Course Description

This course provides an interdisciplinary overview of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), focusing on the interplay between corporations and their key stakeholders. Over the past several decades many factors have contributed to increased expectations for corporations to carry more social responsibilities. Asia is not an exception. At the same time, our governments have acted to reduce their roles in addressing social problems, in favor of market-based approaches.

CSR has progressed from traditional philanthropy and donation to encompass not only what companies do with their profits, but also how they make them. Through their stakeholder relations management and innovative business models, companies can not only develop practices to address environmental and social issues, but also identify opportunities for innovative products and technologies.

In recent decades the emergence of CSR has brought a new wave of social innovations to the marketplace. “Social enterprises” have emerged that emphasize both social and financial sustainability, and, therefore, traditional non-profit organizations, governments and corporations need to adapt themselves to embrace this social innovation. Thus, the topics of sustainability reporting, nonprofit organizations, social enterprises and other topics of interest to students will be discussed in-depth to bring this course to a more forward-looking perspective.

Course Learning Outcomes

On completing the course, students will be able to:

1. Demonstrate a heuristic understanding of economic concepts relevant to analyzing CSR issues.
2. Understand, analyze and critically interpret cases and examples of issues in corporate social responsibility using the relevant economic concepts.
3. Reflect upon the interactions between economic and political dimensions of corporate social responsibility issues and their moral dilemmas.
4. Understand, analyze and critically interpret and reflect upon the relationship between issues of corporate social responsibility affecting businesses and its broader relationship with the nature of society and duties of citizenship.

Offer Semester and Day of Teaching

First and Second semester (course will be offered twice)
Section 1 – First semester (Sat); Section 2 – Second semester (Wed)