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Heroic Narratives of Intentional Non-Compliance with PRME
Abstract
Purpose
The governing bodies responsible for drafting and promoting the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) apparently envisioned a completely voluntary initiative without concern for accountability. Public concern and commentary led to the addition of a reporting requirement in 2010. Two years later, program administrators began to update statuses. As of January 2016, PRME listed 636 signatories on their website. Because the reporting requirement took effect, approximately 86 schools have broken their commitment to comply with the PRME standards. Some schools were de-listed for inaction, whereas others actively left the program. This study aims to understand those who intentionally chose not to comply with PRME.
Design/methodology/approach
This study utilized a heroic quest typology to analyze and understand the behavior of institutions that intentionally chose not to comply with PRME. Narrative analysis of these concluded quests included strategic plans, research summaries, course syllabi and descriptions, press releases, PRME Sharing Information on Progress reports, UNGC letters of commitment, Communication on Progress reports, and internal informants.
Findings
Out of the 15 entities, 4 exhibited dual or quasi-heroic quests. Their experiences offered two viable and practical alternatives for institutions seeking to transcend the business ethics industry limitations of the PRME initiative.
Research limitations/implications
The narrative analysis of this study encompassed a sufficiently large amount of data for confidence in the typological characterization of each institution’s heroic quest. Additional insights from informants would no doubt strengthen the analysis.
Practical implications
The existence of the business ethics industry casts doubt on the ability of business schools and their accreditors to offer substantive change to create a genuine form of responsible management education. This study concludes with two alternative paths taken by schools attempting to escape the narrative of irresponsible management.
Originality/value
The PRME publicly lists signatories in non-compliance. While most of these result from passive inaction, a small number of institutions intentionally choose to leave the PRME. No research has been done to understand these intriguing cases and the heroic quest typology is a unique application in narrative analysis.
... Following the example of Hillon (2017) in investigating a rare phenomenon of business schools publically declaring their intentions to break their voluntary commitment to the Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME), we shall also look for documented corporate executive actions tending toward negative societal impact. Our first step is to identify a pattern of behaviour that suggests an orientation toward CSI in a prototypical corporate leader. ...
This study examines tacit assumptions beneath the "improving lives" theme of the 2018 AOM annual meeting with a blend of strategic management perspectives from critical accounting and qualimetric socioeconomic intervention research. It has been suggested that much more good could come from reducing corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) than from encouraging firms to aspire toward an intentionally vague ideal of socially responsible behavior. Recent scholarship supports the contention that CSR in theory and practice is broken beyond repair, ironically just as large datasets are becoming widely available. Other recent research has shown that firm performance is perhaps just as equally murky. Thus, attempts to connect CSR with firm performance may require a more thorough and imaginative reconceptualization. To search for alternatives, this study follows an internal management intervention approach to the analysis of publically available data. Results offer a set of metrics appropriate for tracking the interaction of CSI and specific aspects of well-being, both within a firm and to society beyond.
... Often, RME decoupling occurs unintentionally, for instance because a school signed up to an initiative like PRME without having properly checked whether it has the financial and non-financial resources for substantive implementation (see e.g., Hillon, 2017). In such cases, it is possible to recouple, because schools have an intention to improve their practices (and do not exploit RME as a public relations smokescreen). ...
This chapter discusses the institutionalization of responsible management education (RME). We start by reviewing different types of institutional pressures that have shaped the diffusion of RME, and we also discuss the relevance of selected institutional entrepreneurs which have influenced the acceptance of RME as a legitimized social practice. The following section focuses on the current status of institutionalization by demonstrating that many schools only symbolically adopt RME and hence decouple their public commitments from actual implementation practices. We review different types of decoupling in the business school context and discuss what determines whether a school decouples or not. The final section takes a look into the future and outlines an agenda for forthcoming scholarly work in this area. This section also discusses in what ways educational and organizational practices can be improved to avoid decoupling and to therefore move more strongly towards substantive implementation of RME.
... Diagonals trace the disjunctions or contradictory relationships. "This arrangement offers an upper surface grammar as an exchange axis for object-values and a lower level at which agents may situate these same values in and out of narrative action" (Hillon 2017). Thus, being and doing are also vertically linked, as human practice at the lower level of the real anthropomorphizes the symbolic upper surface level grammar (Greimas and Porter 1977). ...
Spiritual but broken, theological but flawed—these are the words critics use to describe the Gospel of John. Compared to the Synoptics, John’s version of the life of Jesus seems scrambled, especially in the area of time and chronology. But what if John’s textual and temporal flaws have more to do with our implicit assumptions about time than a text that is truly flawed? This book responds to that question by reinventing narrative temporality in light of modern physics and applying this alternative temporal lens to the Fourth Gospel. From the singularity in the epic prologue to the narrative warping of event-like objects, this work explodes the elemental temporalities simmering below the surface of a spiritual yet superior Gospel text.
The history of the practice of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has largely been limited to the twentieth century, with a focus on the United States. This paper provides a brief introduction to CSR practice from the nineteenth century through World War I in the United Kingdom, United States, Japan, India, and Germany. The relevance of nineteenth-century CSR to current debates and research regarding the motivations for CSR, the business cases for CSR, stakeholder management, political CSR, industry self-regulation, and income inequality are also discussed.
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to gain a greater depth of understanding of both the pressures and barriers for embedding responsible management education (RME) within business and management schools.
Design/methodology/approach
– This paper utilises a longitudinal case study design of six business/management schools.
Findings
– This research identifies a set of institutional pressures and barriers for RME in the business schools selected. First, the pressures appear to come from a number of external business school sources and the barriers from a series of organisational resource and individual factors.
Research limitations/implications
– RME cannot be seen as just a bolt on. The orientation needs to change to view RME as requiring a shift in culture/purpose/identity. Due to the barriers this will require systemic organisational change at all levels and an organisational change process to bring about implementation.
Practical implications
– The results clearly show these market pressures are no passing fad. Failure to respond in a systemic way will mean business schools will run into serious problems with legitimacy.
Originality/value
– This paper fulfils a need for an in depth study of a number of business schools to identify the barriers to RME. This is now a critical issue for schools and this research has provided a number of practical recommendations which will help business schools overcome the identified barriers.
This address uses the question "Is business ethics getting better?" as a heuristic for discussing the importance of history in understanding business and ethics. The paper uses a number of examples to illustrate how the same ethical problems in business have been around for a long time. It describes early attempts at the Harvard Business School to use business history as a means of teaching students about moral and social values. In the end, the author suggests that history may be another way to teach ethics, enrich business ethics courses, and develop the perspective and vision in future business leaders.
More and more scholars are expressing their apprehensions regarding the current state of management education. The increased number of corporate scandals has fueled their concerns that training students to have sound business ethics upon graduation has failed. Consequently, research is emerging that focuses on the lack of impact that business ethics teaching has had on students in recent years. Remarkably, the voice of managers has barely been heard in this area, even though they are the ones who are among those best suited to evaluate graduates’ capabilities to solve ethical dilemmas. This research presents the managers’ view on the role of business schools in training students in business ethics, and the managers’ evaluation of business schools’ success in that area. The findings reveal that managers are quite disappointed with the lack of improvement in the ethics of graduating students. Managers nonetheless provide a range of ideas for business schools to work on, and particularly, call for closer collaboration between industry and business schools.
This article examines under what conditions business schools may decouple the structural effects of their engagement in responsible management education from actual organizational practices. We argue that schools may be unable to match rising institutional pressures to publicly commit to responsible management education with their limited internal capacity for change. Our analysis proposes that decoupling is likely if schools (a) are exposed to resource stringency, (b) face overt or covert resistance against change processes, (c) are confronted with competing institutional pressures, and (d) perceive institutional demands as ambiguous. We discuss two implications of this proposition. On one hand, decoupling can cause dissonant legitimacy perceptions, leading to cynicism around responsible management education within business schools. On the other hand, a temporary inconsistency between talk and action may help schools to articulate future ambitions for responsible management education, which, over time, could inspire recoupling effects.
Offered here is a conceptual model that comprehensively describes essential aspects of corporate social performance. The three aspects of the model address major questions of concern to academics and managers alike: (1) What is included in corporate social responsibility? (2) What are the social issues the organization must address? and (3) What is the organization's philosophy or mode of social responsiveness?
Chanson emblematique de l'identite nationale australienne, Waltzing Matilda raconte l'histoire d'un ouvrier agricole vagabond, qui vole un mouton, et qui, confondu par les autorites, se suicide. Cependant, ce recit ne correspond guere a l'ideologie sociale dominante, les paroles de la chanson etant anti-autoritaires, valorisant potentiellement le vol et le suicide. L'A. examine ce recit a la lumiere de la these d'Eric Hobswam sur le banditisme social. Il soutient que la nature universelle des mythes de bandits s'explique moins par la difference de classe (d'apres la these de Hobsbawm), que par les cadres narratifs de la societe qui opposent des ideaux juste et injuste du pouvoir. Finalement, il suggere que l'on peut interpreter le vagabond de Waltzing Matilda, et d'autres antiheros, comme une manifestation de la figure universelle du decepteur
One of the findings contained in Van Fleet and Wren's (2005) report on the teaching of history in business schools indicated that the prevalence of this instruction at the doctoral and undergraduate levels has decreased since their survey in 1983. This dialogue promotes the inclusion of history and historical context in the management/business curriculum and discusses several benefits that may be derived from its study.
Proponents of the transformative potential of the United Nations Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) claim that their adoption could lead to a “paradigm change” in business schools, thus addressing many of the sustained critiques of the sector in recent years. However, this claim and the PRME themselves have to date not been subjected to systematic scrutiny from a Critical Management Education perspective. Applying a critical discourse analysis methodology, this article evaluates how business schools and management education are positioned in key PRME documentation and the Sharing Information on Progress reports of U.K. business school signatories to the PRME. A key finding is that the PRME discourse assumes and promotes a problematic understanding of management education that includes a positioning of business schools as servants of the corporate sector. The impact of this and other assumptions undermines any “paradigm change” claim. Conclusions identify potential discursive and organizational strategies to nurture a more critical, learning-centered PRME discourse.
This paper traces the historical roots of some of our current preoccupations with the ethics of business. Its central argument is that many of the contemporary criteria that we use to evaluate the ethics of business are not new; rather, they date back several centuries. This paper illustrates this thesis by comparing historical and contemporary discussions of three sets of issues: the relationship between ethics and profits, the relationship between private gain and the public good and the tension between the results of capitalism and the intentions of businessmen.
The fact that these tensions are inherent in the nature of capitalism, if not in human nature itself, does not make our contemporary concerns or standards any less valid. On the contrary, it underlies their significance. Contemporary discussions of business ethics constitute part of an ongoing moral dialogue with both deep secular and religious roots.
It has long been assumed that the development of modern contract law was complete once English judges had declared late in the sixteenth century that "a promise on a promise will maintain an action upon the case." Professor Horwitz argues to the contrary that the modern will theory of contract did not appear until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the spread of markets forced jurists to attack equitable conceptions of exchange as inimical to emerging contract principles such as those allowing recovery of expectation damages.
This paper traces the origins and growth of the Global Compact, the UN's corporate citizenship initiative, from the time of its launch in June 2000. The Compact aims at making the process of globalisation more inclusive and, consequently, less fragile. The main engagement mechanisms of the Compactleadership, policy dialogue, learning, partnership projects and outreach activitiesare described and analysed. Roles and responsibilities of the central and supporting actors in the Compactgovernments, business, civil society and labourare outlined. The section on Compact governance places particular emphasis on the fact that the Compact is a voluntary initiative and does not intend to either regulate or monitor participant activities. The strategic direction of the Compact in 2003 includes a greater focus on policy dialogues and on increasing accountability and transparency in participants' Compact-related activities. The Compact's geographical spread and progress are evaluated. The central challenges the Compact will face as a consequence of multiple forces at play in the global arena are examined.
Purpose
– Business schools appear to be slow adopters of responsible management education (RME), though the rhetoric of RME is visible throughout the sector. The purpose of this paper and the accompanying ones in this Special Issue is to address this apparent gap between substance and image by analysing the barriers to RME adoption and potential ways of overcoming them. The contributions offer insights from a range of different perspectives that will help encourage an informed debate on how to make RME more of a reality in management education.
Design/methodology/approach
– This paper analyses the problem within the dominant institutional logic of the business school sector, which is shaped by entrepreneurialism, operational for-profit orientation and externally validated reputation creation. It sets the stage for the other contributions to this Special Issue, which use alternative approaches to analyse the limited progress of RME adoption.
Findings
– This paper identifies five potential barriers to RME adoption: students, as “customers”, do not sufficiently value the “R” in RME; the switch from full-time to part-time and online provision precludes the use of pedagogical methods particularly suited for RME; the fragmentation of intellectual production in business schools makes it difficult to implement an institution-wide RME-based learning model; the standardization of educational provision combined with a focus on ranking-related performance indicators moves business schools away from addressing RME-specific learning needs; and entrepreneurialism and business school rankings link RME directly and indirectly to financial impact, which is difficult to determine. In the authors’ view the way forward requires a review of the intellectual underpinning of modern management in combination with the adjustment of organizational routines and more explicit forms of faculty development.
Originality/value
– The existing literature focuses on the differentiating features of RME and how they can help to overcome deficiencies in management education as practiced today. This paper and others in this Special Issue adopt the reverse perspective and analyse the reasons for institutional inertia as a starting point for identifying ways of encouraging more widespread adoption.
The myth of an economy where nobody could have a predominant position, has lost its credibility. The presentiment of a high risk of social explosion makes companies undertake tentative moral legitimation. Thus, a new paradigm develops according to which the firm has to care for the satisfaction of public interest if “it wants to try to win forgiveness” for misbehavior towards the decorum rules of the atomicity of competition. Thus, there is a wave of “business ethics industry” building up. However, the stock exchange performances considered as ethical, are not different from others! The market does not seem to be able to say why it might be interesting to invest in stock considered as ethical. Moreover, opinion polls reveal a very significant discrepancy between the characterization of “the responsible company” as defined by itself or by notation agencies and, on the other hand, the hierarchy of criteria according to the answers of polled people. When companies and agencies favor sustainable development and good governance, rejecting child labor and so on, polled people consider that the paramount criterion of ethical conduct is personnel management. The problem is right here. Such is the view of a positively critical economist, situated at the point where macroeconomics meets corporate management.
This article highlights two large gaps in the business school curriculum: the neglect of historical and ethical dimensions. An overview is provided of progress made so far in the UK in the evolution of business history as an academic discipline; and also of the take–up of business ethics in university teaching. Both have had some success, but overall the response to these areas has been somewhat lacklustre — at least in the UK. A justification is provided for adding both components to a fully relevant business education. When the two are combined, the result can be a highly rewarding combination that provides insights that may not be possible for management writers, who work only in the present. Corporate ethics, the social responsibility of companies, disclosure, the environment, the actions of multinational companies overseas, the dilemmas of whistle–blowing, the impact of lobby groups and health and safety issues can all be understood more fully by students if they approach these subjects from an ethical and historical standpoint.
After almost 30 years of publications, Journal of Business Ethics (JBE) has achieved the position of main marketplace for business ethics discussion and knowledge generation. Given the large amount
of knowledge produced, an assessment of the state of the art could benefit both the constructive development of the discipline
and the further growth of the journal itself. As the evolution of a discipline is set to be reflected in the evolution of
its leading journal, we attempt to characterize changes in the intellectual structure of business ethics through a bibliometric
analysis of articles published in JBE. Specifically, we conduct a knowledge-stock analysis to assess the evolution, major trends, and current state of the journal.
Additionally, we use citation and co-citation analysis to provide an accurate description of the content and the advancement
of research in business ethics. Through the results of our analysis, we are able to: (1) pinpoint the characteristics of the
growing stock of knowledge published by JBE over the years; (2) identify the most influential works on business ethics research; and (3) detect the formation and evolution
of schools of thought in business ethics.
The tension between external forces for better ethics in organizations, represented by legislation such as the Sarbanes–Oxley
Act (SOX), and the call for internal forces represented by increased educational coverage, has never been as apparent. This
study examines business school faculty attitudes about recent corporate ethics lapses, including opinions about root causes,
potential solutions, and ethics coverage in their courses. In assessing root causes, faculty point to a failure of systems
such as legal/professional and management (external) and declining personal values (internal). We also found that faculty
recommend external forces as a remedy more often than increased ethics educational coverage; we contextualize this finding
with recent ethics education literature. We conclude by proposing that neither legislation nor ethics education alone are
complete when addressing widespread unethical corporate acts and offer a multi-faceted approach to ethics educational opportunities.
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