Cross-sector partnerships are widely hailed as a critical means for addressing a wide array of social challenges such as climate change, poverty, education, corruption, and health. Amid all the positive rhetoric of cross-sector partnerships though, critical voices point to the limited success of various initiatives in delivering genuine social change and in providing for real citizen participation. This collection critically examines the motivations for, processes within, and expected and actual outcomes of cross-sector partnerships. In opening up new theoretical, methodological, and practical perspectives on cross-sector social interactions, this book reimagines partnerships in order to explore the potential to contribute to the social good. A multi-disciplinary perspective on partnerships adds serious value to the debate in a range of fields including management, politics, public management, sociology, development studies, and international relations. Contributors to the volume reflect many of these diverse perspectives, enabling the book to provide an account of partnerships that is theoretically rich and methodologically varied. With critical contributions from leading academics such as Barbara Gray, Ans Kolk, John Selsky, and Sandra Waddock, this book is a comprehensive resource which will increase understanding of this vital issue.
Cross-sector partnerships are widely hailed as a critical means for addressing a wide array of social challenges such as climate change, poverty, education, corruption, and health. Amid all the positive rhetoric of cross-sector partnerships though, critical voices point to the limited success of various initiatives in delivering genuine social change and in providing for real citizen participation. This collection critically examines the motivations for, processes within, and expected and actual outcomes of cross-sector partnerships. In opening up new theoretical, methodological, and practical perspectives on cross-sector social interactions, this book reimagines partnerships in order to explore the potential to contribute to the social good. A multi-disciplinary perspective on partnerships adds serious value to the debate in a range of fields including management, politics, public management, sociology, development studies, and international relations. Contributors to the volume reflect many of these diverse perspectives, enabling the book to provide an account of partnerships that is theoretically rich and methodologically varied. With critical contributions from leading academics such as Barbara Gray, Ans Kolk, John Selsky, and Sandra Waddock, this book is a comprehensive resource which will increase understanding of this vital issue.
"When most people think of corporate responsibility, they are focusing on a business's effect on and relationship to stakeholders. A Responsible Business sees stakeholders as full partners and meaningful instruments for the evolution of healthier communities and more successful businesses." —from the Introduction The Responsible Business offers a new and strategic approach to doing business that holistically integrates responsibility into all aspects of an organization, allowing for returns at every level, business and social. This book goes beyond the often well intentioned but limited attempts at sustainability to present a framework that allows organizations to bring responsibility into everything they do and re-imagine success. From innovation, product development, and production processes to business management, strategic planning, and shareholder development, the author shows how being a Responsible Business is a practical skill that can be applied day-to-day at every level of the business. No longer just the role of a department or the job of CSR professionals, successful responsibility and business efforts start at the business level, are then taken to the corporate level, and are finally applied throughout the organization. The Responsible Business outlines a framework for building a responsibility and consciousness infrastructure that applies a living systems view to the business and inspires all of its stakeholders, including shareholders. Throughout the book, illustrated by examples from technology to manufacturing, large and small, public and private, Sanford demonstrates how to make responsibility integral to all aspects of a business as an engine for innovation, profitability, and purpose. Praise for The Responsible Business "This is a very significant book. It makes it clear that businesses have a single boss with five interrelated aspects. The stories are among the crispest, most evocative case histories I have seen. The book is for any corporate leader trying to do the impossible: create a business that recreates the world." —Art Kleiner, editor-in-chief, strategy + business, and author, The Age of Heretics "Carol Sanford offers us a proven, practical, and systems-based approach that integrates five stakeholder groups into a business system working as an integral whole. Essential reading for leaders wanting a system framework for sustainability and business success!" —Otto Scharmer, MIT Sloan senior lecturer; author, Theory U: Leading from the Future as it Emerges; and coauthor, Presence "The Responsible Business challenges many assumptions corporate leaders, investment advisors, and sustainability experts have long taken for granted. It provides a road map that can help innovative businesses think about how to be truly transformational." —Sam Ford, Fast Company expert blogger and director, Peppercom "The powerful concepts in The Responsible Business have changed the process of sustainable development and how communities truly thrive. Indeed, these proven approaches will be the roadmap to truly achieve the deepest level of living communities." —Bill Reed, founding member of LEED System and coauthor, The Integrative Design Guide to Green Building "Critical for re-imagining the future of business. Rarely a day goes by that I do not call on this way of thinking and looking at the world. It is useful for taking on the big business decisions that so many of us face every day." —Chad Holliday, chairman, Bank of America
Introduction to Business covers the scope and sequence of most introductory business courses. The book provides detailed explanations in the context of core themes such as customer satisfaction, ethics, entrepreneurship, global business, and managing change. Introduction to Business includes hundreds of current business examples from a range of industries and geographic locations, which feature a variety of individuals. The outcome is a balanced approach to the theory and application of business concepts, with attention to the knowledge and skills necessary for student success in this course and beyond. This is an adaptation of Introduction to Business by OpenStax. You can access the textbook as pdf for free at openstax.org. Minor editorial changes were made to ensure a better ebook reading experience. Textbook content produced by OpenStax is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Arguably, the Human Resources (HR) function is the key partner in embedding Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Sustainability initiatives in any organisation, as this can be achieved only when a company educates, engages and empowers its entire workforce. This book goes even further and proposes that the HR function has a responsibility to be proactive in leading the way in establishing a company-wide CSR-enabled culture. And, yet, this is not happening. HR managers are preoccupied with their traditional roles of organizational development, recruitment, training and compensation, and are failing to see the opportunities that CSR brings for them as professionals and for their organizations. CSR for HR has been designed to change the game. It provides HR managers with a thorough understanding of the drivers and principles of CSR and a practical step-by-step guide to the way CSR interfaces with every HR function. Recruitment, compensation, training, employee communications, employee well-being, health & safety, employee rights, involvement in the community, and employee impacts on the environment are all discussed from the CSR–HR standpoint, with many clear examples showing how HR can leverage CSR strategies to deliver greater benefit for the business, for employees, for society, for the environment and, ultimately, for HR professionals themselves. The HR function plays a critical role in embedding a values-based, strategic CSR mindset and establishing an organizational culture that meets the needs of today's stakeholders. HR professionals who understand this and adapt accordingly will reap the benefits. The book explains why, how and what to do next, offering detailed advice, tools, a roadmap to get started and hundreds of tips from companies around the world, including original content from HR managers of large corporations. Written from the standpoint of an HR professional waking up to the strategic possibilities of incorporating CSR in her day-to-day role, the book has an easy and engaging style, ideal for the busy managerial reader. CSR for HR is both a wake-up call and a toolkit and will be essential reading for practitioners in both HR and CSR, as well as being a sought-after teaching resource for both executives and students.
By bringing together their respective competencies and resources for the greater good, governments, business, civil society and multilateral agencies have been seeking innovative ways to work together to respond to the myriad global challenges of our time: the impact of climate change; human security; the prevention, care and treatment of HIV/AIDS and other major diseases; the generation of new investment, entrepreneurship and employment; and financing for development. The appetite for such partnerships appears strong. Over 90% of corporate executives responding to a World Economic Forum survey felt that future partnerships between business, government and civil society would play either a major role or some role in addressing key development challenges. This trend will only be increased by the Western financial crisis and the retreat of the state from many areas of societal concern. In the last 15 years, many new partnerships have been formed, and many new people exposed to partnership ways of working. There have been remarkable successes, but also a range of concerns about effectiveness and accountability. Partnerships can work, but can they work better? Many practitioners are now asking how they can achieve a greater scale of impact to match the magnitude of the social and environmental challenges we face. When considering how to equip their organization or programme with the necessary skills to engage with companies in new ways, many leaders of NGOs or UN agencies hire staff from the private sector. Although such staff exchanges are important, it is not sufficient to rely on private-sector staff to develop and implement strategic forms of engagement. Rather, engaging business for social change is a specialism in itself. This book seeks to distil some of the author's 15 years of experience and key learnings on the advanced strategic planning of partnerships for people who work within civil society or public-sector organizations and who already partner with companies. Much of the research focus to date has been on operational issues, rather than on the strategic challenge of evolving partnerships to achieve a greater scale of impact. Rather than helping the reader with moving on from partnerships, this guidebook is intended to help with moving up to a greater scale of impact. The author identifies three generations in the evolution of cross-sector partnering and draws insights from the latest biological evolutionary theory on how complex systems can sustain themselves over time, translating this into a method for understanding and assessing partnering practice. Evolving Partnerships provides a rich and accessible mix of commentary, boxes for clarification, and 11 exercises to help the reader evolve partnering to achieve a wider level of impact – a level that responds to the scale, depth and urgency of the challenges we face today. Written by one of the world's leading authorities on partnerships and a key architect of global partnerships, including the Marine Stewardship Council, Evolving Partnerships will be essential reading for all those involved in cross-sectoral partnerships.
This book examines the changing reciprocal relationships between corporations and their various social obligations over the very long term - from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Chapters from emerging and established business historians assess the full range of social obligations that corporations held historically. By adopting an innovative methodological approach that is long-term and comparative, this book offers a challenge to the literature on corporate history and will be of interest to researchers and academics in the field of finance and business history.
The original essays in this timely collection discuss the many ways to foster innovative and unprecedented collaborations leading to more effective partnerships between major institutions and corporations to poor and disenfranchised communities. Many of today's pressing issues are covered in-depth: bridging the digital divide; community reinvestment; university and corporate partnerships; and corporate responsibility.
The basic function of companies is to add value to society. Profits are a means to an end, not an end in itself. The ability of companies to innovate, scale and invest provides them with a powerful base for positive change. But companies are also criticized for not contributing sufficiently to society’s grand challenges. An increasingly VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) world creates serious governance gaps that not only require new ways of regulation, but also new ways of doing business. Can companies effectively contribute to sustainable development and confront society’s systemic challenges? Arguably the most important frame to drive this ambition was introduced and unanimously adopted in 2015: the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDG-agenda not only defines a holistic set of global goals and targets, but also foundational principles to guide meaningful action to their achievement by 2030. Multinational companies have signed up to the SDGs as the world’s long-term business plan. Realizing the SDGs provides a yearly $12 trillion investment and growth opportunity, while creating hundreds of millions of jobs in the process. But progress is too slow – witnessing society’s inability to deal with pressing human, ecological, economic and health crises – whilst the vast potential for societal value creation remains underutilized. This book provides a timely account of the systemic, strategic and operational challenges that need to be addressed to enhance the effectiveness of corporate involvement in society, by using the SDGs as the leading principles-based framework for actionable, powerful and transformative change. Principles of Sustainable Business is written for graduate and postgraduate (executive) students, policymakers and business professionals who want to understand the complex challenges of global sustainability. It shows how companies can design and implement SDG-relevant strategies at three levels: the macro level, to assess whether the SDGs present wicked problems or opportunities; the micro level, to develop and operationalize innovative business models, design new business cases and navigate organizational transition trajectories; and the meso level, to develop fit-for-purpose cross-sector partnering strategies. Principles of Sustainable Business presents innovative tools embedded in a coherent sequence of analytical frameworks that can be applied in courses for students, be put into practice by business professionals and used by action researchers to help companies contribute to the Decade of Action.
Acting in a socially-responsible manner has become a crucial success factor for many international firms due to the highly complex, competitive, and volatile global environment in which they operate. This book will contribute new ideas, contemporary knowledge, and original research to the area of socially-responsible international business, and offers challenging directions for future research. Topic covered range from global environmental influences on acting in a socially-responsible way; foreign buyer reactions to responsible business and international market targeting to development of socially-responsible international business strategies.
