Instilling Social Responsibility through Marketing Research Field Projects

Abstract

Social Responsibility is a topical issue in the business world these days. Organizations are going beyond donating money, and providing active guidance and expertise to help solve social problems. Although both educators and business leaders have stressed that business students need to be trained in social responsibility, until now, such training has mostly been restricted to courses in business ethics. In this paper we describe a more “hands-on” approach that synergistically combines aspects of classroom learning, real world experience and social responsibility. Currently, the effort is restricted to the traditional marketing research course that is taught in most business schools and it involves conducting semester long field projects to solve “real” management problems for nonprofit organizations that deal with social causes. We propose a conceptual framework to establish the need for such a pedagogic innovation then discuss the procedures followed with regard to the field projects and the types of organizations for whom we have conducted research. We finish with a discussion of the benefits and obstacles provided by such a course to various constituencies and also the obstacles that we, as faculty, face in implementing such courses.