• Structure an Action-Based Plan
• Understand the roles of Social Enterprises and Sustainability management practices.
• Develop critical perspectives on fundamental arguments about economic and social policies.
• Get an introductory grasp of complexity theory and its relevance to the development of social policies.
• Establish a solid cost/benefit framework for the analysis of internal sustainable management practices.

Course content:

There is a clear recent shift in the development economics literature from a focus on economic growth towards a more integrated framework that incorporates such concepts such as well-being, sustainability, and other non-economic factors. Even though economic growth is still a necessary condition for development, local policies can increasingly rely on social entrepreneurship and sustainable business policies for improved development. This course invites graduate students to delve into different business practices that can transform the socioeconomic landscape and to use recent theoretical contribution in different fields such as economics, complexity theory, and management. The course explores critically social entrepreneurship and sustainability to analyze its economic and social impact.  The course is structured to provide students with a series of coherent modules. The first module introduces concepts in development economics and  complexity theory. The main idea is to incorporate novel ideas into more traditional growth theories. We use a broader perspective on development, using concepts from complexity theory and other disciplines to provide a solid theoretical framework. Students are expected to tackle sophisticated theoretical papers in this module.  The second module introduces concepts from social entrepreneurship and explores case studies, discussing its possible impacts and shortcomings in promoting local development. We introduce concepts from complexity theory into the analysis of social entrepreneurship with the goal of establishing the boundaries of local development from social enterprises. The last module explores the role of companies in promoting sustainable ideas by transforming the socioeconomical environment, analyzing the possibility that private firms can be promoters of change by changing internal management practices. We use a Business as Usual to a Future Sustainable Business framework to explore the role of firms in changing the international business context - one of the case studies for this module explores changes in a multinational bank that introduced a credit score system based on sustainability of the agricultural sector.   The course is fairly interactive and relies on the reading of the material and the experience brought by the students.

Course structure:

Preliminary assignment: Initial idea for the final Action-Based Plan. 
 
Class 1 Determining the main indicators of development. 
Class 2 A development economics model. 
Class 3 Macroeconomics and climate change. 
Class 4 Looking at Data. What does it tells us about the world? 
Class 5 A Primer on Complexity Theory 
 
Feedback: Approval of Action-Based Plan. 
 
Class 6 Social Networks and Poverty.  
Class 7 Social Entrepreneurship: Concepts and Ideas. 
Class 8 Social Entrepreneurship: Cases. 
Class 9 Is there a sustainability imperative?  
Class 10 Sustainability: Business Cases and Firm Valuation. 
Class 11 Comprehensive Review 

Preliminary Assignment: To help students get maximum value from ISUP courses, instructors provide a reading or a small number of readings or video clips to be read or viewed before the start of classes with a related task scheduled for class 1 in order to 'jump-start' the learning process.

Course timetable is available on https://www.cbs.dk/uddannelse/international-summer-university-programme-isup/courses-and-exams

We reserve the right to cancel the course if we do not get enough applications. This will be communicated on https://www.cbs.dk/uddannelse/international-summer-university-programme-isup/courses-and-exams in March 2021.

Mandatory readings:

Additional relevant readings:

Duflo's Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty. Journal of Economic Literature, 50(1), 103-114. (4) – Lectures 3-5 
Axelrod, R. (1986). An evolutionary approach to norms. American political science review, 80(04), 1095-1111. (13) – Lecture 4. 
Ostrom, E. (2014). Collective action and the evolution of social norms. Journal of Natural Resources Policy Research, 6(4), 235-252. (19) – Lecture 4. 
Hidalgo, C. and Haussman, R. (2009) The building blocks of economic complexity (20) 
Edited by Partha Sarathi Dasgupta, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom, and approved May 1, 2009 (received for review January 28 
The New Economics of Sustainable Development: A Briefing for Policy Makers. Chapter 2. (3) – Lecture 2. 
The global financial crisis and the evolution of markets, institutions and regulation, Journal of Banking & Finance 35, 502–511, (Moshirian, F., 2011). (12) – Lecture 10. Corporate Social Responsibility in the International Banking Industry, Journal of Business Ethics, 86(2), 159-175 (Scholtens, B., 2009) (13) – Lecture 10. 
Keeping Ethical Investment Ethical: Regulatory Issues for Investing for Sustainability, Journal of Business Ethics, 87(4), 555-572. (Richardson, B.J., 2009) (14) – Lecture 10. Observing and Learning from Social Entrepreneurship: Transparency, Organizational Structure, and the Role of Leadership (A. Steven Dietz & Constance D. Porter, 2009) (8) – Lecture 6.