Chapter 5 Curricula strategies in university graduate MBA programs: The demands of corporate social responsibility and sustainability

As recently as the 1970s, scholars were defending the proposition that the only responsibility of businesses was to maximize its profits (Friedman, 1970). The ensuing years saw the birth and growth of another proposition: that the responsibilities of businesses extend beyond profitability, particularly short run profitability, to embrace a larger responsibility to society. The concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) was initially fed by scandals concerning defective products, political misbehavior, executive corruption, and labor abuses. The CSR agenda rapidly expanded in the 1980s, driven by very public incidents such as the Exxon Valdez and Amoco Cadiz oil spills, the ICMESA Italian dioxin release, the Bhobal chemical spill, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster, the Three Mile Island near disaster, and the discovery of the ozone “hole” to include environmental concerns. Interest in CSR concerns expanded further, in response to such occurrences as the massive destruction of tropical forests and the exploding amount of greenhouse gases produced in both the expanding economies of China and India and the developed economy of the United States, to include the realization that the link between corporate decision making and disasters has become truly global in their impacts. The size and dominance of multinational and transitional economic organizations have brought an appreciation of their global impacts into the center of consciousness of the modern world.