Why we need a relational approach to responsible management education: Exploring business students’ experiences of moral positioning

This article explores how students experience moral positioning in responsible management education learning environments and how this shapes their engagement with responsibility. Drawing on a relational view of learning, we understand responsible learning as constituted through learners’ interactions with people, practices, and artefacts in the educational environment. Using positioning theory, we analyse how students interpret everyday acts and how these enact and reproduce the prevailing moral order of business education. Our analysis identifies three positions through which students experience responsible management education: Number-cruncher, Depository, and Responsible management-engaged. Our findings show that students frequently experience pedagogical and institutional acts as positioning them towards a more instrumental ’business of business is business’ logic. By foregrounding students’ experiences of moral positioning, the study highlights how everyday classroom practices shape which forms of responsibility engagement appear legitimate or marginal. This helps explain why students may disengage from responsible management education even when they express interest in responsibility issues. We conclude with implications for how business schools can mobilise institutional, curricular, and pedagogical practices to make responsibility-supportive positions more visible and legitimate.