Embedding Responsible Management Education – Staff, Student and Institutional Perspectives

There is a resurgence in responsible management education, with business schools’ considering its adoption as vital for business courses. Nevertheless, initiating institution-wide changes for responsible management education is an inherently complex activity in business schools, requiring not only revisions in their curriculum, but also sustained faculty and institutional support. This paper explores this complexity in one UK business school, a signatory to the Principles of Responsible Management Education, who have commenced a programme of change in RME. Based on primary data obtained from two workshops with the business schools’ faculty, a student survey and a systematic analysis of the curriculum of four undergraduate degrees and two post-graduate degrees, we find that misalignment between faculty skills and institutional bureaucracy, together with an inconsistent focus on responsible management across the curriculum raises key challenges for its adoption. We extend the premise that significant change in RME, requires fundamental changes of a business school’s own ethos of what responsibility means to itself. Ke

Is corporate environmental disclosure associated with firm value? A multi-country study of Gulf Cooperation Council firms

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.open access articleSeveral studies have found a relationship between corporate social and environmental disclosure and firm value or accounting profitability. Where environmental disclosure has been the focus, though, only single-country studies have been published; and most of the previous research concerns the developed world. This study examines the association between corporate environmental disclosure (CED) and firm value (FV) in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, where CED has been increasing from its previous low base. Findings from a multi-country sample of 500 firm-year observations using a 55-item unweighted environmental disclosure index suggest that CED is significantly and positively related to FV as measured by Tobin’s Q (TBQ). The relationship is robust to using a weighted version of the disclosure index, individual countries and environmental disclosure sub-indices. Some evidence of a positive relationship between CED and return on assets (ROA) is also found, but even where statistically significant, the relationship is much weaker than in the case of TBQ. For empirical and theoretical reasons, we recommend that future studies pay greater attention to market-based proxies, if possible when investigating the value relevance of CED in both developed and developing countries. Our results suggest that both managers and policymakers in GCC countries should take a positive view of expanded CED

Conceptualising Change Processes; A Model of Institutionalising Responsible Management Education

As corporate social responsibility rises among business agendas across the globe in response to the increase in scandals and corporate crises, so too does the need for managers to have an increased ethically, sustainably and responsibly focused awareness. Responsible management education (RME) is regarded as a reaction to the partial blame on business schools for having ‘failed’ to educate managers in this regard. Business schools across the UK are raising their level of RME activities within teaching, research and enterprise. This paper aims to conceptualise from an institutional perspective how business schools are institutionalising RME and proposes a model of institutional change processes that they can engage with. The paper focuses on the UK higher education environment and examines additional contributing factors to the change process including internal and external stakeholders and theoretically the role of institutional entrepreneurs, which support the institutionalisation of RME

Is corporate environmental disclosure associated with firm value? A multicountry study of Gulf Cooperation Council firms

Several studies have found a relationship between corporate social and environmental disclosure and firm value (FV) or accounting profitability. Where environmental disclosure has been the focus, though, only single-country studies have been published, and most of the previous research concerns the developed world. This study examines the association between corporate environmental disclosure (CED) and FV in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, where CED has been increasing from its previous low base. Findings from a multicountry sample of 500 firm-year observations using a 55-item unweighted environmental disclosure index suggest that CED is significantly and positively related to FV as measured by Tobin's Q (TBQ). The relationship is robust to using a weighted version of the disclosure index, individual countries and environmental disclosure subindices. Some evidence of a positive relationship between CED and return on assets is also found, but even where statistically significant, the relationship is much weaker than in the case of TBQ. For empirical and theoretical reasons, we recommend that future studies pay greater attention to market-based proxies, if possible, when investigating the value relevance of CED in both developed and developing countries. Our results suggest that both managers and policymakers in GCC countries should take a positive view of expanded CED