Chapter 13: Educating Managers for Global Business Citizenship

The alphabet soup of social responsibility and ethics is already daunting— B&S, BE, CSR, CSP, CC¹—and yet we believe that a new concept is needed— global business citizenship (GBC). Many of our publications over the last few years have focused on developing the theoretical, historical, conceptual, and empirical underpinnings for GBC, and the culmination (at this writing) is the recent book we coauthored with colleagues Patsy G. Lewellyn and Kim Davenport: Global Business Citizenship: A Transformative Framework for Ethics and Sustainable Capitalism.

In this chapter, which is informed by our recent book, we will first briefly overview the problems with other conceptualizations of ethics and social responsibility. We will then review the theory and conceptual development of GBC’s operating model. Next we illustrate how to teach GBC through readily available cases and related web research, and in this context, we’ll discuss some of the challenges that arise when using a global perspective to teach business ethics and social responsibility.