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Earlier this year, the Schulich School of Business officially launched a Centre of Excellence in Responsible Business, the first of a series of similar initiatives. Integrating business ethics, corporate social responsibility and business and sustainability, the new Centre will create and disseminate new knowledge about responsible business; enable and inspire managers, policy makers, students, academics and consumers to integrate ethics, social responsibility and sustainability into the core of their decision-making processes; and foster a new generation of business leaders equipped to create a more just and sustainable society through responsible business. With the new Centre, the Schulich School seeks to provide brand leadership for Schulich and to make a more meaningful impact on society through teaching and research.

Schulich is already recognized as a world leader in responsible business. Last year, the School was named #1 in the world in The Aspen Institute’s biannual Beyond Grey Pinstripes survey, a global ranking of the top 100 MBA programs that are preparing future leaders for the environmental, social and ethical complexities of modern-day business. It is the first time a Canadian business school has ever been ranked #1 in any global survey of management education. The School was also ranked #1 in Canada in the field of corporate social responsibility (CSR) for the seventh year in a row by Corporate Knights magazine in their 2010 annual survey.

The new Centre will position responsible business at the very heart of the School’s activities. It will foster greater integration of the subject across the School, as well as among Schulich, other York University faculties and other universities. The Centre will be important not only in attracting external funding support, but also in continuing to attract the best and the brightest students and scholars from across the globe to Schulich.

Schulich’s preeminent position in the field of CSR can be attributed to several areas of expertise across the School, and to numerous individual initiatives. The Centre of Excellence in responsible Business builds on existing clusters of faculty and administrators dealing with four specific teaching and research programs: business and sustainability, corporate social responsibility, business ethics and nonprofit management and leadership. The Centre is currently headed on a rotating basis by the directors of the first three programs. The current director is Dirk Matten, Hewlett-Packard Chair in Corporate Social Responsibility and Professor of Strategic Management/Policy. Matten is one of the world’s foremost experts in the field of CSR and a member of the World Corporate Ethics Council. He is co-author of The A to Z of Corporate Social Responsibility, and along with Schulich Gardiner Professor of Business Ethics, Andrew Crane, is co-editor of The Oxford handbook of Corporate Social responsibility.

A total of 40 Schulich faculty members who have research interests related to responsible business will have a collaborative role in the Centre. They bring research strength in accounting, operations management, economics and strategy. The Centre will also work with the School’s Executive Education Centre to develop non-degree programs in business ethics, CSR and sustainability.