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Typically, responsibility is something people working in a business presume applies to the other guy…whether a customer, supplier or distributor.  The idea is that then the other guy will pay for the problem.  That someone working in the business might have been at fault is not even considered, at least outwardly, in this mentality of otherness-responsibility.  Responsibility here means “I won’t pay; you must pay!”  It is essentially immature self-centeredness and cheapness used as a weapon.

In general terms, responsibility follows, or depends upon, there being some action thought to be required of someone.  Only if Susan is to pick Billy up at practice at 4:30pm is it her responsibility to do so.  The attribution of responsibility depends on the premise that Susan is required, or has agreed, to make the pick-up.  Were it unclear whether she or say Mary were to make it, Susan could reply to someone’s claim that she is responsible for picking up Billy that she is not responsible because it is Mary’s turn.  The attribution of responsibility depends on an agreement as to function or action coupled with a particular agent.   In the case of a businessperson telling a customer what the customer’s responsibility is, the customer could reply “I did not agree to do X so I am not responsible for it; in fact, you are responsible for it because your advertisement states that your firm does X.”  So disagreements about responsibillity are actually disagreements as to who does what.

Corporate Social Responsibility as a movement presumes that managers do X beyond their respective firm’s maximizing or satisficing shareholder returns.   The managers have a fiduciary responsibility to act in the interests of the owners of the wealth that is the corporation because it is a requirement that the managers do so.  Expanding the managers’ functions beyond maximizing returns (and minimizing cost consistent with those returns) is a matter on which reasonable people can disagree because the question is really about what sort of society we want.   However, using responsibility as a way of imposing such an expansion beyond that which has been agreed to is to use the term prescriptively—meaning that there is over-reaching involved.   I would like managers to do Y as well as X, so I declare managers to have a responsibility to do Y (as well as X).   Responsibility really isn’t the right word here because the underlying agreement on the agent-function matter has not been established.  In other words, responsibility properly follows from a given agent-function rather than institutes it.   Claiming that corporations have a responsibility to act in concert with public opinion or extant social norms—to the extent that it goes beyond the business profit calculus—is to use responsibility in a way that presumes more than is presently the case.  This use of the term is really an instance of ideological prescription rather than a reminder of an agreed social contract that has modified the corporate fidicary duty to the owners of the private property.    Using the term responsibility to create an agent-action foundation puts the horse before the carriage.

So we over-reach when we say that the bankers of the commerical and investment banks that are too big to fail have a responsibility to act within public opinion on the bailout (e.g., concerning bonuses and trading on the banks’ own books).  Even if it is in the long term interest of the financial institutions that the financial system remain viable, the managers correctly point out that their responsibility (i.e., agreed upon actions) is to act in their stockholders’ interests.   To say that the big banks had a responsibility to rescue Lehman Brothers in September, 2008 even if doing so is not in their respective stockholders’ interests is essentially to express the public’s (and government’s) wish that Wall Street step up to the plate and do what is good for the system.   To make saving a bank too big to fail part of the big banks’ responsibilities, there would have to be a requirement that they do so (unless they agree that it is part of their activities).   That is to say, there would have to be a law or regulation because otherwise there is not apt to be the sort of mutual agreement out of which responsibilities can be extracted.  A person can say, “the law says you must do Z, therefore it is your responsibility to do Z.”  The response can’t very well be “Well, the law doesn’t apply to me so it is not my responsibility to do Z because I haven’t agreed to do it.”  This is not to say that a typical manager wouldn’t like to use such a line if he or she could get away with it.  Such a self-maximizing mentality makes the legal foundation of responsibility all the more important.

On the question of whether more government regulation is needed for banks too big to fail (as well as health insurance companies), I would shelve the use of the term responsibility and look instead at the mentality of managers in general (as well as in the industry in question).   Whereas the Senate can be likened to a herd of cats instinctively unwilling to be managed, a corporation can be likened to cats circling tuna.   The tuna is their required function: to act in the interests of the stockholders (typically short term).  To expand a business manager’s function to include working against systemic risk (banking) and working so all American citizens are covered (health-insurance) is an excercise in futility unless these functions dovetail with the stockholder/profit interests.  So in addition to government regulation being necessary (as responsibility is not sufficiently viable as a constraint because the agent-action foundation has not been established),  regulators would have to monitor the companies to keep the managerial feet to the fire.  Also, the regulators would have to be monitored because of the managers would have an incentive to capture the agencies that otherwise pin in the firms.  The managers will constantly be trying to turn toward the tuna.  Whether hardwired or socialized by managerial culture to do so, managers can be expected to incessantly strive for more tuna.

As an example of such striving being at the antithesis of constraint, logging companies that sold forests to the US National Parks in the mid-twentieth century continued logging even after the managers knew the sales had gone through.  Also, the managers of the banks too big to fail fought financial regulatory reform in the wake of the banks’ own culpibility in the crisis of 2008.  In addition to reading this as presumption to excess, it can be interpreted as the allure of the tuna always there.  Even if a cat could feel guilty for having knocked over a vase on the way to the food, the animal would turn right around and fight efforts to thwart it from the tuna.  The guilt is extrinsic to the animal as it pursues the tuna.  That is to say, we impose ought on an activity that is simply an “is” to the cat.   As Hume points out, you can’t get ought from is.  The cat’s mentality is essentially to keep striving for tuna, which ideally (to the cat) means ignoring constraints (if possible).   If managers could routinely ignore the law when it is in their interest, it is futile to believe that they would be the sort of creatures that would allow themselves to be guiled into acting within the contours of social norms.  What I am getting at is this: In the CSR movement, there is far too much reliance on the good faith of managers of companies—as if they can be lured away from the tuna, even for a minute for a good cause. The CSR movement ignores the managerial nature, or mentality, or tries to modify it with insufficient force.   The mentality is far too intractable and the use of responsibility far too over-reaching for CSR to be viable in the real world. Essentially, the CSR movement, even in its beginnings in the 1950’s by a few well-meaning though naive businessmen, presumes Hume’s naturalistic fallacy as somehow invalid (meaning that extant societal norms can be taken as normative on their own basis and managers can be presumed to have a responsibility to act in sync with them even if doing so is not in the stockholders’ interest).

We should not rely on CSR or good corporate citizenship in lieu of government regulation when business firms (or entire industries) put us or our society at risk of harm.  The business calculus understands requirements, not “oughts,” and responsibility follows (rather than establishes) the requirements.   To presume otherwise is mere wishful thinking along with a dash of imposing, which is really the self projecting itself on to the world—making the world in its own image.

Joseph Natoli avers that "what we think comprises a 'good education' has already been affected by market values." He observes further, "Organizations come into being by solving problems. The problem solver is a corporate asset."  Whereas Natoli treats problem-solving and critical thinking as mutually-exclusive, I contend that critical thinking has been reduced in popular parlance problem-solving.  As in the coming of Thursday nights to be reckoned by college students are a weekend night, here too business schools have been the conduit wherein critical thinking has gained primacy over even the higher analytical and synthetic thinking activities (which are not limited to problems, and, in fact, can transcend them even in problem-solving). The schools have also been the conduit wherein the power-point presentation in business has come to the classroom, as if lecturing were merely presenting. To be sure, there is nothing out of place for problem-solving and presentations in the corporate world. All the power to them--or maybe not. Maybe this is the problem wherein corporate customs know no bound, and thus feel no self-restraint as they over-spill onto disparate domains as though spoiled children. My contention is that the easy slide onto college campuses of both critical thinking reduced to problem-solving and presentations reduced to bullet-points has conflated, in effect, vocation and education. Even worse is the baleful portent of education being reduced to training. It is bad enough when a business school becomes "commercialized" in this respect. Faculties of Liberal Arts and Science schools ought not to have appropriated so much from commercial education (and ultimately corporations) without paying sufficient attention to the negative impacts on pedegogy. Teaching by power-point, for example, may cut off higher forms of thinking; problem-solving may involve losing "why?" to "how?"

One might ask: where have the scholars in the schools of education been as corporate ways have made such inroads in academia?  Why haven't education faculties written more the funnelling effects on pedegogy of critical thinking as problem-solving and teaching as presentation?  In December, 2010, the National Council on Teacher Quality and U.S. News & World Report announced plans to grade more than a thousand schools of education. The deans of several of these schools objected that the teacher quality council’s methods for arriving at ratings were not transparent enough and were not supported by research. Course information, textbooks and admissions selectivity are, according to these officials, too superficial.  That may be so, but it could nevertheless be the case that the school officials were nervous about being graded because they had a sense that education schools had been asleep at the wheel as universities (and presumably high schools) have come unwittingly to embrace corporate practices at the expense of that which is sui generis, or unique, in education. 

Brian Kelly, the editor of U.S. News, said the push-back from education schools was evidence of “an industry that doesn’t want to be examined. These teacher-education programs are hugely important and not very well scrutinized. This is coming at a time when you have this tremendous national push for improvements in teacher quality: Who’s teaching the teachers?”  Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education, said that many, if not most, teacher-training programs are mediocre. “It is time to start holding teacher-preparation programs more accountable for the impact of their graduates on student learning." According to The New York Times, "Education schools have faced criticism frequently over the years. They are faulted by a recent wave of education advocates as emphasizing education theory over hands-on classroom training, and as graduating teachers with weak academic skills." Rather than theory, however, faculties of education schools may have been absorbed in various ideological movements at the expense of being oriented to knowledge, with K-12 teachers buying into the fads at the expense of even the basic subject-matter of their courses.

For example, process-learning was at one time the rage in some high schools. In this movement, teachers threw out their course textbooks in the mistaken assumption that the process of being educated itself proffers such content. However, focusing on learning how to read, for example, does not include a systematic coverage of a given course's subject-matter; instead, the latter is relegated in a hit or miss manner. I once heard a high school civics teacher at a suburban school brag that he had put the U.S. Government textbooks in the school basement and was instead showing movies on immigrants in the U.S. How from this "alternative teaching" approach were his students to learn about federalism and the separation of powers, as well as about the U.S. Senate, House, Supreme Court and Presidency?

Although the misguided "alternative" movements have typically been inflicted on K-12 education, the education scholars' various sidetracks have not only sidetracked the scholars themselves from developing improved teaching techniques oriented to learning a given content of knowledge; the causes that have been at the expense of education (i.e., serving other agendas) have also distracted the zealots from even being able to detect what was occurring on their own campuses, let alone putting their pedegogical expertise at the service of their colleagues, university-wide. It is almost as though college professors got bored with their respective bodies of knowledge and wandered off to pay with new toys from business. Antethetically, I contend that even in business schools the focus should be on knowedge--explaining the phenomenon of business through its various disciplines rather than becoming virtual corporations.  In other words, even business schools can be academic. The best ones are. They have not substituted what they are with what they are studying. Therefore, resisting the encroachments of corporate culture on to academia, I recommend that university faculties and academic administrators recommit themselves to the university's unique, or sui generis, situs and essence.

There is much to do on college-level pedegogy without wandering off onto other pastures.  Exams, for example, should be devised and used based on tests for their validity (is an 80% on a given test really a "good" understanding of the knowledge of the course so far?) and reliability (consistency from test to test). I suspect that test-making and grading are far from systematic, perhaps including such spurious assumptions that only a certain proportion of a class can get A's, or that A's go down to 85% because there is a gap from there to 81%. What is it about the particular test and the body of knowlege covered that makes getting a 90% a measure of excellent knowledge?  Typically, graders simply parrot the custom wherein 90-100 is an A, 80-89 is a B, etc. However, what if a test is made more difficult, or less so?  How should the percentage intervals be adjusted? In short, getting back to basics means thinking about and operationalizing what "excellent," "good," and "satisfactory" mean in the context of learning knowledge.  Compounding the problem of what a grade means is the obfuscation of grades as measurements of knowledge learned and grades as compensation for work done. I suspect the transmutation of a grade into compensation is yet another instance of corporate culture finding its way into academia via business schools. The conduit here are business school administrators and faculty who confuse themselves with what they are studying (i.e., corporations). To give a group an A for having put a lot of work into a presentation, or for being dressed well, is essentially to pay the group for its effort, rather than to measure the extent of knowledge learned. Even assessing a skill is closer to rewarding practice than measuring knowledge learned; knowledge is not skill, and vice versa. 

With a sort of cultural imperialism in full swing at business schools, the faculties of other schools cannot afford to be sidetracked or led astray without seriously undermining their own distinctive raison d'etre. Just as what is good for GM is not necessarily good for America, what commercialized business schools believe is in their interest qua corporations producing skills is not necessarily good for a university as a whole (or even for the business schools). That school of education faculties have stood by, occupied elsewhere, while business school practices and understandings have been allowed to perculate through other schools does indeed implicate the pegegogical experts.

Sources:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/09/education/09teachers.html?scp=1&sq=grading%20schools%20of%20education&st=cse
http://www.truth-out.org/our-market-regime-and-public-education67474