The concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is not new to the 21st century. Its historical development preceded the present century. However, with many major corporate failures in the early 21st century as well as the global financial crisis in 2008 which have affected and continue to affect the economies of nations globally as well as the livelihood of the citizens of these nations, the concept of CSR has appeared to have taken a new turn in the corporate world, at least in the context of business education in MBA programmes. There is quantitative evidence from the Beyond Grey Pinstripes surveys and reports that many major MBA programmes around the world have, in this century, gradually increased their foci on CSR issues through an increase in requirements and courses which pursue and study the integration of social, environmental and economic issues. The dissertation gives a brief summary of the historical development of CSR, notes the quantitative evidence on MBA programmes as mentioned above, and observes and records how CSR is qualitatively interpreted in courses on CSR in these MBA programmes.

The thesis explores 'discourses' on accountability and their congruence with current debates on corporate social responsibility. It draws attention to how the formal accounting discourse on accountability privileges the merits of a 'plural liberal' approach, and how this undermines what is to be done to establish democratic relations between corporations and their 'stakeholders'. The liberal discourse is interpreted as that concerned with the 'administration' of communicative practices in institutionalised rules and procedures. It is argued that liberals impose boundary conditions on accountability in which communication is linked to an 'information processing' methodology. This prompts accountability to be analysed in terms of informed decision-making in economic markets or formal regulatory contexts. Responding to this, the thesis draws attention to the manner in which accountability has been analysed as a lived 'organic' practice, relying more on 'sense making' than information processing behaviour. Links are established between a sense making approach and a 'radical' (post-liberal) approach to engagement and 'praxis'. A definition of praxis is drawn by exploring in depth the foundations of Pierre Bourdieu's critical sociology. Particular emphasis is placed on the dynamic Bourdieu hypothesises between the 'field' and the 'habitus', and his idea that changes in the discursive space can be prompted by and prompt changes in a social, cultural, or political habitus. Bourdieu's work is compared to other related theories of 'reflexive' change - in particular those of Beck, Giddens, and Lash - and related to Lash's distinction between cognitive, aesthetic, and hermeneutic reflexivity. Together, these theorists provide a framing mechanisms for extent to which different forms of communication sustain emergent social movements. These ideas are applied to the communicative practices associated with accountability, and used to inform the idea that non-administered communicative forms could facilitate the transfer of peripheral discourses to the centre of the political space.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Industrial Symbiosis (IS) is an innovative environmental practice which assists companies from all business sectors to commercially trade resources (material, energy. water and waste), building networks that are environmentally integrated and efficient. IS is a very promising and practical approach. however the existing practice presents a number of challenges, a manual procedure heavily reliant on practitioner's knowledge and interpretation of information which not only results in high costs but also limits the scope of opportunity identification and lacks responsiveness to the dynamicity that exists within the IS domain. In response to these challenges, this research introduces a semantic approach for building IS networks and identifying potential synergies between industries which are keen on exploring possible symbiotic opportunities with the aim of reducing consumption of natural resources, environmental strain and waste stream to landfills. Using ontology modeling the research proposes the semantic formalism of tacit and explicit knowledge within the IS domain including information about resources, processing technologies and their characteristics as well as practitioners' knowledge and expertise. The use of semantic web services is also proposed for annotating industries' profiles. The semantic modeling and annotation allows for automated machine processing of IS domain knowledge. Furthermore the research introduces an algorithm which exploits semantic and quantitative models to allow automated and enhanced identification of potential synergies. The algorithm incorporates graph modeling for semantic distance measurement of resource types and vector space modeling for comparison of IS enabling metrics. The algorithm is further extended to incorporate dynamics handling that heavily influence various stages of synergy identification process. The approach moreover supports composition of complex IS chains based on semantic relevance behween partners by recursive repetition of the process. The algorithm computes a matching degree or similarity measure between industries to depict the ratio of potentiality of forming an environmentally and economically sustainable synergy, cultivating the companies' planning and decision making for establishing a symbiotic link. The thesis provides an experimental study as part of the eSymbiosis platform, implemented using the proposed semantic approach verifying the practicality and benefits of it.