• 1. Understand, explain, and discuss how companies collaborate, commodify, and communicate their activities related to humanitarianism and development.
• 2. Students are expected to develop a theoretically-informed, critical understanding of what corporate helping in humanitarianism and development can mean for business and society. 2. Analyze corporate helping processes based on selected theories, concepts and ideas from the course literature
• 3. Critically evaluate corporate helping processes with sensitivity to their expression in diverse contexts and from multiple perspectives.
• 4. Compare and contrast the different theoretical perspectives as well as the different understandings of private and humanitarian actors, and discuss the implications thereof
• 5. Critically analyze relevant cases of corporate involvement in humanitarianism and/or development and reflect on its implications.

Businesses are increasingly taking on direct roles in development as well as humanitarian action, not merely as donors to the charitable work of others, but as practitioners in their own right, sometimes in collaboration with non-profit actors. Whether students are going to roles in the corporate social responsibility divisions of large corporations or in development agencies and nonprofits, they will face the blurred boundaries between market and humanitarian spheres. The purpose of this course is to equip students with the theoretical and analytical tools that allow them to understand how corporations engage with humanitarianism, why, and to what effects.

As a result of the changing landscape of corporate development practice, our students require a broader interdisciplinary grounding. In addition to insights on the role of business in development from organization and management studies, this course provides students with relevant context from political science, development studies, critical geography, and media/communication studies.

The course starts with an introduction to the international organizational landscape around the humanitarian-development nexus as well as the traditional and changing roles of companies therein. After the introductory session, the remainder of the course is organized in three thematic blocs: 

1. Collaboration: Many companies make charitable donations to humanitarian causes, yet there is a strong tendency for companies to be increasingly involved in the actual delivery of assistance, for example by offering their own products or services for sale to frontline relief organizations or through transformational partnerships that seek to develop innovative solutions. This first bloc explores the various ways in which companies collaborate with humanitarian actors and discusses the challenges inherent in such partnerships.

1. Communication: Our frame of communication arises from engaged debates in the fields of media and communication studies and business where scholars try to theorize the relationships between media and socio-cultural forms. On the basis of a fifty year genealogy of humanitarian communication, Chouliaraki’s concept of post-humanitarianism charts a shift in communications demonstrating a show of pity for the distant other to those created by ironic spectators who avoid larger questions of structural inequality and justification for action. Corporate communications must engage with the shifting realities of the media and the humanitarian landscapes and learn how to communicate their helping. What kinds of challenges do corporate humanitarian communications create as well as what kinds of global challenges do they attempt to engage with a response?

1. Commodification: Humanitarian ‘helping’ itself can become a brand. Our frame of mediatization arises from an engaged debate in the field of media and communication studies where scholars try to theorize the relationships between media and socio-cultural forms commodity, as understood by Ibert et al. as ‘a composite of the facets and qualities of a good or service commodity that is deliberately chosen, integrated and communicated by actors as a coherent entity.’ Humanitarian branding is important for all aspects of business and development studies. Strategic motivations for business to enter the humanitarian sphere, which include the cultivation of goodwill from consumers and the expansion of a brand into new markets, can provide a profit rationale for charitable or not-for-profit actions.

Overall, the course enables students to develop theoretically-informed, critical understandings of what corporate helping in humanitarianism and development can mean for business and society.

Students should anticipate that this will be a reading-heavy course as the content is linked to critical reflection on the existing academic knowledge base. Course reading will come from academic books and articles such as these:

• Andonova, L. B. (2017). Governance Entrepreneurs: International Organizations and the Rise of Global Public-Private Partnerships. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Andreu M(2018) A responsibility to profit? Social impact bonds as a form of ‘humanitarian finance’. New Political Science 40(4): 708–726.
• Ballesteros, L., Useem, M., & Wry, T. (2017). Masters of disasters? An empirical analysis of how societies benefit from corporate disaster aid. Academy of Management Journal, 60(5), 1682-1708.
• Banerjee, S. B. (2008). Corporate social responsibility: The good, the bad and the ugly. Critical sociology, 34(1), 51-79.
• Brei, V., & Böhm, S. (2011). Corporate social responsibility as cultural meaning management: A critique of the marketing of ‘ethical’ bottled water. Business Ethics, 20(3), 233–252. https:/​/​doi.org/​10.1111/​j.1467-8608.2011.01626.x
• Chun, R., Argandoña, A., Choirat, C., Siegel, D.S., 2019. Corporate Reputation: Being Good and Looking Good. Bus. Soc. 58, 1132–1142. https:/​/​doi.org/​10.1177/​0007650319826520
• Hotho, J., Girschik, V., 2019. Corporate engagement in humanitarian action: Concepts, challenges, and areas for international business research. Crit. Perspect. Int. Bus. 15, 201–218. https:/​/​doi.org/​10.1108/​cpoib-02-2019-0015
• Kolk, A., & Lenfant, F. (2015). Partnerships for peace and development in fragile states: Identifying missing links. Academy of Management Perspectives, 29(4), 422-437. Krishna, A., Rajan, U., 2009. Cause Marketing: Spillover Effects of Cause-Related Products in a Product Portfolio. Manag. Sci. 55, 1469–1485. https:/​/​doi.org/​10.1287/​mnsc.1090.1043
• Richey, L.A. and A.C. Budabin (2021) Batman Saves the Congo: Business, Disruption and the Politics of Development, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Vestergaard, A., Murphy, L., Morsing, M., & Langevang, T. (2019). Cross-sector partnerships as capitalism’s new development agents: Reconceiving impact as empowerment. Business & Society, doi:10.1177/​0007650319845327.