Turku School of Economics – Educating responsible leaders

Purpose

Turku School of Economics (TSE) will develop the capabilities of students to be future generators of sustainable value for business and society at large and to work for an inclusive and sustainable global economy. Therefore, at TSE, our mission is to educate responsible leaders for national and international businesses and for the Finnish public sector. For us, educating responsible leaders means educating business and economics professionals that are future-oriented, critical thinkers with an ability to analyze both short and long-term consequences of their actions on other people, business, and society. We understand responsibility in broad terms, encompassing economic, social, and environmental responsibility.

Results

Globally, there appears an increasing demand for responsible professionals, decision-makers, and leaders. TSE aims to tackle the matter and provides 33 courses altogether (18 in Bachelor level, 15 in Master level), through which students may embed responsibility as a part of their learning experiences. The yearly number of TSE graduates is around 350 Bachelor’s degrees and 400 Master’s degrees, which in most cases contain responsibility studies.

Implementation

In line with the mission to educate responsible leaders, TSE has taken some important steps towards a more systematic approach to teaching and learning about responsibility. On a practical level, this means that all our Bachelor and Master level programs and specializations include a course that discusses responsibility. At the Bachelor level, all International Management and Entrepreneurship students take a course in Responsible Management. All Marketing and Value Chain Management students in turn take a course on Ethical Questions in Responsible Business. Similarly, in Business Law, and Accounting and Finance, students have courses of Corporate Taxation and Management Control, which timely look at these contents from the responsibility perspective. Moreover, many students are eager to specialize in responsibility in their Bachelor studies. For them, TSE provides several voluntary courses to specialize, such as Sustainable Development, Globalization and Corporate Responsibility, Corporate Responsibility Reporting, Ethical Issues in Finance and Responsible Investing, responsibility questions in Marketing Law, Integrated Marketing Communications, Social Entrepreneurship, and Environmental Economics and Natural Resources, to name a few.

In their Master studies, TSE students are expected to delve deeper into responsibility issues. All master students in both International Management and Entrepreneurship, Marketing and Value Chain Management, and Accounting and Finance have mandatory responsibility courses in their curriculum. Alongside mandatory courses, TSE urges its students into responsibility studies by providing plenty of voluntary courses in Master level alike. TSE offers Master level responsibility courses concerning e.g. Global Business Ethics, Making a Difference, The Strategic Role of Responsibility in Business, Responsible HRM, Climate Change and Trade in the Global South, Firms in Sustainability Transitions, Professional Integrity, Information Technology and Ethics, and The Consumer Culture and the Spirit of Marketing.

A wide and many-sided selection of responsibility courses provides required qualifications for TSE students to be future generators of sustainable value for business and society at large and to work for an inclusive and sustainable global economy.