Corporate social responsibility

Next destination: responsibility

How do companies perceive their social responsibility? Students explore this question on a bicycle tour across NRW

In August 2019, eleven Bachelor students from the Departments of Management Sciences, Natural Sciences, and Social Policy and Social Security Studies covered almost 300 kilometres via bicycle in five days – on the Tour de CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility). Stefan Freitag, lecturer for special tasks and coordinator of the Bachelor of Business Management programme (Sankt Augustin) explains the aim of the tour: “We wanted to meet companies and other important actors such as think tanks, politicians or NGOs in their immediate fields of action and impact, in order to talk to them about CSR”. Other cyclists: Professor Norbert Seeger from the Department of Management Sciences and Holger Willing from the Centre for Ethics and Responsibility.

The group visited nine companies. The first stage destination: the Deutsche Post DHL Group in Bonn followed by the Rewe Group downstream in Cologne. The following day, the students visited the auditing and consulting company PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Bundesliga football club Fortuna Düsseldorf in Düsseldorf. Day three began at C&A in Düsseldorf and led towards Essen to the coworking space Impact Hub Ruhr. Then the first mountain stage: from Essen southwards, where the cyclists visited the Barmer health insurance company and the non-profit GmbH Collaborating Centre on Sustainable Consumption and Production (CSCP) in Wuppertal. The final stage began, after a longer stretch, at Bayer AG in Leverkusen and ended on the Domplatte, the pedestrian area by the cathedral in Cologne.

Insight on site

“The Tour de CSR was a great opportunity to gain insight into the implementation of CSR. It was very interesting to see how differently companies interpret the CSR concept”, reports Tanja Naumann, a student of natural sciences. One company stood out positively. “I had the impression that Deutsche Post already makes a considerable contribution to sustainable business and climate neutrality. This is clear through their increased use of electric vehicles and bikes for transport”, says Naumann.

The Tour de CSR is a joint project of the Department of Management Sciences and the Centre for Ethics and Responsibility (ZEV). A second round is being planned – when this is possible again.

More information: https://www.h-brs.de/tour-de-csr

From the lecture hall to the world: Professors and students visit companies by bike and talk about corporate responsibility in action