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Over the last week or so we have seen a vibrant debate unfolding after the announcement of Apple and Facebook’s latest benefit : Female employees can store and freeze their eggs on the company’s dime so that they can postpone pregnancy beyond the phase where they might want to just focus on their careers. I put the case up for debate in my undergraduate classes on business ethics this week. It was a fascinating experience. To start, we assessed the upshot. There is a surge of female professionals who attempt at pregnancy in their forties and thus a surge in in-vitro fertilization and a host of other avenues to late motherhood luckily provided by progress in obstetrics these days. But there is also a fair number of women who just have to suck it up that by the time they can put their head around having babies, that ship has sailed. Here, such an offer seems to be a big benefit. You can progress in an environment where your commitment to the job is 24/7 – like your male colleagues – and ...

This weekend offered an interesting opportunity to discuss, dissect and reflect on the state of the art of business ethics research and some of its future trajectories. At the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania a small group of business ethics scholars gathered from all around the globe to celebrate and honor the work of one of the faculty members, Professor Thomas Donaldson . Donaldson, a philosopher by training, can be considered one of the pioneers of the business ethics field and one of its most longstanding and certainly most influential voices over the last four decades. Some of the speeches at the event focused on appraising and celebrating Donaldson’s impressive body of work, including many humorous interjections on Donaldson as a person by some of his contemporaries such as  Norman Bowie , George Brenkert , Ed Freeman , or Pat Werhane . Most of the day though was dedicated to work by scholars who build on, extend, refine, and continue some of Donaldson’s wor...

Over the last days we have seen a captivating debate unfolding. Jill Lepore’s article in The New Yorker on the concept of ‘disruptive innovation’ has garnered quite some attention. Not at least from its progenitor, Lepore’s Harvard colleague Clayton Christenen , who appears to be anything but amused . Disruptive innovations - put simply - are new products or services that create new markets, while at the same time turning existing solutions to customer demands obsolete, and thus destroying existing markets and the companies that serve them. In his many books, Christensen initially developed the idea from a corporate context (such as his floppy disk, steel, or construction equipment examples) but it quickly branched out into other sectors. The article is a fascinating read not just because it takes on an idea largely uncontested in academia and beyond. Moreover, the concept of ‘disruptive innovation’ had quite a substantial impact on the real world. Lepore writes as a historian and d...

Today (Monday April 28, 2014)  Jeremy Oppenheim was in Toronto. Oppenheim is the director of the   Global Commission on the Economy and Climate (chaired by former Mexican President Felipe Calderon, co-chairs include Lord Nicholas Stern and the OECD Secretary-General). He was hosted by Corporate Knights ’ Toby Heaps for a 'high level' lunch which included some of the top brass of Toronto’s investment, real estate, insurance and academic communities. And civil society, of course, David Miller (ex-Major of Toronto and now Head of WWF Canada) was there, too. It was, first off, a real game changing experience to see a room of 30ish ‘climate activists’ in pinstripes (or female equivalent) convening over antipasto e bistecca to discuss the plight of the planet. Oppenheim's remarks were thought provoking as they reflected the current gist among those leaders that care  seriously about climate change. Oppenheim started by highlighting that the public debate has somewhat stalled...

After our article on shared value came out in the California Management Review, and we published our last blog piece summarizing our critique, we've had a lot of response from various academics and practitioners in the corporate responsibility field. In fact, we've probably had more emails, comments and calls on this one article than we've had on anything else we've ever published. It has clearly struck a nerve. In the main, these responses have been very positive, suggesting that a lot of people have just been waiting for an article like this to come out. Here's just a smattering of some of the responses we've received (you can also read the comments to our blog post  for more): "This is a long over due excellent and comprehensive critique on the overly optimistic and shallow CSV framework that doesn't really address the real trade offs required to get to sustainable development." "Good on you for re-framing this topic in a manner that more ...

The idea of "Creating Shared Value" (CSV) popularized by Michael Porter and Mark Kramer in the Harvard Business Review has probably done more to get corporate responsibility issues into the boardroom than anything else written in the last few years. In many respects, that is a good thing. Or at least it is until you start to realize all the big problems that are hidden behind the big ideas of CSV. We've just published (together with Guido Palazzo and Laura Spence) a comprehensive critique of CSV in the California Management Review . The published version features a response from Porter and Kramer and a counter response from us which we think makes for quite enlightening reading (you can also download a free, but slightly different, version of our article but without this dialogue over at SSRN ). Our article sets out four main problems with CSV: 1. It is unoriginal.  Porter and Kramer simply don't acknowledge that there is little new about CSV. People have been writin...

Today we have another guest post from our long-term friend and collaborator, Laura Spence, who is just back from the African Academy of Management Conference and had some reflections we thought would be good to share. *  *   *   *   *   * Given the laudable aims of corporate social responsibility protagonists - I guess, roughly speaking, to make the world a better place - you have to wonder why so much time and effort is put into understanding social responsibility in places where really, let’s face it, the social problems are not really that big. Should we be stressing about which company sponsors school sports equipment, or would we be better occupied to worry about schools which have no books? Is corporate lobbying one of life’s big issues or could it rather be the conflation of corporations and governments, systemic bribery, corruption and nepotism? Should we be fretting about diversity training in head offices or focusing on situations where gender, race, ...