Bold Businesses wanted for transformative Deep Retrofit – The CBS Student and Innovation House

By Kristjan Jespersen and Anne Marie Engtoft Larsen.

We live in times of change. Society is quickly evolving in every aspect, facing us with global ecological, economic, human and social challenges. To overcome these perils students must play a key role in formulating and developing the necessary solutions needed to curb these complex future challenges. Its is crucial that, during their studies, students are given the tools needed in a thriving, thought-provoking and ambitious framework in which they can question the status quo and develop world-class innovations with long lasting impact.

Why student engagement matters

The Copenhagen Business School (CBS) has a longstanding tradition of such student engagement. Students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels are actively engaged in various ways (internships, community service learning, entrepreneurship, student organisations, research, etc.) with many communities outside the campus. While many activities are formally initiated through university associations, the vast majority of activities are initiated independently. Students build upon the lessons learned in the classroom with such real-world experiences.

The quickly developing student initiative of creating the CBS Student and Innovation House (SIH) builds upon this already established momentum. Emerging from the vestiges of Frederiksberg’s old police station it wishes to solve the grand challenges of our time in a hitherto unseen collaboration between students, researchers, businesses and the public sector. It will challenge conventional thinking and give students the tools to translate their ideas into solutions while giving them the drive and courage needed to take responsibility for the positive transformation of the world we live in.
Central to the house is its engagement with sustainability as practices and outcomes. It aims to extend beyond narrow definitions and in the spirit of the house entail human and societal well being, as well as promoting sustainable practices in business, economics and society. It is intended to supplement existing activities with a set of specific programs to enable students to work with partners, to forge new initiatives and to inspire, support and promote sustainability activities both on and off campus.

The building

Names on the people in the picture are, from left to right, Anne Marie Larsen, Andreas Gjede, Jens Bonde, Christian Refshauge and Anne Katrine Vedstesen.
Names on the people in the picture are, from left to right, Anne Marie Larsen, Andreas Gjede, Jens Bonde, Christian Refshauge and Anne Katrine Vedstesen.

The foundation for the CBS Student and Innovation House is the 97 year old police station designed by the famous Danish architect Hack Kampmann’s, located in the heart of Copenhagen at Frederiksberg at Howitzvej 30. The building is a cultural and historical gem and forms part of an urban space with with a high architectural value. The building has more than 3,100 m2 plus an inward yard and large basement. The beautiful square with the water fountain and the  two colonnades in front of the house creates a peaceful space and ceremonial welcome. From the outside the building represents the students’ great grandparents’ traditional Danish resource: craftsmanship, while on the inside the building will be a testimony of today’s proud Danish resource: creative and smart minds, who dares to think innovatively and challenge conventional thinking.

Building this vessel will be no small feat. The students have to-date raised 52.5 million DKK and they have framed the project as a living laboratory for sustainability.

SIH – an interconnecting test bed for sustainability and innovation

SIH will treat this deep-retrofit project as an opportunity to implement, test, research, and teach sustainability, and in that way contribute directly to the significant transitions required to reach a sustainable future. The unique focus of the SIH’s approach would be its emphasis on the behavioural and business dimensions of the sustainability components and innovative approach to collaboration between private and public stakeholders and students.

To this end, the students propose a retrofit project that supports its sustainability objectives by:

  • Produces a world-renowned building project, that
  • Operates at the frontier of sustainability,
  • Is net positive in both human-well-being and environmental outcomes,
  • Produces a world-renowned building project, that operates at the frontier of sustainability,
  • Is net positive in both human-well-being and environmental outcomes,
  • Contributes directly to the health, productivity and subjective wellbeing of everyone in the buildings, and that
  • Directly supports and is reflected in the social innovation and community engagement activities that go on in the building and the campus community, including
  • An ongoing monitoring and social science research program, that offers the opportunity to implement, test, and teach sustainability,
  • A specific focus on the analysis of behaviour change,
  • The encouragement of innovation for societal benefit,
  • A strong focus on breaking down silos between students, faculty and society,
  • Partnerships with firms and organizations interested in sustainable building and neighbourhoods, that offer the capacity to build a regional scale living lab that focuses on the role of the business sector in the sustainability transition.
  • Exploring possible ways for integrating students drive and commitment in more informal learning ways, such as extracurricular projects, informal collaboration with researchers along with the possibility of internships and for-credit engagement with both on-campus and off-campus partners.

Invitation for collaboration

This project, however, cannot happen without the vision and mission of forward thinking companies, civil society organizations and municipalities desiring to push the limits of sustainability. The SIH calls on the builders, the technology providers, the municipalities, the consultants, the green building civil-society, the innovators and the start-ups to come together and devise the most innovative retrofit solutions for a project that will have lasting and scalable building opportunities. The students place a challenge at the feet of these stakeholders and invite them onboard this transformative task.

For more info, contact Anne Marie Larsen: annemarie@studenthouse.dk


Kristjan Jespersen is Doctoral Fellow at the Dept. of Intercultural Communication and Management at CBS and Anne Marie Engtoft Larsen is Co-Founder of the CBS Student and Innovation House.

Pic by Petra Kleis.

Merken

Merken

The Decline of Neoliberalism – Implications for CSR?

By Steen Vallentin.

“May you live in interesting times” – so the apocryphal English-language expression goes that people often refer to as ‘the Chinese curse’. Times are certainly interesting. Taken for granted notions of what is up and down and left and right in politics are, if not turned on their head then knocked about in confusing and sometimes frightening ways.

The strange (non-)death of neoliberalism … again?

One of the interesting developments in world politics right now is the crisis of neoliberalism as ideology. A development that some will indeed see as a curse, others as a blessing. It is not the first time that neoliberalism has been declared dead or seen to be in its death throes. Many obituaries of finance capitalism and global free trade were written in the wake of the financial crisis. Nevertheless, neoliberalism has shown itself to be remarkably resilient and has continued – in spite of public criticism – to be a dominant force in public policy around the world. Colin Crouch has referred to this recurring trajectory as ‘the strange non-death of neoliberalism”.

However, Brexit (and the election of Jeremy Corbyn as head of Labour) and the movements surrounding Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in the United States are each in their own way symptomatic of a turning of the political tide against hyper-globalization and free market capitalism. The benefits of free trade – of goods, services and capital – and outsourcing of labor to low-cost destinations are now being challenged across the political spectrum. Even the Republic candidate for the presidency is questioning, supposedly (who knows with Trump), fundamental tenets of economic liberalism. The crisis of neoliberalism is both an intellectual and a popular one. Leading economists like Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, Jeffrey Sachs and Thomas Piketty are among its vocal adversaries, and a public/populist movement is revolting against the crises and rising inequality that are associated with it. Even top economist from the IMF have recently acknowledged that neoliberalism has been “oversold”.

CSR as an embodiment of neoliberal ideology?

These developments, seen in isolation, would seem to pave the way for a political climate  more attuned to the wants and needs of working people and to social values and democratic inclusion (as opposed to solutions based on the supposed workings of the sacrosanct market mechanism). How does it relate to CSR, then? What is the relationship between CSR and neoliberalism?

Arguably, the CSR literature has suffered from a lack of political-ideological self-reflection (and -criticism). Ideological reflection is often left to scholars and others who position themselves as outsiders to the field. As a result, rough and sweeping generalizations tend to prevail. As when critical sociologists and political science scholars suggest that CSR is simply an embodiment or reflection of neoliberalism (because it supports voluntary corporate self-regulation as opposed to government regulation etc.). Critical scholarship of the CMS (critical management studies) variety tend to strongly emphasize the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism as an all-pervasive and suppressive ideology and to stereotype/debunk the CSR literature as a supporter of this ideology.

Locating neoliberalism within CSR: Porter & Kramer on shared value

It is ultimately misleading, though, to think of the CSR literature in total as a reflection of a neoliberal mindset and of CSR promoters as suffering from false consciousness if they fail to realize this. A more nuanced and less stereotypical view of CSR allows us to distinguish between different forms of liberal thinking in CSR and to single out those instrumental streams of thought that more accurately deserves the label ‘neoliberal’. Here, pride of place goes to the strategic CSR/creating shared value approach promoted by Michael Porter & Mark Kramer in their series of influential Harvard Business Review papers. Porter & Kramer effectively subject all social action to the tribunal of cost-benefit analysis and economic value creation. Their approach is supposed to ensure that it is economic rationality and economic measures of worth, and not personal values or fleeting ethical, social or environmental sentiments (as promoted by more or less knowledgeable and qualified stakeholders), that hold sway over proceedings. In their view, shared value represents an internally driven and innovative way for businesses to address social problems and needs in ways that are also beneficial for themselves.

Collective impact – shared value as collaboration

However, a new paper on shared value by Mark Kramer and Marc Pfitzer suggests a softening of the neoliberal rhetoric and an opening toward a more inclusive and democratic approach to responsibility. The core concept here is ‘collective impact’ and the case is made for companies to engage in trust-building and mutually reinforcing partnerships with NGOs, governments and competing businesses as this will provide the strongest basis for dealing effectively with social problems and create shared value. The authors even concede that companies cannot be the backbone of such projects as they are not neutral players; instead, a separate and independently funded staff is called for. Indeed, collective impact calls for a new brand of leadership, ‘system leadership’ that involves multiple individuals from different constituencies leading together.

The new paper has already been accused of intellectual piracy on social media, and it certainly does not excel in terms of originality. Its significance rather lies in its ceding of ground to democratic adversaries in the CSR debate. The paper may be read as a reflection of the diminished self-confidence of purely neoliberal thinking about business and society. Whether or how this ceding of ground will make a real difference in the real world of business remains to be seen. At this time, we can see that a concept (shared value) that is rooted in neoclassical economics and has otherwise been associated with a clear corporate bias is now being presented as a collective, democratic endeavor. It is certainly interesting.


Steen Vallentin is Director of the CBS Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility (cbsCSR) and Associate Professor in the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy at Copenhagen Business School.

Pic by bNation of Change

CSR in Asia – A Learner’s Reflections

By Jeremy Moon.

One of the most exciting features of my CSR adventures has been Asia.  As a result of opportunities to travel, meet and engage with Asian academics and practitioners, I have been able to ponder, write and edit research on CSR in Asia for over a decade. However, I still think of myself as a learner. I don’t live in Asia and I don’t know any Asian languages – unless we count English! 

Moreover, Asia is so large and diverse that acquaintance with one country may give little guidance to how things work in others. Scholars are relatively at ease in generalizing about national approaches in the USA and Europe (probably wrongly, but that’s another story!). In Asia this can be tricky as many countries have diverse business systems (see Witt and Redding eds. 2014).  Nonetheless, Asian countries, no less than any other, do acquire national business systems and thus national studies, with appropriate cautions, are none the less valuable. My paper with Wendy Chapple on the subject (Chapple and Moon 2005) has proved a reference point for other interested scholars. Doubtless it has irritated others who would point, for example, to the diversity of business systems in, say, India, predicated on issues of culture, religion, politics, law and economic development.

We need to address the gap to non-normative theorization of CSR in Asia research

Undeterred I have pursued my appetite for CSR in Asia, most recently with Rebecca Chunghee Kim (Kim and Moon 2015). We investigated the place of CSR in Asian business and management research. Our finding was of a growth of the proportion of publications on Asian topics in the leading CSR journals, and of a growth in the proportion of publications on CSR topics in leading Asian business and management journals between 2000 and 2014. The papers we studied were overwhelmingly empirical rather than theoretical, and the empirics were increasingly of a quantitative rather than of a qualitative nature. It is to be hoped that this imbalance will be redressed particularly by greater attention to non-normative theorization of CSR in Asia research.

Whilst the growth of publications was manifest across all three geographical regions we distinguish (East Asia, South East Asia and South Asia), it was particularly strong in East Asia – largely explained by research on China. This is interesting as in our first analysis of company self-reporting of CSR in Asia conducted in 2002 – 2003 (Moon and Chapple 2005), China did not feature as we did not have a sufficient sample of Chinese companies self-reporting their CSR.

Regulation by norms dominates Asian CSR

CSR in the West has taken a new institutional turn with a shift from an emphasis to ethical norms and philanthropy to include a variety of new organizations (e.g. partnerships, multi-stakeholder initiatives) and regulations (e.g. soft rules of international standards and government reporting regulations). So Rebecca and I investigated what impact these had in CSR in Asia research? Interestingly about 40% of publications we studied had some sort of reference to institutionalization. Whilst this seems like a fairly predictable score, curiously, there was virtually no attention to the institutionalization of CSR in Asia through ‘organization’, and almost all the research focused on the institutionalization of CSR through ‘regulation’.

We investigated these papers further by distinguishing those that focused on regulation by ‘norms’, ‘soft rules’ and ‘mandate’, and whether these regulations were ‘situated’ (i.e. located in specific communities or places) or ‘universal’ (i.e. based on abstractions e.g. human rights;  or international frameworks e.g. the United Nations Global Compact).  Whilst there was some attention to ‘soft rules’ (e.g. the ISO 26000) and ‘mandate’ (e.g. the Indian CSR Act), the finding was of an overwhelming stress on ‘norms’.  The orientation of these norms and other forms of regulation, was almost entirely ‘situated’ rather than universal.

Community as No.1 stakeholder demands ‘the right thing to do’

In this light, our analysis turned to the place of community in Asian CSR.  Our review suggested that this is the No.1 stakeholder in Asian CSR, and this centrality is framed primarily in ethical terms. This ethical character is often expressed with reference to long-standing religious and other cultural conceptualisations of ‘the right thing to do’. It contrasts with the greater stress on the range of ‘primary’ company stakeholders in stakeholder approaches to CSR in the West, including employees, investors and consumers, as well as communities. Here there is greater emphasis on functional motivations for these relationships, notwithstanding Ed Freeman’s own stress on ethical and strategic reasons for managing for stakeholders (e.g. Freeman, Harrison and Wicks 2007).

The way forward

Among the questions that arise is the durability of these community orientations in the context of the increasing internationalization of business. Can Asian companies retain these grass-roots orientations as their value chains grow? Will there be a bi-furcation of CSR in Asia between its domestic relations, institutionalized by the ethics of community, and its international relations institutionalized by CSR organizations and regulation by soft law and mandate? Will CSR in Asia take on a more organizational form? How will Asian and Western forms of CSR interact in the future?


Jeremy Moon is Professor and Velux Professor in Corporate Sustainability at the Department of Intercultural Communication and Management at Copenhagen Business School. His primary research areas are corporate social responsibility, corporate sustainability, corporate citizenship, corporations and governance and business and politics.

Photo: allthefreestock

Getting the next generation critically engaged – Reflections on Responsibility Day at CBS 2016

By Martiina Mira Matharu M. Srkoc & Mette Morsing.

On their very first official day as bachelor students at Copenhagen Business School,  approximately 2.000 young people met at Falkoner Hall near CBS. The main agenda was to engage in a debate about what does responsibility mean for business and for a business school as well as for its students.

The case method as a mean to make responsibility more tangible

To make things a little more ”real”, a case study had been developed for this year’s batch of 2016-students. This year’s case concerned how the Danish glassblower and social for-profit entrepreneur, Pernille Bülow, over the last decade has established a business in partnership with an NGO from the Global South. The business partnership produces jewellery for the Western market and builds on a hundred year old tradition among women in Eastern Ghana of producing beads of recycled glass. Pernille Bülow has managed to re-fashion the beads into stylish jewellery designs to be sold in Europe  and as such creating local jobs for a group of single mothers in the local villages in Ghana. However, Pernille Bülow Ltd. is still a relatively small business; although it has great potential, the social entrepreneurship struggles with a number of challenges. CBS students were therefore given the opportunity to engage in a case competition with the ambition of providing advice to Pernille Bülow on challenges of scalability, internal expansion, social media and marketing.

Across 19 study programs students produced proposals for Pernille Bülow. Over100 proposals were submitted and 3 winners were identified and invited to present in front of a jury that included Pernille Bülow herself the following week and a winner was found and awarded.

A university’s responsibility: shaping leaders with a simultaneous concern for business and society

One of the most important things we do as university staff is to educate the next generation of decision makers. Many years ago, CBS students came to this institution primarily to learn how to “crack the numbers” and get the right answer. CBS has long been recognised as producing solid and capable “tradesmen”. Today this ideal has been extended to include a systematic effort to develop study programs to reflect the complexity of challenges for business navigating in contemporary society. Not only is it important for students to master the tools for profit maximization, but it is increasingly important to learn how businesses have to navigate, engage and contribute to the development of political, social and environmental challenges locally and globally. Needless to say, the understanding and support from CBS top management is crucial for carrying this message across.

Responsibility Day also provides an opportunity for students to directly address top management, an opportunity that is greatly appreciated. CBS’ management team is on stage responding to questions from students like ”How does CBS make sure that corporate partners are aligned or live up to CBS’ ethical standards for example engaging with the British American Tobacco company as a CBS partner?” and “CBS seems to be taking responsibility really seriously, but I believe it hasn’t been like this forever. So when and why did responsibility become such an important part of CBS?” CBS management responded by pointing to CBS’s longstanding tradition of research and teaching in responsible management that serves as point of distinctiveness.

While the CBS Responsibility Day does not necessarily change the mindset of energetic and hopeful young students, the hope is that it will at least make them think about the role of business in a challenged society.


Martiina Mira Matharu M. Srkoc is Head of Section, PRME and responsible for the administration and implementation of PRME.
Mette Morsing is Professor at the CBS Center for Corporate Social Responsibility and researches Business and CSR / Sustainability, Governance and CSR, Communication studies, Organization theory and Identity-image relations.

Pic by Jørgen Albertus

The Business (and Politics) of Business Cases

By Esben Rahbek Gjerdrum Pedersen.

Business cases are an important, but often overlooked, tool for pitching CSR/sustainability within the organisation. Failure to meet internal business case requirements for e.g. payback time has a direct, negative impact on the level of CSR/sustainability activity in the organisation. However, the business case tool is also a flexible document which leaves room for a variety of internal politics.

Business Cases in Academia and Business

The academic literature is swamped with references to the “business case” for CSR/sustainability. The ‘business case’ is mostly used as a generic term for all the corporate benefits from ‘doing good’. In the quest to find the business case for CSR/sustainability, a large number of empirical studies have also explored the link between corporate social performance (CSP) and corporate financial performance (CFP) and various factors affecting this relationship (size, industry, R&D, slack resources etc.).

In business, the ‘business case’ has a quite different meaning. The business case is simply a tool for pitching a new investment. For instance, when a factory manager wants to invest in a new energy efficient technology, a proposal (‘business case’) has to be prepared and sent to top management for approval. The proposal often competes head to head with other investment ideas from the organisation. Therefore, even financially sound CSR/sustainability projects may be turned down if there are other projects with a stronger business case.

The Case of Water

The academic literature is not blind to the different meanings and uses of the “business case”. However, research on the practical use of business cases for CSR/sustainability has been largely neglected at the expense of general discussions of hypothetical benefits and CSP-CFP studies based on available database sources.

Evidence from two new studies on water management in the European food sector indicates that business cases have a distinct influence on the level of water management activities. The findings (still work in progress) are showing that growing emphasis on the business case tool has a negative influence on the level of water management activity. Moreover, the maximum acceptable payback time for the investment also has a negative influence on the level of water management activities.

Even though the business case tool influences the level of water management activities, the business case tool is also subject to various types of politics. Evidence from interviews indicates that business cases is sometimes bended, twisted and packed in different ways and that formal and informal negotiations take place before, during and after the formal approval process. As noted by one of the interviewees (our translation):

”If we lumped all our business cases together, then our earnings would exceed our sales. And with faster payback time. I have looked at this almost all my life (…). Anyone can make a business case and say anything”.

A Call for Practice-Based Perspectives

The results show that practitioners use business cases as a “hard” tool to prioritise investments as well as a “soft” instrument for various types of internal politics. Either way, the evidence indicates that researchers need to pay close attention to the tools and frameworks used by businesses, as they have a very direct impact on CSR/sustainability work. Especially practice-based studies could provide a valuable supplement to the existing literature by focusing on how actors actually ‘do’ things, in this case CSR/sustainability.


Esben Rahbek Gjerdrum Pedersen is Professor at the Department of Intercultural Communication and Management at Copenhagen Business School. He researches CSR, Corporate Sustainability, Non-financial Performance Measurement, Supply Chain Management and Process Management.

Pic by Pexels Photo

The Power of Findings

By Dan Kärreman.

One of the biggest irritations with contemporary organization and management studies is the way we are encouraged – indeed, forced –  to chop, slice and mix our empirical findings in ways that support an abstract argument: the holy contribution.

Findings vs. contributions

It is rare to find someone, anyone, that tells a straight story. It is even rarer to find someone that speak out and support the telling of stories from the field in the name of finding out about social phenomenon.

Suffice to say, we can’t avoid abstractions all together. After all, our job is to speak to larger issues, as well as reporting our findings. However, at this moment in time, the larger issues are (mis)-interpreted in ways that clearly overwhelm the reporting of findings. Today we think of larger meaning as more abstract and specialized meaning, as almost devoid of broad meaning and consequence, and as a product for the consumption of a hyper-specialized tribe with its own language, set of beliefs, and rituals.

It is unusual to find a study that ponders the importance of the object under study on its own merits, in contrast to endless jockeying for positions in various hyper-specialized debates. The question hanging over the researcher in organization and management studies is rarely “what is going on here?” but rather “how can I make this to contribute to contemporary micro-debates and nano-controversies in institutional theory, critical management studies, identity theory, entrepreneurship, innovation studies, gender at work, leadership”, and so on, as if social reality neatly reflects today’s division of labor in academic work.

What is a finding?

Put bluntly, it is a fleck of empirical reality that challenges how we expect social reality to work. It is showing that a brand can be more important for organizational members than customers. It is showing subordinates managing their superiors. It is showing workers turning performance measurements to an exciting game. It is showing how cynicism reinforces rather than undermines distrusted systems. It is showing that choosing work before family in certain occupations is rational because here work provides massive material and emotional support while family life is a resource-deprived combat zone.

Showing, rather than telling, is the true advantage of a compelling finding.

In this sense, a finding compels because it is specific and concrete, rather than abstract and general. A finding speaks of larger issues not because it provides a hyper-specialized abstraction, but because it gives insight to the moment and meaning of actual social reality. It speaks to larger issues not because it reveals mechanisms and patterns, but because it shows the layered minutiae of interactions and dynamics in everyday settings. A finding speaks to larger issues not only because it can be used to fire academic controversies – although it certainly is able of doing that – but, more importantly, because it can put them to rest.

We need concepts that are attached to findings.

I think it is clear that we focus far too much on contributions, rather than findings, in organization and management studies. This is not to say that contributions, in the form of abstract concepts, vocabularies and theories, are bad or useless. On the contrary, we need them to do our job. We always should try to trade in poor concepts and theories for better ones.

However, for now we are preoccupied with creating concepts that cover less and less, and reveal almost nothing. We need to move out of this dead end. We need concepts that are attached to findings. We need methods and techniques that provide findings – findings that can give access to and insight in the strange world of business in society.


Dan Kärreman is Professor in Organization and Management Studies at the Department of Intercultural Communication and Management at Copenhagen Business School.

Pic by Pixabay