Student-Led Organizing for Sustainability in Business

Abstract

This article examines how Masters of Business Administration (MBA) students, at the height of the Occupy Wall Street movement (Occupy), strove to organize socially and environmentally sustainable business practices. We asked: what kinds of learning were supported through student-led organizing, and how? We designed a multi-sited case study that followed seven focal students across contexts as they engaged with an international student network focused on reorganizing for environmental and social sustainability. We drew on methods of ethnography and discourse analysis to detail the “how” of learning as part of student-led organizing for more sustainable business practices. We found that students were learning about changing forms of business and used their learning from conferences, protests, and experiences outside of the classroom to press for changes in the business school curriculum. Students were making visible for each other the knowledge infrastructure of the school and sought to change social and material practices that sustained it. Their work entailed individual actions to change class assignments and speak to professors about changes to business practices and collective efforts to change the way business schools incorporated environmental sustainability into every existing concentration. This case contributes to a growing body of literature on understanding what and how students in an elite network learn in tumultuous times and through collective efforts to resist structural injustice.