Thought Leadership Annotated List

Center for Business Ethics (CBE) at Bentley College

The Center for Business Ethics (CBE) at Bentley College is one of the oldest and most respected ethics centers in the United States.  It convenes academics, business leaders and students for conferences and forums, conducts research, educates executives and consults to employers seeking to integrate ethics across operations.  CBE's research focus includes two areas of particular interest to the SRI community: 

• a survey of organizations on the integration of ethics and CSR practices at the firm level; and
• the ethical development of organizations, including the relationship of individual and institutional integrity, and the influence of "ethical leadership" on organizational culture and identity. 
  

In addition, CBE is exploring the changing relationship of the overlapping areas of business ethics, corporate governance and CSR and what a holistic corporate approach to these areas might look like.

Publications:  CBE publishes a journal, Business and Society Review, as well as an online magazine, Ethics Matters.  Publications and research available at http://ecampus.bentley.edu/dept/cbe/research/publications.html   

For more information, contact Mark Rowe, Senior Research Associate at +1-781-891-2981 or Mark_rowe@bentley.edu.
 

Center for Responsible Business (CRB) at Haas School of Business

The Centre for Responsible Business (CRB) at Haas School of Business at University of California at Berkeley was launched in January 2003.  The Center's vision is to create a more sustainable, ethical and socially responsible society by establishing the Haas School of Business as the preeminent educational institution for research, teaching, experiential learning, and community outreach in areas of corporate social responsibility.

• The Moskowitz Research Program is an important research effort at the Center that examines the foundations and trends in the socially responsible investing (SRI) industry. The program has three main research activities: the Moskowitz Prize; the only global award recognizing outstanding quantitative work on socially responsible investing; http://www.sristudies.org/, an online database of abstracts of key studies in the field; and SRINotes blog, a discussion forum for leading thinkers in the field of SRI.
• The  Social Enterprise, one of the Center's research focuses, examines business ventures designed to integrate social mission with profit, social responsible investing, venture philanthropy, access to capital.  The Center offers many CSR related courses for its MBA, Executive Education, and undergraduate programs. 
  

Publications:  Working paper series can be found at http://repositories.cdlib.org/crb/wps/

For more information, contact Katharine Brewer, Associate Director at +1-510-642-5581 or kbrewer@haas.berkeley.edu.

Center for the Study of Fiduciary Capitalism (CSFC)

The Center for the Study of Fiduciary Capitalism (CSFC) at St. Mary's College of California in Moraga focuses its research for academics and practitioners on "the implications of the rise of institutional investors as the dominant owners of equity and debt capital." Its Director, Dr. Jim Hawley, has been a leading national figure in advancing research into universal ownership and "fiduciary capitalism," which describes the impact and implications of a majority institutionally owned equity and debt as a cross section of the overall economy. Professor Hawley and his colleague, Professor Andrew Williams, have published several articles and a book of interest to any SRI researcher seeking to better understand:

• the impact of institutional ownership (and management) of different investment products across asset classes (e.g., equity funds, fixed income, bonds, etc.);
• the implications for corporate governance and articulation of expanded duties and responsibilities of the fiduciary;
• the role of corporate governance and its relation to SRI and sustainability; and
• the role and definition of materiality and internalized investor costs (externalities) in fiduciary management.

The CSFC holds an annual conference for practitioners and academics, usually in the spring. The most recent convening examined social, environmental and economic risk management and the 2005-2006 conference will address universal ownership in theory and practice.  In addition to facilitating research and convening seminars and conferences, CSFC provides professional/practitioner training, specialized curriculum development, and research/exchange opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students.

Publications:  Refer to key book The Rise of Fiduciary Capitalism: How Institutional Investors Can Make Corporate America More Democratic.  Other publications in research areas available, including articles, working papers and conference papers. 

For more information contact Dr. Jim Hawley at +1-925-631-4204 or jphawley@ix.netcom.com.

Social Enterprise Program (SEP) at Columbia Business School

The Social Enterprise Program (SEP) at Columbia Business School, a concentration within the MBA program, offers a full range of elective courses, activities and initiatives that give students maximum exposure to the field including social entrepreneurship, board and nonprofit management, corporate social responsibility and sustainability, political economy and international development. 

• Research Initiative on Social Entrepreneurship (RISE), SEP's research initiative, has three main focuses: Markets (mapping the capital markets for social entrepreneur), Metrics (improving tools for social impact assessment), and Management (understanding strategic choices and dilemmas).
• Among the three main focuses, Metrics is the focus in which RISE staff are working in collaboration with several investment funds and foundations to review, analyze and apply various methods that can be used by early-stage social enterprises to help assess social impact and measure social return on investment (SROI)
• SEP sponsored a student research trip Corporate Social Responsibility and Socially Responsible Investing European Study Trip in 2005.  The trip visited Eurosif, Vigeo, BNP Paribas, Deminor, Danone, CSR Europe, European Comission, World Wildlife Fund, Transparency International, and EABIS.
• Research partners include Rockefeller Foundation, Surdna Foundation, Calvert Social Funds, Commons Capital LP, Expansion Capital Partners, Sustainable Jobs Fund LLC, and Underdog Ventures.

While SEP's research focus on SRI is the early stage investment such as social venture capitals, some of its faculty members have their research expertise in SRI in general.

Publications:  Reports and case studies can be found at http://www.riseproject.org/reports.htm.

For more information, contact Sandra Navalli, Program Manager at +1-212-854-1801 or mailtsn2010@columbia.edu. 

International Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility (ICCSR)

The International Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility (ICCSR) is situated in the Nottingham University Business School.  Among 4-5 other research areas in CSR, the ICCSR examines SRI in five key ways:

• the development of SRI screens and mechanisms; how they are constructed by actors and made socially acceptable for the financial world and how they legitimize the SRI field more broadly;
• emergence and evolution of Social Rating Organizations in Europe and US (e.g. historical analysis of the development of pioneering actors such as ARESE/VIGEO in France, or KLD in US, analysis of the construction of database, benchmarks, etc.);
• institutional dynamics of the Socially Responsible Investment field in various countries;
• economic performance of Ethical Funds (using KLD data and ARESE data), challenging conventional notions of the ethics-profitability dilemma; and
• the use of SiRi agency rating data from OECD companies to check for and suggest improvements to internal consistency in screening for social performance and to highlight the influence of various international and national socio-institutional determinants on the nature of the CSP-FP relationship. 

As an academic research institute, member of the SiRi network and consumer of US-originated SRI data, ICCSR is well placed to respond to queries from and network with SRI researchers/practitioners in both Europe and the United States. 

In addition to its SRI work, ICCSR also contributes research to conferences, runs the UK's first MBA in CSR and conducts research in the following CSR areas: theory and nature of CSR; comparative research on CSR in various national and regional contexts; sustainable development and environmental management; current issues in CSR (identities on the web, HIV/AIDS, governance, globalization, public/private partnerships, gender mainstreaming, gender, sales and customer relations, stakeholder communication/accountability, CSR and R&D, UK CSR consultancy industry); and organization and morality. 

Publications: research papers available online. 

For SRI topics, contact Dr. Jean-Pascal Gond, Lecturer in Corporate Social Responsibility at +44 (0)115 951 5261 or Jean-pascal.Gond@nottingham.ac.uk; or Dr. Wendy Chapple, Deputy Director at +44 (0) 115 9515278 or  wendy.chapple@nottingham.ac.uk.  For CSR topics, contact Dr. Chapple.