Corporate Social Responsibility or CSR is becoming increasingly important for students, academics and managers to engage with. CSR is an area of corporate self-regulation that integrates sustainability and business ethics into the business model. 'Greening', responsible management, social reporting, are all aspects of CSR management that we look at in this module.

Corporate activity impacts our ecological biosphere, political landscape, and global economic activity in a variety of ways. Corporate activity is responsible for increasing rates of burning fossil fuels, the dumping of toxic industrial waste into the environment, depleting natural resources at an unsustainable rate, and maximising the wealth of powerful elites. More recently it has become clear that corporations are entangled in political issues that destabilize democracies through digital platforms and news corporations. With corporations behind so much unhealthy and negative activity – can they be trusted to do the right thing?

In this module we question if corporations can be socially responsible given the legal and business norms they operate within. We look at various stakeholders who are impacted by or impact corporate activity to understand how corporations have positive and negative impacts on our society and on the world’s ecological biosphere.

The module has been developed in collaboration with the CSR strategist firms: SustainAbility and Future Fit Business Benchmark.