Corporate Policy and Social Responsibility- 130 - Master's Year 2

An industrial engineer by training, I created a CSR consulting firm after getting my degree in 2008 and directed it until the summer of 2014. 

 

The experience gave me a solid grasp of environmental issues, but it also made me realize that aspects of CSR extend to social and corporate governance. 

I wanted to increase my expertise in those areas, and so decided to join the 2015 cohort of the Corporate Policy and Social Responsibility program because of the variety of courses offered by the curriculum. And I have to say that I wasn’t disappointed! 

 

This program gives students an excellent general background in social issues and corporate governance.  I think that the way students learn to read organizations sociologically allows them to place current debates on climate change, precariousness, psychosocial risks, and transnational companies in a historical and academic context.  

 

The program covers such a rich variety of subjects -- and leads to such a rich variety of careers! Personally, the Corporate Policy and Social Responsibility program sparked an interest in socially responsible finance and investing, a path I’m going to follow after completing my six-month internship with a leading European non-financial rating agency. 

An alumna of the Corporate Policy and Social Responsibility program, I now have a contract position (as of September 2016) as Project Officer for Domaine de Longchamp at the GoodPlanet Foundation. I’m working on the opening of a venue dedicated to raising public awareness of ecology and humanitarianism. The project requires me to call on the knowledge I gained in a variety of fields (ecology, sociology, solidarity, CSR, etc.) during my Master’s program on a daily basis. 

 

I previously studied at a business school, and so for me, what the Corporate Policy and Social Responsibility program provided was a global vision of society and the major challenges we’re facing. The theory we studied is actually closer to reality that I would have thought when I was a student: this is definitely a professional Master’s program, providing the tools necessary to work in a company, consultancy, or NGO! 

 

My thesis topic was “How do we reinvent democracy in the digital age?” It was a huge question, and one that is still pertinent to this day. My internship at a “socially engaged” consulting firm allowed me to test my hypotheses and take a real-world approach to the topic in the context of our work with a particular telecommunications company. My advisor mentored me so that I submitted a high-quality project, and it’s one that I am still proud of. 

 

Would I do it all over again?Without a doubt, I’d return to the Corporate Policy and Social Responsibility to study sociology et corporate social responsibility! 

After three years of preparatory classes in literature, I decided that I wanted to study social sciences, and so started the third year of the Bachelor’s degree in social sciences at Université Paris Dauphine – PSL. I realized that sociology was my passion, and so I stayed on, doing the first year of the Master’s program in Public Action and Social Regulation. Over the course of this rich, varied year, the project on commercial work and the courses in the sociology of work made me want to focus on issues of occupational health and working conditions, public employment policies, and the relationship between sustainable development and work. At the end of the first year of my Master’s degree, I opted for the Corporate Policy and Social Responsibility program because it seemed to provide a way into these issues that was both pertinent and aimed at helping students professionalize. The program directors, whom I’d already had as professors, also made me want to do the program! And I wasn’t disappointed! 

 

The program gave me so much space to think about the issue of corporate social responsibility. The strength of this comprehensive program is definitely in the diversity of material covered in the curriculum. The faculty is also a big draw: the professors share their research expertise and their conceptual rigor, and the professionals, who come from a very different world, bring a practical and concrete vision of careers in CSR. The work we were assigned, in addition to the apprenticeship thesis, gave us an opportunity to independently explore the subjects that interested us the most. 

 

I did my final internship with a regional fund that supported and developed work in the local community. This Social and Solidarity Economy company was my introduction to the reach of SSE in France.  Seeing so many people committed to useful social and economic action made me want to get more involved in SSE, and I will continue working at the company, but this time as an employee.  

 

I would recommend that any student wanting to put a sociological, legal, and economic education to work for a responsible economy consider this excellent program!

I joined the Corporate Policy and Social Responsibility program after studying economics. It was a choice born of a desire for openness. Openness to the world, primarily: the program’s courses, which are taught by renowned professors, deal with the big challenges facing us today. Open-mindedness, too, since sociology, which is a discipline comfortable with interdisciplinarity, approaches such issues with the intellectual flexibility to see them from innovative and original points of view.   

 

And while students hold the Corporate Policy and Social Responsibility program in high regard, it should be said that a large number of companies do too. When it was time to choose an internship, I decided to do mine at a management company so that I could assess, in my role as a non-financial analyst, the social, environmental, and governance policies of listed companies. 

 

I am now in charge of the employment watchdog at a large trade union organization, where I coordinate national surveys, carry out analyses using statistical software we were introduced to in class, and communicate about subjects we studied such as occupational health and gender equality.

As a professor of sociology at Dauphine and a member of the Inspectorate General of Social Affairs, I think it is particularly important to teach our students about a number of important policies, such as social policies, and to give them the knowledge to become active participants in both public and private organizations.  Understanding the resistance movements and reasons that explain the existence of the French social model as we know it, knowing how to understand the economic weight of social protection in our country, and having a firm understanding of issues pertaining to labor law and social security all seem absolutely essential to the successful occupation of so many roles in today’s society. The rich and varied curriculum taught to the students in this program should allow them not only to integrate into but to evaluate, with the large number of tools now available to them, the employers of today. From the point of view of a professor, this is a Master’s program that is incredibly rewarding to teach in! The students are dedicated, motivated, and attentive; they appreciate digging into the concrete reality of social relations, engaging in theoretical and applied work, in small groups, and doing field research where their work reveals how social policy mechanisms actually function.   Teaching in this program is good for the soul. 

As head of the Social Observatory at Banque de France, I am delighted to be able to talk about how much we enjoy welcoming students in the second-year Corporate Policy and Social Responsibility Master’s program who want to study corporate social regulations. It’s a win-win situation from the moment of recruitment: the student brings the quality of their education, their motivation, their seriousness, and their approach to social issues and their analysis, and I bring them deep knowledge of the business world and professional relationships, and guide them to a better understanding of qualitative survey methods, tools, theory in practice, and project organization. The student quickly integrates into the team, and soon takes on the role of junior sociologist. The result is a complete sociological diagnosis consisting of 80 interviews and including everything from the exploratory survey to the analysis of the results, as well as an interpretation of the problem per the specifications of the commissioning entity: an analysis of the social impact of the modernization of a production workshop.