Sustainability Management Teaching Resources and the Challenge of Balancing Planet, People, and Profits

Abstract

Over the past decade, there has been a notable increase in discussions surrounding the integration of global sustainability issues and responsible management practices into the business school curriculum. What we have yet to see, however, and what we would like to begin with this introduction, is a meaningful discussion regarding the overarching goals of sustainable and responsible management education as they relate to the available teaching and learning resources in this domain. To achieve this, we first identify the tensions between teaching sustainability to change the world for the better and those aimed at making companies better off. We propose that there should be a balance between these two aspirations. We then turn to the thoughts of academic practitioners in the field with a survey of 169 management and sustainability instructors. Results indicate that respondents use papers, cases, and videos to teach courses in this field, while textbooks and electronic resources (i.e. databases, simulations, and apps) are only marginally utilized. The respondents are only moderately satisfied with most of the available teaching resources as well as the integration of existing resources within general curricula. The results show some interesting differences between postgraduate and undergraduate courses and also between junior and senior instructors. In this introduction, we argue that the moral enthusiasm for teaching in the sustainability domain must not take away from precise analysis of problems, solutions, their implementability, and their interconnected complexity. As such, we propose a set of five recommendations for the design and selection of sustainability management teaching resources that will effectively address issues related to planet, people, and profits

Exploring Sociology of Education in the Promotion of Sustainability Literacy in Higher Education

“…A relevant question that arises from this topic is the need to distinguish education from sustainable development [33,59]. This positioning seems to refer to something close to sustainability literacy, given the need to attain competencies that are intentionally used as social learning [49,60].…”

“…Regarding specific learning in higher education in general, Halsall, Powell and Snowden [55], Aragon-Correa, Marcus, Rivera and Kenworthy [59], Hedden, Worthy, Akins, Slinger-Friedman and Paul [56], Bizerril, Rosa, Carvalho and Pedrosa [35], Ortiz and Huber-Heim [83], Arends [84], Strode [85], Jacobs [86], Balakrishnan and Claiborne [87], Jones, Baran and Steuber [88], Kindon and Elwood [89] and Kersten, Crul, Geelen, Meijer and Franken [90] stress the need for an active learning. Arends [84] emphasises the need to implement several learning practices so as to make learning profitable and more efficient, considering the learning objectives, the environmental conditions and the traits of both students and teachers.…”

“…In fact, numerous authors advocate the need for collaboration in the teaching of sustainability as a multi-dimensional problem [1,5,9,53,59,115]. This learning and teaching process entails interdisciplinarity, i.e., "the promotion and mobilisation of synergies of two or more different scientific disciplines" [116] (p. 45).…”

Productive, Structural and Dynamic Study of the Concept of Sustainability in the Educational Field

“…Over the last few years we have experienced a notable increase in discussions about sustainability, making it an exponentially growing research topic [1,2]. The political realities of a pluralistic and democratic society, such as the one in which we are mostly placed [3], must balance the needs of multiple groups, as well as integrate science with other sources of knowledge to provide contextualized responses to the challenges pursued to achieve true sustainable development.…”

“…As for the work on sustainability in the educational field, one study [1], in which the authors surveyed more than a hundred instructors of management and sustainability, shows that the most used teaching resources for this type of training activity are documents, cases and videos and-to a lesser extent-electronic resources such as databases, simulations or applications [15]. On the other hand, another study [16] shows that working on sustainability in class in a punctual and transversal way in any subject is more effective than attending specific courses.…”