Beyond moral righteousness: The challenges of non-utilitarian ethics, CSR, and sustainability education

Abstract

Criticisms of business education have abounded. Many have argued that even a teaching field such as that of responsible management education (RME) – including ethics, corporate social responsibility and sustainability (ECS) -, expected to be close to the ideals of the critical tradition, seems to remain stuck in a utilitarian practice. Such a practice represents, nonetheless, an impediment to the development of competencies, which future managers will need in order to understand societal grand challenges and to contribute to the fulfilling of contemporary collective objectives such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This paper discusses why the situation is so, what have been the main barriers to change, and why they persist. It presents the results of a study the objective of which was to understand, from the point of view of French-speaking and English-speaking ECS scholars, what a non-utilitarian teaching means and what has impeded its development and sustaining. Findings indicate that the barriers are multiple (multi-level and multi-actor) and interdependent on each other, and imply that the sole efforts of the morally righteous teachers are not sufficient to lift them. Actors at different levels (the business scholars themselves, the business schools' deans, the business medias and their ranking systems, the major accreditation agencies, etc.) should reflect upon their practices.