Suzanne Flint-Young

This research aims to explore the relationship between corporate governance and CSR: What are the major factors that play a direct role in the establishment of this relationship? How does context and institutional background impact upon the relationship between CSR and Governance? Using in-depth semi-structured interviews from two types of governance systems in three countries over three years, this study has demonstrated that in practice, within different settings, CSR is being used both as a strategy as well as a reaction to different drivers. We call this adaptive governance where governance can be defined as a flexible system of action incorporating strategic and monitoring activities that determines the way a company enacts its responsibilities to its shareholders and stakeholders and which is determined at any given time by the interrelationship of institutional drivers and behavioural norms. Governance systems and their interrelationships with CSR are demonstrated as fluid according to the national and institutional context, economic situation and industry impact. In the eyes of practitioners corporate governance includes both structural and behavioural factors as well as responsibilities and actions towards shareholders and stakeholders. Contextual factors that this research highlights to be important to the incorporation of CSR into governance include the economic environment, national governance system, regulation and soft law, shareholders, national culture, behavioural norms and industry impacts. Hypotheses on the impact of institutional contexts, industry impacts and economic situations on different types of CSR actions are proposed for further research.

In business schools, there is a persistent myth according to which management education is, and should be, ‘value-free’. This article reflects on the experiences of two business schools from Finland and Australia in which the UN Principles for Responsible Management Education have been pragmatically used as a platform for breaking with this institutionalized guise of positivist value neutrality. This use of PRME makes it possible to create learning environments in which values and value tensions inherent in management education can be explored and exposed. Inspired by Rorty’s understanding of ethics—notably his discussion of ‘final vocabularies’ and ‘moral imagination’—and Flyvbjerg’s reading of phronēsis, the article discusses an approach to learning that helps both teachers and students in exploring and exposing values in management education by problematizing dominant business school vocabularies, thereby leading to moral development, in the Rortian sense. The article presents a number of final vocabularies that business students come to class with, some learning methods used to challenge these vocabularies through discussion of alternative vocabularies, and the new directions for moral imagination that may result.