Educating Future Engineer-Managers About Corporate Social Responsibility Following the École de Montréal’s Perspective

Abstract

Relying on an assessment of CSR education in highly-ranked business schools and our own experience at the specialized MBA in Science and Engineering and in Technology Management at the business school of the University of Québec in Montreal, we argue that teaching CSR to engineer-managers should not be misconstrued as a plea for moral rectitude, or as a limited utilitarian recipe for managing issues or stakeholders—as it too often is. Rather, it should allow students to recognize corporations as social institutions so that they can gauge their impact on a social scale and better weigh the values that inform them. It should as well make them aware of the dilemmas engineers are facing as they practise the managerial profession. Our approach is founded on the premises of the Montreal CSR School, a socio-critical perspective, at a junction of the French and Canadian CSR scholarships.