Building legitimacy for sustainable business schools: Using the business model concept when teaching corporate sustainability

Abstract

Dedication to sustainability means that business schools face challenges to their legitimacy. Teaching is the central activity through which business schools build legitimacy, and there are three legitimacy related aspects of management education which can be directly influenced through teaching: the overreliance on normative theoretical models in teaching and research, the distance between academia and practice, and the custom of developing academic silos. We suggest that the business model concept is especially well-suited to ameliorate these characteristics and support the development of more legitimate and sustainability-oriented business school. The paper builds on experiences gathered from a master's course in sustainable management where the business model was used as a key component in the analysis of the sustainability performance of selected case companies. The results show that the business model concept helps students to critically assess normative theories on management by introducing practice-oriented questions about how sustainable business management can be conducted and how value creation can be conceptualized for different stakeholders. The business model helps to bridge the gap between practice and academia by conveying an understanding of the complex reality that managers deal with. Furthermore, by providing a common terminology the business model improves the students' ability to make connections between subjects taught in separate disciplines. Nevertheless, the business model also poses a risk to teaching sustainability since it may be interpreted as elevating an economic perspective on sustainability. The paper both exemplifies how teacher led activities may help to ameliorate the challenge that sustainability poses to business schools and discusses the implications of using the concept as a part of legitimacy-oriented work.