Thursday, April 7th, the iMBA and the Faculty of Economics of the UV will be holding a seminar addressing the sensitivity of consumers to CSR in the retailing sector.
Following in the footsteps of the Managerial Marketing Seminar organised a few weeks ago, the International Master’s Degree in Business Administration (iMBA) will be holding a new conference shortly after the Easter holidays.
The seminar, geared towards Marketing Research, is entitled «Corporate Social Responsibility and Irresponsibility: How do Consumers React to Ambivalent CSR Information? Application in the Retailing Sector». Leading the seminar will be Valérie Swaen, Professor of Marketing and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) at the Louvain School of Management (Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium) and at the IESEG School of Management (France).
The seminar will be held on April 7th in the Villalonga Room (1st Floor of the Faculty of Economics), from 1pm to approximately 2:15pm.
Postgraduate marketing students, PhD students, undergraduates in their last year and academics willing to attend should submit their registration beforehand at imba@uv.es. The number of seats available are limited.
Abstract of the seminar:
Consumers appear to be particularly sensitive to corporate social responsibility (CSR), which can be broadly conceptualized as companies’ status and activities with regards to their perceived societal obligations. The CSR movement has spawned a veritable flurry of communication activities to manage perceptions of corporate social responsibility to society. Yet at the same time, the world has witnessed some of the greatest cases of seemingly corporate irresponsibility (CSI) with environmental disasters such as the BP oil disaster, huge human abuses in some parts of the world, such as illustrated in the Rana Plaza case, and more recently the VW’s ongoing emissions scandal. Quite surprisingly, irresponsible corporate activities have received limited attention in the CSR literature until recently. In this context, the main purpose of this research project is to explore how consumers’ corporate responsibility and irresponsibility perceptions about their main food retailer interrelate to impact consumers’ value perceptions and consumer-based brand equity.
Full Bio of Professor Swaen:
Valérie Swaen has a PhD in Management Science from the Université catholique de Louvain and she is Professor of Marketing and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) at the Louvain School of Management (Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium) and at IESEG School of Management (France). She studied corporate social responsibility from different fields of management (marketing, organizational behavior, strategy, leadership, and accounting), but her main research interest concerns stakeholders’ reactions to CSR communication. She has published academic papers in international journals such as Marketing Letters, Journal of Business Ethics, International Journal of Management Reviews, and Management Accounting Research, among others. She has also contributed to the edition of various special issues of international journals on the topic of CSR. She is the deputee director of the CCMS ("Center of Excellence on Consumers, Markets and Society") and the head of the Louvain CSR Network of the Louvain School of Management. She holds or has held different Chairs in CSR (for Belgacom, GDF SUEZ and the Philippe de Woot Award for the best Master thesis related to CSR).
Related working paper – Using infomercials to communicate about CSR: A way to enhance credibility?
