THE EXPERIENCE AT HANKEN SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS
Introduction
Hanken School of Economics is a leading, interna- tionally accredited (EQUIS and AMBA) university in the field of economics and business administration. It has approximately 230 members of staff, including 120 members of faculty, operating in 5 departments: accounting and commercial law, economics, finance and statistics, management and organisation, and marketing. Hanken has about 1,900 students study- ing for BSc or MSc degrees and around 160 students studying for a PhD degree. The School offers seven international master’s degree programmes in English. It has campuses in Helsinki and in Vaasa. Challenges
Signing on to the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) initiative by Hanken’s former dean, Marianne Stenius, in 2008 helped to highlight the strategic importance of strengthening the integration of corporate responsibility (CR) in all activities at the business school. However, this does not mean that this strategic importance has been automatically recognised in all parts of the School. This is related to Hanken’s governance system and its more bottom-up decision-making culture, which empowers active faculty members (initiatives are welcome), but also may constrain the strategic implications of their actions (an implementation in every discipline cannot be imposed or even strongly supported from the top). While the Hanken leadership is showing its
continued commitment to PRME, the level of strategic priority that has been given to CR issues at the School might not be as high as in more “top- down” schools. Thus, the faculty members who have been in charge of PRME implementation have used PRME itself as a lever to overcome these potential strategic barriers, in three main ways.
Actions taken
First, they have leveraged the fact that they are from different depart- ments to articulate PRME curriculum change as a cross-disciplinary issue. By creating a CR study module incorporating courses from their respective subjects – supply chain management and corporate geogra- phy; and politics and business – and “horizontally” mobilising other faculty members potentially adhering to the Principles within subjects such as accounting, commercial law, management and organisation, and marketing, we have been able to develop a cross-disciplinary programme that has become the spine of PRME implementation and has shown that PRME should be integrated across all the different subjects in the School. The study module now integrates courses from almost all subjects, which means that students majoring in almost all subjects are increasingly exposed to courses integrating CR and ethical issues into their own major subjects.
Second, the writing-up and publication of PRME reports have been used to raise awareness of CR issues in the School, not only by giving opportunities to the deans to reflect on these issues when writing the prefaces, but also because the reports have been occasions for enhancing both internal and external communication on CR. In addition, the design and contents of Hanken’s reports have received positive feedback from other schools involved in PRME, which has been noted by the deans and has
contributed to raise PRME on their strategic agenda. This also means that the continuous improvement ethos (in terms of social responsibility) tied to PRME reporting is also increasingly accepted in the School. (See Hanken’s case study “Beyond bureaucracy: Reporting as a strategic tool at Hanken” in Section 6 for more details and a discussion of Results.)
Third, the possible relation between PRME and further accreditation of the School has been used as a lever. Initially, PRME was marketed by the faculty members to the leadership of the School as a foresight that CR in the curriculum will become a more explicit issue in the accreditation processes in the future. In this case, the influencing tactics employed did not need to be very strong as the dean had picked up similar signals through formal and informal international networks, and was thus very keen on the idea. As Hanken is involved in several accreditation and re-accreditation processes, the School’s leadership has allocated more explicit strategic importance to how CR and ethical issues are integrated in the curriculum. The faculty members in charge of PRME implementation have thus been invited to give our input on some of these strategic issues. In addition, the cooperation with another PRME signatory school (Audencia Nantes School of Manage- ment in France) has led to a joint session on the implementation of (and cooperation on) PRME at the AACSB conference in Paris during fall 2010; this has helped to put both schools more strongly on the map as role models in terms of PRME implementation, which in turn has helped raise the strategic nature of PRME internally. From the viewpoint of faculty members active within PRME, this has meant a feeling of more support for PRME initiatives both in course and programme developments and other PRME-related activities, such as the planned development of CR-related partnerships with companies and non-governmental organisations.
Since those faculty members who champion PRME are often not directly involved at a strategic level in the governance of their business school, they need to creatively find ways to make the most of the opportunities that PRME provides them for steering strategic curriculum change. My advice to faculty champions is to try and leverage the three above issues: (1) the notion that it is desirable for curriculum to be affected across the different subjects (not just one separate subject on ethics); (2) the reporting process as a way to raise the strategic profile of PRME at the School – through inviting school leadership reflections, using the finished report in internal and external communication – and place the School in a continuous improvement process; and (3)
accreditation processes as opportunities to raise the strategic profile of PRME at the School and the international recognition of the School in terms of its contribution to responsible management education.
Martin Fouge`re, Assistant Professor in Politics and Business, Hanken School of Economics
Why PRME is/was important
. Articulating the need for curriculum change across different subjects: creating a cross-disciplinary study module.
. Leading to enhanced internal and external communication on the CR-related work done at the School (through reporting as process and outcome) and its continuous improvement.
. Leveraging accreditation processes so as to both raise the strategic nature of CR issues internally and put Hanken on the international map when it comes to CR issues (both strengthening each other).