Corporate Social Responsibility

Introduction

Understanding more about student values

Following on from their Entrepreneurship Projects, both Subject Centres became interested in discovering more about student values. They were curious about what was driving students to consider work in social entrepreneurship and if this was linked to any particular shift in their values. They were keen to extend this interest to explore whether members of their subject communities were also interested in values and what interest employers were showing in these issues.

The project has raised a number of questions –

Is there a shift is student values in these academic communities?

Is HE supporting the development of student values?

Would it help students if they were better able to understand and articulate values and in particular would it improve their employability?

How important are values to employers?

This project has begun to address some of these questions and its clear there is more work to be done both in terms of understanding value systems and how higher education and business engage more directly on these issues.

What are we talking about?

The government sees CSR as the business case to our sustainable development goals. It’s about how business takes account of its economic, social and environmental impacts in the way it operates.

For the purposes of this project we have taken the umbrella heading Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) to represent the complex range of issues that most HE institutions and employing organisations are currently grappling with. Taken singly these include - values and ethics, sustainability, citizenship, diversity, human rights, globalisation and responsible business practice.

(For a simple description of CSR see appendix a. The What, Why, How of CSR)

Making connections across the subject centres

Teaching linked to ethics and the environment in subject centre communities

These examples represent a sample of...