Beyond Performance: Business Sustainability in question
The Summer School is designed to promote doctoral education and research in management studies and contribute to the development of enlightened practice in the management of business organizations. The Medici Summer School advocates a special focus on cross-fertilizing research across US and Europe traditions.
| In 2011, the theme of the Summer School was developed in liaison with the GDF-Suez Chair on Business and Sustainability: “Beyond performance: sustainability in question”. 26 doctoral students from European and US universities (among others Duke, Erasmus, IESE, Imperial College, NYU, HEC, North-western, Politechnico Milano, Oxford, University of Zurich, Warwick) participated to the School | Times were allocated to presentations by key scholars dealing with sustainability research, to group discussions and presentations of the research of the students, and in particular to the specific challenges of doing research in CSR. The “journey” began with a cognitive approach, moved to discussions on the change in paradigm due to CSR concerns, then to institutional pressures linked to CSR, to strategizing about CSR and eventually to social movements. | Common issues raised all through the week were concerns about the lack of a clear definition of the concept of sustainability, the difficulty for researchers to publish papers on CSR in academic journals, the predominance of the economic paradigm that sees firms as rational profit-seekers. |
