CIBJO President lectures business school graduate students about Corporate Social Responsibility in jewellery sector

MAY 14, 2015

“Socially responsibility is a way of life. It should never be considered a strategic alternative, which a business may select to increase revenue or to provide itself with a competitive advantage,” said CIBJO President Gaetano Cavalieri, speaking yesterday in Milan to students in the MBA Global Business and Sustainability program at ALTIS – Postgraduate Business & Society, the business school of Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, the largest private university in Europe and the largest Catholic University in the world.

In a wide-ranging presentation, Dr. Cavalieri described to the students, who hail from countries around the globe, the development of CSR strategies in the jewellery business, and the specific obligations to society that should be assumed by a luxury product sector.

“We deal in what commonly are considered luxury items,” he stated. “In other words fine jewellery is non-essential, unlike food, energy or pharmaceutical products. Consequently, in the big scheme of things, there is a tendency to view our industry as having limited significance.  But that is not the case. On a global scale the number of individuals directly and indirectly employed by the greater jewellery industry runs into millions, and there are entire countries whose economic wellbeing is dependent upon the products we produce and sell.”

With the increasing public interest in CSR, and with the private sector’s responsibility toward the greater society becoming a fixture in many business school programmes, Dr. Cavalieri has been invited to lecture before numerous academic forums about the specific programmes introduced in the jewellery trade. Among the universities at which he has lectured are the Polytechnic University of Milan and Sciences Po, the Paris Institute of Political Studies.