Teaching students to be sceptical of the facades that organizations effect is one of the most important things that I did in the last year.

Lecturers in Business Schools across the world are straddled with a profound challenge: trying to prevent the next financial crisis, the next Enron or the next Volkswagen scandal by teaching students to think about the broader impact of their decisions as managers and reflect upon the civic responsibilities of the profession.

Over the last academic year, I worked as a part of a course that asked first-year students on an undergraduate degree program in Management to do two presentations on contemporary corporations. In the first, students were asked to present generally on specific key concepts attached to the company of their choice (“managing”, “hierarchy”, “values” etc.). The result was unexpected. Sure, many students had opted to discuss firms with “ethical” practices like the Body Shop or John Lewis. With “corporate social responsibility” (CSR) being the buzzword on everyone’s lips and “sustainable business” being the new management consultancy du jour, this was unsurprising. That is to say, with many firms eager to show an increasingly concerned public that they are doing their part to draw the planet away from global ecological collapse, it was to be expected (though still commendable) that these prospective managers would be reflecting upon the civic commitments and societal accountability of their profession.

What was surprising, however, was that my students trusted corporations to report truthfully on their ethical and sustainable practices. From their presentations, it became clear that it did not occur to many of the students that material posted by a corporation on the internet might count as marketing material that sought, among other things, to improve one’s perception of the corporation’s brand. To me as an academic who studies organizations, it is easy to take for granted that someone would doubt or be suspicious of what an organization puts in press releases or posts on its online spaces. I understand this to be a façade managed by Public Relations and marketing teams, one that represents a non-existent reality of “social responsibility”. Thus, I was simply astonished that the majority of students had not even considered that a corporation might not be the best judge of how “ethical” their business practices were or that corporations might not be trustworthy enough to self-report their environmental impact.

The second presentation, in which students were challenged to make a decision about whether to take money from an angel investor and either expand factories in the UK or outsource to Cambodia (where labour and manufacturing cost were lower), confirmed my suspicions that something was wrong here. Many students found themselves thinking about fiduciary responsibilities ahead of concerns about the carbon footprint of shipping; about profits over potentially poor labour standards. A majority opted to outsource and in their presentations they gave the same tired rhetoric that we’ve all heard from corporations time and time again. Statements like “we care about the environment”, or “our employees are our number one asset”, following which they would discuss how Cambodia’s lower minimum wage would mean increased profits for their firm. That is to say, now they were the ones presenting a façade of CSR.

When pressed in a Q&A, many folded and could not speak about the paradoxical ideas at work here. The best presentations ended up being those that tried to argue that they would try to “build sustainability into their actions”, for example using a material made only in Cambodia (e.g. Kapok fabric) or that they would see investing in local communities as a priority, but the majority had no answer. “Socially responsible” was simply another adjective that they could deploy to describe their brand; one that carried no real moral and ethical weight and signified no more concern for the well-being of humanity than any other descriptor. What was interesting here is that the same could be said for those who opted to stay in the UK, that is, that they invariably tried to paint the act of staying in a positive light, as though the corporation should be rewarded for not exploiting minimum wage labour in Cambodia, even where it was clear that they intended to pay no more than minimum wage to their UK workers.

The second presentation proved to be a watershed moment and many left the course reflecting critically upon the decisions that they had made, the morally dubious ways in which they had tried to justify them and, moreover, the façades that they are convinced to participate in as consumers. That is to say, we as members of the public know that modern corporation has a negative impact upon the environment, but how many of us stop to genuinely consider whether what is being said by firms in their online spaces? How many of us critically reflect upon the image of the “ethical corporation” and how this gets used as an empty marketing tactic?

This gets me to the heart of the matter. What scholar Douglas Kellner calls“Critical media literacy” is thus not just another academic fad or preoccupation; it is an essential component of survival in contemporary society. Getting students to the point where they no longer blithely accept corporate rhetoric and repeat empty statements which constitute trite attempts at virtue signalling is crucial for precisely the reason of avoiding the crises and ethical compromises for which these rhetorics serve as a cover.

None of this is to say that there are not “ethical firms” or that all of my students are morally bankrupt. Rather, it is to suggest that most Management students need help to reflect upon the various ways in which corporations represent ethics so that they may not only become more savvy consumers but more importantly, may take up the challenge to think about what makes a “good” manager and why the profession itself has been historically compelled towards scandal. Indeed, if at least a few of them left the course thinking about, in light of increasing awareness of anthropogenic climate change and our general impact upon the planet, how to genuinely conduct business sustainably and responsibly, then as as a teacher, I can’t really ask for more than that.

(Special thanks to Dean Pierides at the University of Manchester for designing the course discussed here)