How should a sustainability manager decide whether to continue working with a supplier in a region where local law and EU law point in different directions? What can a compliance officer do when commercial targets and environmental or human rights obligations sit in tension? These are the kinds of questions that confront practitioners working in responsible business and sustainability roles in multinational corporations (MNCs). They sit at the intersection of ethics, law, strategy, and cultural context—and they rarely admit clean answers.

This course examines such questions from the inside. Rather than approaching corporate responsibility through financial frameworks and headline debates alone, we work at ground level: alongside the managers, sustainability specialists, and frontline staff who must translate normative commitments into operational decisions, often under conditions of commercial pressure, legal complexity, and cultural difference.

The course brings together academic perspectives and practitioner experience. Students will engage with foundational and contemporary debates in business ethics and sustainability management, and with the rapidly evolving body of mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence legislation—including the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), the German Supply Chain Act (LkSG), and other instruments emerging across jurisdictions. Students will also meet senior practitioners from leading MNCs, who will share how these issues look from inside the corporate organisation—what works, what does not, and where the difficulties lie.

By the end of the course, students should have a clearer view of what responsible practice in global business actually involves, what kind of professional students wish to become in this field, and how to navigate the dilemmas students will inevitably encounter.

By the end of the course, students will have:

• understood why MNCs and the people who work in them face growing pressure to act responsibly, and identified the principal sources of that pressure—regulators, investors, civil society, employees, consumers, etc;
• engaged with the main theoretical lenses used to make sense of corporate responsibility, including corporate responsibility and sustainability, business and human rights, stakeholder theory, and corporate accountibility;
• developed a working understanding of the current generation of mandatory due diligence legislation and what it means in practical terms for global sustainability and compliance teams;
• examined, through case studies and direct engagement with practitioners, what responsible practice looks like in real corporate settings—including the difficulties that are not visible from the outside;
• begun to articulate studentsr own position on what responsible practice should mean, and to defend that position constructively under challenge.

The course is designed to develop the following skills and competencies:

• Analytical thinking under complexity. Decisions in this field are rarely binary. Students will practise disaggregating complex situations, weighing competing claims, and reasoning through trade-offs without resorting to slogans or formulae.
• Stakeholder/rightsholder engagement and dialogic competence. Students will work directly with the challenge of engaging stakeholders/rightsholders whose interests and cultural backgrounds differ—through case works and conversations with practitioners.
• Critical and reflective thinking. Exposure to diverse and sometimes opposing viewpoints will require students to examine studentsr own assumptions, articulate studentsr own perspective, and revise it where the argument warrants.
• Presentation, discussion, and debate. Students will present, discuss, and argue in most sessions, building confidence and competence in structured argumentation.
• Global mindset. Students will collaborate effectively in intercultural teams; develop discursive and negotiation skills in international contexts; engage constructively with diversity and difference; and build substantive knowledge of how global social and economic systems are interconnected.

Most of the learning in this course takes place in the room—in discussion, case studies, and particularly in the guest practitioner sessions, which cannot be reconstructed afterwards. Attendance is therefore a firm requirement. Students must be present for at least 80% of scheduled sessions; students who fall below this threshold are de-registered from the course. Missed sessions will also affect studentsr participation grade and may affect graded work conducted in class.

The course runs as an interactive seminar. Sessions typically combine:

• focused conceptual inputs to introduce frameworks and debates;
• case studies on contemporary corporate dilemmas, drawing on both established cases and current developments;
• guest practitioner sessions with senior representatives from MNC sustainability, ethics, and human rights functions, structured to encourage genuine dialogue rather than rehearsed presentations;
• stakeholder dialogue simulations exercises that place students in the position of different actors—corporate, civil society, regulatory, investor, rights-holder—and require students to argue from each;
• reflective work in which students connect theoretical material, practitioner insights, and studentsr own developing perspective.

Individual assessment — 50%

• Active class participation: 25%
• Reflection paper (5 pages): 25%

 Group assessment — 50%

• Simulation performance: 25%
• Group case presentation: 25%

No written exam.

The purpose of the assignments—particularly the reflection paper—is to develop and express studentsr own analytical voice. All submissions are checked for plagiarism and AI use; where authorship is in question, students may be invited to an audit interview.

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