Responsible Capitalism: Strategy, Governance and Finance

The school is organized by Venice International University with the participation of professors from Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, Columbia University, Henley Business School, IESE Business School, and University of Lausanne.

The program is designed to promote research and education on the future of capitalism in the light of current research in economic sociology, strategy, organization theory, finance, history and philosophy.
The school will provide a unique opportunity for researchers in the early stage of their career to interact with prominent scholars in the field and develop their own research projects.

Course leader

Prof. Francesco Zirpoli

Target group

Current Ph.D. students, research master’s students (e.g. MPhil students), post-doc researchers in Management, Strategy, Organization Theory, Finance, Economic Sociology, and related disciplines from universities worldwide.

Course aim

The growing gap between rich and poor, the social and environmental side effects of production and a regulatory vacuum around multinational production networks have forced new critical debate on our economic system. The School will therefore investigate sustainable capitalism from different angles: It will start by analyzing the ever more “postnational” constellation of capitalism, the potential roles and responsibilities of corporations in this changing societal context and sustainable corporate strategies. It will discuss the integration of environmental, social and governance factors (ESG) in traditional financial portfolio management and the concept of responsible investment. Finally, it will analyze one of the key complications of sustainability, namely the fact that it requires interdependent decisions and actions of multiple agents acting in a distributed environment. This circumstance alters both decision-making and the strategy implementation processes, and challenges the current governance and management conceptual toolkit available to scholars and practitioners.

Program structure:
The 5-day program will combine lectures, seminars, and developmental workshops.
In the morning, the state-of-the-art in research will be discussed along with selected articles, including the presentations of faculty’s own research work on the topics.
In the afternoon, participants will be invited to present their research ideas and, under the guidance of a senior scholar, they will develop their research projects.
The program starts on Sunday evening with a welcome reception and ends on Friday afternoon with a site visit in Venice.