Studying a Growing Niche: What Does Being a CR or Sustainability Professional Mean?
By Dr. Donato Calace
Corporate responsibility (or its sister concepts such as sustainability, corporate citizenship, and the like) may have won “the battle of ideas”, being awarded with the status of its own in business schools and having dedicated departments in the world largest companies, it still remains a tucked away exotic island compared to well established continents of other management disciplines, such as strategy or marketing.
Despite the explosion of the field in the last 20 years, we know very little about the exotic flora and fauna that populates these departments. Who are these CR professionals? How do they work together? How do they differ from other business professionals?
My colleague from Cass Business School, Szilvia Mosonyi, is writing a roadmap to this emerging occupation of CR professionals. She presented her preliminary results based on interviews with 40+ CR in-house professionals and consultants in a report available here. In detail, Szilvia observed the dynamics of the client-consultant relationship, pointing out similarities and peculiarities that characterise the CR field.
Dr. Donato Calace is an ESG Specialist at eRevalue, a data technology company, where he is currently writing a new ESG Ontology for applying Natural Language Processing technologies to corporate reports, regulations, social media, and news.
