Something to Believe In Creating Trust and Hope in Organisations: Stories of Transparency, Accountability and Governance

Rupesh A. Shah. Since starting work with the New Academy of Business in November 2001, I have been supporting our research and educational activities through a focus on action research. I have been involved in collaboration with United Nations Volunteers (UNV), aimed at both exploring and enhancing the relations between communities and business in seven countries from the South. I have also supported the New Academy's educational work with universities and begun a stream of work on responsible business education in schools. In my PhD, from the School of Management, Centre for Action Research in Professional Practice at the University of Bath, I explored the links between personal change, organisational learning and sustainable development. I did this through a double lens of the collaboration between an NGO and business alongside my own attempts at engaging in collaborative research. When I need to nurture the parts of me that research doesn't quite reach, I can be found in a community-owned, organic garden, near where I live in Bath. David F. Murphy. I am Director of the New Academy of Business, an independent business school that provide entrepreneurs, managers and organisational leaders with the insights and capacities necessary to respond progressively to the emerging challenges of sustainability and organisational responsibility. Since I joined the organisation in 1998, I have developed the New Academy's international network of partners working together on various education and research initiatives on global corporate responsibility. This work has included a two-year international action research project on business-community relations with United Nations Volunteers (UNV) in seven countries. Other recent projects include good governance in development co-operation with the European Commission, corporate responsibility practices in South Asia with TERI-Europe, and a feasibility study on the social marketing of job quality in micro and small enterprises with the International Labour Organisation. From 1993-97, I undertook research at the University of Bristol on the implementation of corporate social responsibility policies and completed my PhD on business-NGO relations and sustainable development. Prior to my arrival in the UK in 1993, I co-ordinated various community development programmes for the Canadian NGO CUSO in West Africa and Canada, where I also managed volunteer programmes for a Canadian AIDS organisation. I am the co-author of In the Company of Partners: Business, Environmental Groups and Sustainable Development Post-Rio (The Policy Press, 1997) and am currently a member of the Amnesty International (UK) Business Group on Human Rights. Malcolm McIntosh. I am a writer and teacher on corporate responsibility and sustainability and a Visiting Professor at the universities of Bath and Nottingham (UK) and Waikato (NZ). I also teach at the universities of Stellenbosch (SA) and Bristol (UK). In 2003 I was appointed a Special Advisor to the UN Global Compact. I am Founding Editor of The Journal of Corporate Citizenship, Editor of Visions of Ethical Business 1998-2002 (FT Management/PricewaterhouseCoopers) and author and co-author of many books and articles on corporate citizenship. My latest book is Raising a Ladder to the Moon: The Complexities of Corporate Responsibility (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). I am currently working on a new book, Learning To Talk: The Early Years of the UN Global Compact (Greenleaf Publishing, 2004) with Sandra Waddock and Georg Kell with a Foreword by Kofi Annan. I am most interested in the possibility of a new metalanguage which reaches across professional and intellectual divides. This requires the development of cultures of humility and conviviality.