Science has one, and so does the arts. Medicine, too. There are academies for almost everything, it seems. Isn't it about time that corporate social re0sponsibility had one, too? Academies are places of higher learning, knowledge sharing and professional rigour. They give a subject nobility. For a nascent concept like CSR, you could argue that an academy could be a means of ratification.

Anyone attending a CSR academy might want to understand what they're studying first. That's no mean feat, says Ben Davies, director of membership relations at CSR Europe, an information network for ethical business. "The first few years of CSR Europe was spent in extremely long meetings trying to hammer out a definition," he recalls, adding that the group eventually decided to simply look at projects on the ground demonstrating innovation in the general area.

"We don't call it CSR. We call it CR," says Patrick Mallon, director for benchmark and reporting at Business in the Community (BITC), a network of companies focusing on promoting ethical business. It is about how businesses run day-to-day, and their general impact on the world, he says.

Mallon's definitions are particularly important, because in the next couple of months, BITC will be relaunching the CSR Academy, an initiative that it originally inherited from BERR (formerly the DTI). "It was a virtual academy, although they had done some training through partner organisations," says Mallon. It consisted of a web-based competency framework and some slides on a masterclass used by different organisations. "We didn't think the competency framework had been reviewed or evaluated in three and a half years, and we were not sure that it was making much difference," he admits.

BITC will be relaunching the CSR Academy as a face-to-face training organi sation. "I want to move it into more of a mainstream resource, providing high quality professional training to individuals with a tough job in front of them, " Mallon says, adding that it will run courses on everything from introductory concepts, through to integrating CSR into the business, and community investment. "But it has to be about training with other organisations, because the whole agenda is so wide."

Also on the cards is a professional development element, so that people will gain some sort of accreditation. BITC is not a standards developing organisation, so it will work with others. "I would imagine a combination of both professional bodies and universities wanting to get involved in accreditation," he says.

Business schools are in a unique position to help foster the development of CSR academies, because they straddle both the academic and the business worlds. As research associate at the University of Western Ontario's Richard Ivey School of Business, Tom Ewart gets to see both sides of the coin, and he thinks that there is work to do. "There is a critical gap there. Academics are responding to their own incentive systems, and creating a lot of interesting and important knowledge, but not all of it is relevant to the world of practice," he warns. " Very little is communicated in a way that anyone else beyond a few researchers can understand."

Understanding the metrics used to describe CSR is just as exciting an opportunity for Ewart as thrashing out the language with which to speak about it. Using advocacy and emotion to talk about sustainability is less valuable to him than a system of what he calls evidence-based management. After all, in a community that is trying to change the way it operates, what better subject to discuss then outcomes?

To this end, Ewart established the Research Network for Business Sustainability [www.sustainabilityresearch.org] as a means of bridging the gap between academia and business. Launched three years ago exclusively by researchers, it opened its self up to "practitioners" (CSR professionals to you and me) roughly 18 months ago, and now includes representatives from NGOs, industry, and governmental policymakers. Around 250 researchers and 100 practitioners are direct members of the network, which also has between 500 and 1,000 separate subscribers. Some practitioners sit on a leadership council that identifies research priorities. It is just wrapping up the first round of a project to synthesise all the public knowledge on those issues, which will continue throughout the coming year.

But how easy is it to develop rules and best practices for a concept as broad as CSR? "Institutionalising CSR is very dangerous," Davies says, adding that any such efforts must allow for innovation on the ground, rather than introducing too rigid a framework. He cites CSR projects as diverse as Danone funding local vitamin-enriched yoghurt manufacturing in conjunction with the founder of the Grameen Bank to Vodafone's Safaricom subsidiary in Kenya working with local communities to use mobile phones as a means to transfer money in the absence of local banks as evidence that a one-size-fits all approach to CSR project management will never work.

Some of the best CSR projects are grassroots developments that become significant in the corporation, he explains, whereas institutionalisation is traditionally a means of ratifying concepts from the top down. "It's dangerous to institutionalise things too much, if you look at the Vodafone initiative it started as a social project and ended up becoming a business line of the company," Davies says.

One of the other challenges involves organising multiple stakeholders as that institutionalisation occurs. Who gets to define the framework for CSR, and where do they come from? It isn't just businesses, or universities, but also environmental lobby groups and human rights organisations, to name but two. " Climate change, demographic change in Europe, workplace wellbeing – these are things that can't be thrashed out by a single set of stakeholders," Davies warns. "We are at the stage now where there is a realisation that you have to approach it together."

In the last three or four years, those stakeholders have come together more than in the past, he suggests, but adds that there will always be an element of agenda setting. NGOs can't lose their legitimacy by partnering with companies too closely, meaning that there will always be tensions within the non-profit world as it tries to dance with the corporate one.

As CSR becomes more universally understood, a consensus between such stakeholders could become more likely and a CSR academy will doubtless help with that task. Davies also hopes that foundational undergraduate courses in universities may also be able to instill some basic values in emerging graduates. "There is a question mark among companies over a potential mandatory module at the bachelors' level. Some universities and business schools are looking at that," he says.

Combined efforts such as these may lead to what Mallon hopes is the eventual full integration of CSR into business – delivering responsibility and sustainability as a fundamental alteration of a business's DNA, rather than some sort of surgical graft. "You are differentiating people from the core business when you say that you have specific managers that you want to train in CSR," he warns, adding that eventually that compartmentalised approach will have to be challenged.

However, many observers will likely respond that it is a case of all in good time. As a relatively nascent concept, CSR is going to need more than one organisation fighting its corner to get it to that stage of full integration with the rest of the business. BITC's CSR Academy is just one of them. Other organisations with similar goals include the European Academy for Business in Society, and in Canada the Sustainable Enterprise Academy. They will all have their own angles on the topic, but a diversity of approaches may be just what the concept needs as it begins to mature.