Back to (re)sources!
For this new 2022-2023 academic year, the Louvain School of Management is pleased to welcome a new professor, Corentin Hericher, who will be teaching to our students in Master’s degree the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) course.
Who is Corentin Hericher?
Corentin Hericher is assistant professor in Sustainability Management at Louvain School of Management and LouRIM. He completed his PhD at LSM in May 2020 and has several years of work experience outside Academia (Army, sales, logistics and consultancy). His research interests focus on employees’ reactions to organization’s actions that have an effect (positive or negative) on its stakeholders. He has published in international academic journals such as the Journal of Management and Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility.
We have interviewed Corentin regarding his career and his new experience as a University Professor at the Louvain School of Management, here is his shared experience.
Q: What did you do before teaching at the LSM?
Corentin: In 2007, I joined the Army as a helicopter pilot trainee for three years. Afterwards, I arrived to Belgium, and started to work as a phone seller for almost a year before working in logistics and completing a master’s degree in Labor Science at the UCLouvain. After having completed this Master’s degree, I started to study Management, and then joined the LSM and LouRIM and worked as a teaching assistant for 6 years.
In 2021, I joined Deloitte for a year, first as a Senior Consultant and then as a Manager in Financial Crime. In 2022, I am back at the LSM, but as a professor this time.
Q: What did you gain from this experience at Deloitte?
Corentin: I acquired knowledge in financial crime, especially about money laundering and fraud investigation. I learned how to structure my work, how to manage an international team. Finally, I learned how to translate objectives into operational goals and how to answer the needs of companies, in other words to put the theory into practice.
Q: What brought you to the Louvain School of Management?
Corentin: Besides fraud investigation, what I enjoyed the most at Deloitte was teaching. I gave practical training courses on anti-money laundering, anti-corruption, sanctions and embargoes, and whistleblowing. In addition, I enjoyed the interaction with the colleagues. Yet, I thought that I was missing something. I did not have the time to reflect and share knowledge on specific topics without having time and money constraints, which is why I decided that coming back to Academia was the right thing for me. Moreover, I love research.
Q: Speaking of research, what was your doctorate’s topic?
Corentin: I studied employees’ emotional and behavioral reactions to corporate social responsibility. Technically, I looked at how perceptions and evaluations of corporate social responsibility (CSR) of the organization translate into pride, elevation and anticipated guilt of employees, and how these emotions would translate into behaviors at work that would support the CSR of the organization.
Q: As a professor, what strategies will you use to maintain student engagement during classes?
Corentin: I would argue that the biggest challenge will be to make students interact especially in large groups and in English. My strategy will be to use every tool at my disposal to make students interact. Wooclap is an interesting tool, but until a certain point. Another challenge would be to find new tools to keep students interacting.
My theory/practice technique would be very interesting for this new position. For instance, during my previous experiences, I used to conduct experiments with the students on topics randomly allocated and see how the students would react to different scenarios. Basically, my technique was to make them participate, complete a questionnaire, and discuss the results.
With the Consulting Project, the challenges are different. Interactions are easier because the students’ groups are smaller, however, students will have to be proactive and, autonomous because they will not have clear guidelines to follow.
Q: What are the values you will instill in your classes?
Corentin: One of the main values that I want to share with students would be a sense of benevolence. I want to show them that it is not because you are in a position of authority that you cannot interact in a nice, polite and thoughtful manner. Open-mindedness towards others is somehow lacking in organizations nowadays.
Furthermore, I would like them to develop their critical mindset, which is why I decided to give a non-normative approach to the CSR course. I also want to share with them strong knowledge of the topic and not be an echo: I want to give scientific facts and then discuss it together, so again, put the theory into practice.
Q: Why do you think that sustainability is more important than ever?
Corentin: Because if we do not act sustainably, we will die. The first reason why we need to be sustainable is to ensure that future generations will also answer their own needs.
If we continue to deplete resources, the ones coming after us will not be able to live. We often say that the earth needs to be saved, but it is the conditions for the future generations to survive that matters. The earth will survive without the human species. That is why there is an urgent need to educate people around us.
I want to give my students the necessary tools to be capable of assessing the quality and the ambition of a company regarding its sustainability and be able to make informed choices in function of their values.
Q: Do you think that younger generations are more aware of the importance of sustainability?
Corentin: Yes, I think they are. However, we all need to learn how to consume less and act more sustainably. I hope that sustainability will be part of every course we teach students so that we can integrate students will be capable to integrate sustainability in their future managerial decisions. Therefore, I hope that someday, we will not have to teach a sustainability course anymore because it would be perfectly and transversally integrated to all the courses.
Q: What is the value of this type of approach, which emphasizes collaboration, and exchange of experience between companies and students?
Corentin: I would talk about organizations rather than companies. A wider range of organizations can talk about CSR: NGOs, networks, and public organizations. I believe that interacting with organizations help students confront the knowledge they learn to specific situations. It also gives them a practical perspective on theoretical learnings that we offer them at the university.