In their first formal training course, new executives at Unipart find themselves face to face with John Neil, the chief executive of the UK components and logistics group.

A strong believer in the importance of corporate social responsibility (CSR), Mr Neil outlines the company's model of stakeholder relations, takes them through what its values are and suggests how they should be applied in the work they will be doing at Unipart.

At BP, the oil company, a similar message is broadcast to employees through the company's leadership training. A three-tiered approach is directed at the company's top 550 leaders, its middle management and what it calls "first-level leaders" - the 10,000 executives around the globe that have supervisory responsibility or task force roles.

Non-governmental organi sations (NGOs) are brought in to discuss their view of BP and how the company relates to their activities.

"It's not about standing up with a pack of slides, walking people through it and then asking them to recite it back," says Tom Standing, senior adviser for learning and organisational development at BP.

"We try to create an environment where people have a dialogue because we are trying to affect significantly the beliefs and attitudes [of executives], rather than give them regulations."

However, the experience of BP and Unipart executives is not one shared by all students in corporate universities or corporate training programmes.

"There may be a growing awareness [of CSR] but not a lot is happening in corporate training organisations," says Leo Burke, director of executive education at Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business in Indiana.

And often, where corporate citizenship is covered, it is in the more limited realms of ethics classes, compliance with environmental standards or offering employees volunteering opportunities.

Part of the problem is that many of the traditional systems for training business managers focus on number crunching, while CSR remains extremely difficult to measure in those terms.

The structure of the programmes at corporate universities does not always allow for the introduction of cross-disciplinary topics, such as citizenship programmes or social investment. For example, the main purpose of the programmes at Dell Learning - which uses e-learning to instruct and educate the computer company's employees while at work - is to ensure its staff is up to speed in the skills that are directly applicable to their jobs.

Professor Burke, who was previously director of strategy at Motorola University, Arizona, argues that in-house business education does not necessarily lend itself to instruction in areas such as sustainable development and community investment.

"Corporate universities tend to focus on the specific skills training or, for those programmes that are addressed to senior executives, they tend to be business-issue specific," says Professor Burke.

Nancy McGraw, assistant director at the Aspen Institute, which monitors how CSR is being integrated into business education, agrees with this line of thought.

"There has been an emphasis placed on meeting specific skills and the needs of corporations - and those are often the more technical skills," she says.

Another difficulty in formulating corporate training in the area of CSR is that what CSR entails is very different for each company.

While multinational clothing manufacturers are dealing with supply chain issues, such as conditions for workers in the factories that produce their garments, for the financial services or legal sectors, CSR involves a very different set of challenges.

This makes it hard to produce off-the-shelf programmes in CSR that are able to go much further than basic training in ethics and compliance or techniques, such as stakeholder mapping.

Business schools argue that this is where they come in. With their growing role as suppliers of custom-built executive education courses, business schools can create tailor-made training solutions that incorporate CSR in different ways for a wide variety of companies.

Indeed, often such programmes are so closely tailored to an organisation's needs that they go beyond simple instruction.

"It is much more a kind of research and consultancy intervention as well as formal executive education training," says Andrew Wilson, director of the Centre for Business and Society at Ashridge College.

And business schools are certainly not subject to the financial pressures that force executives to focus on quarterly profits.

Many companies tend to be internally focused organisations, whose managers have too much to do and are rewarded only for their financial performance.

In such an environment, creating the time and incentives for executives to learn how to take on CSR is tough.

"There is enormous pressure for financial results and stemming from that is a pressure to mobilise all the resources at the disposal of the enterprise to generate those results," says Professor Burke.

However, Alyson Warhurst, director of the Corporate Citizenship Unit at Warwick University, sees a deeper structural issue at work. "There are few companies that actually employ social scientists or anthropologists - and those are the sorts of skills you need to address these complex issues of community and human rights," she says.

"Until companies realise that they have to be looking at a different type of skill set, they will not be able to make significant advances in this area. That is the next big challenge."