Bolstering responsible management education through the sustainable development goals: Three perspectives

Abstract

Acknowledging the roles and responsibilities of business in society and the importance of realizing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), contemporary management education is characterized by the integration of a rich palette of initiatives in the field of Responsible Management Education (RME). It is important though to recognize that these initiatives, however laudable, so far represent rather basic, and thus insufficient, ways of truly integrating sustainability into management education. This Provocation to Debate essay therefore identifies three perspectives for bolstering RME through the SDGs: (1) addressing the fact that SDGs incorporate trade-offs, tensions, and paradoxes; (2) realizing the SGDs implies engaging in systemic activism; and (3) embracing the SDGs comes with emotional affect. As such, this essay is an invitation to critically reflect on the roles and contents of management education in spurring sustainable development and to engage in a meaningful discussion about the value and the limitations of the SDGs for advancing the RME agenda.

Keywords

Activism emotional affect paradox responsible management education sustainability sustainable development goals

Background: Responsible management education and the sustainable development goals

High-profile corporate scandals around the turn of the century, the financial system’s meltdown and ensuing economic crises of 2008–2011, and the increased awareness of the devastating ecological and social impacts of business have led to the critical scrutiny of both corporate practices and the role of business schools (Burchell et al., 2014; Kurucz et al., 2014; Swanson and Frederick, 2003). With pressures to integrate ethics training in management education mounting, expectations about the roles and responsibilities of business in society rapidly changing, and social movements particularly in the field of climate change quickly growing, business schools worldwide have reflected on their roles and responded through embracing the idea of Responsible Management Education (RME). Through a rich palette of RME initiatives, business schools have integrated the topic of sustainability into their management education programs, acknowledging the intricate links between business and society and the need for companies to operate both within planetary boundaries and in a way that meets social foundations (Raworth, 2017; Rockström et al., 2009).

These initiatives broadly vary from so-called saddle bag approaches (Sharma and Hart, 2014) that rely on bolting on or plugging in sustainability contents onto and into existing curricula to applying a more integrative approach taking sustainability as the primary lense to interpret the realm of business-society relations (Waddock and Lozano, 2013). In today’s management education practice, RME initiatives differ with respect to their sustainability contents, teaching methods, whether or not these initiatives are a mandatory part of the curriculum, and the educational level at which they are implemented within business schools (Wu et al., 2017). Kurucz et al. (2014) have argued that this attention for sustainability is part of a provocative educative practice and, as such, can function as a driver of developing critical approaches toward management education that stimulate reflective practice and encourage business schools as public spheres of conscientization. Referring to the work of Giroux (1988, 2011), these authors contend that management educators must increasingly adopt a role of public intellectual working to “foster a common public discourse and prepare students to be critical thinkers and engaged citizens” (Kurucz et al., 2014: 449).

A prominent way in which business schools have adopted the sustainability agenda and responded to the call to reform management education by the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) is through integrating Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in their programs (Parkes et al., 2017; Storey et al., 2017). The SDGs represent the operationalization of Agenda 2030, which offers “a plan of action for people, planet and prosperity” and which “seeks to strengthen universal peace in larger freedom” (United Nations, 2015: 1). These goals capture an encompassing spectrum of sustainability topics that are, by definition, integrated, indivisible, and universally applicable, implying “deep interconnections and many cross-cutting elements” (ibid., p. 6) and have become the de facto sustainability standard for businesses and governments that aspire to contribute to the sustainability agenda (Mio et al., 2020; Moratis et al., 2018).

Unfortunately, scrutinizing the initiatives taken within the management education community to contribute to this agenda reveals that, many RME initiatives taken by business schools, while laudable and aligning with the ambitions of the PRME, actually represent rather basic ways of integrating sustainability into management education that neither acknowledge the complexities of sustainable development nor recognize the full learning potential offered by the SDGs. In fact, these initiatives are predominantly based on applying an issue-based content perspective on the SDGs; viewing the SDGs merely as a contemporary, clear-cut, and legitimized interpretation of the ambiguous and essentially contested sustainability concept (cf. Okoye, 2009) rather than considering sustainability to represent a challenge that requires transformational and systemic change, that questions assumptions about “business as usual,” and that may have significant ramifications for management education program design and the ultimate function of business schools in our society (cf. Kurucz et al., 2014). More specifically, within the context of this approach to integrating sustainability into management education, the SDGs seem to simply function as a general overarching orientation or unifying doxa for the functioning of business schools (related to education, research, and organizational processes) and as an internationally accepted framework that acknowledges the importance of discussing the sustainability concept from the perspective of different socioeconomic and cultural contexts (Garcia-Feijoo et al., 2020; Storey et al., 2017). Also, we see that the wordings that various business schools use to describe their attention for the SDGs tend to emphasize the SDGs as merely a contemporary framework for demonstrating or acknowledging the spectrum of relevant sustainability issues and how these are relevant for business, the instrumental use of the SDGs in terms of the market, innovation, or investment opportunities they embody, and local or regional interpretations of social and ecological challenges that essentially focus on a subset of the goals (cf. Storey et al., 2017; Weybrecht, 2017, 2020). Unfortunately, interpreting the integration of the SDGs in management education in these ways may very well limit their impact to becoming part of already existing RME initiatives and approaches that are underpinned by long-held and ingrained beliefs about the main functions of management education and may only lead to incremental advancements in addressing sustainability in teaching and research. Also, such approaches run the risk of uncritically emphasizing so-called shared value approaches to sustainability that are based on the assumption that sustainability represents a new source of corporate profit, market opportunities, and economic prosperity (Crane et al., 2014). Or even worse, communicating about the SDGs as a central point of orientation for RME initiatives could turn out to represent a form of “bluewashing”; associating the organization with the United Nations in order to obtain legitimacy for what is instead of serving as the impetus for the real change that is needed (Berliner and Prakash, 2014).

Bolstering RME through the SDGs

Against this background, it is crucial to note that the SDGs harbor far more interesting perspectives to bolster RME. Below, we identify three such perspectives, which could contribute to advancing more critical approaches to management education, advancing RME in ways that go beyond rudimentary application and interpretation of the SDGs, and identifying a much-needed new role for business schools in spurring sustainability.

Perspective 1: The SDGs incorporate trade-offs, tensions, and paradoxes

Sustainability has been recognized as a phenomenon of trade-offs, tensions, and paradoxes, notably because of the integration of seemingly contradictory goals in and apparent interdependencies between the ecological, social, and economic realms that the concept represents (Hahn et al., 2014). Indeed, and identified by Kurucz et al. (2014: 437) as the “sustainability paradox,” “our dominant approaches to wealth creation degrade both the ecological systems and the social relationships upon which their very survival depends.” Reflections on the role of business in the sustainability agenda, as noted above, have so far predominantly taken an instrumental perspective, arguing how addressing sustainability challenges may lead to some sort of business or economic value, as vividly argued by the likes of Hart and Milstein (2003) and Porter and Kramer (2011). As is characteristic of such instrumental approaches, sustainability is seen as a means to a “higher” end (i.e., corporate profit), making investments in ecological quality and social justice conditional on economic success rather than considering the former as determinants of the latter. However, within the context of the SDGs, it has been observed that SDG #8 (Decent work and economic growth) does not align with the other SDGs, as research by Hickel and Kallis (2020) has shown that absolute decoupling of economic growth from resource use and carbon emissions is either not corroborated or highly unlikely, making green growth elusive. This notion, in turn, can and should spark debate about the extent to which the SDGs are fit for the purpose they aim to serve and whether or not they can actually facilitate the transformational change needed to arrive at an economic system that respects ecological and social thresholds. Hickel (2020) recently criticized the SDG Index, a global metric to track countries’ performance on the SDGs, for celebrating rich countries’ limited direct ecological impacts while ignoring the underlying explanation of offshoring polluting activities to countries in the global south. The dramatic ecological impacts of patterns of overconsumption and social development efforts in the global north are not accounted for in nor reflected through the SDGs, thereby compromising the principle of “strong sustainability.” This begs reflection on whether sustainable development is a contradiction in terms and whether the SDGs are based on assumptions that reflect and reinforce longstanding economic power relations (cf. Carant, 2017).

Also, the sustainability paradox extends well beyond the competing interests of business and society or economics and the environment. As Hickel (2014) has argued, stimulating economic growth and eradicating poverty by focusing investments on empowering young women may shift away the attention from more important drivers of poverty, including debt, tax evasion, and labour exploitation. Such gender-based approaches (SDG #5) may therefore compromise efforts on improving institutional infrastructure and governance (SDG #16). In a similar vein, a potentially problematic relationship exists between SDG #1 (No poverty), SDG #4 (Quality education) and all SDGs that focus on environmental goals; getting people out of poverty and providing them with quality education will lead to a quickly growing and prosperous middle class in societies of developing economies, leading to exploding patterns of consumption and production. As research from the Footprint Network into the relationships between human development and the Earth’s biocapacity has shown, within the context of our current socioeconomic system high levels of human development correlate with exponentially increasing ecological footprints (Wackernagel et al., 2019). These observations become even more problematic against the background of Agenda 2030 stating that “eradicating poverty in all its forms and dimensions, including extreme poverty, is the greatest global challenge and an indispensable requirement for sustainable development” (United Nations, 2015: 1).

From the perspective of RME, such paradoxes, trade-offs, and tensions provide management educators with opportunities to stimulate profound reflections on value creation. Since the SDGs are fundamentally oriented toward society-level value creation (cf. Kurucz et al., 2008), formidable questions arise: What value do we, as a society among many, wish to create? How do we decide what is the right value to create? What is the right way of creating value? And is there a “right” decision to make? In addition, questions of societal value creation are multidimensional, comprising temporal (now/later), spatial (here/there), and personal dimensions (self/other), which adds to the complexity. Such thorny questions can perhaps best be addressed through triple-loop learning. This mode of learning challenges our thinking about the ways in which we create knowledge and the values and norms that underpin our assumptions. As Kurucz et al. (2014: 450) write, “it emphasizes the importance of transdisciplinary, situated, and relational learning, [shifting the focus] from the individual as learner, to learning as participation in the social world, and learning is taken as an integral aspect of generative social practice.” Within such generative social practice, sustainable development and sustainability transitions can be viewed as negotiated outcomes of a process that relies on interactions between all stakeholders involved that revolves around defining what societal value is, discovering synergies between different parts of the system for creating the desired societal value, and deciding which actors should play what role in creating societal value – without being constrained by the roles and responsibilties actors currently have. An issue that is related to the aforementioned instrumental approaches to sustainability concerns interpretations of the responsibilities of companies and their approaches to realizing the SDGs. It has long since been an established practice for companies to conduct so-called materiality analyses through which they prioritize sustainability issues based on criteria such as business and stakeholder relevance, associated short-term or long-term financial or non-financial risks, and to what extent these issues fall within a company’s sphere of influence (Whitehead, 2017). This approach toward sustainability has led to widespread cherry-picking behavior by companies, selecting and prioritizing sustainability issues based on the perspective of the business and its direct stakeholders rather than basing these decisions on what issues represent the world’s most pressing sustainability challenges. As such, the SDGs confront business with the inconvient truth that, despite the idea that aligning the interests of business and society is a central assumption in contemporary sustainability discourse, there is a substantial mismatch between interpreting sustainability from a corporate context on the one hand and what is required to truly solve the world’s problems on the other.

The SDGs should therefore not lead to cherry-picking but rather to realizing and truly accounting for the trade-offs, tensions, and paradoxes that can be found in business-society relationships. In fact, accepting the need to achieve the SDGs means acknowledging not only the complexities involved with simultaneously addressing environmental, social, and economic aspects, but also involves analysis of and reflection on the interplay of ecological and social goals—both within and between these categories. Accepting such a more complex perspective should encourage and enable management educators to accommodate for conflicting yet interrelated concerns, and thus not focus on eliminating or simplifying them, but rather on opening doors for more creative and provocative teaching, research, and theory-building (Lewis and Smith, 2014) as well as for addressing ethical dilemmas in decision-making. For instance, management educators could shift their focus from a traditional framing of sustainability as a win-win “business case” to discussions about the erosion of sustainability values by markets. Also, they can explore new narratives that break with the dominant discourse of (green) growth, including degrowth and post-consumerism, and what corporate value creation would look like when business itself would take up the gauntlet to challenge the culture of consumption.

Perspective 2: Realizing the SGDs implies engaging in systemic activism

Despite its prestige in the business world and apparent success as an educational institution, various scholars and practitioners alike have contended that, in several respects, management education is in a state of crisis. Examples of critiques on business schools include their marginal influence on and relevance for management practice, a lack of attention for the “heart and soul” of graduates, a failure of instilling norms of ethical behavior, and lacking a noble purpose (e.g., Akrivou and Bradbury-Huang, 2015; Bennis and O’Toole, 2005; Pfeffer and Fong, 2002; Waddock and Lozano, 2013). A conclusion of the 2015 “Business Education Jam” hosted by Boston University was that “the crisis in management education is part of a larger crisis of confidence in the public role of business, following the economic disaster of recent years and the questions of value—and values—that it raised. We need to address this problem at the root, by making ethical behavior a central part of business education” (Business Education Jam, 2015: 28). As noted in a recent FT Special Report on RME, the consensus is that business schools should step up their teaching and research efforts to educate the next generation of students with a greater focus on sustainability, ethics, and social purpose (Jack, 2019).

While one would be hard-pressed to contradict these observations and deny the value of such interventions, business schools should actually take the initiative to formulate their roles beyond “molding ethical individuals, developing responsible leaders, and creating cultures that support them” (Business Education Jam, 2015: 14) by taking an activist posture toward sustainable development. The nature of the SDGs urges and necessitates business schools to redefine their roles toward this end, as they capture a universal sustainability agenda in dire need to be realized and that recognizes the integrated and indivisible nature of challenges within this agenda (United Nations, 2015).

Obviously, management educators might question whether activism is a proper role for business schools, as activism is often associated with having a non-neutral position toward certain political or social goals, including campaigning for these, and hence very ideology-laden. However, through their investigations of the (hidden) curriculum of management education (including RME), scholars have identified that the current position of business schools is anything but neutral. In fact, they have identified other values than sustainability as being central to their understanding of the functioning of business organizations and the role of business in society, thus inhibiting critical reflexivity, imposing a particular agenda based on an instrumental approach to sustainability, and limiting fundamental change (Millar and Price, 2018; cf. Høgdal et al., 2019). Moreover, these current approaches toward the roles and responsibilities of business in the sustainability agenda, as addressed under the previous perspective, have so far not translated into, and are very unlikely to ever result in, actual patterns of ecological and social sustainability. Hence, activism, based on a very different non-neutral position than the one currently taken, is indispensable for business schools to truly contribute to realizing the sustainability agenda in an effective way. This interpretation of the function of management education aligns with the ideas set forward about critical management education by Grey (2002) and recognizes the need to break silence about, express dissent about, and give voice to the limitations and failure of the role and responsibilities of companies within the dominant sustainability discourse, seeing business as a positive force for change. This acknowledges the need for RME to include other, more radical or transformative corporate approaches to improve ecological quality and social justice, more pluralist political views of corporations in society, reflecting on the roles of the various institutions in society, and investigating novel pathways of societal change and modes of organization (e.g., Loorbach et al., 2017; Mäkinen and Kourula, 2012; Narayanan and Adams, 2017). Activism, then, can be seen as a concrete, action-oriented manifestation of a critical approach to management education and a way to advance the RME agenda.

Systemic activism, specifically, refers to a type of activism that recognizes the systemic, complex, and interconnected nature of the problems it sets out to address and, by implication, assumes that change is required on many different levels. The SDGs themselves clearly reflect this nature of our world’s most pressing problems because many of the goals are communicating vessels and represent systemic problems that do not have single issue solutions, but actually require a rethinking of economic, political, social, and cultural systems (cf. Narberhaus and Sheppard, 2015). From the perspective of RME, it is important to realize that business has a pivotal role to play when it comes to understanding both problems of sustainability and designing and implementing solutions to these problems.

Within this context, a crucial function of the SDGs is that they can help identify important leverage points for triggering systemic change. To this end, Sachs et al. (2019) have developed six SDG transformations and identified corresponding priority challenges and regulatory challenges that recognize the interdependencies between SDGs: education, gender, and inequality; health, well-being, and demography; energy decarbonization and sustainable industry; sustainable food, land, water, and oceans; sustainable cities and communities; and digital revolution for sustainable development. These six transformations “provide a framework for mobilizing governments, business and civil society around targeted problem-solving and SDG implementation” (Sachs et al., 2019: 812) and may hence offer powerful leverage points for RME aiming to engage in systemic activism. These transformations also imply that more activist approaches toward RME will require business schools to develop partnerships with people and organizations from inside and outside the systems they aspire to change in order to contribute to realizing the sustainability agenda, something that is already exemplified by SDG #17 (Partnership for the goals).

In order to develop an idea about what such activist approaches could look like, we urge management educators to reflect on the role(s) they want to take up and deem important in spurring sustainable development as well as to encourage their students to experiment with the uptake of various roles within and beyond the confinements of the business school. According to Narberhaus and Sheppard (2015: 56–65), these roles may include that of the “acupuncturist” (identifying windows of opportunity to shift policy, the logic of the debate, and mindsets), the “questioner” (supporting deliberation on wicked problems and helping to create new discourse and a cultural shift), the “broker” (creating meaningful connections and learning cycles between networks around system change), and the “gardener” (naming, connecting, nurturing, and illuminating the pioneers of a new system). Management educators may also emphasize the development of phronetic leadership, for instance through studying social movements through actively participating in them (cf. Gherardi, 2018). On an institutional level, business schools could opt for appointing a “climate activist in residence” that challenges policies, administrators, educators, and students, and thereby influences decision-making toward policy and learning outcomes that contribute to combatting climate change. Such initiatives may benefit the emancipation of the RME agenda within business schools too, as well as have an influence on the broader management education system.

Perspective 3: Embracing the SDGs comes with emotional affect

Both the directly and indirectly lived experiences of environmental and social problems have been demonstrated to trigger emotions in people and affect their wellbeing. On the human health–ecosystem health nexus, for instance, conceptualizations of ecological grief and climate anxiety have surged over the last few years (Cunsolo and Ellis, 2018). Against this background, it is important to recognize that (the message incorporated in) Agenda 2030 and the SDGs can be quite overwhelming for both management students and management educators. The breadth of the spectrum of challenges, difficulties involved with their technical operationalization, their geographical scope and complexity, their entanglement and the consequent dilemmas in deciding what is the desired way of action, and the lack of actual progress in realizing the agenda, or even isolated goals for that matter, may very well trigger emotional responses in management students and educators alike. From the perspective of advancing RME, and also in relation to the previous perspective, the SDGs may thus call for actively deploying more holistic pedagogies that engage students in emotional learning, for instance to develop passion in addition to cognitive modes of learning (Montiel et al., 2018; Shrivastava, 2010). Scholars such as Audebrand (2010) argue that it is important to elicit positive emotions and develop bonds with the natural environment in order to promote sustainability values such as caring, environmental sensitivity, family, and stewardship. However, especially given our limited progress in realizing Agenda 2030, it is equally important for management education to accommodate for the negative emotional effects that awareness of and experiences with sustainability challenges may bring with them. While RME may rely on a pedagogy of passion for working on sustainability that revolves around profound enthusiasm and connection, it should be noted that passion, in its literal Latin and Greek meaning, also implies suffering. This represents something that not all students might be equipped to dealing with (yet). In fact, more and more educators report that students struggle with their emotions when confronted with the sustainability topic in general and the SDG agenda in particular; whereas many students find working on sustainability meaningful and perceive it as a way of aligning their personal identity and (future) professional identity, it can also represent a topic that is emotionally and mentally exhaustive. When the ambition to “change the world” is lying in wait and students are encouraged to demonstrate sustainability leadership, intense feelings of disappointment and self-doubt, possibly even despair, may be inevitable when student realize the full scope of the complex and collective responses that are required to tackle wicked problems of sustainability (cf. Heizmann and Liu, 2018). RME then also has a responsibility to at least encourage students to develop the ability to engage in self-care. As Akrivou and Bradbury-Huang (2015: 237) have stated eloquently, “it is urgent that we revise the role of business schools to help transform the current paradigm of business to one that promotes ethically integrated, emotionally sound managers as a pragmatic, not utopian means for developing a “new normal” in management education that can support ethics and prosperity in our globallly shared economic, social, and natural living systems”.

This notion is especially important when one considers the necessity to engage in triple-loop learning for realizing the SDGs, which focuses on phronetic knowledge and participation in a learning process that revolves around generative social practice (Kurucz et al., 2014). Immersing students in issues of sustainable development in such a way implies that they are confronted with many “inconvenient truths”, including human suffering, environmental degradation, and the impossibility to effectuate those solutions that are urgently needed. The lived experience of these inconvenient truths may dissolve the boundaries between the self, others, and the physical world, revealing a dark side of sustainability; it becomes embodied rather than remaining a (relatively) abstract notion that is observed and analyzed from a safe distance. As an integral part of the RME agenda, this should prompt management students and educators alike to embrace an ethics of care and develop and demonstrate attentiveness, responsiveness and respect, as well as to hone their ability to listen, show empathy, and demonstrate responsibility (cf. Kurucz et al., 2014; Slote, 2007). Related to this, Gherardi (2018: 2) has recently introduced the concept of affective ethnography as “a style of performative ethnographic process that relies on the researcher’s capacity to affect and be affected in order to produce interpretations that may transform the things that they interpret.” As this concept acknowledges the complexity of the ways in which elements (texts, actors, materialities, language, agencies) are entangled, it may be well-suited as a style of research practice for investigating the SDGs and, as such, contribute to furthering the RME agenda. Recognizing that the management researcher—again, whether it be a student or a faculty member—is bodily affected by and bodily affects the fieldwork (s)he is performing opens up possibilities to understand the object of investigation from novel viewpoints, understand the self and the emotions one experiences when engaging in research on sustainability, and the ways in which the object of investigation and the self interact and impact each other. Translated into more practical terms, this may stimulate management students and faculty members to approach issues of sustainability from pluralistic action-oriented or activist perspectives and (co-)create meaning for oneself or for others, either through educating or researching (cf. Caniglia et al., 2020).

Against this background, the authors are currently engaged in research among students that aims to identify how they feel about the current state of the world in general and several specific sustainability challenges in particular. It would of course also be interesting to investigate whether management students and faculty alike recognize the emotional and affective sides of addressing sustainability and whether they think this needs to be addressed (and, if so, how) through management education. As an extension of this, research could focus on students’ emotional and affective responses to (a) sustainability not being addressed throughout the entire management curriculum or (b) revealing the hidden curriculum behind their program, the effects of the cognitive dissonance that may arise from such experiences, and how such experiences may influence their willingness and capacity to enact the sustainability agenda.

Conclusion

This Provocation to Debate essay has identified three perspectives associated with incorporating the SDGs that go beyond the rather basic ways in which sustainability is generally addressed in management education to date. As such, this essay serves as an invitation to engage in a meaningful discussion about the value and the limitations of the SDGs for advancing the RME agenda and about signposting avenues for future research on the topics addressed. It is also an invitation to critically reflect on the roles and contents of management education in spurring sustainable development in general and regarding the business-society interface in particular. Following the call of United Nations Secretary-General Gutierrez that the decade of the 2020s should become the “decade of action” on the SDGs, the authors of this essay hope that management education will soon be ready to take a defining role in this process and that this essay stimulates immediate action among management educators and their institutions to rethink mainstream approaches toward RME.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the useful comments of three anonymous reviewers.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Lars Moratis

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