The Business Ethics Blog

For better or for worse, the Nottingham University Business School is now offering an MBA in Corporate Social Responsibility

According to the programme’s website:

The MBA in CSR is a unique programme combining advanced teaching and learning in management with state of the art thinking in corporate social responsibility. This combination allows progressive learning at the leading edge of knowledge in the general discipline of management studies and socially responsible business.

Most people will see this as unremarkable, the natural consequence of the whole “ethics thing” coming of age.

The problem: While it’s true that, for some people, “CSR” is simply a synonym for “business ethics,” (i.e., the study of right & wrong decision-making in business), it’s more often used to describe a particular thesis about what responsibilities business actually has. From that point of view, CSR is the thesis that firms have obligations to return benefits to “society” beyond the benefits they typically provide (namely providing goods & services, providing employment, building wealth, and paying taxes).

It’s perhaps an unfortunate accident of vocabulary that the term “Corporate Social Responsibility” came to mean a particular view about the social responsibilities of corporations, rather than simply meaning the study of what social responsibilities corporations may have. None the less, it does have that meaning. And it’s a worrisome thing, I think, to have an MBA programme apparently dedicated to a particular, not-uncontroversial, normative thesis.

[Thanks to Andrew Potter.]