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 broad view of sustainability goes beyond resilience and longevity and emphasises the need to balance environmental, social, and economic considerations in decision-making. It has a direct link with the quest for sustainable developmentâthat is, a development that will not inhibit future generations in their quest for development (WCED 1987). It recognises the nested interdependency amongst the economy, society, and environment. In other words, the success of the economy is dependent on the viability of society, and the success of society requires the viability of the environment. As such, without the environment, there will be no society, and without society, there will be no economy. The three are interwoven. Hence, the threat of climate change, whilst an environmental phenomenon, has both social and economic consequences.
Sustainability, therefore, strives to ensure the integrity of this nested interdependency, which is very much at the heart of the United Nations (UN) 2015 sustainable development goals (SDGs). The SDGs are amongst the greatest pursuits of our time. Given the focus of the SDGs on inter-generational equity, the pursuit of sustainable development is, arguably, a normative project, which entails collective responsibility and action from different actorsâfor example, governments, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), multinational institutions, the academia, and the business community. The SDGs are also fundamental to the contemporary corporate sustainability movement, which emphasises the need to balance environmental, social, and economic considerations in decision-making. This balance has been understood and expressed in many ways including but not limited to environmental sustainability, economic sustainability, and social sustainability. This is a growing agenda the academia has been called to effectively contribute to.
Business Schools and professional managers, as producers and disseminators of management knowledge, are now being challenged to incorporate this broad view of sustainability into their curricula. The business and management schools (BAMs), in particular, have broad reach and impact on the three pillars of sustainability through their streams of activitiesâthat is, research, teaching, and engagement. Through teaching, for instance, they influence current and future generations of managers and leaders. In this regard, business schools are increasingly seen as a major player in moving sustainable agenda forward while also empowering individuals and organisations to put in place sustainable solutions. This they do by linking together theory and practice of responsible management into their programmes. In addition, there have been initiatives (e.g. the Grey Principles) and the United Nations Principles for Responsible Management Education (UN-PRME) to promote this agenda. In addition, business education accreditation bodies driving the agenda include EFMD Quality Improvement System (EQUIS), The Association of MBAs (AMBA), and The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), who have started making stringent demands on business schools to reflect sustainability thinking in their curricula.
Since the inception of the UN-PRME in 2007, there has been increased debate as to how to integrate and adapt sustainability into the management education to meet the needs of the twenty-first-century business climate. While there is a seeming consensus by the globally focused management education institutions that sustainability needs to be well ingrained into their management educational curricula, the relevant question is no longer why but how. In spite of the current effort and elegant push on business schools to incorporate sustainability into their operations, some business schools still take for granted how it should be done.
Many BAMs take an insular approach to sustainability in the area of teaching, research, and structure. Shareholder value maximisation and, to a larger extent, meeting the needs of all material stakeholders are projected as the centrepiece of the siloed curriculum, with ethics and societal issues not mainstreamed. In most BAMs, for instance, there is often little support for faculty members to make the transition to a sustainability informed curriculum. This has often resulted to subtle resistance from some faculty members, while others are frustrated and intimidated by the need to incorporate sustainability into their courses and teaching programmes. We (i.e. the editors) face these pressures in our various schools and in practice. However, this traditional approach to management is gradually changing. A growing number of BAMs in the last decade are beginning to respond to the call that management education plays an important role in moving the sustainability agenda forward, and preparing future managers, practitioners, and leaders to meet the challenges of sustainability.
From our experience, higher education institutions (HEIs) are willing to support their faculty members to make the transition to sustainability informed curricula. Unfortunately, there are very few resources available to support the HEIs. In addition, some business schools and management scholars still find it difficult to embed sustainability in their teaching activities. This book is keen to fill this gap. It is intentionally not heavy on theory and academic jargons. The idea is to make it as simple as possible. The chapters provide some examples of, and guides on, how sustainability can be integrated into management educationâespecially in the MBA modules, as a flagship BAMs programme.
Chapter 2 provides the ample explanation of how sustainability can be embedded into entrepreneurship curriculum with a case study of how it was done in a public university in the United States. Frances M. Amatucci based her argument on the need for a paradigm shift in delivering entrepreneurship education submitting that the recent UN-SDGs offer a platform for exploring and exploiting sustainable entrepreneurial opportunities. Since entrepreneurs employ innovation and creativity in their business models, there is a symbiotic relationship between entrepreneurship and sustainability that can hardly be separated in the twenty-first century.
Rob Gray in Chap. 3 focuses on sustainability accounting and education: conflicts and possibilities. Accounting education has a long history of resisting ideas and innovations, which may fundamentally challenge taken-for-granted assumptions. However, these concerns were especially acute when issues such as ethics, social responsibility, social accounting, and now sustainability are being introduced into its curriculum. Sustainability challenges everything about modernity, at least in principle. The chapter shows how the integration process has been challenging as it appears to sit uncomfortably with the accounting conventions and mores. The chapter concludes that integrating sustainability into accounting education will require aggressive and high degrees of disruption, cognitive dissonance, and breaking out of norms. The underlying theme of the chapter, therefore, is that if the educators and students are not feeling importuned and fundamentally challenged, then we are not properly looking at sustainability in accounting.
In Chap. 4, Andrew J. Angus and Joseph G. Nellis explore the embedding of sustainability into business economics . Mainstream economic thinking of sustainability has fused into the field of environmental economics , a sub-discipline of microeconomics. They however propose the need to move beyond this parochial outlook of sustainability. Using the two competing views of sustainability (i.e. weak and strong sustainability), they suggest that sustainability thinking should be infused into business economics education through microeconomics and macroeconomic...