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Durham Business School has developed an integrated approach to the development of MBAs for social and environmental stewardship. Students are exposed to the concept of CSR at the very beginning of the programme. This takes the form of a two-hour session on CSR and sustainability issues, followed by a guest speaker who has direct responsibility for these issues in a corporate setting. Students are then required to undertake their first piece of assessment on this topic.
This introduction is then followed by elements of CSR and sustainability being incorporated into some of the core modules. Several elective modules then give further opportunity to address a variety of social and environmental stewardship issues, as appropriate for each module. Dissertation support is provided for students who wish to pursue the area in even greater depth.
Durham Business School is an integral part of Durham University. As such, it is committed to reducing its environmental impact and improving the local environment. This affects both the people who study, work and live at the School and for the wider community in line with the University’s Environmental Policy.
This commitment is reflected in policies which seek to make the most effective and efficient use of all its resources, encouraging all members of the School community to develop an ecologically sound approach to their work and lifestyle.
Durham Business School recognizes that like all large organisations, it has an important role to play in helping to tackle climate change by significantly reducing its CO2 emissions. We are committed to responsible energy management and the highest standards in energy efficiency. It is in the School’s best interest to reduce the amount of money it spends on energy, releasing funds for other purposes. At the same time, reducing energy consumption helps the School to reduce its environmental impact.
The University’s Environmental Policy includes sections on: Biodiversity, Energy, Fairtrade, Travel, Procurement, Renewable, Waste, and Water.
Durham Business School employs a range of ways in which it contributes towards the University’s wider environmental activities, these include:
The Business School is working to the University wide review of energy management and carbon reduction. Each department has plans for reducing energy in their areas ranging from the major areas such as traveling impacts as part of field work, right through to simple changes such as printing documents on both sides – or where possible, not printing at all.
The module covers stakeholder / shareholder theory; ethical theory and globalisation; employees and business ethics; sales, marketing and consumer ethics; supply chain and competitor ethics; sustainable development and business ethics; shareholders, corporate governance, finance and accounting ethics; managing business ethics. It is available as a Distance Learning module which all Full-time MBA students can take.
Amongst the Business Projects undertaken by students from the 2009-10 cohort, two were with Alliance Boots. The first explored Alliance Boots’ response to global natural disasters, the second the employment of ex-offenders by Alliance Boots. These are typical of the kinds of opportunities for students to explore a practical issue related to CSR / Sustainability which the Business School seeks to promote.
Explores the environmental pressures at work on organisations, how they can respond to these influences, and the management issues involved in aligning these forces. Specifically, the theme takes an integrated perspective of the operating environment of the organisation.
Each year at least one guest speaker is invited to address CSR / Sustainability Issues. In 2009 the speaker was Richard Ellis, Director of CSR at Alliance Boots (Health and Beauty wholesalers and retailers). In 2010 the speaker was Karen Wilkinson-Bell, North East Director of Business in the Community (a business-facing organisation promoting CSR to corporates). This session is in support of an lecture on CSR / Sustainability and the students write their first formative assignment on this topic.
In 2010 Richard Ellis, Director of CSR at Alliance Boots (Health and Beauty wholesalers and retailers) spoke to a Corporate Forum event to which local companies and full-time MBA students were invited. This also included a report on a Business Project (see Core / Required courses) carried out by a full-time MBA student with Alliance Boots during the summer of 2010.
The University offers an alternative Third Sector Career Fair which attracts both social enterprises and mainstream companies advertising social / environmental roles.
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the association between corporate environmental disclosure (CED) and earnings management (EM) and the impact of corporate governance (CG) mechanisms on that association.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses performance-matched discretionary accruals (DA) as a measure of EM. The paper also uses ordinary least square regression with robust standard errors to examine the association between CED and EM for a sample of 245 UK non-financial firms for the financial year ended on March 2007. Three different theoretical frameworks are used to identify the expected association between CER and EM. These include: signalling, agency and stakeholder-legitimacy theories.
Findings – The paper finds no significant statistical association between various measures of DA and environmental disclosure. The paper also finds that some CG attributes affect the relationship between CER and EM.
Practical implications – The result suggests that UK corporate managers are not using environmental disclosure as a technique to reduce the probability that public policy actions will be taken against their companies.
Originality/value – Since most empirical research is limited to the US setting, this paper provides a novel contribution to the existing literature, as one of the first to examine this issue in the UK.
This paper develops a set of 16 criteria, divided into four groupings, for responsible business practice (RBP) in Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) drawn from the existing SME/RBP literature. The current lack of a general set of criteria against which such activity can be judged is noted and this deficit is redressed. In order to make an initial assessment in support of the criteria so derived, an exploratory feasibility study of RBP in U.K. Fair Trade organisations was conducted. The findings from this study show that most but not all of the RBP criteria seem to be applicable to U.K. Fair Trade organisations but it is recommended that the complete set of criteria continues to be used in further research until such time as there is a general consensus as to which criteria are appropriate. Implications for RBP in small businesses in general, and for Fair Trade organisations in particular, are drawn out and suggestions for further research are identified.
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore how corporate environmental reputation (CER) affects the association between current annual stock returns and current and future annual earnings. In particular, it seeks to examine the potential usefulness of CER to investors in predicting future earnings.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses the returns-earnings regression model introduced by Collins et al. to examine the importance of CER for investors. It uses a sample of 889 non-financial firms listed on the London Stock Exchange from 1996 to 2004.
Findings – The paper finds that firms with higher levels of CER scores exhibit higher levels of share price anticipation of earnings than firms with lower levels of CER scores.
Originality/value – This paper is the first direct evidence that CER contains value-relevant information. Such information is potentially useful to investors in anticipating future earnings.
We propose a systemic, multilevel framework for understanding trust repair at the organizational level. Drawing on systems theory, we theorize how each component of an organization's system shapes employees' perceptions of the organization's trustworthiness and can contribute to failures and effective trust repair. We distinguish the framework from prior work grounded in dyadic assumptions and propose underlying principles and a four-stage process for organizational trust repair. Finally, we explore the implications for research and practice.
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