Cranfield School of Management will host the 2008 European Academy for Business in So

[FabianPattberg]

Cranfield School of Management will host the 2008 European Academy for Business in Society (EABIS) Colloquium from 10 – 12 September 2008.

This will be the first time the event has been held in the UK. More than 300 delegates from leading businesses and business schools across Europe and further afield are expected to attend.

EABIS is a unique alliance of companies, business schools and academic institutions that is, with the support of the European Commission, committed to integrating business in society issues into the heart of business theory and practice in Europe.

It was formed in 2002 at INSEAD Business School (France) by a number of leading European business schools including Cranfield, Bocconi (Milan), IESE (Spain) and the London and Copenhagen Business Schools. The founding corporate partners are IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Shell and Unilever. EABIS now includes over 60 Business Schools and corporate members.

The theme of this year's conference is `Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability: Leadership and Organisational Change.' It will focus on how businesses integrate responsibility and sustainability.

Conference Chair Professor Andrew Kakabadse said: "EABIS is the world's largest business-academic-stakeholder event on Corporate Responsibility and Management Development providing a unique platform for high level debate and exchange.

"The conference will drill into the vital challenges of embedding Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability into the DNA of a firm (structures, cultures, systems, processes and competencies), the implied organisational change, innovations or even transformation this takes, and the required leadership for making this happen."

Co-chair: David Grayson, director of the Doughty Centre for Corporate Responsibility at Cranfield, explained: "Cranfield School of Management is all about knowledge into action; and this conference is an opportunity to exchange experiences of embedding ethical business practice.

"Across the world there are heightened expectations of how business should be run. The EABIS conference will improve understanding of how businesses can respond to these heightened expectations in ways which are good for business as well as good for society."

For further information, please contact: Helen Knight, EABIS Colloquium Co-ordinator, at helen.knight@cranfield.ac.uk or visit www.eabis08.info