Management Education for a Sustainable World: Aiming for More Than Business as Usual

Introduction

To stay within the limits of “acceptable” climate change, which is set to a one-and-a-half degrees Celsius increase in the worlds’ land and oceans’ temperature, the efforts of humankind will have to be multiplied more than once or twice (Allen et al., 2019; United Nations, 2019). The consequences that we would face if we continue our path to temperatures higher than that are, to some extent, still unknown. However, scientists predict different kinds of ecosystem damage that could even be irreversible (Allen et al., 2019). As young Greta Thunberg said in her speech at the United Nations Climate Action Summit held in September 2019, the chances of us achieving that goal are rather low (NPR Staff, 2019). It appears that the odds are more than half against us. Nevertheless, this is not the only challenge the world faces. Political extremism, international fragmentation, and commercial conflicts are just a few of the topics that plague the news and add to the economic turbulence of our era (Cole & Snider, 2019). Seemingly never-ending wars are fought (or might be boiling as you read this) leaving significant numbers of people without homes, wandering the earth in the quest for shelter. Ultimately, all these elements are just pieces of a larger system that is seeing its mere viability being threatened.

In this major test of the human race, education may play a significant role (Olalla & Merino, 2019). For instance, the United Nations has positioned education at the core of its strategy for the promotion of sustainable development (Avelar, da Silva-Oliveira, & Pereira, 2019). Higher education holds the potential to construct a sustainable future (Tilbury & Ryan, 2011). In particular, management education may play a starring role (Cole & Snider, 2019; Filho et al., 2019; Kolb, Fröhlich, & Schmidpeter, 2017), providing options to address today’s crisis (Cullen, 2017). Scholars have explored how management education can influence our achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals by cascading their impact through quality education, the 4^th Sustainable Development Goal (Avelar et al., 2019; Kolb et al., 2017; Ndubuka & Rey-Marmonier, 2019).

However, business education has been criticized for its emphasis on a traditional vision of business where certain courses still favor “utilitarian ethics, a business case logic of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and a narrow definition of sustainability” (Ramboarisata & Gendron, 2019, p. 10). Education for sustainable development calls for a different approach (Gatti, Ulrich, & Seele, 2019) that takes content as well as processes and performance into account. To advance management education and enhance its influence on the adoption of sustainability as part of business strategy, in this chapter, the author presents a proposed pathway toward the development of competencies for sustainability and describes some of the teaching practices that could be used at each stage of the pathway.

As the meaning of competence is engrained in the notion of performance (Terrence, 1999), viewing sustainability teaching and learning from the perspective of competencies stresses the importance of managerial action and its outcomes. However, to develop competency, different objectives in diverse areas might require consideration. Bloom’s Taxonomy (Bloom, Engelhart, Furst, Hill, & Krathwohl, 1956) proposes that learning occurs in three different domains: affective, cognitive and psychomotor. While the affective domain refers to attitudes and interests towards a given topic, the cognitive domain refers to the level of dominion of specific knowledge, and the psychomotor domain refers to skills (Bloom et al., 1956; Forehand, 2010).