Sustainable Development in Business Education

Abstract

This chapter highlights the challenges of teaching sustainability in business schools. The authors provide a discussion of economic liberalism and different forms of stakeholder theory to explain the varying attitudes among educators towards ethics, responsibility and sustainability. The assumption that business schools encourage a ‘profit-first-mentality' is fleshed out, and it is argued that this attitude likely affects the effectiveness of teaching and learning in respect to ethical, responsible and sustainable values. The chapter later questions whether it is better to flow with the dominant economic-driven values as prescribed by conventional business education or to challenge it in order to nurture sustainability-driven values among students. These options are explored and the suggestion that entrepreneurship has a role to play as a pedagogical tool to support the teaching of sustainable development is offered. It is argued that entrepreneurship does not confront, but supports the extant values of conventional business education and therefore is a feasible approach for business education. Finally, implications for business and management education, as well as, the role of entrepreneurship to promote sustainability-values are discussed drawing on models and two case studies (UK and China).