Responsible management education: rhetoric vs reality

Despite the commitment of business schools, has the complex agenda of embedding sustainability authentically translated into reality?

By Fara Azmat

, Ameeta Jain

and Bhavani Sridharan

The pressure for business schools to address sustainability and make management education responsible driven by initiatives like Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME), UN Sustainable development goals (SDGs), and major accreditation bodies such as AACSB, EFMD is intense, growing, and impossible to ignore.

In the context of rising sustainability challenges — growing inequalities, climate change, geopolitical tensions, corporate scandals, the effects of the global pandemic — business schools across the world are facing the pressure of delivering RME to enable students to develop into responsible future leaders. Incorporating sustainability perspectives, RME is a holistic term that requires business schools to adopt a systems perspective focusing not only on education, but also on research and enterprise activities, while cultivating their own ethos and demonstrating commitment with actions across every school activity (Azmat et al, 2023; Beddewela et al, 2017). For business schools, delivering RME is not just a moral responsibility to equip students with the sustainability mindset, knowledge and skillsets, it also has strategic implications. The external pressure — driven by PRME, UN SDGs, and the major accreditation bodies such as AACSB, EFMD and the Financial Times — for business schools to deliver RME is intense and impossible to ignore. As part of this global movement, a growing number of schools are now committed to delivering RME through embedding SDGs across curricula, research, and partnerships. While this rhetoric of RME is important, after more than seven years of adoption of SDGs and halfway towards Agenda 2030, there is a need to assess how business schools are proceeding towards the delivery of RME and the reality in the field of management education.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, student enrolments in business schools have been adversely impacted, leading to ongoing pressures for profit maximisation

For business schools, RME has proven to be ‘a complex, emerging, evolving and nonlinear process’ (Cicmil et al, 2017, p. 303). This is because it challenges the dominant business school pedagogical constructs of profit above all else and the primacy of shareholders’ rights, and seeks to transform stakeholders’ knowledge, understanding and behaviour to a more balanced, ethical, sustainable world (Kurucz et al, 2014). Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, student enrolments in business schools have been adversely impacted, leading to ongoing pressures for profit maximisation. Schools are being forced to navigate the tension between increasing their enrolments and revenue, with the cost of changing the business school ethos required for RME.

To understand the rhetoric versus reality of business schools’ commitment to RME, we interviewed a cross section of academic staff and a group of undergraduate and postgraduate students from an Australian business school, and experts on SDGs and PRME from Australia and across the world. Using this primary data, we were able to identify: first the current position of rhetoric versus reality of embedding SDGs in business schools, and second, the enablers and roadblocks in this process of RME, enabling us to make some suggestions on how to overcome these roadblocks.

What are business schools doing now?

All business schools in our global sample are committed to delivering RME, however their journey in doing so varies, dependent on their own unique context, organisational needs and idiosyncratic capacities. We concur with earlier research that found business schools tended to focus on embedding SDGs in their curricula (Wersun et al, 2020) in their approach towards RME, through mandatory core or elective units, across the entire curriculum, or using an interdisciplinary approach. Schools are committed to embedding sustainability in their operational activities, by incorporating SDGs in their strategic plans, reducing carbon emissions, across supply chains, transport, construction and finance. On a positive note, embedding sustainability is increasingly being embraced in schools, leading towards positive social and environmental impact. One expert explained: