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Well it's been in gestation for a while, but we're pleased to announce that the 3rd edition of our business ethics textbook has been published today by Oxford University Press. Once more subtitled 'Managing corporate citizenship and sustainability in the age of globalization' it's a continuation of our efforts to provide an integrated approach to the subject of business ethics and corporate responsibility ... and this time we've gone for a fully international perspective. Or as we nicknamed it during development, a "rest-of-the-world perspective"  - i.e. one that offers a real alternative to a subject still dominated by parochial US textbooks. This is the pre-publication proof of the front cover, showing an Angolan fruit seller supported by a microfinance scheme in Luanda. We thought it not only helped to highlight this global orientation but also worked well with a new case on microfinance we feature in the text titled "Targeting the poor with mi...

Today we have another in our occasional series of guest bloggers. This time up its Christine Hemingway, a visiting fellow at the International Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility, Nottingham University. Here she is talking about what she calls corporate social entrepreneurship .  --------------------------------------------------- In the wake of the global economic crisis caused by financial irregularities and lapses in corporate governance and personal integrity, part of the fall-out has been a big kick up the backside for business ethics. There is renewed vigour which has boosted momentum behind the growing CSR movement and the need for ethical business, with the clarion call: “How can we prevent this from happening again?” So I was really interested to see the idea of the B companies in the last post: a practical approach to positioning the corporation as social enterprise, which involves stakeholder governance, backed by legal certification. This looks like a great step...

Spied over at CSRwire today was this interesting little video from CNN on the B Corporation phenomenon. For those who haven't run into this before (and we have to admit that included us until recently), B Corporations are, in the words of their inventors , "a new type of corporation which uses the power of business to solve social and environmental problems." Hmmm, doesn't sound very new to us. Sounds suspiciously like CSR, or maybe social enterprise, or social business as Muhammad Yunus likes to call it. Well yes, in a way B Corporations are pretty much like these existing forms, except there are a couple of new twists. And it's these new features which account for some of the interest - both good and bad - that B Corps are beginning to stir up. The first big difference is that B-Corporations are certified. As a company. To a single set of standards. Not a ranking. Not a product or site certification. A full company certification. Yes, you heard it right. This...

Check out our post on the ethics of free news on CSR Wire.... CSRwire Talkback - Can We Really Afford Free News?