Loughborough University School of Business and Economics Bi-Annual Magazine

INSPIRE LOUGHBOROUGH UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF BUSINESS AND ECONOMICS BI-ANNUAL MAGAZINE ISSUE 16

CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY WHY CSR IS GOOD FOR YOUR BUSINESS

Editor: Ondine Barry

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WELCOME Welcome to Inspire, the magazine of the School of Business and Economics at Loughborough University. This issue focuses on corporate social responsibility (CSR).

CSR is constantly in the news, whether it be through the misdemeanours of organisations like Cambridge Analytica, through critical global issues such as climate change and the use of plastics, or occasionally through examples of good practice.

In this respect I am reminded of the many positive stories of community engagement that emerged following the recent tragic death of the Leicester City Football Club owner, Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha. He was loved by the people of Leicestershire for his many acts of generosity, such as the significant donation he made to the local hospital and the buying of food and drinks for fans he met out on the town.

As signatories to the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME), ethics, sustainability and social responsibility pervade the activities of the School. CSR is a key element in the curriculum of our teaching programmes at undergraduate and postgraduate level.

Our research, as reflected in this issue, engages with and impacts on the CSR agendas of organisations. And I’m especially proud of our staff and students who regularly engage with not-for-profit organisations through research, staff volunteering, student projects and internships.

Earlier this autumn I was teaching a group of postgraduate students on a consulting skills module. Our particular interest was how modelling and analysis approaches support analytics work in organisations. We discussed some of the ethical issues that we might face as ‘consultants’, whether in an internal or external capacity.

Our starting point was to recognise that models almost never provide purely objective

analyses. Indeed, because models contain subjective information, especially on human behaviour, and they are simplifications of the real world that need to be interpreted by humans, there is a high level of subjectivity in the recommendations that proceed from them.

One ethical challenge I asked the students to consider was what they would do if their client wants them to change their model to ensure it produced a result that is favourable to the client’s desired outcome. Should they make the change and take the money, or should they be steadfast to the results even if they are not favourable?

While each person will have to decide on the right answer for them, my own experience in the apparently objective world of analytics is that these difficult ethical dilemmas exist.

I hope you find the range of articles in this issue of Inspire both interesting and enlightening.

Sincerely yours,

Stewart Robinson Dean, School of Business and Economics, Loughborough University

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NEWS

2018 Summer Graduation The 2018 Summer Graduation drinks reception was held in July at the University’s Netball Centre. With family, friends and staff members of the SBE all celebrating together, new graduates were welcomed into the Loughborough alumni family.

The 2018 Winter Graduation ceremony and drinks reception will take place on Monday, December 17th.

New School Video Senior Apprenticeships Programmes Launch Earlier this year the School set up a suite of apprenticeship leadership programmes targeted at working professionals. The Level 7 programmes – equivalent to a Master’s degree – are aimed at organisations who are already part of the UK Government’s Apprenticeship Levy scheme.

The apprenticeships, an MSc in Strategic Leadership and Executive MBA, are aimed at equipping people who are already in management positions with the knowledge and skills to operate more effectively.

To find out more, contact Business Development Manager Vicki Unwin on: 01509 222160 or V.E.Unwin@lboro.ac.uk

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The School is delighted to announce the release of its latest School video: Engage + Inspire + Transform, bringing together testimonials from outstanding students, staff and graduates of the School.

If you haven’t yet seen it, please visit the School of Business and Economics’ Playlist on Loughborough University’s YouTube channel.

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New Multi-Million AI Research Project Announced A £20million scheme to investigate how artificial intelligence and data science can transform UK services industries will be launched in December. Loughborough University is one of three academic institutions tasked by the UK Government to look at using artificial intelligence to increase processing times, improve customer engagement and unlock new potential in accountancy, legal and insurance services.

Professor Alistair Milne (pictured) and Professor Chris Holland will lead one of the three projects, Technology Driven Change and Next Generation Insurance Value Chains, which aims to identify and map the opportunities for AI-based innovation in the UK insurance industry.

Professor Milne said: “Working closely with some of the major UK insurance firms, we will examine how new technologies such as AI, machine learning and distributed ledgers are changing business processes and business models in underwriting and risk analytics, claims processing and in customer engagement, examining the barriers to adoption and the enablers of change.”

The three new research projects are backed by £3million through the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund (ISCF) – a Government scheme to strengthen UK science and business innovation – and will be led by UK Research and Innovation.

Data Analytics Research News Professor Tom Jackson, Associate Dean for Research in the School of Business and Economics and a member of the School’s Centre for Information Management, has had a new book, Business Analytics: A Contemporary Approach, published by Palgrave.

The book, co-authored with Steven Lockwood, explores the importance of data in providing the analytics for everyday situations and how it can be used effectively to drive outcome, improve performance and inform and influence decision making.

Professor Tom Jackson: “With the speed at which data is created it’s time to understand what we can do with it all. We are delighted that this book provides a rapid introduction into using big data through to using it in action, by providing possible data architectures. It also has a great chapter on ethics and what’s next for big data.”

In addition, Professor Jackson is part of a multinational Loughborough University-led study, TOXITRIAGE, that seeks to revolutionise the way the world tackles life-threatening CBRN events.

Professor Jackson leads the TOXI-MOTIVE research segment of TOXI-TRIAGE. TOXI-MOTIVE is looking at how best to utilise social media to track a crisis situation as it develops, aiding the deployment of the emergency services and tackling the spread of fake news.

You can find out more at www.lboro.ac.uk/news-events/toxi-triage/toxi-motive

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NEWS

SBE Doctoral Conference The fifth annual SBE Doctoral Conference was held on September 3rd, showcasing the wide range of research being carried out in the School.

With presentations in different formats, researchers at all stages of their PhD journey were able to present their research in the constructive environment of the conference.

Professor Tom Jackson, Associate Dean for Research at the School, said: “It’s wonderful to see the PhD community, spanning many different discipline areas, coming together to share their research. It’s at these intersections that great ideas are born.”

Prizes were awarded by year group for the best 20-minute presentation, with first prize going to: • Year 3 – Tony Dawson (“Cognitive Workload in Multimedia Learning: A psycho-physiological study of the cognitive effects of multimedia presentations”) • Year 2 – Majd AbedRabbo (pictured) (“The Implications of Connected Customer Shopping Experience on Town Centre Retail Performance”) • Year 1 – Ursula Davis (“Quantitative Modelling for Resource-efficient Supply Chains: A systematic review”)

Brexit and the SBE In case you haven’t yet had your fill of Brexit news and reports, it might be interesting to read what some of our academics in the School have been writing and saying with regards to the UK’s impending exit from Europe.

Dr Huw Edwards heads the School’s TRANSIT research interest group and provides expert commentary on UK & EU economics and international trade Dr Elena Georgiadou (pictured) heads the 28+ Perspectives on Brexit project team and provides expert commentary on trade negotiations analysis Dr Alok Choudhary provides expert commentary on the UK’s supply chains Dr Jonathan Seaton provides expert commentary on business economics and pricing Professor David Llewellyn provides expert commentary on UK and EU economics and banking

Visit the SBE Research Blog for insightful and thought-provoking posts on Brexit and more.

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Dignity and Respect at Work The Dignity and Respect at Work Intervention Group, or DRAWING, co-led by the School’s Dr Iain Coyne and colleagues from Sheffield and Leeds, held the third of many workshops, supported by the Centre for Work, Organisation and Society (formerly the Centre for Professional Work and Society) that saw experts from academia, professional bodies, unions, the private sector, public sector and charities to foster discussion, come together to develop collaborations and ultimately produce an evidence-based intervention for addressing bullying in the workplace.

Benefits of a Student Consultancy Project Student consultancy projects are an integral part of both the MSc Business Analytics programme and the Loughborough MBA. They offer your organisation a cost-effective way of gaining fresh insights, ideas and understanding around an interest or challenge your company faces.

Students on both the MSc and MBA will have a solid understanding of powerful analytical tools to enable projects in areas such as: • Problem structuring methods • Statistical modelling and optimisation

The aims of the Group are to develop collaborative research and practice activities between academics, professional bodies, charities, unions, public and private sector organisations and practitioners; to share knowledge and encourage debate; to design evidence-based workplace interventions; and to evaluate the effectiveness of dignity at work.

For further information, please contact Dr Iain Coyne.

• Simulation • Decision and efficiency analysis • Forecasting Benefits to you include access to insightful and rigorous analysis; opening up collaboration pathways with a UK Top 10 business school; contributing to the corporate social responsibility agenda by providing powerful learning opportunities for future employees.

If you would like to speak with us to discuss a possible student consultancy project, please contact Dr Duncan Robertson on +44 (0)1509 222188 or D.A.Robertson@lboro.ac.uk.

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BECOMING SUSTAINABLE CONSUMERS The topic of environmentally sustainable development is arguably one of the most pressing issues of our time. In this respect, researchers have paid close attention to the topic of food production and consumption, as it poses one of the biggest future challenges in terms of safeguarding environmental sustainability.

By Dr Lazaros Goutas

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The principal reason for this increased attention is that the global population growth to 9 billion people by 2050 is expected to place an enormous pressure on the demand for food and our ability as societies to produce it.

These pressures are also likely to increase the negative impacts on the environment, such as the release of greenhouse gases, environmental pollution, water shortages due to over-extraction, soil degradation and the loss of biodiversity, and disruption to our ecosystem.

Recent improvements in resource-intensive production and smart farming, as well as enhanced knowledge and information flows in food supply chains, have partly alleviated the tensions mentioned above. However, there is no debate around the fact that considerably more can be done to ensure the sustainability of the food system, especially in terms of encouraging people to consume more sustainably.

Sustainable consumption and production is primarily concerned with increasing net welfare gains from economic activities by reducing resource use, degradation and pollution along the whole lifecycle, while increasing quality of life. It requires cooperation among actors operating in the supply chain, from producer to final consumer, and involves providing consumers with adequate information through standards and labels.

In this context, information systems, and technology more broadly, can play an eminent role in terms of influencing food consumption behaviour. The ability of technology to provide information and feedback on individual consumption on a real-time basis (e.g., during the use of mobile applications during the shopping experience), can raise awareness and transform consumption behavior into more sustainable patterns.

As an example, several applications (e.g., Yuka, GoodGuide, EthicalConsumer) have 10

recently been developed and entered the marketplace with promising usage figures.

The basic affordance of these artefacts is that through a scanning technology, enabling users to view the sustainability credentials of the products they are about to purchase, with the ultimate outcome of potentially making more informed choices along the lines of environmental sustainability and ethical consumption.

Naturally, the increased use of technology in consumers’ food purchasing journeys is not limited to offline purchasing channels. In fact, more and more people are nowadays purchasing food online.

According to retail analysts IGD, online grocery shopping in the United Kingdom is the fastest-growing purchase channel, both in terms of value and growth. The

— “Environmentally sustainable development is one of the most pressing issues of our time.”

— average value of weekly online sales in predominantly food stores has more than doubled in the first half of this decade, reaching nearly £142 million in 2016.

Similarly, a recent analysis by Nielsen showed that online grocery sales are predicted to capture 20% of total grocery retail by 2025 to reach £78 billion in consumer sales. Using these online purchasing channels, it is increasingly easy for consumers to assess the sustainability information, and as a result there is hope that the more consumers leverage technology to purchase food, the higher the likelihood that purchasing decisions will be made by taking sustainability parameters also into account.

Despite this promise, there is still little evidence to suggest an actual shift in consumers’ purchasing preferences towards sustainable products. To start with, existing research has shown that the mere

disclosure of attribute information around environmental sustainability does not necessarily bring the desired behavioural effects.

Even if consumers have on aggregate terms developed more positive attitudes towards sustainable consumption, in many cases these attitudes fail to materialise into substantive action. In food choice, as in many other product categories, most consumers claim to consider sustainability issues generally important and desirable, but this does not necessarily translate into purchasing behaviour.

According to research by the Institute of Grocery Distribution, product pricing is still the most dominant factor in consumer thinking, and wider sustainability issues do not feature highly amongst factors affecting consumer choice, even if the growing interest in organic and fair-trade products is a positive sign.

Against this backdrop, part of my research tries to get a better understanding of the dynamics of consumer behaviour that develop in online environments and how the use of technology, and information systems in particular, can aid people into consuming more sustainably, not simply by overloading consumers with additional attribute information, but by identifying ‘smarter’ ways of interacting with consumers and nudging them to make sustainable product choices.

For instance, in some ongoing research together with colleagues from the Universities of Baylor and Lancaster, we are initially looking into the optimal ways through which digital artefacts can segment consumers according to their motivational and general ability to purchase sustainable products.

Most importantly, we show that when this segmentation is coupled with a persuasive technology design that differentially interacts with consumers (e.g., by providing inspirational messages, reminders

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— “We need to identify ‘smarter ways’ of interacting with consumers and nudging them to make sustainable product choices.”

— to perform a desired action, or ‘plain’ sustainability-related attribute information) depending on where they stand on their sustainability journey, can yield promising results in terms of guiding consumers into more sustainable product choices.

In conclusion, the battle for a sustainable food system is an ongoing one, and changing individual behaviours is key in this respect.

I strongly believe that leveraging the power of technology to identify novel and more intelligent ways of both informing and interacting with consumers can be a winning factor in terms of meeting this objective.

Lazaros Goutas is Lecturer in Information Management and a member of the Centre for Information Management. Lazaros can be reached at l.goutas@lboro.ac.uk

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Creating Sustainable Supply Chains A compelling business tool for managing sustainability within the industry is significantly improving the way supply chain managers around the world are measuring, assessing and developing their sustainability practices and performance of their global supply chain.

An interview with Dr Alok Choudhary SUSTAIN, developed by Dr Alok Choudhary and his research team at the School, is a data-driven, cost-effective and userfriendly online toolkit, which provides a structured approach for companies in manufacturing and logistics sectors to manage their sustainability objectives.

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Working with international collaborators, the toolkit has been developed through extensive research on environmentally sustainable and resilient supply chains carried over the last four years.

Funded by international authorities in the

UK, EU, USA, Asia and the Middle East through several international projects, the toolkit development research has engaged academic partners and industrial stakeholders in manufacturing, supply chains and logistics sectors across four continents.

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“SUSTAIN is a free-to-use web-based tool,” explains Alok, “which has been used to help businesses change their operational and supply chain practices. When we piloted it at several companies in India and the UK, we saw significant benefits in their financial savings, increased resource efficiency, reduced environmental footprints and increased competitive differentiation.”

Between 2014 and 2016, Dr Choudhary led Next-GIFT (Next Generation Sustainable Freight Transportation), an international project between the UK-USA and India that identified research users’ needs in the area of sustainable logistics and transformed the practices for improved efficiency and environmental sustainability.

Next-GIFT also involved collaborators from Australia, France, the Netherlands and China to understand the sustainability challenges faced by global logistics and supply chain industries through several industrial workshops.

Dr Choudhary co-founded the UK Forum for Supply Chain Sustainability in 2016 in collaboration with the Carbon Trust to provide a platform for UK businesses and academic institutions promoting knowledge sharing, the exchange of best practice, mutual learning and networking. To date there have been two Forums, attracting more than 100 companies from across the UK all interested in sustainable supply chains, with a third planned for early 2019.

Since 2015, Dr Choudhary has led the EU-India collaborative project REINVEST, funded by the European Union, to advance his research on sustainable logistics with the specific focus on the two areas. In collaboration with international partners from Italy, Greece and India, the team engaged in interdisciplinary and industrydriven research to improve environmental sustainability and operational efficiency, and to influence regional policy in the logistics sector.

“REINVEST is a group decision-support framework based on novel intuitionistic multi-attribute decision-making methods,” says Alok. “It was developed for UK logistics companies. The project revealed that incentive alignment and resource sharing are the two most critical collaborative processes, and it helped the organisations’ decision makers prioritise their operations to achieve sustainable collaborative differentiation in reduced carbon emission, congestion and road accidents.”

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Dr Choudhary received additional threeyear grants from British Council’s UKIERI to further investigate the sustainability, resource efficiency and resilience of supply chains in the UK and India.

“Our work on industry-driven and applied research continues to expand as we move to more stringent environmental regulations and the growing need for a sustainable society,” says Alok.

“REINVEST is also looking at the resilience of the food security system,” explains Alok, “a major global challenge facing both India and UK. We used a Fuzzy Evidential Reasoning Algorithm-based approach to identify, model and manage food security impediments. The model provides insightful directions to managers to better understand the severity of existing impediments and associated risks.”

“Going forward, we are currently identifying how and why businesses engage – or do not engage – with current water resource accounting tools and understanding the limitations from a business perspective. Next, we aim to develop a water resource efficiency methodology applicable to water footprinting in the supply chain across sectors.”

By combing the above-mentioned research, a data-driven and user-friendly web-based sustainability toolkit has been developed for companies and organisations in various sectors. According to Alok, the toolkit has allowed logistics companies to assess their sustainability performance based on multi-dimensional KPIs, identify hotspots for improvement, benchmark their performance in the sector and use the lowest cost interventions and best practices to improve their performance.

Alok and his research team are also working towards meeting the national strategic need to become more resourceful regarding material use, reuse of products and reducing the volumes of plastic waste through innovative circular economy business models that capture, create and deliver equitable value for all stakeholders.

If you are interested in talking with Alok about his research, or are a prospective doctoral student interested in pursuing a PhD at the School, please get in touch with him.

The toolkit will be formally launched at the end of 2018 with support from East Midland Chambers, Heathrow Airport and Carbon Trust in the UK. As a result of his enterprising work, Dr Choudhary was awarded a Dean’s Award for Impact on Practice by Professor Stewart Robinson and Loughborough University’s prestigious Vice Chancellor’s Award for Enterprise. He was also recognised by the Carbon Trust for his pioneering work on Low Carbon Supply Chains and invited by House of Lords to showcase his collaborative UK-India sustainability research to a group of politicians, think tanks and bureaucrats.

At the regional level, Dr Choudhary and his team have worked closely with economic decision makers and industry leaders in his role as the academic lead of Loughborough University for Advanced Logistics, a key priority area for Leicestershire Local Enterprise Partnership (LLEP) and the East Midlands Chamber of Commerce.

He is now working with directors and managers through the Chamber of Commerce to refine and improve the functionality of the SUSTAIN toolkit to maximise the impact of research on regional business users.

Alok Choudhary is Reader in Supply Chain Management and a member of both the Management Science and Operations group and the Logistics and Transportation Analytics research interest group. Alok can be reached on a.choudhary@lboro.ac.uk

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CHARG ME UP BOOSTING THE ADOPTION RATES OF ELECTRIC CARS

By Dr Didier Soopramanien

Transport – in particular, passenger vehicles – is a major source of air pollution. The UK Government last year announced that sales of new diesel and petrol cars and vans will be banned from 2040.

To achieve this target, the Government outlined a series of measures in its Road to Zero strategy document, some of which include significant investment in the infrastructure of charging stations.

My research is generally concerned with the decision that consumers make when they have to choose between different alternatives, especially when their decision involves whether or not to adopt a new product or service.

I began being interested in electric cars back in 2009 when I was an Assistant Professor at Lancaster University supervising

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a Chinese PhD student whose thesis was on the adoption of electric cars in the Chinese car market.

Little did I know that this would be the start of quite an interesting adventure that would take me to China for nearly six years. This experience of living, working and travelling in China, which is currently the largest car market in terms of sales (though not ownership), has certainly shaped some of the work I am currently involved in.

Early research on why very few car users were adopting electric cars focussed on what is called the product attributes of these cars and how consumers were comparing them to petrol fuel cars. This research found that the driving range of electric cars was a major concern for car buyers. Despite significant technological progress to improve the driving range, this ‘range anxiety’ remains a serious issue for car buyers.

Other related product attribute issues that cause anxiety for car

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— “Governments can encourage organisations to implement measures to incentivise their employees to switch to sustainable transport.”

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buyers include the ease (or, more often than not, the difficulty) of finding a charging station to charge their car’s battery and the amount of time it will take to fully charge it.

More recent research has started to consider how factors other than the attributes of cars can accelerate electric car adoption rates. Using data from Chinese respondents, my recent joint work with Lixian Qian (Liverpool University Suzhou China) and Jose Grisolia (Nottingham University China) investigates the effect of infrastructure availability, or simply put, the number of charging stations and their proximity to your home.

We also consider other factors such as subsidies to cut the cost of purchasing

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electric cars and factors that may discourage people from buying petrol fuel cars.

One such policy factor unique to the Chinese car market is that in Beijing, for instance, there is a lottery system for new car licence plates. Buying an electric car increases your chances.

This is the typical carrot-and-stick approach to motivate people to change their perception towards a better alternative, in this case, electric vehicles.

A ‘carrot’ policy measure is the subsidies offered to buy an electric car, or, in the UK, if your vehicle emits less than 75g/ km or less of CO2, you don’t pay the London congestion charge. A ‘stick’ policy measure is to increase taxes on petrol fuel cars.

A different but related approach is to think of the ecosystem of transport. An ecosystem can be interpreted as the support system that allows something to work. Importantly, we can change the elements of the system so that we alter how people use those system’s products and services.

A systems approach also allows us to think of all the stakeholders involved; stakeholders who can bring about a change in the existing transport ecosystem towards one that favours electric cars.

Clearly, the car industry is a stakeholder.

Government is also a major stakeholder, typically implementing the carrot-andstick policies mentioned previously. A third stakeholder in this ecosystem that

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— “Perhaps sustainable transport policies should be formally embedded into organisational CSR policy initiatives.”

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we rarely think of is employers.

Demand for transport is what we call derived demand. That is, in general, we use and choose a particular mode of transport to perform other duties and activities rather than deriving pleasure from the mode of transport itself. One of these duties is the commute to work.

The Department for Transport Statistics for Great Britain finds that commuting to work accounts for around 20% of trips in the UK, 67% of which involve using a personal vehicle.

Surely then, organisations can be thought of as playing a similar role to governments in encouraging employees to buy and use electric cars to drive to work.

In turn, governments can encourage organisations to implement measures to incentivise their employees to switch to sustainable transport. These encouragements might include the installation of charging stations, free or subsidised charging and/or reserved parking spaces for employees with electric cars.

that in other countries people don’t depend as much on cars – this is an issue that deserves more attention.

So, should organisations go beyond incentivising employees to buy electric cars?

Can or should they play a much bigger part in changing the way we think about the role and purpose of cars?

Organisations these days “compete” on how socially and environmentally responsible they are, and this may imply that sustainable transport policies should be formally embedded into organisational CSR policy initiatives and metrics.

I invite you to contact me if you are interested in this area of research and if you would like any of the reference material which supports my research.

An ecosystems approach also means that we have to acknowledge that employees use their cars to go shopping, to visit families, to take their children to school (an activity that is often combined with the commute to and from work).

This clearly justifies the need to pay more attention to organisational transport policies for their employees, not only in relation to the purchase and use of electric cars, but perhaps also towards a broader policy initiative of sustainable transportation.

Recently, I was talking to colleagues about my research, and we were discussing whether a family can function without a car.

One colleague put forward the argument

Didier Soopramanien is Reader in Marketing and a member of the Centre for Service Management.

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CORPORATE CULTURE AND INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY IN BANKING 2018 marks 10 years since the most serious banking crisis in generations and one that imposed enormous economic and social costs on a wide range of stakeholders.

By Professor David T Llewellyn

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Along with various forms of misconduct, trust and confidence in banking has been eroded; indeed there is market research evidence that the reputation and esteem of banks has been badly affected.

In the words of an authoritative Group of Thirty report: “The reputation of banking and the broader financial sector has deteriorated since the financial crisis and is now at an historical low in terms of trust on the part of clients and customers”.

There is also criticism that those responsible for the crisis and examples of bank misconduct seem not to have been adequately punished, if sanctioned at all.

While this is not altogether true, we can understand why the perception has arisen.

Four types of bank misconduct can be identified: cavalier risk management; mis-selling of financial products to potentially vulnerable consumers; violations of national and international rules on, for instance, money laundering; and manipulation of financial markets.

In other words, the crisis of 2008 (whose effects are still working through) is not the only factor. Other much-publicised examples of misconduct in the UK include mis-selling of PPI and pensions, instances of rogue trading, the manipulation of LIBOR and money laundering. As a result, massive fines have been imposed on banks – but who exactly pays the fine, or should be sanctioned, is a central issue.

This is important because trust and confidence is crucial in financial services for several reasons: some financial 20

products are only purchased once, which means there is limited opportunity to learn from experience; there is a principal-agent relationship between financial firms and their customers; the value of many financial contracts are not known at the point of purchase and so it is not always clear precisely what we are buying; given the long-term nature of many financial contracts, the behaviour of the financial firm after the transaction has been made impacts on the ultimate value of the contract; and there is often a lack of transparency in complex financial contracts.

Furthermore, many financial transactions (e.g., investments and pensions) are longterm in nature where trust places a vital role. The erosion of trust is, therefore, a serious issue.

In the School of Business and Economics we have postgraduate and undergraduate modules devoted entirely to examining the specific factors that contributed to the financial crisis. But ultimately it is the underlying culture of the banks and the degree to which individuals within the banks are held accountable.

Culture is central in all firms when considering corporate responsibility.

Different authors have offered a wide variety of definitions of “culture”. For our purposes we refer to that given by Allison Cotterall (Chief Executive of the Banking Standards Board): “Collective assumptions, values, beliefs and expectations that shape how people behave in a group”.

The group focus is important because we learn from Identity Economics (and our own

experience) that people behave differently in different environments. We all of us have multiple identities: in the family, amongst friends, in our job, etc. Behaviour is often different in each area.

We can assume that those bankers who attempted to illegally rig market interest rates (the LIBOR scandal) would not steal from their local corner shop or sell an inappropriate financial product to their beloved grandmother. People behave differently in a group than they do when acting alone. Group culture is therefore a central issue to consider.

The culture of any firm or organisation is important to understanding individual and collective behaviour: it creates business standards, influences employees attitudes and generally establishes norms of behaviour. This in turn provides a link with consumer trust and confidence. This is particularly important in banking and finance because of the pivotal role that financial firms and banks, in particular, play in the economy.

The financial crisis has spawned the biggest change ever in banking’s regulatory regime. But is this the right approach?

My experience having been involved with the regulation of banks is that regulation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for good behaviour.

There needs to be a greater focus on the underlying culture of banks because if this is hazardous no amount of regulation will prevent misconduct.

At the heart of many instances of misconduct is a combination of hazardous culture, perverse incentive structures

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— “Who should be held responsible for bad behaviour?

The firm itself or its decision makers?”

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within financial firms, weak internal governance arrangements and a lack of individual responsible and accountability.

No amount of regulation can compensate for bad ethical behaviour.

When considering the banking crisis and various examples of hazardous behaviour, two issues immediately come to mind: who was responsible and why?

When focussing on the who it is a question of whether the focus is to be on the institution or the individuals working within it. Banks do not make decisions; it is the individual employees that make decisions.

— “The erosion of trust is a serious issue.”

— But culture and individual behaviour interact in a complex way: individual behaviour can influence corporate culture, and established culture influences individual behaviour.

Who should be held responsible for bad behaviour? The firm itself or its decision makers?

It is also a question of effectiveness: What is likely to influence future behaviour more – a £10 million fine on the bank (ultimately the shareholders and customers themselves) or a £50,000 fine on individual employees?

Personally, I believe it needs to be both in order to truly change the culture, with a

regime that makes individuals responsible and accountable for their actions.

Reform is needed, and the previously mentioned Group of Thirty report has argued that: “A major improvement in the culture of banks is now a matter of necessity and sustainability and is an imperative for regaining society’s trust”.

Supervisors should examine the underlying culture of financial firms, and individuals need to be made more accountable for their actions and decisions when there is a negative impact on consumers’ welfare.

A welcome move comes with the Financial Conduct Authority’s Senior Managers Regime which has recently come into force.

Regulators now require that all relevant employees within financial firms are covered by: “a set of conduct rules and act with integrity, due skill, care and diligence… and pay due regard to the interests of customers and to treat them fairly...”

In addition, senior management is specifically targeted, with individual employees to be held responsible for their actions with the possibility that they may be sanctioned.

Culture has changed within banks as anyone in the UK who watches Dad’s Army will know. The local bank manager in the programme may have been a pompous fool, but everyone had trust and confidence in him, and he always acted with the utmost integrity. While he managed a much simpler bank than exists today, perhaps there is a case for: “Come back, Captain Mainwaring – all is forgiven”.

David T Llewellyn is Emeritus Professor of Money and Banking and former Chair of the European Banking Authority. David can be reached on d.t.llewellyn@lboro.ac.uk

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THE NEW GLOBAL SOCIAL ENTREPRENEUR SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP IS AN EXTREMELY POWERFUL BUSINESS MODEL THAT CONTINUES TO BE ON THE RISE, AND YET IT IS A TREND THAT DEFIES EASY DEFINITION AND CATEGORISATION. An Interview with Michelle Aitken

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A social enterprise can be a not-forprofit or a profit-making enterprise.

It can be founded and run by people with volunteering backgrounds, environmental backgrounds, community development backgrounds, NGO or governmental backgrounds or private sector backgrounds. It can be a charitable foundation or a business whose profits all go to the fund or institution it supports, offering a sustainable future to the people it helps.

But in essence, it is an enterprise that uses business solutions to solve or alleviate social issues.

Michelle Aitken in the International Business, Strategy and Innovation (IBSI) group at the School has been working for the past six years with a global social enterprise in Nottingham called Education for the Children (EFTC). EFTC was set up to support a school in Guatemala whose mission it is to help disadvantaged children in the town of Jocotenango get an education, rise up out of poverty and go on to lead rewarding lives and inspire future generations.

Guatemala suffered from a very long and debilitating civil war which saw an estimated 200,000 people lose their lives.

Recent generations of children have grown up without fathers and role models. There is still a great deal of abject poverty, and it is not surprising that the literacy rate is one of the lowest in the Western Hemisphere.

The School of Hope that EFTC funds has to date seen more than 1,000 children and 450 families supported through its programmes, providing an invaluable education but also meals and essential aids such as basic hygiene classes and water filters via its Social Services programme.

Michelle has been travelling to Guatemala at least once a year to work with the school and the students since 2012, and over the past few years she and colleagues at the SBE have started looking at the ways in which social enterprises operate and how they are contributing to the global economy. In fact, later this academic year Michelle will be teaching the Global Social Entrepreneurship module in the new MSc in International Business.

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“It was a wonderful opportunity for me to join two strands of my work in entrepreneurship together and research the area more,” says Michelle. “In the module we will be looking at social enterprises in depth, how they operate, their business models, their values and objectives and the role they now play in the global economy.”

— “Where corporate social responsibility plays a key role in the corporate world is in the feeling of value that employees can have.”

— It is an area that Michelle feels passionate about and an area that she says has not been previously considered as being business in the past: “You used to simply call a not-for-profit organisation a charity, but actually, most charities aren’t just focussing on raising money or giving hand-outs anymore; they are seeking more sustainable pathways”.

Over the last few years EFTC has also undergone a reassessment of their objectives – instead of simply raising the funds to support the School for Hope, they strive to help the students be in a position to give back to the school and community themselves, thus supporting the next generation of children.

“What we’re seeing in Guatemala now, after 12 years, is that some of the children who have graduated are coming back and volunteering as employment advisors for the younger kids, helping them with their CV and giving careers advice, which is wonderful. Some alumni have even started sponsoring a new generation of students,” says Michelle.

multinational network of social enterprises across a range of different sectors and areas over the last few years – Professor M.N. Ravishankar has connections in India, Nicaragua and the UK as well as in Guatemala along with Michelle Aitken, and Dr Michelle Richey works with the TERN group in London (see Inspire issue 15), among others.

Their research includes studies on how these businesses are run – are they run differently? Do they have different issues? Can you apply traditional business principles to a social enterprise?

“I think where corporate social responsibility particularly plays a key role in the corporate world,” says Michelle, “is in the feeling of value that employees can have. My experience is that if there is a sense of corporate responsibility internally, such as allowing staff to support a charity or matching charitable fundraising that they might do, this gives staff a sense of worth that goes further than just doing a job. Galvanizing this feeling of working for a worthwhile employer is probably the bigger win for companies with a successful CSR policy – rather than simply sticking a CSR commitment poster on the side of the van or using it for marketing on your website.

“There are so many ways a company can add real value to a social enterprise, whether it’s helping develop their IT systems or providing office space or up-skilling staff. Whatever you choose to do, make sure you chose a suitable enterprise and align your company’s values to the project. Alignment is key because it provides much better buy-in from employees and stakeholders.”

The IBSI group is also looking at the ways in which social enterprises can develop businesses to make money and provide long-term support. Indeed, EFTC is working with the School of Hope in Guatemala to develop food and coffee exports as a potentially viable and sustainable business going forward.

“It’s about developing a business with a social purpose and putting your profits back into an organisation that you feel is of value,” emphasises Michelle.

The IBSI group has cultivated a

Michelle Aitken is Associate Lecturer and a member of the International Business, Strategy and Innovation discipline group. She can be reached on m.aitken@lboro.ac.uk 23

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FOSTERING CSR REPORTING IN

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reporting by corporations on their social and environmental activities has grown exponentially in the past decades. Companies generally provide such information on a voluntary basis.

As a consequence, a variety of reporting approaches has emerged, subject to the country and industry organisations operate in, their size, as well as the idiosyncrasies of their operations.

by Dr Petros Vourvachis More recent attempts to introduce related regulation have primarily focused on more developed countries and have so far been met with scepticism, due to the lack of effective enforcing and audit mechanisms.

Recently, I have worked on a research study with colleagues (Dr C Arena, University of Naples Federico II, Italy and R Liong, PT Priskila Makmur, Jakarta, Indonesia) which looked at CSR disclosure in accounting annual reports and other dedicated CSR publications of companies based throughout the Southeast Asian region.

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We particularly explored the impact of the introduction of CSR regulation (through a rather vague stock exchange requirement encouraging companies to provide broad descriptions of their related activities) in companies’ reporting in Malaysia and Indonesia in 2006, as well as whether, in contrast, voluntary initiatives, such as awards or accreditation schemes, have any impact in disclosure.

Covering an 11-year period (2002 – 2012) we manually analysed the content of publications using the Global Reporting

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Initiative (GRI) as the coding base – GRI is the most frequently adopted reporting standard on voluntary basis by international companies and assesses disclosure in areas such as governance, society, labour, human rights, environment, product responsibility and economic impacts.

Although it is widely argued that CSR is largely a western phenomenon and hence Asian firms lag behind their western counterparts, our research shows that CSR reporting has increased in Asia, both in terms of the number of companies publishing such reports and the extent and quality of the information published, especially in recent years.

Amongst the different countries there are considerable variations in the disclosed topics, reflecting different local concerns and established corporate practices.

Indonesian companies, for example, appear to disclose more information on environment and human rights compared to Singaporean companies, which have a greater emphasis on strategy and governance.

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Reporting to some extent is influenced by economic development – corporations based in poorer countries such as Cambodia and Myanmar show very low levels of disclosure. Malaysia and Singapore however have comparable levels of disclosure, despite their significant differences in wealth .

On average, companies report more on strategy, operations and governance and less on environment, society and human rights. Poor disclosure in those areas can be attributed to a variety of factors, including low awareness, lack of perceived benefit or governmental pressure.

Interestingly, it seems that the introduction of regulation has had only a small impact in companies’ reporting. Companies that began reporting on CSR following the introduction of regulation showed very low compliance, which can possibly be explained in light of the flexible nature of the regulations (disclosure topics weren’t specified, nor clear guidance on the metrics that firms needed to use, nor the specific sanctions in cases of non-compliance).

Companies already reporting on CSR did not increase disclosure but rather moved information (particularly on environment and labour practices) from their CSR report to their annual report. Information about categories such as product responsibility and human rights actually decreased overall as organisations redrafted their reporting agendas based on the new regulations.

In a way, the vague nature of the regulation sent negative signals to the organisations regarding their importance. However, our evidence suggests it also allowed them to conceal their poor related performance (though companies operating in countries with high law enforcement, e.g., Singapore, showcased an increased compliance).

There appear to be very strong associations of CSR disclosure with voluntary initiatives and particularly general CSR awards (not only reporting awards). Corporate disclosure of related achievements is very detailed across reporting media with particularly larger companies often compiling lists of accolades of their subsidiaries which they repeat and expand over the years.

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These are practices generally not evidenced to that extent in western settings. Our findings suggest that voluntary initiatives established over time in the region can be effective in fostering the provision of CSR information, particularly in countries with lower levels of law enforcement.

Based on our research, we recommend companies in this region begin to adopt more flexible forms of regulation, potentially in the form of ‘report or explain’, a method commonly found in corporate governance regulations and which has also been successfully introduced in the CSR context in South Africa as recent research suggests.

Such an approach would not only ensure some level of compliance, but would also allow organisations the flexibility to decide on the level of detail they wish to adopt, and potentially grasp any associated benefits by developing more comprehensive reports and explanations.

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regulation introduced, in order to promote more systematic, transparent and inclusive forms of reporting.

This article is based on the article “Carrot or stick: CSR disclosures by South East Asian companies” by Arena, C, Liong, R and Vourvachis, P, published in Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal in 2018 and presented at the 4th Congress on Social and Environmental Accounting Research (CSEAR) conference in Toulouse, France in 2017.

Petros Vourvachis is Lecturer in Accounting and a member of the Accounting and Finance discipline group. Petros can be reached on p.vourvachis@lboro.ac.uk

Our findings also call for effective enforcement of the application of these regulations, regardless of the type of

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WORKPLACE BULLYING DRAWING TOGETHER EXPERTISE TO DEVELOP EFFECTIVE INTERVENTIONS

By Dr Iain Coyne

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The recent Cox Report into Bullying and Harassment of House of Commons Staff and the momentum generated by the #MeToo movement provide concern and comfort in equal measure.

Concern, that in the world today there is still a pressing need for such investigations and movements. Comfort, that individuals are raising awareness of this phenomenon as well as identifying pathways to reducing the extent of negative behaviour in society.

Societal norms create a climate within which an organisation’s culture resides, and therefore norms and values implicitly promoting unacceptable interpersonal behaviour are likely to be modelled by individuals and acted out at work.

The current societal drive to highlight injustices in behaviour and promote an altogether more acceptable model for human actions provides a strong context for us to reflect on progress made within reducing workplace bullying.

It may well come as a surprise to many people then that in research and practice, high-quality evidence on the development and evaluation of bullying interventions is limited at best.

Examples of preventative approaches exist, but these are either espoused, not directly evaluated or, where evaluations exist, data is limited in providing definitive answers to the success of an approach.

It seems an organisational default position is to generate a policy and assume this is sufficient to address a complex, socially oriented and dynamic phenomenon. This is all the more concerning when one considers the ever-increasing knowledge and understanding we are exposed to on this topic.

The research base on bullying at work, while still plagued with debates around conceptualising and measuring bullying, has matured into one where genuine insights into antecedents, mediators, moderators and outcomes are offered.

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— “Leadership styles influence the extent of bullying at work with autocratic and aggressive management styles correlating with bullying behaviour.”

— Arguably, it is now time for organisations and institutions across the sectors to collaborate, use existing knowledge and experiences to develop and evaluate more robust, evidence-based bullying interventions.

With this need in mind, working with Dr Christine Sprigg and Dr Sarah Brooks (University of Sheffield Management School) and Dr Sam Farley (Leeds University Business School), we have established the Dignity and Respect at Work Intervention Group, or DRAWING. DRAWING is a collaborative network comprising representatives from academia, practice, professional bodies, unions, charities, NGOs and private sector organisations who are tasked with sharing expertise and knowledge to help generate and evaluate a set of practical and evidencebased interventions for workplace bullying.

The network is in its early days, but there are four areas we are focusing on to help drive effective bullying at work interventions.

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ASSESSMENT OF RISK

MANAGING CONFLICT

BYSTANDER TRAINING

Organisational explanations for workplace bullying dominate the extant literature, stating that the work environment fosters a culture in which bullying and harassment can emerge. Antecedents within this perspective include strained and stressful environments, politically motivated work culture, role ambiguity, role conflict and organisational change.

Another perspective views bullying as a form of conflict escalation. Here, the bullying antecedents highlighted previously are seen as a catalyst for conflict to emerge.

Therefore, early adoption of conflict management strategies should prevent conflict from reaching the destructive levels of bullying. Where perceived conflicts are handled well, bullying levels seem to be evident.

Bystanders are employees who witness bullying but are not involved directly as either a bully or target.

The lens within which these antecedents are viewed is a stress one, promoting the idea that the stress and strain ‘caused’ by role conflict, organisational change and more, results in individuals experiencing or engaging in bullying at work.

One practical example of applying the work environment hypothesis to interventions is with the development of risk assessment tools. These tools aim to help organisations assess the level of risk for bullying which they can then use to help drive through risk-reduction interventions. For example, Hoel and Giga (2006) developed the Bullying Risk Assessment Tool (BRAT) to assess individual experiences of factors related to organisational fairness, team conflict, role conflict, workload and leadership. Initial evidence within a UK study suggested some support for this tool in relating to experiences of workplace bullying.

One of the objectives of the DRAWING team is to provide organisations with an early approach to preventing bullying within the workplace.

— “Bystanders can play an active role in discouraging or escalating bullying.”

—

Members of DRAWING are looking at the methods and approaches used within conflict management research and practice to develop organisational, group and individual level approaches to managing conflict to prevent it escalating into bullying.

LEADER COMPETENCIES The role of the leader within workplace bullying is central to ensuring that practices are embedded within the culture and functioning of an organisation or group.

The leader provides a role model that influences and guides the behaviour of other employees. Research points to leadership styles influencing the extent of bullying at work with autocratic and aggressive management styles correlating with bullying behaviour.

Additionally, evidence suggests that a laissez-faire approach to leadership can also promote bullying behaviour, through the leader’s inaction in dealing with bullying as it arises.

They are however a very important (and often neglected) group, as they are likely to represent the largest number of people negatively impacted by ongoing workplace bullying.

Bystanders can play an active role in discouraging or escalating bullying through supporting the target of aggression, speaking up on their behalf or through active/passive support for the perpetrator’s actions.

In DRAWING, we are considering how organisations can foster a safe environment in which bystanders can voice their concerns over witnessed bullying behaviour and how to develop bystander training which stimulates positive bystander actions when witnessing bullying towards another person.

The challenge for the DRAWING network is not only to develop practical and evidencebased interventions, but to establish appropriate metrics on which to evaluate the usefulness of these interventions.

Ultimately, effective organisational actions should help to establish cultural change which not only benefits employees within the organisation, but also society as a whole.

Here, DRAWING members are exploring which effective leadership styles and competencies are needed to manage and prevent workplace bullying. The aim is to then develop training packages to help foster and develop these competencies.

Iain Coyne is Senior Lecturer in Organisational Psychology and Deputy Director of the Centre for Work, Organisation and Society. Iain can be reached on i.j.coyne@lboro.ac.uk

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By Dr Yasser Eliwa

DOES BEING

ALWAYS LEAD TO DOING BETTER? LENDING INSTITUTIONS’ REACTIONS TO CSR Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is a multi-layered concept that is defined by Carroll and Buchholtz in their book Business and Society as “the responsibility of business, which encompasses the economic, legal, ethical, and philanthropic expectations placed on organisations by society at a given point in time”. CSR is a response to society’s doubts of the organisation’s ability to cope with the rapid change in the environment.

Dr Yasser Eliwa, a Lecturer in Accounting and Financial Management, has years of research on financial reporting, financial analysis, corporate governance and CSR. Recently, his research has been focussed on the effect of a company’s CSR practices on the cost of external debt financing, which is what he writes about in this article.

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Continuing in his own words: I found that better CSR practices enhance a company’s external financing capacity by lowering its cost of bank loans. This result suggests that banks explicitly take into account the risk arising from poor CSR practices when pricing and designing debt contracts.

In recent years, there has been a growing demand among companies’ stakeholders such as customers, employees, communities, governments and shareholders to adopt policies regarding social and environmental issues.

This rising trend was found by the latest Nielsen Global Survey on CSR in 2015, which shows that 66% of global consumers are willing to pay more for sustainable brands compared to 55% in 2014.

On the other side, many companies responded positively to this demand and invested in their CSR practices hoping to establish and sustain strong relationships with their constituents as a competitive advantage and to differentiate themselves from other companies.

In this regard, a recent study by the United Nations revealed that 89% of 1,000 CEOs from more than 100 countries believe that their commitment to CSR practices is translating into real impact on the success of their companies.

Therefore, it is not surprising that CSR practices have become one of the main themes in corporate strategy in recent years.

Despite this wide recognition of the importance of CSR practices, there is no consensus in prior studies about its economic consequences.

Opponents of CSR practices, who follow the classical economic viewpoint, argue that CSR practices represent a misallocation of corporate resources that could be better invested in internal projects to increase company shareholders’ wealth.

While proponents argue that the efficient implementation of CSR practices enhance the company’s financial performance as it creates and maintains a competitive advantage by establishing long-term relationships with key company stakeholders.

These two contrasting arguments motivated a large amount of research on the economic consequences of CSR

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practices; however, there is a scarcity of studies that examined the impact of companies’ CSR practices on their cost of debt.

Consequently, little is known on whether lending institutions care about CSR practices of companies.

Let’s examine the situation more closely.

Debt financing plays an important role in companies’ external financing and growth. Globally, bank loans are becoming increasingly important to companies.

According to new research by the McKinsey Global Institute, global debt has continued to rise since the financial crisis of 2008. Total debt has increased by $72trillion (74%), from $97trillion in 2007 to $169trillion in the first half of 2017.

Government debt accounts for 43% of this increase, and nonfinancial corporate debt for 41%.

Also, recent research by Thomson Reuters indicates that the size of the debt market is three times as large as the size of equity markets worldwide. The significance of the global debt market size and its importance to corporate financing invites us to examine the relationship between companies’ CSR practices and their cost of debt.

I am currently investigating this issue, building upon previous research in which I applied longitudinal models to examine whether engaging in CSR practices reduces debt financing costs for companies.

In addition, I look at the effects of country characteristics on this relationship using a sample of all non-financial companies in 15 European countries, utilising information from annual reports and financial databases.

they have a significant impact on the cost of debt. The results indicate that the environmental dimension has the largest impact on the cost of debt compared to other dimensions.

This finding encourages companies to start engaging in more socially and environmentally responsible activities. It indicates that it does matter to engage in such activities, as it seems that lenders place a premium on “good” CSR companies by demanding relatively lower interest on their debt, resulting in a lower cost of debt.

I have also found a stronger relationship between CSR practices and the cost of debt in more stakeholder-oriented countries, such as Denmark and Sweden, than in less stakeholder-oriented countries, such as Greece and Spain.

This study has practical implications: It enhances socially responsible managers’ confidence in pursuing CSR activities. These activities will not only contribute to society at large, but they also benefit companies by lowering their financing costs.

It encourages managers of low ESG performance firms to increase investments in ESG-related activities, as doing so may reduce their cost of debt and enhance the value of the firm.

Finally, it reassures firms struggling to finance their ESG practices due to limited resources that devoting the largest portion of these resources to their environmental practices is beneficial on many levels.

The preliminary findings of this research indicate that better CSR practices enhance a company’s external financing capacity by lowering the company’s cost of bank loans.

This suggests that banks explicitly take into account the risk arising from poor CSR practices when pricing and designing debt contracts.

For example, many banks in the UK, such as the Co-operative Bank, reveal in their regular reports their rejection to grant loan facilities to business clients due to environmental, social and governance (ESG) concerns.

Also, CSR is decomposed into their individual dimensions to test whether

Yasser Eliwa is Lecturer in Accounting and Financial Management and a member of the Accounting and Finance group at the School. He can be reached on y.eliwa@lboro.ac.uk 33

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An interview with Dr Manuel Alonso, Director of Student Services at Loughborough University

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— “Employers are increasingly aware that they need to be employing people who are resilient – able to manage their own stress, mental health and wellbeing.”

—

There is increasing demand for access to mental health services across the sector. The reasons behind this can be quite varied for students – from anxiety relating to their course or extracurricular activities, stress following a relationship break-up or bereavement, or pressures arising from living independently for the first time.

Indeed, according to an article in The Guardian, 75% of mental health issues begin before the age of 24.

In an interview with the University’s Director of Student Services, Dr Manuel Alonso, we ask about the mental health support offered to students at Loughborough.

“We have a generation of students who are much more health literate and much more willing to talk to you about mental health,” says Manuel. “The stigma is not the same as it was 10 or 15 years ago.

This is something that is surfacing within our younger generations and increasingly we need to be teaching students skills to manage positive mental health.”

“The approach that we are developing here at the University,” explains Manuel, “is to have a range of different ways of addressing this demand – in addition to offering reactive services for students presenting in distress or in acute need, increasingly the focus is to try to develop skills for students to be able to positively manage their wellbeing.”

The Loughborough University website includes a well-thought-out and easily accessible section for students on Health and Wellbeing, with links to counselling and disability services, mental health

and wellbeing services, housing advice, international student support, faith and spirituality, help around harassment and bullying and much more.

Over the past two years the University has developed the role of Wellbeing Advisors in Schools. These advisors can provide a first port of call for students who are presenting with a range of concerns, including stress or low mood. The Wellbeing Advisers work with the Schools to respond to individual situations but also to try to identify the underlying causes of the stress and see how these can be tackled to make the environment more inclusive.

In addition, this academic year has seen the roll-out of a unique skills-development programme called Personal Best, which covers a large range of skillsets, including positive mental health and wellbeing. This year, Personal Best is being introduced to first-year students in five Schools on campus, including the School of Business and Economics, where it is an integral component of the first-year core undergraduate module on skills development.

sure our students are rounded individuals when they leave university. Mental health is for everyone. There are services to support you if you need it, but you can also learn some skills to help long-term.”

Alongside the various health and welfare services offered by the University and the Personal Best programme, Dr Alonso and his team are working on a third strand – workshop and group delivery – to complement the services already offered to students, such as bereavement workshops.

“Common themes we see presenting, such as workload, exam stress, relationship breakdowns, will be featured,” says Manuel, “but throughout the theme will be about developing skills and selfawareness. Ideally, we want to see our students learning about themselves and building long-term skills that will help them move into the workforce and become resilient, confident employees.”

There is also a Personal Best app which features as part of the award-winning MyLboro app, which all Loughborough students can access to help their understanding of mental wellbeing and many other skills and attributes which may aid their future development, success and happiness.

“Employers are increasingly aware that they need to be employing people who are resilient – able to manage their own stress, mental health and wellbeing,” says Manuel.

“And it is clearly a skill, something that you can learn. And this is why it is part of Personal Best, because we want to make

Manuel Alonso is Director of Student Services at Loughborough University and can be reached on m.alonso@lboro.ac.uk

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CSR SBE IN THE

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT Action Homeless is a registered charity and social enterprise based in Leicester.

The main focus of its work is with the homeless, helping and supporting people both in their immediate time of need and in providing skills development opportunities to enable them to get back on track with their lives.

The School has for more than four years partnered with the Leicester Riders basketball team and the Nottingham Panthers ice hockey team to support local charity Action Homeless through various sponsorship initiatives. School staff make a donation to the charity each time they go to a game, have volunteered to help on specific projects and contribute food, supplies, presents and advent calendars every year during its Christmas appeal.

Together with Action Homeless the School has hosted two evening seminars on social enterprise for local businesses and has funded places on its Leadership and Management programme for Action

ENTERTAINING THE ELDERLY Philip Wilkinson-Blake, Director of IT and E-learning for the School of Business and Economics, works in care homes in his spare time as a dancer, singer and floristry teacher, providing fun and entertainment for the residents. He has sung at The Amwell Home in Melton Mowbray and The Ashton Care Home in Hinkley and is now a regular performer at Egerton Lodge in Melton Mowbray.

Phil trained with the Alzheimer’s Society in Nottingham for nine months on the theory

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behind Singing for the Brain workshops.

Phil uses musical instruments, multimedia video shows and memory cards with the names of famous performers from the 1940s to 1960s (like Frank Sinatra, pictured) to engage and entertain the residents in these homes.

Amwell Home’s Activities Coordinator Emily Bates said of Phil: “He has become a firm favourite within our home!”

Homeless staff. In addition to this, the CEO of Action Homeless, Mark Grant (pictured above with Maxine Clarke), has delivered a number of guest lectures to SBE students.

SBE staff members Malika Lawrance and Maxine Clarke have been instrumental in raising awareness of the charity across the School. Malika, who helped set up the partnership back in 2014, said: “It is a real pleasure to bring a car-load of presents and advent calendars to Action Homeless, knowing they are being handed out to people who don’t have very much.”

Action Homeless is only one example of the School’s collaboration with local organisations and engagement with the community. Recently, undergraduate students have had the opportunity to work on projects for a social enterprise in Leicester, and the SBE has been approached by a newly established social enterprise in Loughborough to provide advice on how to patent its idea, upscale the business and suggest concepts for its packaging and marketing.

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RESPONSIBLE MANAGEMENT EDUCATION A signatory to the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) since 2016, the School is proud to be aligned with the United Nations Global Compact initiative, whose mission is to ‘…inspire and champion responsible management education, research and thought leadership globally’.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals

Dr Andrew Rothwell is the School’s liaison for PRME and as such strives to raise awareness of the richness and diversity of work that goes on in the School, across the wider University and in the PRME community in relation to sustainability, social responsibility and ethical practice.

Over the last two years the School has been able to fund activity in the School through the Dean’s Award for Corporate Social Responsibility. Four projects have to date been funded, including Dr Alok Choudhary’s collaboration with the Carbon Trust and Copenhagen Business School on Responsible Supply Chain Management; Dr Ian Herbert’s development of Learning Through Work as a way of supporting sustainable professional careers; Dr Rahul Kumar’s collaboration with the Department of Computer Science in relation to apps for sustainability; and Dr David Roberts’ research on the use of imagery to support dyslexic student learning in large groups.

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SOUTH AFRICA CHALLENGE The South Africa Challenge (SAC), which started in 2012, is an experiential learning programme that seeks to identify and develop emerging leaders during a two-week personal development and leadership course in South Africa with the objective of developing innovative and sustainable methods to solve problems affecting communities in the country.

Set up to develop new products and services alongside the South African partner network, the SAC has for many years now involved students from the School, and this year’s Challenge saw the SBE sponsor three students (Diba Tavakolizadeh, Simona Petrova and Raoul Patel) who joined a team of

20 participants in Durban (pictured below).

At the 2018 SBE Dean’s Awards Dinner, International Business BSc graduate Tek Simkhada was nominated for the Corporate Social Responsibility award for his inspiring work in Nepal following the country’s devastating earthquake in 2015.

The team worked on problematic societal issues such as accessibility to safe drinking water, the negative stigma around autism, unemployment and lack of career guidance in schools, as well as the development of entrepreneurship and Java programming skills within the local SME community.

You can find out more by visiting the South Africa Challenge website.

Tek, who is Nepalese but grew up in England, flew out to Nepal to work for a year at ground level to help rebuild and renew the country’s schools, meeting with villagers, parents and children and village elders to discuss the best way forward.

Writing for the Nepali Blog lexlimbu, Tek said: “In many villages during my travels, there was a great deal of community talks in big open grounds where elders will sit facing a group in a semi-circle. There is a sense of community and a move towards a “we” for a common goal. The elder will create an agenda where everyone contributes and where disputes are taken care of in that moment of time. This localised view and approach can enhance the ability of community practices and participation.

Big organisations’ objective is quick responses, but it’s up to the local people to help themselves by being more expressive.”

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An interview with Jimmy Thomas

HIGH STAKES:

THE BATTLE TO CAP FOBTs

Successful businessman and philanthropist Jimmy Thomas, who is best known for his decades as a successful bingo entrepreneur (Loughborough-based Beacon Bingo) and the more recent London Hippodrome casino renovation, is a passionate supporter of the campaign to cap the maximum stakes on fixed-odds betting terminals (or FOBTs).

The campaign began with the Welsh MP for Swansea East, Caroline Harris, who was concerned by the impact FOBTs were having in her constituency. She told Wales Online: “Last year there were more than 230,000 individual sessions in which a user lost more than £1,000. These machines have increased the risk of problem gambling which carries a huge social and economic cost”.

Soon, several prominent politicians including Boris Johnson, Iain Duncan Smith and Jacob Rees-Mogg began openly backing the reforms, but the Government announced it would delay implementing any caps until October 2019.

Mr Thomas and his son, Simon, have spent much of their time in the last few years supporting various ministers (notably former sports minister Tracey Crouch who was instrumental in writing 38

the reform policy) to persuade the Government to look into the impact that FOBTs were having on towns and families across Great Britain.

Introduced in 1999, FOBTs became an instant success. No more than four FOBTs are allowed in a shop.

Bookmakers have got around this by opening up multiple shops in towns across the country, such as Newham (East London) where there had been closures from the economic crisis and where the lure of instant cash for people out of work or down on their luck is still tangible.

Currently, you can bet up to £100 every 20 seconds on fast-moving games like roulette. Each machine brings in an estimated average profit of £50,000.

Newham alone has no fewer than 81 betting shops, 14 on its High Street. The profits are staggering.

Whether or not you agree with gambling, the difference between being able to lose £100 every 20 seconds versus having a limit of £2 per bet, which is what bingo halls are capped at, is huge.

“The gambling industry has been in this country for hundreds of years and has always been respected and controlled,” says Mr Thomas. “When you are in a casino, it is regulated and the age of the

clientele can be checked as well as their condition – are they drinking too much, are they being too risky?

“Betting shops don’t have people at the door to check IDs or look after their welfare. They just let people go in, and of course they find it very lucrative, but they are unfortunately taking the money off the poor and vulnerable.”

When Tracey Crouch resigned as an MP in November over the announcement from the Treasury of an 18-month delay, she set in motion a turning of the tides which has since resulted in an apparent u-turn by the Government with its declaration mid-November that the stake reduction would be brought forward to April 2019.

“People love to gamble,” says Mr Thomas, “they take pleasure from it.

But it has to be controlled; the heavier the gambling, the more it has to be controlled.”

Jimmy Thomas

INSPIRE

SCHOOL OF BUSINESS AND ECONOMICS

BUSINESS INSIGHT

by Jeff Prestridge

CSR and financial services: Applauding best practice As a personal finance journalist and economist, I have long argued in The Mail on Sunday that companies can be successful without just being focussed on profits.

Indeed, the ‘best’ businesses I deal with in my capacity as Personal Finance Editor – scrutinising every entity from utility giants through to pension providers and banks large and small – are often those that genuinely care about customers and the communities they operate in. In other words, they tick all the boxes when it comes to corporate social responsibility.

To give but just one example, I recently interviewed the boss of Coventry Building Society, a leading provider of savings accounts and mortgages. I have no personal dealings with the business, so when I praise it, it is purely because the mutual is a standard bearer for CSR. In a nutshell, it wants to do the right thing for the customer as well as be a good employer and a supporter of the cities and towns it has branches in (for the record, they extend well beyond the West Midlands). No stakeholder is disadvantaged.

This does not mean Coventry is a luddite in terms of the way it goes about its business. Far from it. Coventry still needs to make healthy profits so it can keep reinvesting in itself. Also, the mutual

fully embraces the modern age with customers being able to transact online, via phone or by post. But unlike many rivals, it is heavily investing in its branch network – to the tune of £35million. The raison d’etre is two-fold.

First, many of its customers – and not just the elderly – still want to deal with a living person, not a machine, when sorting out their finances. Coventry wants to welcome these people rather than shove them online as many rivals are keen to do.

At Daily Mail & General Trust where I work, we have all been given free reusable coffee cups. We also have annual ‘community champions’ awards to encourage us to go out and do good things (I won it in its inaugural year for raising £100,000 for the Brathay Trust charity).

To sum up, CSR isn’t just for charities – it can be a massive force for good (and profitable) within business too.

So Coventry is making its branches as customer friendly as possible – no security screens, plenty of staff on hand to help out with queries and private rooms that customers can use if they want to chat about sensitive financial matters, and at no extra expense to those who do so (often financial institutions offer preferred rates for online-only activities). There is even a space dedicated to community events.

Secondly, and crucially as far as CSR is concerned, Coventry acknowledges that it has more chance of thriving if it does all it possibly can to support the communities within which it operates.

Of course, there is more to CSR than community support – and businesses are now employing a multitude of ways to make themselves CSR fit for purpose.

More environmentally friendly. Good corporate governance.

Jeff Prestridge is a Distinguished Alumnus and Personal Finance Editor of The Mail on Sunday.

He can be contacted via Twitter @jeffprestridge

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Loughborough University School of Business and Economics