Summary
This downloadable PDF lesson plan for business English teachers explores the nuanced concept of stakeholder capitalism. Tailored for advanced (C1) students, this ESL material enables discussions on corporate responsibility, economics, and contrasting business philosophies.
Based on a clear instructional video, the lesson covers essential business vocabulary and focuses on developing formal language skills, including the grammar of nominalization. Students will engage in critical thinking and debate through activities culminating in a boardroom role-play, making it an ideal resource for mastering complex business English.
Activities
- Students start by discussing the primary purpose of a company and its responsibilities, activating their prior knowledge on the topic of corporate ethics and goals.
- Learners match key vocabulary from the video and lesson material, such as shareholder, stakeholder, and procurement, with their definitions to ensure comprehension.
- Students watch a short video explaining the concepts of shareholder and stakeholder capitalism and answer comprehension questions to check their understanding of the main arguments presented.
- A gap-fill exercise helps students practice useful phrases and idiomatic expressions relevant to business discussions, such as 'walk the talk' and 'a spillover from'.
- The lesson includes a grammar section focused on nominalization, a key feature of formal business English. Students practice converting verbs and adjectives into nouns to create more concise and abstract sentences.
- The lesson culminates in a group role-play where students act as a company's board of directors. They must debate different proposals for using company profits, justifying their decisions based on stakeholder theory and practicing their acquired language skills.
So where are we at with capitalism? We're at the point that we just go from crisis to crisis. You know, we're currently living through a health pandemic. On the back of that of course we have a massive global warming crisis, but we often have financial crises.
So one of the key problems is that if we keep just fixing our way out of each crisis, we will by definition be too little too late. And I really believe that we should be constantly negotiating together about the type of capitalism we want and getting a much more functional form of capitalism. And I really don't think we have a choice right now.
Shareholder capitalism starts with the idea that only business creates value and second that business creates value best when it's maximizing share prices and values for shareholders.
Stakeholder capitalism starts with the idea that wealth is actually created collectively by different types of organizations, not only within business.
The second point is how do we make sure also that wealth is redistributed between all these different value-creating stakeholders? And that means, you know, to workers and improving working conditions. It means serving our communities and definitely our planet so it is more sustainable. But it's a much stronger concept if it's linked to an idea of wealth creation itself.
There's different ways to walk the talk of stakeholder value. One is to recognize how the success of a company has been, is, and will be reliant on this immense, you know, kind of collective effort and actually name checking it, right?
Talk about the funds from the public sector, you know, procurement, grants, loans, bailouts, recovery packages. Or talk about the trade unions that really helped foster, say, a better negotiation between capital and labor, right?
So actually to name check all the different types of relationships surrounding a company which have been part of its own success.
So for example, lots of the drugs that we all use, blockbuster drugs, often trace their research to organizations like the National Institutes of Health, which in the United States invest over $40 billion a year in health innovation.
And so the first recognition is this wider, you know, structure, social and physical infrastructure that companies benefit from. I just think that has to be, you know, admitted.
Second is what does it actually mean to do things differently, right? Just maximizing profits can only get you so far.
Even if we look at the vaccine right for COVID-19, if you look around the world at different types of pharmaceutical companies, some have been willing to sign what the World Health Organization is calling for, which is a patent pool to really share all the different knowledge that is behind not only the vaccine but also the therapies like Remdesivir.
And so, you know, for me that's walking the talk of stakeholder value. So if you're not willing to sign up to a patent pool, if you're not willing to charge a competitive low price for the vaccine, you know, as the AstraZeneca vaccine is a fraction of the cost of the Pfizer vaccine, the cost and the prices matter in terms of the massive rollout that we actually require globally.
And we shouldn't assume that these are just kind of generic standard and deterministic properties. What you see is a very different type of behavior.
Third, if we think back to, you know, the moon landing, which is what I reflect on in my book, and just this immense collective effort that happened in order for this extremely hard goal to be fulfilled, much harder than delivering today, you know, personal protection equipment to frontline workers, it was a hard task.
It actually meant truly collaborating. You know, going to the moon was not just aeronautics. It was also investment in materials, nutrition, electronics. The whole software industry in some ways was a spillover from that.
But what it also required was a very different approach to industrial strategy. There was no list of sectors. There was a problem that had to be solved and all these different sectors came together with government guidance to solve that problem.
And I just think we need to get into that mission mood shot kind of mindset, which is instead of just asking for handouts and subsidies, how can we actually collaborate together to foster new solutions for big problems, which today could also be something like, you know, getting the plastic out of the ocean.
But it really does mean that in terms of the immense lobbying effort, you know, that companies have globally, that what they are asking for is less just about a subsidy here, a guarantee there, a tax reduction there, but actually working together with different actors in a fundamentally different way and being willing to collaborate towards solving a problem.
I think we would just have a very different, you know, planet that we would be living on today.
We shouldn't see this as limiting your ability to make profit. The profits that are going to be made will be reflecting this collective value creation. This is the kind of big recognition point, which is if companies care about stakeholder value, they have to begin with how wealth is created in the first place.
If wealth is in fact created collectively, then what does it mean to also make sure that we are adequately distributing the rewards that actually reflect that value creation?
In that famous Google grant that went to Sergey Brin, you know, it could have said, you know, here's some money. If all fails, do not worry. It's guaranteed. Just, you know, go away, experiment.
But if you make over X billion, say, on the back of this grant for the Google algorithm, a certain percentage will come back to an innovation fund, a common pot that will help the future Googles. Why not?
We need to remember this is about certain types of market outcomes. There's varieties of capitalism. We are again living through multiple types of crises, and if we want to foster long-term growth, we want to have a sustainable planet, we need to be working together in a fundamentally different way.
And it's not going to happen just by talking the talk of stakeholder value. We need to start walking that walk.
Vocabulary focus
The vocabulary focuses on key business and economic terms such as shareholder, stakeholder, procurement, bailout, subsidy, and foster. Students will also learn useful idiomatic phrases including 'walk the talk', 'too little, too late', and 'a spillover from' to facilitate more natural and sophisticated business discussions.
Grammar focus
The grammar section focuses on nominalization, which is the process of converting verbs or adjectives into nouns (e.g., 'creation', 'regulation', 'decision'). This grammatical tool is essential for formal and business English, enabling students to write and speak in a more abstract, concise, and academic style. The lesson includes an exercise to practice this transformation, reinforcing understanding and application.
