Ethics, CSR and Sustainability (ECSRS) Education in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region

Conceptualization, Contextualization, and Empirical Evidence

Noha El-Bassiouny,Dina El-Bassiouny,Ehab Mohamed,Mohamed Basuony

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000082241
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is undergoing significant socio-political and developmental transition. Although interest in corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the region is growing, little research has addressed corporate social responsibility education and its potential impact. CSR has an important role to play in the socio-economic development of the Middle East and North Africa due to the volatility and developmental needs of the region. Recent research has highlighted that the vitality of the institutional environment and the needs of multiple stakeholders in CSR are not necessarily consistent with the notion of CSR in the West.

This book compiles conceptual, contextual, and empirical research that addresses the concepts of CSR, ethics, and sustainability education in the MENA region, with a special emphasis on how educators can bridge to the Giving Voice to Values approach.

This book presents a much-needed portfolio of articles from authors based in Egypt, Morocco, the Sultanate of Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), highlighting first an overview of the topic and its corresponding publications in the MENA region, then presenting several exemplary cases related to ECSRS application in various countries.

1 A citation-based systematic literature review on ECSRS education in MENA region countries

Nisar Ahmad, Helena Knight and Irfan Butt

Introduction

The last couple of decades have seen a renewed interest from both the academic and the practitioner community in the role of ethics in business education, as a potential institutional antecedent of ethical business practice. The onset of the new millennium marked by globalization, and pervasive and increasingly complex social problems often attributable to dubious business practices, resolutely marked the end of the ambivalence of the role of business schools to promulgate ethical business practices (Smith, 2003). Early critics called out European and North American business schools as co-responsible for the aftermath of the infamous corporate scandals that uncovered unprecedented levels of unethical business practices (Adler, 2002; Ghoshal, 2005). Business schools were accused of having morphed into “brainwashing institutions” preoccupied with shareholder primacy, as prescribed by the Friedmanite ideology (see Friedman (1970) for Friedmanite ideology; see Matten and Moon (2004) for an overview of business schools’ criticisms) that perpetuated the amoral management stalemate in the late twentieth-century business practice (Carroll, 2001). Management education at universities was desperately out of sync with the emergent values-driven society that demands business responsibilities to transcend beyond those related to shareholders (Doh & Guay, 2006).

The landscape began to change significantly following the introduction of the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) by the United Nations (UN) in 2002, which endorsed education as one of the underpinning principles of sustainable development. The advocacy by one of the key global institutional players, which stated that academia represents a key institution that “most directly act as drivers of business behavior” (United Nations Compact, 2007) attracted the attention of a variety of actors. Universities from across the globe became PRME signatories (UNPRME, 2019), pledging to integrate the different principles to their operations. An increasing number of scholars began to examine the different factors of ECSRS education. Matten and Moon (2004) provide one of the earliest comprehensive overviews of the state of business ethics and responsibility education in Europe. The authors reject the view of the lack of capacity in European business schools to develop CSR education. CSR course provision is common and takes the form of either individual modules or specialized programs, typically at the executive and postgraduate levels. “Mainstreaming” CSR education, i.e., embedding it in the core of business education for optimal outcomes in the future of business, happens mainly through offering optional modules, but also embedding CSR into other modules and courses, and offering special seminars, industry speakers, and conferences. Practitioner speakers emerged as the most popular teaching method and faculty members as the focal driver of CSR education in European universities.

In the decade since the Matten and Moon (2004) review, and with the institutional support established, research on ethics in management education began to grow steadily. Consistent with Matten and Moon (2004), scholars have considered the different aspects related to institutional matters (Maloni et al., 2012; Wright & Wilton, 2012; Amaral et al., 2015) and the curriculum side (Niu et al., 2010; Nicholls et al., 2013; Lozano et al., 2015) of ethics integration in universities. Matters of terminology have also been considered. Matten and Moon (2004) suggest that in addition to the prevalent CSR terminology, ethics and sustainability are commonly employed. A study of the top 50 business schools listed by the Financial Times in 2006 also found that the most frequent combination in study requirements by MBA students is ethics, CSR and sustainability, or ECSRS, as the topic will be referred to in the rest of the chapter (Christensen et al., 2007).

Much of the existing studies focus on a single level of analysis, while the lack of multilevel analysis has been identified as a key gap in CSR research in general (Aguilera et al., 2007; Aguinis & Glavas, 2012). In the ECSRS education field, Setó-Pamies and Papaoikonomou (2016) integrate the institutional level (faculty, university), the curricular level (course design, modules) and the instrumental level (specific methodologies) as a multi-prong approach to improve the learning environment, and so instill pro-social attitudes, knowledge and behaviors in business school graduates. However, the framework omits an individual level of analysis, despite the incessant calls in extant literature for greater integration and improved understanding of the individual level as a single unit of analysis and as part of a multilevel study (Aguinis & Glavas, 2012). A more detailed understanding is crucial as it is the beliefs and attitudes of individuals that are the key predictors of outcomes from interventions (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1975; Ryan & Deci, 2000). Moreover, the emerging concept and methodology of Giving Voice to Values suggests that it is the individual level, the students’ personal beliefs and attitudes, and their education and training on how to enact their values effectively, that essentially determines whether the aggregate of macro- and meso-level measures results in a sustainable business practice. Yet, as lamented by Painter-Moorland and Siegers (2018: 807), “What is often missed in our considerations of ethics teaching is what our students already value when they walk into our classrooms.” Research thus needs to integrate students’ most basic beliefs and guide them to critically reflect upon them, to ensure that they align with the institutional and organizational-level efforts for better future business.

Moreover, as is the case with the general international CSR literature (Aguinis & Glavas, 2012; Pisani et al., 2017), much of the developments and research within the ECSRS education discipline have happened in Western countries. None of the CSR literature reviews focused on the region provide any insights into the state of ECSRS education nor do they highlight education as an area of concern for driving ethical business practice in the MENA countries. This appears to support the declaration by Izraeli made over two decades ago (1997: 1557) that “business ethics education is not institutionalised in academia in the Middle East” and “business ethics courses are not taught, very little research being conducted, there are not any specific publications on the issues, nor any regular training on business ethics.” El-Bassiouny et al. (2018) analyzed the status of integrating education for sustainable development in the Arab region for management education. To the best of our knowledge, there is no systematic literature review on the topic of ECSRS education in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

A systematic literature review (SLR) is a well-defined process with a comprehensive search technique, research questions, data extractions, and data presentations (Kitchenham et al., 2009) that is invaluable to provide a general picture of the developments in a particular field of study. The main advantage of an SLR would be that it is objective in article selection, all-inclusive, exhaustive, and repeatable, to name a few. Further, it has an explicit criterion for searching papers, including a thorough evaluation and discussion on quality research on a particular topic. SLRs were initially carried out mostly in medical science. However, it has now become a standard in many disciplines. Several studies using this methodology have been published in top-tier journals across many disciplines (e.g., Calma & Davies, 2016; Liu et al., 2013; Liket & Simaens, 2015) with a comprehensive review on CSR published in the Journal of Management by Aguinis and Glavas (2012).

Keeping in view the above discussion and to address the lacuna in ECSRS literature, the primary objective of this chapter is to carry out a systematic literature review based on citation analysis and a basic content analysis focused on ECSRS education in the MENA region. Accordingly, the study provides an initial outline of the developments in the field to date using a bibliometric lens. We examined 267 peer-reviewed articles which are focused on CSR in the MENA region. The study provides the leading sources of knowledge in the forms of the most influential papers, authors, and journals. The bibliometric data is complemented by a content analysis of papers that address education, as a specific subset of the overall ECSRS sample. Vital insights are provided into ECSRS education literature in the MENA region through an outline of prevalent research orientations, research design, data collection method, country, ECSRS concept, and level of analysis.

Accordingly, the study makes the following value-added contributions. A comprehensive, multilevel framework for analyzing ECSRS education is offered. This is achieved by integrating an individual level of analysis to the framework proposed by Setó-Pamies and Papaoikonomou (2016). This addition is supported through the results of the content analysis, which show that the individual level in terms of student beliefs and attitudes is the most widely addressed topic in the sample articles. This is the case even though (a) the individual level is the least analyzed level in CSR research (Aguinis & Glavas, 2012), and (b) the recently developed multilevel framework for the integration of ECSRS in management education omits the individual level (Setó-Pamies & Papaoikonomou, 2016). Accordingly, the chapter contributes insights towards the bridging the divide of the micro (individual) and macro (institutional) levels in management studies (Aguilera et al., 2007; Aguinis & Glavas, 2012). We further demonstrate that sustainability as a concept underpins the majority of the education-related studies reviewed in the region. In terms of geopolitical context, ECSRS education research focuses primarily on issues related to Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, and Lebanon, with no studies found for Algeria, Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Morocco, Syria, or Tunisia.

The rest of the study is organized as follows: section 2 provides the methodology used in the study. Citation analysis is discussed in section 3. Section 4 provides the detailed content analysis

Methodology

The primary objective of the current chapter is to carry out a systematic literature survey on CSR, specifically for education in the MENA countries. The analysis has been carried out using a systematic search process in searching for relevant articles. This is followed by a citation and content analysis of the selected education articles. A brief discussion about these methodologies is described in this section.

Article selection process

The literature related to CSR in the MENA region has been searched through well-known databases, namely ScienceDirect (SD), ProQuest Central (PQC), and Busin...