Incorporating Sustainability in Management Education

Sustainability has become a new mantra, a philosophy of sorts. It does, however, mean different things to different people. If one takes the literary meaning of the word, it could simply suggest longevity or the ability to continue in existence irrespective of counteracting pressures. Another word often used in this regard is resilience. While longevity and resilience are integral to sustainability, they tend to, somewhat, present a narrow and limited view of sustainability.

The sustainability revolution requires a paradigmatic shift in the way entrepreneurship education is delivered. There are ample opportunities to introduce sustainability concepts into the entrepreneurship curriculum since they employ innovation and creativity in both product/service and business model applications. Increased demand for clean, renewable energy, abundant safe drinking water, and healthy products give rise to innovations in the use of biomimicry, green chemistry, green supply chains, and building design. The sustainable development goals (SDGs) developed by the United Nations provide a platform from which entrepreneurial opportunities emerge. Although the entrepreneurial process may be the same, sustainability requires changes in business plan or business model development. A case study of how sustainability is embedded in the entrepreneurship curriculum in a public university in the United States is provided.

Accounting education has a long history of successfully resisting ideas and innovations which may fundamentally challenge taken-for-granted assumptions. Whilst it is just about possible to adopt an understanding of sustainability which does not challenge fundamental assumptions about economy, capitalism and accounting, it is arguably the duty of education to encourage the exploration of such challenges. This chapter briefly reviews these contentions and then, having offered a review of approaches to sustainability accounting, suggests how educators might approach the question of how disruptive a sustainability accounting education might be. The underlying theme of the chapter is that if the educator and the student are not feeling uncomfortable and fundamentally challenged, then we are probably not looking at either sustainability or education.

To a large extent, mainstream economic thinking on sustainability has coalesced into the field of environmental economics. However, in this chapter we propose that practice has now moved beyond this view of sustainability. Sustainable action is often led by business as a means of gaining competitive advantage, creating, or destroying barriers to entry, or creating new markets. We suggest that sustainability thinking should be infused through both microeconomic and macroeconomic teaching, rather than being a distinct topic on a microeconomics module or course.

Accordingly, we propose that a microeconomics syllabus should view sustainability from a firm’s perspective, as a means of improving competitiveness, creating new barriers to entry, or disruptive innovation, rather than viewed entirely through a lens of government intervention. A macroeconomics syllabus should include questions around how to measure economic growth, adjusted for environmental gains and losses, or in a way that more closely links to human wellbeing. Consideration should also be given to what concepts such as the green economy, circular economy, and steady state economy mean in the context of macroeconomic planning.

Globalization has changed the world and greatly affected business and management education. However, within mainstream curricula globalization is often framed in a particularly narrow sense, which often reproduces business-as-usual. By implication, a sustainability perspective is hardly noticeable in most university-level subjects that draw from globalization. To explore ways of overcoming this shortcoming, I reflect on two aspects of my experience attempting to integrate sustainability into international business (IB) studies. First, I consider limitations related to course content, discussing ways to re-orientate IB towards meaningful inclusion of sustainability. Second, I identify four common student types—‘radicals,’ ‘deer in the headlights,’ ‘traditionalists,’ and ‘highbrows’—to highlight particular challenges that arise when students are confronted with a sustainability perspective. Using illustrative examples from my lectures, this chapter proposes certain strategies that others may utilize to effectively further the sustainability agenda within business and management studies.

This chapter presents a timely case for incorporating sustainability education as a key feature of marketing curricula. Heath and McKechnie in this chapter contextualise marketing education for sustainability within the changing higher education landscape, which has been shaped by increasing demands from international and national stakeholders to develop sustainability literacy amongst students. They share their experiences of embedding sustainability within a new marketing course by focusing predominantly on environmental and green issues, and they discuss pedagogical matters and practices within it. Drawing on a review of literature on marketing and the environment and on examples from practice, they suggest ways to engage students with sustainability issues from the outset and to facilitate their learning. They reflect on challenges of this endeavour and ways to overcome them.

Notwithstanding the highly laudable efforts of the Principles for Responsible Investment and other Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG)-related trade groups and organisations, Responsible Investment (RI) has still to be mainstreamed in the financial services industry. Despite hugely increased awareness, implementation still lacks depth across many financial institutions. The major challenge is that mainstreaming RI effectively involves a system change—a paradigm shift that, amongst other things, will require a corresponding culture change within the world of institutional investors and with it a higher degree of knowledge skills and expertise. This is no easy task: at a fundamental level, it is proving difficult to change or redirect the financial services sector. Even following the global financial crisis it would appear that, rather than change, the system has, in broad terms, merely been repaired with largely the same people doing similar things as before, albeit in a tighter and less permissive regulatory environment. Genuine global industry ESG integration and adoption of RI will require additional efforts and a greater diversity and depth of knowledge, skills, and understanding from an employee’s entering or wishing to flourish in the sector. It is in this aspect that business schools and other higher education facilities can play a leading and hugely significant role to address some of the current gaps. This chapter addresses how sustainability thinking can be embedded in finance curriculum.

This chapter presents the case for integrating sustainability principles into supply and value chain management provision at higher education level as an urgent matter for consideration. It draws on the key declarations including Global Action Programme (GAP) of UNESCO that support the incorporation of sustainability values and practices into all aspects of learning to underscore the need for embedding supply and value chain management curriculum with sustainability. The shared experience and insights from scholarly engagement with integrating sustainability principles at three levels in higher education facilitate sustainability knowledge transfer. Grounded in the extant literature, a critical discussion of the integration process including pedagogical practices reveals prospects and challenges to scaling up of sustainable supply and value chain management education.

The role of business is changing and business schools need to adapt to new demands. Data from both MBA graduates and sustainable practitioners show areas that business schools can focus on to attract the students who will become tomorrow’s leaders and ensure that they have the tools to lead. These are summarised as Curriculum, ensuring the centrality of sustainable business; Context, demonstrating the value of sustainable business leadership; Communication, showing the need for integrity and engagement with the complexity of sustainable practice; Collaboration, creating community both within and out with higher education; Connection, engaging the whole student, emotionally as well as intellectually; and Challenge, looking afresh at consensus ideas about how businesses operate and inspiring students to transform business into a powerful agent for positive change.

This chapter traces the evolution of several inter-linked business models for embedding corporate sustainability, and how the use of these models in teaching at two business schools—in the UK and the Netherlands, with groups of international students—developed over almost a decade.