ETH PhD Academy on Sustainability and Technology 2013
Adressing Ecological Sustainability: A Matter of Stakeholder Management and Competitiveness
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June 2nd – 7th, 2013, ETH Zurich
Addressing ecological sustainability is at the core of organizational strategy. Not only is it the responsibility of companies to contribute to ecological challenges such as climate change but many stakeholders expect management to play an active role in stabilizing the world’s ecosystems. This brings sustainability to a cornerstone a competitive strategy. This PhD-Academy focuses on the interfaces of environmental challenges, stakeholder management, and corporate financial performance.
The aim of the annual ETH PhD-Academy is to promote excellent PhD-research in the area of sustainability and technology, and to develop responsible leaders for tomorrow. While the 2013 Academy focuses on stakeholder management and ecological sustainability in general, we would especially like to encourage applications from PhD-students working on organizational strategies and climate change. The five day Academy concentrates on improving the research design and methodology of participants’ PhDprojects. We invite PhD-students with a background in strategic management, stakeholder management or sustainable finance to participate in the Academy. Besides content-related discussions, students will get valuable feedback from their peers and three professors with extensive organizational research experience:
Impressions
R. Edward Freeman is the Elis and Signe Olsson Professor of business administration at the Darden School of Business at University of Virginia. Freeman is also a professor of religious studies and a faculty advisor to UVA's Institute for Practical Ethics and adjunct professor of stakeholder management. Moreover he is academic director of the Business Roundtable Institute for Corporate Ethics.
Freeman received his BA in mathematics and philosophy (1973) from Duke University and his PhD in philosophy (1978) from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Washington University, St. Louis. In March 2010, the University of Virginia Board of Visitors named Freeman as a University Professor. Freeman is the first faculty member in Darden’s history to be given this rare honor, accorded to less than 20 professors among the more than 2,200 professors at UVA.
From 1987 to 2009 he was Director of Darden's Olsson Center for Applied Ethics, one of the world's leading academic centers for the study of ethics. Before coming to the Darden School, Freeman taught at the University of Minnesota and the Wharton School. Freeman is the author and editor of more than 20 volumes in the areas of stakeholder management, business strategy and business ethics as well as more than 100 articles in a wide variety of publications. He has received a number of awards for his publications and excellence in teaching, and, in 2008, an honorary doctorate from Universidad Pontificia Comillas in Spain for his work on stakeholder theory and business ethics. external pagemore info
Sandra Waddock is the Galligan Chair of Strategy and Professor of Management in the Carroll School of Management at Boston College. She is a co-founder of the Leadership for the Change Program: Sustainability, Responsibility, Community at Boston College and the Initiative for Responsible Investing. She currently serves on the Steering Committee of the Global Organizational Learning and Development (GOLDEN) Network for Sustainability.
Dr. Waddock received her BA from Northeastern University, an MA degree from Boston College, and the MBA (1979) and DBA (1985) from Boston University. She is the author and editor of eight books, and has published more than 100 articles on corporate citizenship, responsibility management systems, corporate responsibility, and management education.
In her academic career, Waddock has worked as a consultant and board member for different institutions such as the Social Issues in Management Division of the Academy of Management, the International Association of Business and Society, and the UN Global Compact Task Force on the Principles for Responsible Management Education. For five years she worked with the US. Consortium for Faculty Development in Central and Eastern Europe to help build management education in the emerging economies of central and Eastern Europe.
Waddock has received numerous awards for her research and teaching such as the 2005 Faculty Pioneer Award for External Impact by the the Aspen Institute and World Resources Institute, and the 2011 OBTS David L. Bradford Outstanding Educator Award. Widely published, Dr. Waddock's research interests are in the area of macro-system change, corporate responsibility, management education, and multi-sector collaboration. Her papers on corporate citizenship and responsibility have appeared in The Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Executive, Strategic Management Journal, and Business & Society, and The Journal of Corporate Citizenship. external pagemore info
Volker Hoffmann is an associate professor for sustainability and technology at the Department of Management, Technology, and Economics of ETH Zurich.
He received a diploma in chemical engineering from ETH Zurich in 1997 and a diploma in business administration from the University of Hagen, Germany, in 1999. In 1996/97 and 1999/2000 he worked as a visiting scholar and scientist at MIT where he investigated uncertainty propagation in large scale process models for the chemical industry (group of Gregory J. McRae). In 2001, he obtained his Ph.D. from ETH Zurich with a thesis on multi-objective decision making under uncertainty in chemical process design (group of Konrad Hungerbühler). Before joining the faculty of ETH Zurich in 2004, he was a project manager at McKinsey & Company where he worked in the chemical and electricity industry. He focused on strategy development for European utility companies, especially in the light of upcoming greenhouse gas regulations. During his career, Volker Hoffmann received several scholarships and awards including a German National Academic Foundation Scholarship (1994-97), an Ernest-Solvay-Scholarship (1996/97), and an Exchange Fellow Scholarship of the Alliance for Global Sustainability (1999/2000).
Volker Hoffmann's research at ETH Zurich centers on corporate strategies with respect to climate change, with a focus on climate policy and innovation. Recent research results are being published in journals such as the Journal of Management Studies, Global Environmental Change, Climate Policy, Energy Policy, the Journal of Industrial Ecology, the European Management Journal, Business Strategy & the Environment, Policy Sciences, Environmental Science & Policy, and Ecological Economics.
This academy was supported by
- ABB
- Mercator Foundation Switzerland
- oikos Foundation
- Syngenta