Articulating 'Global Social Responsibility': The Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) as a Global Governmental Project

The voluntary ethos of the business-driven Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) movement is becoming increasingly pervasive at global governance level, primarily through high-profile, agenda-setting initiatives such as the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises and the UN Global Compact (GC). In this paper, we set out to examine the case of a GC-related initiative, the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) - a list of six principles meant to address the challenges of sustainability through the decidedly loose notion of 'global social responsibility'. We understand PRME as a governmental project meant to promote and implement GC values in management education, and study how it is designed to 'responsibilize' different subjects: proactively responsible management education faculty members; business academic institutions as 'good citizens'; students as future businesspeople ('future generators of sustainable value for business and society', as formulated in principle 1); and plenty of other 'stakeholders', including almost paradixically, business corporations. We then proceed to discuss the inherent ambiguity that characterizes PRME and the core concepts it refers to, before concluding on how this ambiguity, leading to a rather 'weak governmentality', potentially opens up spaces for re-articulations of what 'social responsibility' should consist of, along notions of accountability and regulation.