• The Conflict-Free Gold Standard:  Building an industry coalition to address the challenges of conflict gold. This case study describes why and how the World Gold Council led the development of the Conflict-Free Gold Standard (the Standard) from 2010 to the end of 2012. The Standard provides a common, voluntary approach through which gold mining companies can undertake due diligence and provide assurance to stakeholders, based on compliance with accepted international benchmarks, that their gold has been extracted in a manner that does not cause, support or benefit unlawful armed conflict or contribute to serious human rights abuses or breaches of international humanitarian law. The full report can be accessed at the link above. Click here for the Executive Summary.
  • How Sustainable Enterprises Develop. Sustainable entrepreneurs are part of a growing movement of business founders and leaders who can be described as ‘men and women creating and running businesses which focus on creating both societal as well as business value - so called blended or shared value: integrating profit with purpose as a single organising idea’. The importance of exploring how SMEs can be supported to create greater positive social and environmental, as well as economic, impacts is underscored by the sheer size of the contribution by SMEs to the UK economy.  This report explores these themes.
  • Will Evidence-based management Shape the future of Corporate Sustainability Reporting. The latest Doughty Centre Occasional Report jointly authored by Dr Palie Smart, Dr Sara Holmes and Professor Steve Evans, explores the increasing demand for measuring and reporting corporate sustainability and performance and the current reality and future potential of evidence or science based reporting.
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  • Purpose Driven Leader - Purpose Driven Career: Doughty Centre Visiting Fellow Anita Hoffmann builds on our earlier work on purpose, with a powerful reflection on careers with purpose – and how organisations that aspire to endure into the indefinite future, should be seeking to capitalise on a powerful constituency of mid to late-career employees who aspire to careers with purpose. The challenge, of course, is that today, all too often, these same employees perceive – rightly or wrongly – that it is career or purpose. As Anita argues: this need not be so! Wise organisations will want to retain and harness this talent to enhance productivity and improve customer service.
  • Business Critical: Understanding a Company's Current and Desired Stages of Corporate Responsibility Maturity: Ron Ainsbury and David Grayson (2014)Various academic authors and practitioner experts have described Stages of Corporate Responsibility Maturity. The position of a business in these Stages of Maturity depends on mindset, which is based on elements such as its time-horizon, focus, outlook, attitudes to transparency and relationships (accountability), collaboration, and business model. This in turn influences business purpose, strategy, organisation, policies and practices; and ultimately performance. This new Occasional Paper examines these as a company evolves through Stages of Maturity, along with potential triggers to evolve which, in future, may be linked increasingly to organisational resilience and to performance. Maturity models can help organisations to transform themselves. They can be a tool for boards and senior management teams to help identify where their business now is, where it would like to be and stimulate thinking about how to get there.
  • Creating Sustainable Businesses Through Social Intrapreneurism: David Grayson, Heiko Spitzeck, Elisa Alt and Melody McLaren (2013)This Occasional Paper is a continuation of research by the Doughty Centre on the work of social intrapreneurs - individuals within large corporations who take direct initiative for innovations which address social or environmental challenges profitably. In this phase of the research the 'enabling environment for social intrapreneurs was explored, identifying key factors that enable (and disable) innovation.
  • Salvaging the Big Society: A ten-point plan: David Grayson and David Harrison (2011).The "Big Society" is one of the main unifying themes of Britain's Coalition Government.? Some say it is the unifying theme. Yet the authors of the Occasional Paper argue that the overall concept is not widely understood, even amongst inhabitants of the Westminster village, and that this has led various commentators, prematurely in the view of the authors, to write the Big Society's obituary.? Views are divided on what Big Society means.? One of the challenges is that the Big Society is a compound term; it bundles together a number of political and philosophical ideas: localism and devolution; more consumer choice and a greater variety of providers of public services; and greater responsibility on the part of individuals, businesses and civil society for improving the current state of civic affairs.? All designed to lead, according to advocates, to a smaller state and, by implication, a bigger society.
  • Intrapreneurs: an extra force for sustainability: David Grayson, Melody McLaren and Heiko Spitzeck (2011)This paper examines how individuals, businesses and Civil Society organisations interact to create sustainable value for business and for society at large. It focuses on the contribution that social intrapreneurs can make to this. Social intrapreneurs are people with a large corporation who take direct initiative for innovations which address social or environmental challenges profitably.
  • The Business Case for being a Responsible Business: A joint publication with Business in the Community (2011)The aim of this report is to articulate succinctly the business case for being a responsible business - a headline synthesis of the arguments being used and the most frequently stated business benefits. Between June and December 2010 the Doughty Centre researchers drilled into data from 2003-2010 from both academic research and what business themselves are saying.? The main goals of this research are to: identify the business case realised by business that embrace being responsible; understand how this business case has changed in the past eight years; and understand how the business case looks likely to develop over the next few years.
  • Mind the Gap: Making Sense of Sustainability from a Business Manager's Perspective: Sharon Jackson (2010)A decade ago the world witnessed a series of high profile corporate crises resulting in the erosion of trust in business, wealth being destroyed, and many people losing their jobs - not an auspicious start to the new millennium. A significant gap had developed within some corporations between good intentions and good actions. In response to the collapse of Enron in 2001 and other corporate scandals, many more organisations have made bold commitments to embed their espoused CR principles. It is clear that many organisations are still struggling to integrate the CR or sustainability principles that they espouse into daily business processes, and are being criticised by their stakeholders for a gap between rhetoric and action.
  • Governance: an Analysis of BITC Corporate Responsibility Index Data on Stakeholder Engagement and Governance: Eric G Hansen and Heiko Spitzeck (2010)It is increasingly understood that organisations cannot have a full perspective of the issues, opportunities and threats that they face without the help of outside experts. Thus, for organisations (especially large ones) it is increasingly common to engage in different forms of stakeholder engagement in order to source external views and thereby improve internal decision making. Few empirical investigations have evaluated how stakeholder input is taken into account in relation to internal decision-making. This paper elaborates on (voluntary mechanisms of) stakeholder engagement with a focus on how stakeholders can influence corporate decision making.
  • CR and the recession: learning from responsible business: Abiola Barnor and Nadine Exter (ed.) (2009)Research done by several prestigious organisations shows that businesses? desire to be corporately responsible has not fared too badly in the recession, despite widespread job cuts, shrinking budgets and the re-prioritisation among corporate, third and governmental sectors. This is the first global recession in which the concept of CR is part of standard business language; the increase in the delivery of truly sustainable business and the lack of written evidence of CR behaviour on past recessions suggests that the effect of recession on CR is worth investigating as are the potential changes likely to occur following the recession.
  • CR and the Media: David Grayson (2009) This paper discusses how CR is covered in the media and the media's own corporate responsibilities, covering both traditional and new media. The increase of new media is dramatically increasing pressure for greater accountability and transparency, and for making more information available aster. Global media will continue to evolve rapidly and potentially in unexpected ways. Companies and promoters of CR will need to be more proactive in articulating the purpose of business, the impacts of responsible business and how individual businesses are seeking to minimise negative environmental and social impacts.
  • Who should head up your sustainability function? A joint think piece with David Grayson CBE and Stuart Morton of Odgers Berndtson (2009)Businesses are at different stages of maturity in embedding corporate responsibility and sustainability.? A few are still indifferent - or even in denial.? Many more treat it as a bolt-on to business operation.? Some have started to build corporate responsibility and sustainability into their purpose and strategy.
  • Embedding Corporate Responsibility in the MBA Curriculum: Chris Marsden OBE (2008)The case for including CR in the mainstream MBA curriculum is growing.? Student demand seems to be increasing. CR issues are impacting on more and more companies and future managers need to be aware of them and to be introduced to effective ways of managing them.? There are clear opportunities for companies to develop new and profitable ways of doing business in a more sustainable way.? As more companies are publicly exposed for serious CR failings, the blame is likely in part to be levelled at business schools for not preparing their students properly.? So, it is timely to ask how best this should be accommodates in an already overcrowded MBA curriculum.
  • The Business of Business is ...? Unpicking the corporate responsibility debate: Chris Marsden OBE and David Grayson CBE (2008)Companies must be part of any lasting solution to many of the pressing environmental and social problems facing the world.? All companies do good things and bad things, often at the same time.? The essence of the debate over CR is whether governance of the good and bad things companies do should be left to market forces and state regulation of whether companies should deliberately set out to do good things beyond the minimum required to achieve their financial goals.