Recent seminars
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The business and society seminar series aims to bring first-class scholars and leading practitioners from around the world to stimulate and support research and teaching in the School of Management and throughout the University.
Seminar Series 2010 7th October Agnes Nairn Title: "I Smell Ethics" The PR departments of multinational corporations are great at talking about their socially responsible behaviour. But what about all the employees just doing their day job? Agnes will talk about an "Ethical Awareness Programme" she created and delivered for the research division of a global FMCG company which researches everything from the chocolately taste of your favourite ice cream to the heady scent of your fabric conditioner. She will look at how the company has tried to create a unified approach to the ethical challenges faced by researchers serving consumers in all parts of the globe." 5th May Dr Mick Blowfield University of Oxford Title: Outsourcing Governance: what Fairtrade tells us about C21 governance In this presentation Dr Blowfield draws on one of the very few pieces of longitudinal field research on the impacts of Fairtrade. It approaches Fairtrade from a governance rather than reputations perspective, and emphasizes the implications for mainstream business rather than the co-governance movement. It examines if there is a mismatch between the promise and delivery of Fairtrade, and the consequences of that. It also asks if the current state of such approaches provides opportunities for companies to use Fairtrade’s weaknesses to make the value chain a better avenue for delivering ethical governance, and the implications for similar co-governance models. 14th April Professor Mike Barnett University of Oxford Title: The theoretical and empirical business case for CSR In this seminar, I discuss and interweave two papers I have in progress on the business case for CSR -- one theoretical and one empirical – in hopes of advancing a more nuanced understanding of the complicated relationship between social and financial performance. The theoretical paper brings to the fore cognitive constraints that limit which corporate good deeds and misdeeds stakeholders notice and so helps identify boundary conditions on the effectiveness of market mechanisms in effecting social control of firms. The empirical paper measures financial returns to various levels of CSR and finds a curvilinear relationship wherein firms that do the most good achieve the highest returns. This curvilinear relationship helps explain prior mixed findings that have muddled together various levels of CSR and suggests the need for a more contingent perspective on when CSR may and may not pay. It also suggests that to truly distinguish oneself as a socially responsible firm, and catch limited stakeholder attention, you must be really good 3rd March Corinna Dögl, PhD Candidate Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg Title: Stakeholder pressures, CSER practices, and business outcomes. An Empirical Study in Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands
2009 11th February Michael Green Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World and Why We Should Let Them". Michael's seminar is based on his book, which addresses the topic of modern philanthropy and takes a critical look at questions like: Are the super-rich the new super-heroes of the world stage? Are there limits to what philanthrocapitalists can achieve? Is the philanthrocapitalist approach likely to tip the power balance even more in favour of funders? Isn't it undemocratic for the super-rich to have so much unaccountable power?
2008 10th December Dr Julian Dennis, Wessex Water "A Sustainable Approach to Business in a Regulated Utility" 3rd December Jean-Pascal Gond, University of Nottingham "The Social Construction of the Positive Link between Corporate Social and Financial Performance" 26th November Andrew Bone, Director of International Relations, De Beers "De Beers: A Story of Transformation" 20th February Laura Spence from Brunel Research in Enterprise Innovation, Sustainability and Ethics (BRESE) Keeping it Local: Waitrose and Supply Chain Ethics in the UK - is coming to gave a CBOS research seminar. Laura is a Reader in Business Ethics at Brunel University, UK and a member of Brunel Research in Enterprise, Innovation, Sustainability and Ethics (BRESE). She is also the section editor for Small Business and Entrepreneurship of the Journal of Business Ethics and an executive member of ISBEE. Laura’s research interests include: ethics and CSR in small and medium sized enterprises, social capital, supply chain ethics and competitor intelligence gathering. She has published in a wide variety of journals including Business Ethics Quarterly, Journal of Business Ethics and the International Small Business Journal. Her books include Social Capital and Responsibility: The World of SMEs (with A. Habisch and R. Schmidpeter, eds, Palgrave, 2004) and Corporate Social Responsibility: Readings and Cases in Global Context (with A. Crane and D. Matten, eds, Routledge, 2008). 25th January Pursey Huegens, Erasmus University "Structure! agency! (And other quarrels): Meta-analyzing institutional theories of organisation." 26th November Andrew Bone, Director of International Relations, De Beers "De Beers: A Story of Transformation" |