Ethics, CSR and sustainability in marketing education

Ethics, corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability have become important, yet challenging tasks for marketers. An integration of these issues in marketing education is needed. This chapter examines the integration of ethics, CSR and sustainability in marketing education empirically. The curricula of universities in the UK are analysed to determine whether marketing courses contain coverage of ethics, CSR and/or sustainability. The results indicate a great variety regarding the extent to which universities integrate the three topics into marketing modules. Ethics tends to be more present than CSR and sustainability; the latter two are only incorporated into a marginal number of the examined marketing modules. The study also addresses whether current marketing textbooks include sections on ethics, CSR and/or sustainability. This step reveals almost all textbooks cover ethics; yet the number of pages dedicated to this topic is on average very small. CSR and sustainability are taken into account even less by these textbook authors.