Contenu du sommaire : Development of Social Responsibility in French Business Schools

Humans are not born to die, but to innovate. When social sciences meet management, they cannot avoid CSR, that necessary oxymoron: an inescapable obstacle that justifies the timeliness of specific work devoted to the pedagogy of a CSR that is not Windows dressing. Such are the constraints of the question asked, the offspring of a long line of conceptual battles that punctuate the history of a secular education under permanent tension. The result is the need to base all research and teaching of CSR on the solid foundation of an understanding of responsibility in a brief evocation of its multidisciplinary approaches, whose deep roots are inevitably sociological and philosophical.

This article is a report of an interview conducted in 2014 with Jean-Louis Le Moigne, to whom we pay tribute here. We will therefore take a thematic look at the key ideas from this interview. Jean-Louis Le Moigne presented us the constructivist thinking and in particular the predominant place of models in any thought. When a researcher is modelling a phenomenon or a dynamic system, he has to study its purposes, transformations, functions and also the environment with which it is permanently linked: in other words, he has to consider the complexity of what he is studying and modelling. Therefore, the researcher's stance is not neutral and requires to make conscious choices - in particular by being aware that a data is by definition constructed; he has to be responsible and dignified. The researcher's ethical duty can also be seen in the teaching he provides, a duty exemplified by Jean-Louis Le Moigne.

Over the past decade or so, management sciences have been taking on subjects that have been described as sensitive. While they have a strong societal resonance, they are often associated with the potential for threats to the various research stakeholders. While threats to respondents have been discussed at length in the literature, threats to researchers are still underestimated, as they are often defined in terms of their professional responsibility, including by the researchers themselves, in terms of their political role. This conception, based on one of the researcher's forms of commitment, has the consequence of sidestepping some of the threats associated with other forms of commitment, such as the interest in studying sensitive subjects. For this reason, this article focuses on the behavioral dimension, questioning the extent to which the researcher's social responsibility is impacted by the fact of studying a sensitive subject and by the multiple constraints to which he is subjected to protect participants and himself. We conclude that by studying the sensitive, the researcher's responsibility is reinforced at individual, institutional and societal levels, constraining his freedom. Confronted with their own vulnerabilities, a need for objectivity and a framework formalizing ethical expectations, they may even feel unable to study sensitive subjects. While these effects are undoubtedly restrictive, they reinforce the need to question the ethics and aims of research, underlining the importance of a strong reflexivity for any researcher of sensitive subjects, particularly in management, where this reflexivity is still relatively little materialized in publications.

The normative foundations of corporate social responsibility (CSR), transposed to the teacher-researcher in management sciences, raise questions because of the many paradoxes they involve. This article, which is interdisciplinary across law and management, seeks to determine what this responsibility covers, and more precisely, the nature of the obligations that arise for the teacher-researcher in a management school, both as an actor, within the framework of his or her organization or institution, but also as a member of a scientific community. While the responsibility of any scholar can only be measured in terms of his or her academic freedom, his or her societal responsibility (SR) can be assessed by taking into account the expectations of his or her stakeholders and integrating the associated practices. However, far from always being an opportunity to meet the scientific challenges related to sustainable development, our critical reflection allows us to highlight the consequences of this managerial logic of action, now coupled with a legal logic, which reduces the autonomy of researchers, without guaranteeing the social, societal or environmental impact of their work.

This article questions the place of teacher-researchers in today's society, which is undergoing the fruits of the reforms initiated by the Lisbon Strategy in 2000. Based on an analysis of the literature in Management Sciences, this article shows that the economic, geopolitical and financial environment profoundly modifies the role of teacher-researchers in French society. A model underlines the two facets of the teacher-researcher's job, namely teaching and research. It also shows the subtle balance between these two roles and the ability to adapt to different audiences and outcomes. Finally, the performance indicators used by the State aim to show the inefficiency of teacher-researchers because they are based on inappropriate criteria. This article offers some ideas for integrating more relevant indicators that evaluate the performance of teacher-researchers on a societal scale.

How can we ensure that research work in management science is useful to society? The purpose of our article is to show that Intervention-Research Method (IRM) in Management is an effective research methodology for doing just this. IRM is incorporated within the Engaged Scholarship approach: the co-construction of knowledge is the result of researchers working with members of organizations. The aim of this process is to increase the likelihood that complex phenomena will be understood as well as ensuring the usefulness of the research to society. Through a number of IRM studies carried out over the past decade, we can demonstrate that this methodology applied to CSR processes: constitutes a responsible source of innovation and has ‘societal value' ; facilitates the implementation of a strategic project to successfully anticipate a changing environment, enhanced by organizational agility. Ultimately, the societal utility of this form of research is threefold: it contributes to the development of research knowledge in management science ; it enables the operational implementation of responsible approaches within organizations ; it provides CSR education that is firmly grounded in the real world, constantly updated to address the most relevant issues facing organizations and focused on the acquisition of skills by learners.

Management teacher-researchers work in an increasingly complex world facing many major challenges such as health crises, the fight against global warming, poverty and exclusion, and the crisis of representativeness. While the social responsibility of teacher-researchers is nowadays well established, the nature of their engagement is not always unanimously understood. Debate persists between those who are in favor of engaged scholarship, which is considered useful to organizations and society, and those who are against it. This contribution is in line with the approach of engaged scholarship developed by Andrew Van de Ven. The objective is to understand complex problems by integrating others' perspectives in a framework that enables the progress of knowledge for theory and practice. How does the application of engaged scholarship promote the social responsibility of teacher-researchers in management vis-à-vis the various stakeholders? To answer this research question, we analyze the relationship between engaged scholarship and the social responsibility of teacher-researchers from a theoretical point of view, and through a new course carried out at ESC Clermont Business School from an empirical point of view.

The objective of this article is to draw lessons from an innovative example concerning the role of management teacher-researchers in the animation of programs integrating CSR through the link between theory and practice. This example shows how the support of management education is part of a dialectical relationship between teacher-researchers and the professional practices developed in the context of a work-study program in a company or organization. The article leads to question the way to succeed in the integration of the social and societal responsibility of companies and organizations and to outline the impacts for the stakeholders, starting with the students.