6th Global Conference
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Monday 2nd July - Thursday 5th
July 2007
Mansfield College, Oxford
Session 7: Audits, Ethics and Social Responsibility
Chair: Jo Thakker
Reporting Sustainable Development in the Service
of Social Responsibility for a Business School
Fabrice
Mauleon
ESCEM Europe Centre, Tours, France
France engaged in the diffusion of the concepts of sustainable development and social responsibility in 2001 by requiring companies nationwide to publish social and environmental information relating to their activities annually. The Ecole Superieure de Commerce et Management (ESCEM), which was among the first French business schools to introduce compulsory, interdisciplinary courses on sustainable development, accepted its role as a model for responsible and ethical business practices. This paper demonstrates how a school of business can educate by example when it increases its own transparency and publishes a formal annual report of its social and environmental impacts.
Sustainability in Higher Education: Engaging Students in Campus Environmental
Audits
Stephen
Woolpert
Saint Mary’s College of California
How will today’s students
learn to see the environmental problems of the poor as their responsibility?
The campus itself is serving as a model of sustainability, with curriculum
and operations reflecting an integrative approach to learning and practice.
By actively studying the environmental impact of their own campuses,
students are being educated for a sustainable future. They are also fulfilling
the public purpose of liberal education by increasing their capacity
for responsible membership in the communities in which they will live,
learn, and work.
This paper describes how campus environmental audits
teach students to “think
ecologically”. Ecological thinking is a set of integrative skills
that reach across the boundaries of academic disciplines. It is a habit
of mind which recognizes that individuals are members of larger social
and biotic communities, and therefore leads students to consider social
and environmental problems to be at least partly their own.
Examples
of campus eco-audits and learning outcomes related to two dimensions
of ecological thinking will be presented:
1) Systems thinking—the
consideration of an issue, a topic, or a problem in its larger context.
This holistic way of knowing views decisions, creative acts, and learning
as transactions that connect us with the larger context of life.
2) Biophilia—E.
O. Wilson’s term for human’s affinity
for the natural world. Biophilia thrives on local knowledge of, and direct
relationships to, the places where people live and work.
Each of these dimensions is nurtured by “pedagogies of place”,
learning activities that treat the campus’ landscape and operational
practices as subjects of inquiry.
Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Ethics:
The Indian Context
Vikramaditya Singh Malik and
Roshan
Santhalia
NALSAR Univeristy of Law, Hyderabad,
India
Corporates are traditionally known as engines for driving the economic performance of an entity, its success being measured in terms of high returns on equity at individual plane and its contribution to the nation’s economic growth on a collective plane. Do they have any social or environmental responsibility? This paper begins with an attempt to define the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) with relation to the newer concept of environmental ethics and extending to the boundaries of corporates involving themselves in the international carbon trading market. The paper would give reasons as to how exactly Carbon trading is an excellent answer to the prevailing disrespect shown by the Corporates against the Environment. Having defined the concept as it is commonly understood or as propounded by the theoreticians of CSR as an applied concept in the context of the environment, the paper seeks to examine the position in the Indian context, with some historical background, and the current practices, including the setting up of the National Authority, under the provisions of the Kyoto Protocol, laid down by the UNFCCC, and its compliance. The sustenance of these expanding environmental operations doesn’t hold a future promise without adherence to the OECD principles, UN millennium development goals and the concept of CSR, which repeatedly are laying stress on realisation of the losses caused to the environment and the responsibility of corporates towards these losses. The generally accepted principle is that if a company has caused some damage to the environment, be it in the form of air or water pollution, it owes a debt to the society to make up for it. The issue is as to whether the march towards becoming environment conscious and socially responsible is how to chalk out a peaceful way of harmonizing the corporate world with ecology and environment.