The Aspen Institute Center for Business Education (Aspen CBE) announced today the winners of the 2010 Faculty Pioneer and Dissertation Proposal Awards. Dubbed the "Oscars of the business school world" by the The Financial Times, the Faculty Pioneers recognition celebrates business school instructors who have demonstrated leadership and risk-taking in integrating social, environmental and ethical issues into the MBA curriculum. The Dissertation Proposal Award seeks to identify innovative Ph.D. research in core business disciplines that considers the interdependence between business decision-making and a wider societal or environmental context.

"We are thrilled to honor these trailblazing individuals," said Nancy McGaw, Deputy Director of the Aspen Institute Business & Society Program and Director of Aspen CBE. "They are the scholars and teachers leading the way to ensure that our future business leaders are ready to tackle the financial, social and environmental challenges they will face in their everyday business decisions."

The 2010 Faculty Pioneer Award winners are:

• In the "Lifetime Achievement" category: James Post

The 2010 Dissertation Proposal Award (DPA) winners are Lite Nartey, a PhD candidate in management at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, and Vishal Agrawal who recently completed his PhD in Operations Management at Georgia Tech and has joined the faculty of the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University.

This year's Faculty Pioneer winners were selected from nominations submitted by respected academics and business executives from around the world; self-nominations for the Faculty Pioneer awards are not considered. Finalists are selected by Aspen Institute staff in consultation with prominent academics. Faculty Pioneer winners are selected by a panel of corporate judges and the DPA winners are selected by academic judges. This year's final-round judges are:

• Dan Bross, Senior Director of Corporate Citizenship, Microsoft


• Ray Fisman, Columbia University, Columbia Business School


• Deborah Holmes, Global Director of Corporate Responsibility, Ernst & Young


• Lauren Iannarone, Head of Sustainability, Barclays (formerly with Shell)


• Mitch Jackson, Director of Environmental Affairs and Sustainability, FedEx


• Rachel Kowal, New York University, Leonard N. Stern School of Business


• Donald Schepers, Baruch College - CUNY, Zicklin School of Business


• Valerie Smith, Vice President of Environmental Affairs, Citigroup


• Larry Zicklin, New York University, Leonard N. Stern School of Business

The winners and finalists will be honored as part of the 2nd Aspen in New York Business & Society Annual Forum, October 26-27, 2010 (www.AspenInNYC.org). In addition to public recognition, Faculty Pioneers and Dissertation Proposal Award winners receive an honorarium.

To learn more about these two award programs, please visit www.aspencbe.org/awards/index.html.

About the Aspen Institute Center for Business Education
The Aspen Institute Center for Business Education equips business leaders for the 21st century with a new management paradigm--the vision and knowledge to integrate corporate profitability and social value. As part of The Aspen Institute Business & Society Program, the Center aims to foster values-based leadership, encouraging individuals to reflect on the ideals and ideas that define a good society, and to provide a neutral and balanced venue for discussing and acting on critical issues. www.AspenCBE.org

The Aspen Institute mission is twofold: to foster values-based leadership, encouraging individuals to reflect on the ideals and ideas that define a good society, and to provide a neutral and balanced venue for discussing and acting on critical issues. The Aspen Institute does this primarily in four ways: seminars, young-leader fellowships around the globe, policy programs, and public conferences and events. The Institute is based in Washington, DC; Aspen, Colorado; and on the Wye River on Maryland's Eastern Shore. It also has an international network of partners. For more information, visit www.aspeninstitute.org.

FACULTY PIONEER AND DISSERTATION PROPOSAL AWARD WINNERS

Faculty Pioneer: Lifetime Achievement
James Post
Boston University

James Post is the John F. Smith, Jr. Professor in Management at the School of Management at Boston University. He holds degrees in both law (JD) and management (MBA, PhD), and teaches strategic management, corporate governance, and professional ethics. Over his 35-year career at Boston University, Dr. Post has held leadership positions in the doctoral program, public & nonprofit management program, and management policy department, focusing most on corporate governance and ethics.

Dr. Post is the author of more than 100 publications on business, public policy issues, and public affairs management and has been a commentator on television (CNN, CNBC, Fox, Bloomberg) and is often quoted in print media, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, International Herald Tribune, and San Francisco Chronicle. He is author, co-author, or editor of 20 books, including Managing Environmental Issues: A Casebook (with Rogene Buchholz and Alfred Marcus) and Private Management and Public Policy (with Lee Preston). The Academy of Management commended Private Management and Public Policy for "its lasting contribution to the study of business and society." Additionally, Dr. Post's research on how companies manage stakeholder relationships has been published by Stanford University Press (Redefining the Corporation: Stakeholder Management and Organizational Wealth). He served as series editor of Research in Corporate Social Performance and Policy, an international research series published by Elsevier, and as co-author of a leading text in the business and society field, Business & Society: Corporate Strategy, Public Policy, Ethics, with Anne T. Lawrence and James Weber.

Faculty Pioneer: Lifetime Achievement
David Vogel
University of California at Berkeley

David Vogel is the Solomon P. Lee Professor of Business Ethics at the Haas School of Business and Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley. He received his doctorate in Political Science from Princeton University and has been a member of the Berkeley faculty since 1973.

Dr. Vogel's books include Ethics and Profits: The Crisis of Confidence in American Business (1976), Lobbying the Corporation: Citizen Challenges to Business Authority (1978), Ethics in the Education of Business Managers (1980), National Styles of Regulation: Environmental Policy I Great Britain and the United States (1986), Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in America (1989), and Trading Up: Consumer and Environmental Regulation in the Global Economy (1995). His most recent book, The Market for Virtue; The Potential and Limits of Corporate Social Responsibility (2005), received the prestigious best book award from the Social Issues Division of the Academy of Management in 2008 and has been translated into French, Korean, and Japanese.

Dr. Vogel is co-editor of Corporations and Their Critics: Issues and answers on the problems of corporate social responsibilities (1980) and Global Challenges in Responsible Business (2010). Additionally, he contributed to the Oxford Handbook on Corporate Social Responsibility (2010) and Creative Capitalism: A Conversation (2008).

Dr. Vogel's writings on corporate social responsibility have appeared in Forbes.com, Harvard Business Review, California Management Review, Business and Society, the Social Innovation Review, Learning Perspectives, Ethical Corporation, the BSR Weekly, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Sciences Humaines.

He has lectured widely on corporate responsibility to academic and professional audiences in the United States, Europe, and Asia and is affiliated with CSR programs in Italy, Great Britain and France. Since 1982, Dr. Vogel has served as editor of the California Management Review, which has prominently featured managerially relevant research on business and society, environmental management, and corporate social responsibility.

Faculty Pioneer
Mark Swilling
University of Stellenbosch (South Africa)

Mark Swilling is Professor of Sustainable Development in the School of Public Leadership (www.sopmp.sun.ac.za) at Stellenbosch University and Academic Director of the Sustainability Institute (www.sustainabilityinstitute.net). He is responsible for the design and implementation of a Master's and Doctoral Program in Sustainable Development that gets delivered at the Sustainability Institute in Stellenbosch, South Africa. He also heads up the TSAMA Hub, a new Center for the transdisciplinary study of sustainability and complexity at Stellenbosch University; the TSAMA Hub hosts a new Doctoral Program that involves collaboration among seven of Stellenbosch University's departments. Professor Swilling has written widely on social, environmental and economic issues; he has published 37 articles in accredited journals, 8 books/edited collections, 59 peer reviewed articles in edited books, and has two books in publication. Professor Swilling is a member of the United Nation's Environment Program's International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management. Professor Swilling obtained his PhD from the University of Warwick in 1994.

Faculty Pioneer: Rising Star
Aaron K. ("Ronnie") Chatterji
Duke University

Aaron K. ("Ronnie") Chatterji is currently serving as a Senior Economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) where he focuses on entrepreneurship, small business and innovation policy. Professor Chatterji is on leave from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business where he is an Associate Professor of Strategy. His work investigates some of the most important forces shaping our global economy and society: entrepreneurship, innovation, and the expanding social mission of business. He is especially interested in the fluid boundaries between government and business, and how public policies interact with the activities of responsible companies, social entrepreneurs, and creative customers.

Professor Chatterji has been an advisor for Duke's Program for Entrepreneurs and Duke Engage; a board member for Durham Community in Schools and an entrepreneurship teacher at a Durham public high school; and a Fellow at the Center for American Progress. He has testified as an expert witness at the House Committee on Small Business and the U.S. Department of State. His work has been cited by CNN, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, and other media outlets. He has authored opinion pieces in The Washington Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Raleigh News and Observer and has appeared on television and radio. Professor Chatterji also received an inaugural Junior Faculty Fellowship from the Kauffman Foundation to recognize his work as a leading scholar in entrepreneurship. He holds a PhD from the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley.

Dissertation Proposal Award
Lite Nartey
University of Pennsylvania

Lite Nartey is pursuing her doctorate in Management at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. Her primary research interest is to explore the relationships, contingencies, and dynamics among firms and their political and social stakeholders. She is specifically interested in multinational firms within the extractive industries because these firms are forced to interact with diverse and often powerful stakeholders including NGOs, governments, multilateral agencies, legal authorities, conservationists, development experts and members of the community in which their operations are located.

Lite's dissertation investigates innovative strategies that multinational firms can utilize to improve relations with their stakeholders. Traditionally, firms undertake corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives in a bid to engender stakeholder cooperation and support for their operations. However, these initiatives often provide little to no benefit to both the firms and the stakeholders they seek to benefit. She attributes this to: 1) a lack of firm commitment to effective stakeholder engagement, and 2) a lack of guidance as to how and when to engage which stakeholders. Applying concepts from network theory, Lite's research details links between the existing network structure of relationships between the firm and stakeholders, and the strategic choices firms can make to alter that structure to engender cooperative relations with stakeholders. Her work seeks to move the focus from moral, ethical, and normative principles of stakeholder engagement, to a focus on profit maximizing behavior and discussions of meaningful, sustainable practices that are grounded in theory. She is advised at Wharton by Witold Henisz.

Dissertation Proposal Award
Vishal Agrawal
Georgia Tech (for his PhD)

Vishal Agrawal recently completed his PhD in Operations Management at Georgia Tech and has joined the faculty of the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University.

Vishal Agrawal's dissertation focuses on the environmental implications of operations strategies. He investigates business models and strategies that are greener and how they can be profitably implemented. His research draws from different fields such as marketing, economics and industrial ecology and utilizes a diverse set of methodologies from optimization, microeconomics and game theory to behavioral experiments.

In particular, he investigates whether leasing can be a greener strategy than selling. He is also interested in the effect of consumer behavior on operations and product design. In his dissertation research, he experimentally investigates the consumer behavior for re-manufactured products and its managerial implications for a firm interested in product recovery and re-marketing. In his dissertation, he also analyzes the trade-in strategy of firms in the context of re-manufactured products. Vishal hopes to continue his research and teaching interests in sustainability as a new faculty member of the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University.

The Aspen Institute Business and Society Program

The Aspen Institute Business and Society Program

The Aspen Institute Business and Society Program is dedicated to developing leaders for a sustainable global society. Through dialogue and path-breaking research, we create opportunity for executives and educators to explore new pathways to sustainability and values-based leadership.

More from The Aspen Institute Business and Society Program