MBA students and corporate citizenship: incorporating industry-specific service-learning projects into the curriculum

The purpose of this teaching brief is to describe the integration of service-learning and corporate citizenship in an MBA-level course. In the context of this course, the term ‘corporate citizenship’; is used to refer to relationships between businesses and nonprofit organizations. The term ‘service learning’ represents a teaching tool whereby students use course-based concepts to learn about and actively address social issues in their local communities. The course, called Managerial Skills and Perspectives (MSP), was designed in the late 1990s as a practical course through which full-time MBA students gain hands-on experience in select managerial areas. This year, with the introduction of the corporate citizenship module, the course had three main topic areas: (1) self-management, (2) team building, and (3) corporate citizenship. Corporate citizenship was the third and final component of the course, building on the learning that took place in the self-management and team-building sections, and is the focus of this paper.