overview of GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) as applied to corporations as well as SMEs. Both the methodology and the terminology of GAAP financial statements will be presented through lecture and exercises. Students will be given the basic equity market transparency requirements and shown the relationship to accounting procedures and ethical reporting methods. Analysis of financial statements and a comparison of national and regional accounting methods will also be discussed to acquaint the student with the effects of culture upon financial standards.
This course explores contemporary risk management methods available to corporations that may assist their care of various risks in today’s complex business environment. The first part of the course focuses on the fundamentals of risk and risk management, including analysis of why corporations bother to manage risk at all. Emphasis is given to the economic impacts of losses, risk assessment and enterprise risk management. The second part of the course introduces a variety of recently developed risk management tools available to management. Corporate finance ideas will be integrated into analysis of corporate risks and loss financing methods, as well as risk securitisation. Risk management is analysed through the lens of sustainable development.
Issues:
- Strategy and HRM
- Current Issues of HRM: Diversity Management
- Staffing
- Compensation and Benefits
- Employee Development
- Performance Appraisal
- Downsizing and Outsourcing
- International HRM
- Industrial Relations
- Testimonial: Chief Human Resource Management/member of the executive board (CHRM) Hans van der Meulen
This course discusses ethical and responsible management of teams and colleagues to enable managers to
- Appreciate major concepts surrounding individuals and team behaviour
- Identify and understand the factors that influence individuals and teams
- Analyse problems and find appropriate solutions for individual and team issues
- Understand themselves better in work contexts and in team situations
- Develop responsible managerial practices
To help develop the students' competence as ethically responsible managers able to work with diverse stakeholders having different sets of values by:
- Understanding the concept of culture and how cultures influence the way people think and behave in organisations
- Developing the ability to identify one’s own cultural preferences and how they influence one’s interactions with people from different cultural backgrounds
- Understanding the dynamics of intercultural teams, co-located and virtual, and how to improve communication in these teams
This course is designed to assist students in understanding the global environment in which international business takes place. Topics addressed include a discussion of key global policy issues plus environmental and ethical concerns, and an understanding of the dynamics of the global economy.
This course includes a look at all issues related to corruption and bribery in foreign direct investment, numerous cases of investment in Tanzania (mining), Russia (development) and China, bribery in international negotiations: (what are the ethical aspects of gift giving, money transfers, etc?), and numerous simulations of participations in bidding and competitions.
- Developing critical thinking on leadership and negotiation models
- Identifying competences and area for further development concerning leadership and negotiation skills
- Defining and promoting a model of authentic leadership which has at its core, a respect for individual creativity and potential. Leading ethically is a key characteristic of this model.
The course on the legal environment of companies emphasizes new forms of regulations that emerge in the context of globalization. It is important for future managers to know the legal context in the field of CSR, i.e. legislation on compulsory social reporting in France and other European countries, but also new kinds of norms, such as the Global Compact, the Global Reporting Initiative. The part dedicated to European Business Law deals with Employment Law as well as with the impact of free movement on national social legislations and the integration of social dimensions in decisions on mergers.
In November 2010, Audencia's MBA students organized their first Global Responsibility Day for MBA alumni and regional company representatives.
Throughout the day, several workshops allowed the international MBA students to exchange with managers from regional and national companies. The company representatives presented their strategies and activities in the field of CSR and sustainability, and the MBA students explained how companies in other countries face similar challenges. These discussions allowed the international MBA students to discover the specific approaches of French companies to CSR and sustainability through concrete example, and the regional managers to get new ideas to enrich their own strategies.
In the evening, a round table was organized for the students of all programs as well as for the general public. Moderated by Audencia's dean, this round table brought together a representative of the UN Principles of Responsible Management Education, the CEO from the local company Armor, a member of Audencia's faculty and an MBA student.
Given the success of the event, the Global Responsibility Day will become an annual event.
In November 2009, Audencia and EABIS organized an academic conference on Global Responsibility bringing together researchers, representatives from business and other stakeholders as well as students.
For two days, the conference focused on the different aspects of stakeholder engagement in order to promote global responsibility.
The best communications presented during the conference were published in a special issue of the academic journal Management & Avenir in March 2010.
Each year, Audencia's microfinance chair and Axé Sud, one of Audencia's student clubs aiming to promote microfinance, organize a conference on microfinance open to all students and the general public.
These conferences are organized in partnerships with banks and NGOs.
In April 2011, Audencia and two other business schools that were among the first to adopt the United Nations Principles for Responsible Management Education (Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki, Finland and ISAE/FGV in Curitiba, Brazil) will organize an academic conference on CSR and sustainable development.
The three schools have been working together on issues related to CSR and sustainability, notably through joint participation in conferences, organization of joint seminars, and teacher exchange, since 2008.
The conference is organized in 8 streams moderated by teams of faculty members of the three schools and is open to MBA students:
1. Articulating the political role of business through CR: Paradigm shift or business as usual?
2. Responsible Management Education: Beyond complacency and contestation
3. Business-NGO relations: Power, challenges and opportunities
4. CR and the Base of the Pyramid: Empowering the poor while exploiting new markets?
5. CSR in the Supply Chain
6. Differences within and/or outside organisations: Diversity as Corporate Social Responsibility
7. Great expectations: Stakeholder Engagement for Global Responsibility
8. Social Responsibility Investors: How Do They Use Their Power? How Can Corporations Respond to SRI Power?
Twice a year, Audencia organizes a prestige dinner in Paris to disseminate the principles and values of CSR and sustainability among the school's alumni and partner companies.
Each dinner is organized around the presentation of research by Audencia's faculty in the field of global responsibility followed by a debate between high-level representatives of businesses, NGOs, trade unions and public authorities.
Audencia organizes short programs in the field of CSR and sustainability for MBA students from its partner schools. These weeks include seminars with faculty members as well as company visits.
Between August 2009 and July 2011, Audencia will have hosted student groups from the following partner universities:
- George Washington University
- Aston School of Management
- University of Cincinnati
- Yonsei University, South Korea
One of Audencia's student clubs aims to promote the integration of handicapped individuals in companies.
To raise the awareness of these issues among our students, the club has organized basketball and table tennis matches between our students and handicapped students from Nantes.
They have also written their own play dealing with the integration of the handicapped within companies.
Audencia is one of 25 schools worldwide to have been selected to participate in the Aspen MBA case competition beginning in March 2011. Students are asked to innovate at the intersection of for-profit business and environmental, social, and ethical issues.
The contest’s theme of global responsibility sits well with Audencia’s own stress on respectful actions and responsible management. Geared towards the environmental, social, and ethical questions facing for-profit business leaders, the event aims to highlight how firms can change the world for the better.
The Aspen Institute’s aims are to promote values-based leadership and to provide a neutral forum for discussing and acting on key issues.
One of Audencia's students clubs organizes an annual film festival on global responsibility and sustainable development.
The first edition of this film festival took place in October 2006 and formed part of the National Sustainable Development Conference organized in Nantes.
The students are sponsored by companies and local authorities to organize this two-day festival and to give free access to all the films. A part of the festival is reserved for children. After the films, those attending have the opportunity to discuss issues with the film-makers.
It was in the framework of this student festival that Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" was projected for the first time in Nantes.
In order to promote CSR and sustainability among our students and local managers, Audencia organizes the Global Responsibility Awards in partnership with an engineering school in Nantes. The students evaluate the economic, social and environmental performances of the participating companies through interviews with different stakeholders.
To highlight the best experiences, an annual award ceremony is organized where selected companies share their practices.
In April 2010, Audencia organized its first Diversity Day for the students of the whole business school.
The day starts with a round table on the importance of diversity management for the economic performance of companies with HR managers from different companies.
The students then attend parallel workshops on different aspects of diversity management, i.e. equal treatment of male and female workers, integration of handicapped workers, anti-discrimination linked to candidates' origins.
Finally, there is a forum allowing different local clubs and networks that aim at promoting diversity within companies to present their activities to the students.
The event will be renewed in 2011.
On a regular basis (at least 6 times a year), Audencia hosts speakers from businesses, trade unions or NGOs to present their personal involvement in globally responsible activities and to exchange with students, faculty and other employees of the school.
These workshops aim at raising the awareness on the various challenges of implementing a CSR strategy within a company or other organizations.
The format of each workshop is the following:
- 15-minute presentation by the speaker
- 3 concrete questions from a student, a faculty member and an employee
- open discussion
After the workshop, a short interview of the speaker is filmed and made available through Audencia's Global Responsibility Blog.
Audencia's Alumni Association Réseaudencia and the school's Centre for Global Responsibility have created an alumni club dedicated to global responsibility and sustainable development. This club organizes regular meetings between those who already work in the area and those seeking to reorient their careers.
Audencia has launched a series of brochures presenting the different jobs and careers in various business sectors. These brochures contain interviews with alumni students who explain the main activities in their jobs as well as the different steps that allowed them to be recruited for this job.
These brochures highlight in particular the involvement of the alumni in CSR and sustainability activities and the role these activities play in the development of their career.
One of the aims of Audencia's career services is to raise awareness of global responsibility among the student population. In liaison with the school's Center for Global Responsibility, the service has compiled a dossier of those companies where the issue of responsibility is at the forefront. In this way, students expressing a desire to work for an employer with a commitment to global responsibility can be orientated by the service.
"Since its founding in 1998, LESMA has brought together a multidisciplinary team of researchers in management sciences (especially marketing and strategy), in social sciences (economics, sociology, anthropology and psychology) and, for certain projects, specialists in food science and processes. The research performed by LESMA generally concentrates on the enhancement of foodstuffs, nutritional claims, consumer perception and risks, etc.
This research allows certain practical recommendations to be drawn up that contribute to the prevention and anticipation of food scares while addressing the current preoccupations of those involved in marketing and innovation for the agribusiness sector.
Recent research includes a study of the perception and marketing of lab-produced oysters, and an examination of the nutritional claims made by certain dairy goods products."
French banking group Banque Populaire and Audencia Nantes have founded a Banque Populaire chair to conduct research on the economic and social role of co-operative banks, with a particular focus on microfinance.
The ongoing research program measures the optimum conditions for the success of microfinance schemes in both developing countries and industrialized nations.
The chair’s team of researchers and industry specialists has set itself the following objectives:
- To collate, analyze and evaluate the various techniques of modern microfinance
- To analyze these practices through both economic and sociological approaches
- To attempt to formulate concrete recommendations and to produce a statistical analysis of the risks involved
Audencia's Institute for Global Responsibility aims at promoting management that integrates social and environmental issues as well as stakeholders' expectations to improve companies' long-term economic performance. To achieve this, the Institute develops academic research, innovative pedagogy and corporate partnerships.
The institute is also in charge of implementing the principles of global responsibility in the school's management. In cooperation with the school's stakeholders, it has developed a global responsibility strategy as well as a three-year action plan.
SIFE’s aim is to make students in higher education more aware of the nature of both companies and entrepreneurs via projects aimed at conciliating social responsibility and economic development.
Students from Audencia have previously won the European edition, following their performance at a 12-country final held in Warsaw before a jury composed of 20 international companies. Audencia student teams ahve also won numerous prizes in the French final of the challenge.
In November 2010, Audencia's students launched a Net Impact chapter at the school in order to promote CSR and sustainability.
This chapter will enable Audencia's students to be part of a worldwide students and alumni network in these fields.
The concept of CSR is a relatively recent addition to the agenda in Germany, although the country has a long history of companies practicing corporate social responsibility. The expectations of society had remained stable for many years, encapsulated in laws, societal norms, and industrial relations agreements. But over the past decade, a growing number of German companies, often triggered by their multinational activities, have started to engage with diverse stakeholders to redefine the nature of their social responsibilities. This contribution reviews and illustrates the development of diverse forms of social responsibility in German corporations and analyses how actors in business and society can build on traditional strengths to find new institutional arrangements for sharing tasks and responsibilities in the interests of achieving a better balance between societal, economic, and environmental needs.
As soon as firms pretend to integrate principles of social responsibility in their corporate discourses, they have to make sure that social arguments can be well accepted by present and future managers. Are there sociodemographic types of managers for which such discourse would be more or less well suited? Based on two samples (100 first-year students from the Nantes Business School and 168 employees belonging to the alumni of the same school), this study allows to crosstab discourses perception and professional experience. Results show that professional experience increases receptiveness to discourses oriented towards economic and financial objectives. The most experimented managers consider that the social interests must be more an object of practices than of discourses.
Many studies in the fields of law, sociology and management point to the transformation of subordination in the employment relationship. This is often explained by the triangulation of the traditionally bilateral employment relation between employer and employees by the involvement of clients or their representatives in the operational and organizational conditions of work. Such studies rarely distinguish between the various types of clients, nor between the reality and rhetoric of their role and influence. Our objective is to propose a classification of the triangular situations between employer, employees and clients based on the concept of power and to analyse the impacts of clients on conditions of work and employment relations.
The purpose of this paper is to introduce the area of Green Logistics and to describe some of the problems that arise in this subject which can be formulated as combinatorial optimization problems. The paper particularly considers the topics of reverse logistics, waste management and vehicle routing and scheduling.
An important neef of corporations for internal audits is the ability to detect fraudulently reported financial data. Benford's Law is a probability distribution which is useful to analyse patterns of digits in numbers sets. A history of the origins of Benford's Law is given and the types of data sets expected to follow Benford's Law is discussed This paper examines how BA students falsify financial numbers. The paper shows that they fail to imitate Benford's law and that there are cheating behaviour patterns coherent with previous empirical studies.
The increasing numbers of women in the labour market and the rise in dual-career couples have prompted many organizations to introduce programmes to help their employees balance their work and personal lives. Positive employee perceptions of such initiatives have tended to be assumed rather than demonstrated. This study examines how a proposal for a work-life balance programme is actually viewed by employees. Drawing on survey data from 300 employees in a shopping centre in France, the study finds evidence of a range of attitudes. These attitudes are influenced not only by existing and potential constraints, but also by the possibility of the employees benefiting from child care as well as their views concerning the role of the organization. Attitudes towards the provision of child care are particularly positive when they seek to attenuate difficulties of work organization and are consistent with a flexible approach that takes employees’ personal constraints into account.
This article examines the key themes surrounding gossip including its contexts, the various outcomes (positive and negative) of gossip as well as a selection of challenges and controversies. The challenges which are highlighted revolve around definitional issues, methodological approaches, and ethical considerations. The authors' analysis suggests that the characteristics and features of gossip lend itself to a process-oriented approach whereby the beginning and, particularly, end points of gossip are not always easily identified. Gossip about a subject or person can temporarily disappear only for it to re-surface at some later stage. In addition, questions pertaining to the effects of gossip and ethical-based arguments depend on the nature of the relationships within the gossip triad (gossiper, listener/respondent and target).
The purpose of this research is to offer a model that incorporates both direct and indirect effects of brand's perceived personality on three major relational consequences of this construct: trust, attachment and commitment to the brand. In addition to the links between brand personality and its relational consequences, the interdependence links amongst these consequences are also considered.
Some of the choices made through the ongoing international accounting normalisation process show that the IASB has adopted norms for controlling (images) rather than for ruling. Controlling supposes that economical and social agents become official actors in the negotiation. A focus on accounting norms applied to minerals exploration costs suggest that accounting regulation can sometimes be governed by political matters. Considering the notable exception allowed by IFRS 6, thanks to which oil companies can circumvent the paragraphs 11-12 of IAS 8, this article addresses the legitimacy and effective targets of the international accounting normalisation. The question of the ethical status of the board is then brought up.
This article uses Carbonnier’s sociology of law as a theoretical framework to understand the efficiency of joint audit in the French corporate governance context. Joint audit has been strongly criticised by a range of professionals, academics and politicians. These criticisms focus on the ineffectiveness of the law underpinning joint audit. We show that these criticisms are based on a confusion between material and symbolic effectiveness of the law and cannot bring into question the relevance of joint audit which remains a key institution of corporate governance.
Microfinance is an expanding branch of finance which has great growth potential. Microfinance institutions (MFIs) bring together a very mixed group of structures on both a legal and organizational level. This paper aims to explain accounting standards imposed upon non-profit MFIs in order to identify shortcomings in the way financial statements are established
The aim of this article is to analyze the process through which new categories of stakeholders emerge and constitute themselves as sufficiently powerful, legitimate and committed actors to become partners in companies’ strategies in the area of corporate social responsibility and diversity management. To do this, the article mobilizes the theory of social regulation developed by Jean Daniel Reynaud that insists on the role of social actors in the development and enforcement of rules governing organizations and that underlines that these regulations may lead to the emergence of new actors.
The development of tourism in the Sahara is achieved at the expense of a fragile environment and society. If tour operators do gain, the most responsible of them, aware of the damages, multiply the charters and ethical commitments of all kinds. These efforts, too often merely cosmetic, however, may not solve the problem of incompatibility between global responsibility and tourism in the Sahara.
According to the approaches to innovation Norbert Alter (2002, 2005) and the joint regulation of Jean-Daniel Reynaud (1997, 2000), deviance is a positive component of organizational functioning. These theories have in common to observe that deviance is compromised, or even cooperation, between different sources of legitimacy. Based on a qualitative analysis of opinions and attitudes of twenty managers of middle and senior managers in the mass distribution, this study aims to understand why some minority players take the risk of deviance: the choice of deviance would be motivated not by a desire for opposition but by a desire to be of service to employees and customers, the desire deemed compatible with the goal of economic efficiency.
If Golden Parachutes have been hardly criticized since the beginning of financial crisis, have we to conclude necessarily that they are unethical instrument and that they should be forbidden. The aim of this paper is to valuate Golden Parachutes in an ethical perspective by using major ethical conceptions: consequentialism and deontologism. We underline the ambiguous status of Golden Parachutes and their utility for shareholders.
The research shows that performance measures about corporate social responsibility are not integrated significantly into strategic performance measurement systems. Nevertheless, corporate social responsibility performance measures tend to become more developed in companies that are larger, are listed on a public stock exchange and in industrial firms.
This article argues that a twofold paradigm shift is occurring in the field of business and society: away from “managing” stakeholders to “engaging” with them; and beyond “corporate social responsibility” to "global responsibility”. The article discusses the various meanings of “engagement” and introduces the other contributions to the special issue to illustrate how the range of stakeholders is changing and the ways of engaging with them are diversifying. The article closes by noting implications for research and practice.
Based on neo-institutional literature, this article aims to show the influence of organizational isomorphism on corruption. The focus is institutional explanations of corruption. Our model is based on empirical research in Russia at the end of the 1990s. A face-to-face questionnaire was conducted with 552 top executives in private firms across various economic sectors. We used the structural equation model Partial Least Squares, PLS, developed model provides an integrated approach to the technique to test our hypotheses. The study of the relationship between corruption and organizational isomorphism. Our empirical data from firms in Russia allowed us to test various theoretical hypotheses concerning the influence of organizational isomorphism on corruption. Our emphasis is on the influence of competitive, normative and mimetic isomorphism but also the politicization of the economy on corruption.
The goal of this article is to propose a new classification of stakeholders based on the concept of commitment. Commitment is analysed as a social and organisational learning process shared between company directors and their stakeholders. This commitment is a necessary condition – even if it is not sufficient – to the global responsibility of the business. Applied to the membership of the Banque Populaire Atlantique in order to identify the members’ varying levels of commitment, this new mapping technique can aid directors, on the one hand, to modify their relations according to the degree of commitment of each identified group of members, and on the other hand, to adapt their financial products and communications to foster commitment among as many of these groups as possible.
The academic literature on diversity highlights the economic reasons why HDR seek to integrate persons with disabilities. Based on a qualitative survey conducted among 19 HRD and project leaders, this study aims at seeing if the economic argument is sufficient to explain the implementation of measures for the integration of persons with disabilities. Since these policies are also linked to intrinsic motivation (Deci et Ryan, 2001) and meaning (Morin, 2008) given by HDR and project leaders, this study reveals the importance for them of autonomy, relationship to the persons with disabilities and of the feeling that these policies benefit them.
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