How can research and pedagogy become interlinked?
Thanks to the establishment of several research chairs, scientific and academic activities improve the field of pedagogy and enrich courses in economics.
Over the past fifteen years, research has played a fundamental role in the strategic spectrum of French higher education schools of management. Using its development in France, ESDES pursued its growth strategy by creating a modern research centre essentially focused on diverse scientific works and the mixed fertilisation resulting from the combination of education and academic production.
At the heart of ESDES’ research policy lies a fundamental, institutional mechanism of promotion and motivation: the research chairs. Their essential aim is to draw up original research projects on topical issues which require a scientific reasoning likely to enrich the state of the art, both for the academic community and companies and/or partner institutions. These chairs also foster the development of groundbreaking initiatives (within the school or in partnership with other economic and social players) through which new management and economic tools and materials become accessible to the general public.
A final large, international and mixed conference
More specifically, as part of its research chairs, ESDES aims to establish a series of research seminars intended for both academics and companies, conduct applied research (case studies, popular science articles, etc.), include student participation in the companies involved and offer teaching seminars for students. It also seeks to present the chair’s results during large conferences, publish academic articles on the chosen research topic and organise a final large, international and mixed conference (with researchers as well as social and economic players) with prestigious guests and the publication of the resulting collective publication.
The process of enriching pedagogy through research is not however limited to chairs and encompasses all the academic activities undertaken by lecturers, from their teaching role to their research activities, through the use and analysis of the progress achieved in their main area of expertise.
Published works as tools for university lectures
In order to illustrate this search for academic complementarity, let’s take the example of the Economy and Society department. Within this faculty, research is disseminated in two ways through courses offered by the ESDES business school which strongly promote research activities.
“The 3 key themes within the ESDES laboratory : societal responsibility, ethics and social entrepreneurship, finance, corporate government and theory of the firm, economics and management of environmental innovation”
The first way in which research is scattered is through the state of the art; it is closely linked to the subjects studied by the researchers. These activities cover the following three fields defined by the ESDES research laboratory: societal responsibility, ethics and social entrepreneurship; finance, corporate government and the theory of the firm; and finally, economics and management of environmental innovation. For each article — and more generally, at the start of any research project — an extensive literature review is conducted. In this way, the first part of the article can often be used as theoretical and empirical examples in a lecture.
Thorough analysis of large companies’ environmental strategies
The second way in which research is disseminated is through its results, which facilitate the lecture, especially when the latter is centred on the specific nature of an economic or organisational context (particularly through empirical analyses). Courses on sustainable development or on social economy benefit, for example, from the laboratory’s research activities and are shaped by applied case studies or scientific articles. The resulting contribution to literature helps, furthermore, to structure some of the other related courses on environmental strategies implemented in European firms (clean technology, green washing, compliance with the environmental code) as well as the normative aspect of the social responsibility of organisations. It is difficult to assess the resulting number of classes, but these research activities have significantly improved the teaching content. The latter shall be taught in 2014–2015 to 3rd-year students under the title “Corporate social responsibility (CSR) and governance of global firms.”
As for courses on general economics, they lead us to analyse the statistics deriving from the development of the productive fabric. For all courses on economic and social policy as well as on industrial organisation, we have therefore used academic references focused on the growth and structural development of French firms as well as the main conclusions of the articles we have recently published on the subject.
Virgile Chassagnon
Full Professor of Economics and scientific director of ESDES.
