Combining best practices framework with benchmarking to advance principles for responsible management education (PRME) performance

Abstract

Higher education institutions play a critical role in shaping a more sustainable world. There is limited research on ‘how’ business schools can effectively take the UN PRME's Sharing Information Progress (SIP) reports and identify opportunities for meaningful and tangible improvements to business schools. This paper seeks to address this gap in literature. Based on an analysis of SIP reports published by the Canadian business schools and PRME Champions, this paper suggests that combining Reis and Neto's (2020) analytical framework of PRME best practices with Drew's (1997) standard benchmarking process can be an avenue for closing the aforementioned gap in literature. An analysis using Drew's multicriteria benchmarking methodology (1997), combined with Reis and Neto's (2020) PRME framework, has highlighted the significant gaps between the Canadian PRME signatories and PRME Champion group. The results of the Canadian signatories having underperformed on all seven areas of the PRME principles (Purpose 22%, Values, 34%, Method 20%, Research, 39%, Partnership 17%, Dialogue 7%, and Operations 26%), now for the first time, establishes a benchmark for the Canadian PRME signatories, to work with to improve sustainability performance. Following Drew's five steps of benchmarking, opportunities were highlighted for the Canadian signatories to now compare their business school sustainability performance, to global PRME best practices.