Educating Business Students About Sustainability: A Bibliometric Review of Current Trends and Research Needs

Abstract

There has been substantial growth of interest in sustainability in business, management and organisational studies in recent years. This article applies Oswick's (J Manag Spirit Relig 6(1):15-25, 2009) method of bibliometric research to ascertain how this growth has been reflected in scholarly publishing, particularly as it relates to business and management education over the 20 years 1994-2013. The research has found that sustainability as a general topic in business and management studies, as evidenced by scholarly publishing, has accelerated rapidly both in terms of items published and cited. In the mid-2000s, the emphasis of books published in this area began to change from one which advocated 'sustainable development' to one which viewed sustainability as a management practice which could help businesses and society simultaneously. The literature on sustainability within the field of management and business education has been smaller, but has enjoyed a similar growth rate which accelerated sharply in the most recent 5 years of the dataset. Most of the scholarly, peer-reviewed articles analysed tend to advocate the inclusion of sustainability on business school curricula, or to demonstrate the various ways in which faculty have integrated sustainability-related principles in their teaching. A smaller amount of research has been undertaken on the learning experiences of the 'recipients' of these approaches. There is evidence of an extensive variety of approaches used by educators, but the most significant research need which presented is for more empirically driven studies on how and why business and management students engage with the principles of sustainability.

Responsible Leadership Research: A Bibliometric Review

“…Bibliometrics consists of the "quantitative study of physical published units, or of bibliographic units, or of the surrogates of either" (Broadus, 1987, p. 376). Some recent bibliometric studies include: Teixeira, Iwamoto and Medeiros (2013), in the case of bibliometric studies in administration published in top Brazilian journals; Pinto, Serra and Ferreira (2014), on research into culture in international business; Sriwannawit and Sandström (2015), on diffusion research; Cullen (2015), on sustainability and business and management education; Oorschot, Hofman and Halman (2015), on innovation adoption; Lindahl, Stenling, Lindwall and Colliander (2015), on sports and exercise; and William, Tripp-Reimer, Daack-Hirsch and DeBerg (2016), on genomic nursing. A number of recent bibliometric studies have also been published in the leadership literature, such as Batistič, Černe and Vogel (2017) and Tal and Gordon (2016).…”

A Retrospective and Foresight: Bibliometric Review of International Research on Strategic Management for Sustainability, 1991–2019

“…In general, the review suggests that the SMS knowledge base remains an emergent field of study that stills draws attention from diverse groups of international leading scholars in various fields, particularly in the three key areas of environmental science, strategic business management, and engineering. It is not limited to the traditional studies in green/ecological/environmental strategic management and sustainability since these studies are contributed to almost 64% of all documents [126]. In the recent times, the review found that the contemporary SMS knowledge was increasingly linked to business and management.…”

Mudanças em 2018 e Expectativas para 2019

“…Convém realçar que pesquisas suportadas por tecnologias emergentes têm o potencial de contribuir tanto em termos de métodos, ou mesmo como tema de pesquisa per se, versando acerca do impacto das tecnologias emergentes sobre os temas relevantes na pesquisa em negócios. É notória a evolução do volume de dados disponíveis e, por extensão, também é notória a carência de estudos caracterizados pelo exame de dados tão ricos quanto a oferta desses apresenta-se para o futuro próximo (Cullen, 2017;Iliho & Saritha, 2019). É possível que esta constatação seja decorrente da carência de pesquisadores detentores de habilidades que permitam a produção de conhecimento a partir de data driven research (Kimmons & Veletsianos, 2018).…”