Charting the Uncharted: A Panel Discussion on Research and Teaching in Environmental and Social Responsibility

Written by Ling Li and Vinit Tipnis

Professors Serguei Netessine from University of Pennsylvania, Jay Swaminathan from University of North Carolina, Jamal El Baz from Ibn Zohr University, and Beril Toktay from Georgia Institute of Technology took part in the inaugural Symposium on Environmental and Social Responsibility in Supply Chains held at the Kelley School of Business on October 19, 2022. Their panel covered various topics in the operations management community, and the scholars answered a range of questions from the audience. The panel discussed the position of sustainable operations management and emphasized the importance of taking a multidisciplinary perspective. The professors shared their unique experience of working with industry partners, from startups in Africa to large organizations such as UNICEF. Currently, Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) metrics are sparse, but creating a unique measurement scale not only contributes to improved industry practices, but also supports responsible and sustainable research. In addition to academic and industry collaborations, the panel stressed the value of teaching responsible operations management to MBA students and other broad groups. The panel collectively expressed the need for more impactful and inclusive research in the future.

Panelists: Jamal El Baz, Serguei Netessine, Jay Swaminathan, Beril Toktay
Moderator: Owen Wu
Transcription: Tom Palley

Prior to the symposium, we asked the registered attendees to submit questions for the panelists. We grouped the submitted questions by topics, and shared them with all attendees, asking them to prioritize which questions they would most like to discuss. The entire process was done anonymously on a shared document.  Attendees were able to ask questions on the day of the event as well.

Below are the questions and full transcripts of the panel session (with minor edits).

Question on OM and beyond: How can we position responsible/sustainable OM research considering other fields such as business economics, public policy, environmental science, etc.?  Do we have to distinguish ourselves?  Is there anything that only the OM research community can offer in the interdisciplinary areas of sustainability and social responsibility?

Jay: First of all, the goal for us as a community, at least the way I see it, is to be able to provide further insights and help alleviate some of the issues in our society. If we go with that perspective, it’s no longer a question of “us versus them,” but rather that there are opportunities where we [OM] can add a lot more than some of the other fields. By definition, the problems in this area are going to overlap with policy and economics. Clearly, it is not going to be an “either/or” issue, and I would say we take a multi-disciplinary perspective to begin with. With that multi-disciplinary perspective, we can begin to think about which areas OM can add more to than other fields.

To give an example, in the drug distribution project that we did, public policy researchers had already discussed the dimensions of how to do distribution in an equitable manner, but they didn’t know how to balance these dimensions. In order to have an equitable distribution, you have to formulate it in an objective function with multiple criteria and have different types of constraints. These are the types of problems where the OM community can provide insights.

There were lots of researchers in developmental economics literature studying how to build capacity in the developing world. But nobody had considered the supply chain context and showed where capacity needs to increase, and where the investments should go, and where inventory needs to be situated, and how that would impact lives. When we look at multi-disciplinary problems, we need to think about where we as OM researchers can make a larger contribution alongside fellow researchers in other academic departments.

Beril: I couldn’t agree more that it’s not an “either/or,” but “and” when it comes to interdisciplinary research. We do have some unique perspectives to bring. As an example from the policy space, we have looked at how extended producer responsibility works. When you look at it from an economics perspective, there’s a high-level notion of having producers to internalize their externalities on the environment. There are different policies to implement this, including recycling fees, extended producer responsibility, etc. But when you think about implementing a high-level policy concept and how it translates into impact on the field, you need to consider differentiated technologies of companies, relative competitive positioning, and supply chain characteristics, because all of these concepts are essential to understanding how policies translate to implementation. In opening the policy “black-box” and modeling supply chain connections, we can contribute in an important way. In the developing world, we have a lot of good research in responsible sourcing as well.

Digitalization is also impacting how sustainability is done. Given the emphasis on data-driven methods and optimization in our field, I think we may have an opportunity to make an impact by drawing on this newly emerging data that can track products, their environmental impacts, and make decisions based on that. That’s another area I am very excited about.

Jamal: I would just add that we as an OM community have established a specific identity. Now with the pandemic, the whole world has recognized that we have something to offer, and that we have many outlets to prove that, in both theoretical and practical research. And that’s why we are here.

Question on publication: For junior faculty, what are some of the effective ways to identify research problems in sustainable/responsible OM? With tenure clock ticking, how might they identify projects that are publishable at top journals? What are some ways in which our community can engage industry partners more actively, without compromising on the “publishability” of the resulting work?

Serguei: Early in my career, I tried to work with big companies on data projects. It’s exhausting. Big companies bring lawyers and start asking for NDAs and at the end of five years negotiation, the manager leaves and the whole thing goes out the window. My strong recommendation to all junior faculty is to work with startups because they are doing the most innovative, novel things.  Startups are much more digital, so they have a lot more data and instead of bringing lawyers, they’ll give you a handshake agreement and give you anything you want. I know that’s a sort of stone in the direction of big companies, but as a publicly traded company, that’s legally the way you have to operate. So instead of spending a lot of time working with large companies, just offer your help to a startup because they won’t be able to afford it otherwise, and you’ll have the expertise that they want.

Jamal: My advice for publishing is to try to read as much as possible related to recent publications, attend conferences and symposiums where you meet editors. They can give you good insights about publishing. Use your curiosity. Publishable projects should have novelty and meaningful contributions to our community, in my opinion.

Jay: My experience has been that when you work with any organization, they’ll work with you, and they really want to have their problem solved. It doesn’t matter whether it’s small or large. In fact, all of my examples that I gave are very large organizations, sometimes even a government organization, sometimes international organizations.  So, I think that you have to keep that in mind. I would say don’t rule out getting data from big companies for these types of efforts because I think they are lot more receptive to these issues today than they were, say, ten years ago.

Questions on experimental research: In responsible OM, many initiatives lack enough data about suppliers, customers, operations, and everything. Are lab/field experiments a good way to approach such problems, especially field experiments, given they are high risk opportunity from a junior faculty perspective? What are some of the issues in responsible OM that could/should be addressed by experimental methods?

Serguei: I started talking about working with startups. This is another thing that goes for working with startups. Startups experiment a lot. Whether you work with them or not, they will experiment. Now, if you work with them, they will actually allow you to participate in those experiments, guide them in creating experiments, and then gather data. I think field experiments become much easier if you work with young startup companies.

On lab or field experiments, I personally recommend combining the two. If you do lab experiments, always combine them with field experiments because lab experiments are great at getting at some mechanism, but they will never give you any kind of external validity. It’s very hard to convince companies to do anything based on a lab experiment. If you combine it with a field experiment and say, hey, here’s evidence I see in the field, I replicated it in a lab, then it’s a stronger message and a stronger paper, if you want to publish a paper.

Field experiments are kind of the golden standard, if you look at economics.  That is increasingly what economists do.  Work with small companies to run field experiments. It’s not that hard, and it doesn’t take that much time. Very often you can even get data on experiments they are running already, so you don’t even need to wait for a long time for them to run it.

Jay: Regarding field experiments and lab experiments. I think field experiments are quite challenging, quite tough, and quite expensive. If you’re doing it properly, you’re going to spend a lot of time and effort, and it’s highly risky. I would agree with Serguei that you probably want to find somebody in your own department who is a little bit senior, who has the time and is willing to put in the effort to make that connection with the industry—to make these things happen for you so that you are doing the technical pieces of the work. I think if you try to do all of it yourself, you may get something done eventually, but I think you also have to trade it off against the timeline that you’re facing for your promotion and tenure.

Beril: As a junior faculty when you land in a new institution, it takes a while to figure out where the resources are. One can look in one’s own department, if you’re so lucky that you have a senior faculty member who does have experience with field experiments or is willing to do that. Alternatively, some universities have interdisciplinary centers, and it’s really worth figuring out what’s happening on the rest of campus, then engaging with faculty who may already have data or may already have established relationships. You may take a different look at that data.  Try to see if you can leverage what already exists at your university, and don’t necessarily limit yourself to the business school.

In terms of delivering value to companies, some people who’ve done well at that have access to master’s students who can deliver short-term value on projects that are not necessarily publishable without a lot of effort. That gets you the “in” and the quick win, and helps you establish longer term relationships. That’s perhaps another mechanism that you can try to use.

Question from Chengcheng Zhai: My work is on NGOs. I wanted to ask if you have any experience conducting field experiments in collaboration with NGOs, and what are the unique challenges? What are the differences from conducting a field experiment with a government or a for-profit company?

Beril: NGOs are a little bit in between. Because they are resource constrained, there’s a lot of value that you can add, but at the same time, especially with the smaller ones, their systems can be very rudimentary and access to data can be very difficult. For example, with the MedShare project that Ken worked on, the pathway to establishing a relationship with them was to show an interest in what they’re doing, to write a case study that kind of lifts them up and makes them feel good about us, and then match them to a student project that can deliver short-term value. And from these conversations, eventually we identified something that was research-worthy. But even then, to be able to get the data, you needed to create one-on-one relationships. So, Ken went and volunteered there, and cleaned data. He spent a lot of time establishing trust, and after that it became a very productive relationship. So, it can be a little tricky and time consuming as well, but not as challenging as with large companies.

Question on performance metrics: Do you think there exists general metrics to compare and track the results of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) projects—and also to communicate their impact beyond the typical focus on revenue or profit (whether for the publication process or publicity more widely)? Since the social aspect of responsible OM covers a wide array of activities, measuring performance of industry practices is sporadic and on an ad-hoc basis. Most data are qualitative and appear in annual reports. Do you have any suggestions for databases that compare businesses within the same industry or across industries that one could consult?

Serguei: In my research projects, I almost never come across a database with data and with ESG. I don’t expect to either. ESG reminds me a lot of MBA rankings—they all give you different ratings, and yet everybody uses them. I think establishing this kind of outcome metrics would be an interesting research project by itself, and comparing them to figuring out what works and what doesn’t.

There are companies that are doing this, such as B Corp. B Corp rates other companies on ESG kind of metrics. If you work with some of those companies, maybe they’ll make that data available to you. I haven’t tried.

I think you have to think creatively. Reading this question, I thought that if I were into data analytics and I knew a little bit of programming, I could go to LinkedIn and scrape every single title of every single employee working for Eli Lilly and see how many of them have ESG in their titles. I could use it as some kind of proxy of how much money a company spends on ESG activity. That would be a pretty unique dataset that only you have. It probably doesn’t take that long to come up with something like this. So, you could measure how many times a company mentioned ESG in tweets, or on YouTube, or in earnings calls—I’m sure finance people have done it. There are creative ways to do that. Sitting there and waiting for a database is not one of them.

Jay: I agree that there are rankings available. There are rankings on ESG, rankings of companies along multiple dimensions. But just like MBA school rankings, sometimes they don’t tell you what’s inside the black box. When that happens, you’re using somebody else’s subjective assessment and that’s not a fair assessment for research.

Is it valuable to create metrics like that?  From a research center standpoint, I think there’ll be some value. If you can put some resources in and get somebody to collect that data—and maybe Beril’s center is already doing that—it could be a great thing for a center to do.

For an individual researcher, there are some interesting things that one could do with the things that are happening in the marketplace. For example, with the CDP dataset that we are using for one of our research projects, we’re using advanced AI methodology to parse the text that people are talking about. From there, we’re identifying which are the focus areas for the companies, and then trying to relate that back to the performance of the company in terms of their footprint reduction, and so on. So, you can do things like that, and in the process, you’re actually bringing in what is there in CDP, plus you’re bringing in data from other datasets and then you’re creating your own dataset, which is consistent with what Serguei was saying—that you won’t get a dataset pre-made. You’d probably have to create your own dataset to do your analysis, but I think it is worthwhile.

Jamal: I’m going to tackle probably the second question related to social aspects of responsible operations management. I am presently doing research about social responsibility in the supply chain management context. I have encountered several difficulties in measuring what companies and organizations do in terms of ensuring decent work and safety. I had a conversation with Stefan Seuring from the University of Kassel. He has published so many papers regarding social responsibility and I’ve asked him the same question: Is there a database that I could use? He said no, there’s none. Use a questionnaire and ask people. That’s it. And probably some of you could try to do research regarding that. How about doing a measurement scale or maybe an index for social responsibility?

Question on teaching: What are some good ways to include responsible/sustainable OM in our teaching for MBA students?

Jay: I think all of us have sustainable operations classes. If you don’t have a sustainable operations class, you should definitely introduce one in your curriculum. For others, even if you don’t have sustainable operations—like you’re not teaching it—you have cases where you can bring the sustainable angle into your regular class. The way you do it is by adopting cases that deal with these issues. If anybody is interested, I have two cases that I use in my class. In fact, those cases are the most successful cases in the classroom, in a regular supply chain course. That’s the way you would bring this content into the classroom.

One good thing about these topics is that any student in the classroom can relate to them very easily, and they can also see the potential impact that this will have on the society, and most of the students really want to have that kind of an impact.  I’ll give you an example. When I was teaching a supply chain class this semester, one of my cases deals with UNICEF. At the end of the class, I said to the students, “If you’re interested in talking more about this case, please come and I’m happy to do so during my office hours.” A lot of students came, and they were all interested to know more about UNICEF. There is a tremendous opportunity for us as instructors to develop leaders of the next generation who care about these things, and I think we have a great opportunity here in bringing those cases into the classroom.

Serguei: I’ll deviate a little bit from the question because it specifically asks about MBA program, but I want to go a bit broader than that. At Wharton, everybody talks about lifelong learning, and usually we think about educating people who are beyond our MBA and undergraduate programs. At Wharton, we have huge programs for high-school students, we are now going into middle school students, and soon we’re going to go into kindergarten and elementary school—that’s a new untapped revenue opportunity [audience laughter].

What I find fascinating is that in middle school and high school, students are incredibly interested in anything around sustainability and social responsibility. Those are the classes that they want. These are the students in five to ten years that will be coming into our undergraduate program and then our MBA program. The younger generation is much more concerned about the environment than you or me. On the other end of the spectrum, I was shocked when we tried to launch an executive class on sustainability a few years ago, and lots of companies told us, “Oh yeah, that’s very important, and we all understand the importance and we need to do something.” But when we actually started marketing it, we enrolled only three students instead of the usual forty. How come? We started talking to the same big companies and they said, “Oh, we like talking about sustainability, but we really don’t have a budget to educate anyone.” Okay. So, I’m a little bit more skeptical on the executive education side of things, and I’m very optimistic on the younger side of the spectrum, and MBA is kind of in between.

Of course, we all incorporate ESG as we revise materials for classwork. In my innovation class, I used to use a lot of examples of startups like Uber and Amazon, companies that do not particularly strike people as very socially responsible, even though I think Amazon does a lot around social responsibility. I use a lot of examples of more sustainable startups too, or even non-profit startups and MBA students get very excited. It’s easy to get them excited.

Beril: I’ll go in that undergraduate education direction because what we find when we survey our undergraduates is that a lot of high school students come in with this increased interest in these topics, and then they land in the business school or most other majors, and then it’s kind of “crickets” about sustainability. It’s crickets about climate issues. They get pretty disappointed when they observe that there’s this big gap, and they’re looking for opportunities. And yet changing the curriculum is notoriously difficult, especially with interdisciplinary things. So, in addition to the coursework infusion that Jay talked about, which is happening and it can be effective, we’ve also looked for some co-curricular and extracurricular opportunities to allow the students to take some action.

To give an example, at Georgia Tech we have a carbon reduction challenge. We have students going for internships and we’re also a big co-op school, so students go to co-ops all the time. We built a program where students go and do their internship duties and do them well, but while you’re there, look for a carbon reduction project opportunity, find some mentors, pitch a project, and then see if you can get the company to actually do it. Although they have only a few months, some of these projects have actually succeeded. They’re not changing the fuel mix or big things like that, but it’s giving students a taste of being a change-maker. We’re trying to teach them that no matter what your role is later, you can look for these opportunities and you can be effective.

This summer we had a Scheller student working at a consulting company, and she did a project looking at instead of shipping all these orientation materials to people’s homes, what if they had an orientation in person and then they just distributed them there?  She had to look at shipping data, the carbon emission and cost of shipping.  Pretty simple conceptually, but she presented it, and it was well-received. They are going to change it for next year. And she landed a job in the supply chain sustainability practice that’s starting in this company.

Some other students were working at a bank and they looked at the rental cars. The default rental is midsize, and they did some data analytics and found that 90% of customers just choose the default option. And they thought, what if we change the default and make it compact instead of midsize and let’s assume that 50% of the people upgrade. What would be the cost savings to the company, and what would be the carbon dioxide emission savings? Unlike your typical loaded intern, they got to present this to the CFO. And he liked it and said, “Okay, we’re implementing this.” It really gave the students a taste of the kind of impact that they can have.

Looking for those kinds of opportunities—perhaps later on after tenure, because this is very time-consuming at the end of the day—is a good way to have an impact.

Comments from Gal Raz: In the last couple of years, I’ve been on the administrative side as the associate dean of research. I’m looking at how to support our faculty, trying to help them, I would say in multiple dimensions that we talked about today. At the end of the day, I think it’s about impact. It’s about the impact of developing leaders. It’s about the impact of our research work. And when I look at teaching, I usually don’t like to look at it as disconnected to research—it has to be connected. I’ve seen different models work and for me it’s been cases. It’s been a way for me to work on a case that then leads to a research paper. So, I think you can bring something to the classroom and afterwards it becomes research.

But at the same time, we at Ivey accept cases from everybody, so unlike some of our other case collections that we have, 50% of our cases are coming from faculty from all over the world and I’ve done many case workshops. So, I would encourage you to think about working on a case that afterward could help you create a connection with a company that has potential both for impacting students as well as your research. I think there’s a lot of opportunities there to connect teaching to your research.

Jay: There are two types of cases that I end up writing. One is directly related to research. Because I’ve worked so much with these organizations, I tend to think about how to abstract what I learned to what I can disseminate into an MBA classroom. This is one type of case. The other one is where I work with a corporation or an organization, but nothing really gets published from there. It happens, and you have to be ready for that. But then I think about whether there is something there I learned, which I can now bring back into the classroom to contextualize a concept that students are thinking about. So, you should be open to both types of cases. One of the most popular cases is actually through Ivey, so I can second his thoughts about sending it through Ivey. It’s a very fair process in terms of how you assess cases. You don’t have to be a Harvard professor to do it, and I think there’s great dissemination which is available on Harvard publishing, so that’s where I disseminate it from.

Question on carbon tax: Assuming we can agree on a way to tax carbon emissions, how do you think nations should utilize the money raised through such a system—spending today vs. forward looking, national or international focus, etc.?

Beril: The step that the Biden administration is taking is to provide massive incentives across different technology areas, but there’s also a lot of funding for research translation. So, supporting the translation of research into the field through startups, I think that’s a good place to go. There’s also a lot of money that they’re putting into workforce development. In terms of gaining wider buy-in from different groups, that also is a very important place to go. So, I support some of those choices. Although, you can also see that there’s probably going to be misallocation, as always. But incentives seem to be a good place to go.

Serguei: One thing I would say is that I think governments are probably bad at deciding how to allocate this money. So, I don’t believe in efficiency of government in taking this money, taxing companies, and then redistributing. I would advocate something like companies must set aside budgets and then decide how to spend them. So, you know, you do the audit, you say, okay, your company must spend $10 billion a year on CSR [Corporate Social Responsibility] initiatives and then let them decide how they want to spend it. I think that might actually be more efficient. I’ve seen something like this implemented in China. Companies must set aside CSR budgets. I thought this was a good way to go.

Question about the future: Ten years from now, what achievements by the OM community would you wish to see and be most proud of?

Serguei: Some years ago, I co-founded Responsible Research for Business and Management, found at RRBM.network. It’s one of very few organizations that spans different disciplines within business. It unites schools and faculties across OM, finance and so on. The idea is very simple—make our research more responsible to society at large, which, to me means impacting more than just academia, because most of our papers just impact the twenty people in the room listening to presentations of this paper. So how do we also impact society? How do we impact companies? How do we impact people beyond academia? That’s ultimately the goal of our community. It’s grown tremendously over the last 6-7 years. We have thousands of supporters, co-signers, and AACSB—our number one accreditation body—works with us.

For example, we are working with the The Financial Times on changing how MBA programs are ranked. What we want to do is instead of including the number of papers published by faculty, we want to only count papers relative to their impact on society as a whole. We are helping them to devise this ranking. This is the first step because to make our research more responsible to the society, you need to change rankings, you need to change tenure and promotion systems.

I committed to start all of my tenure letters with an assessment of how much impact the person’s research had on society as a whole. So, if you don’t want me as a letter writer, you should know this. In the tenure and promotion system, it should not just count papers and citations and whatnot, but instead should consider the impact on society as a whole. So, if companies are becoming responsible, we, as the academic community have to become responsible as well, in everything—what we teach, how we do research, and what kind of service we do.

When considering the OM community, if you start ranking these papers on responsibility, we will be able to compare different fields. And I would love to have the operations community be rated higher on our metric of ESG than other fields. I would love to stick it to our finance and accounting colleagues and say, look, we are more responsible, we matter for the world more.

Jay: That’s a really nice perspective, Serguei. What would I like to see for the community? I would like each one of us, when we write a paper and we’re ready to submit it, to think about what the impact on society is. Is there any impact in that research? And be happy when there is, and there are more people doing this type of research. I think ten years from now, if we get 80% of people saying, “Hey, I wrote a paper that could have an impact on society in some way.” I think that would be success. By the time you get to the submission stage you really have some kind of a finished product for your research. And so, what I’m saying is, it starts with the self—first as introspection. And just be consistent with what we are saying, we should be able to do that. That is one measure of success.

I think in the last ten years, I’ve seen a dramatic increase in the number of people who are interested in being in this field. And so, I would like to see that growth. Maybe ten years from now this room is not big enough and we need to have two more rooms like this to be here or to a talk like this. That’ll be the second measure of success.

For the third measure of success—right now, when I do my own research and I’m mentoring students and talking to colleagues, particularly junior colleagues, they say, there is impact, and then there is my life in terms of publication. And it seems almost like an either/or. I would consider us a successful field maybe ten years down the road if this either/or dilemma is resolved—which means impactful research is part and parcel of one’s portfolio of research. Whatever we do, we have to think about how we do research. Individuals shouldn’t be studying these topics because they are so passionate about society or the environment, and that is only reason for them to be doing this. Instead, it should be that it’ll be consistent with how they will be evaluated, which goes back to letter writing and internal metrics.

It’ll be great if ten years down the road we have more progress and it becomes a lot easier for anybody who’s interested in these topics. If somebody tells you, “I want to work on inventory management,” or, “I want to work on supply chain management.” We don’t blink an eye. We just say, yeah, sure. But then somebody else comes and says, “I want to work on humanitarian operations.” Then they start thinking yes, it’s very impactful, but can I get it published and where do I submit? So, I would like that to be resolved in ten years time.

Jamal: I second what Jay has said. We would like to see our community or operations management research more relevant. Personally, I would like ten years from now to see research in the field reflecting the diversity, inclusiveness, the perspective of other countries, developing countries, and minorities. That would give me great pleasure if we can achieve that. And I think Beril has a lot to say about inclusiveness, right?

Beril: I am from Turkey, and if I was wearing a head scarf, I couldn’t have gone to a public school there. And I’m sure that in the US I wouldn’t have achieved what I have achieved if I had been wearing a head scarf. Whenever people appear as different or “other,” it’s just difficult to navigate the system. So, I do hope that we become more inclusive, but also that it’s reflected in research. Some of the most exciting things that I’m seeing at Georgia Tech in terms of climate resilience and climate adaptation research, is community-engaged research, citizen science. Involving citizens in collecting data and defining what the research questions are—they don’t frame it as research questions—but what are the questions that they want to know so that they can make decisions in their communities?

There’s some very interesting work happening across engineering, computing, public policy, and city and regional planning. Georgia Tech has tried to incorporate that. If you look at NIH in the health area, there is this notion of action research. The idea that the community members whom your research will impact become an integrated part of the research planning, scoping, research question development, and validation process. I don’t know whether we have a path there as an operations management or more generally, the business school community, but I find that very intriguing. It would be very interesting to think about what action research looks like for us in the business school community and more specifically in the operations management community.

That’s one big question I have. I don’t have any answers for it. I think I would like us to have had more impact on climate work, whether it’s in the mitigation or adaptation areas. One of the challenges I think is that, as with most sustainability research areas, it’s inherently interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary, and publishing becomes difficult. So, it still remains a luxury of a later career endeavor, and I hope that we can find mechanisms to make that more accessible earlier on in people’s careers.

 

Ling Li, Vinit Tipnis, and Tom Palley are doctoral students at the Kelley School of Business.