‘Management education needs to take a radical step away from the dominant way it approaches sustainability’
and received financial support from the Dutch government as part of the latter's Covid-19 emergency stimulus package. In a similar vein, large companies in the fashion sector decided to cancel their summer collections, all in line with the contracts they have with factories in low-income countries that produce them, burdening the latter with the costs of massive numbers of unsold products. Within such narrow interpretations of responsible and sustainable corporate conduct, not behaving irresponsibly quickly becomes outright pandemic parasitism. A second example can be found with Amazon. While launching a US$2 billion USD Climate Pledge Fund in June 2020, Amazon apparently failed to provide for adequate protective measures for its warehouse employees to ensure safe and sanitary working conditions during the pandemic. In the same period, according to a Financial Times report, the company boasted over US$400 billion USD in additional market cap and hired some 175,000 new employees to keep up with spiking online shopping. For reputational reasons, companies may be keen to jump on board the climate bandwagon in order to prevent being labelled a laggard on today's most challenging societal issue, but a healthy workforce and good employee relations (the 'inner' side of sustainability) are part of the same course – even though this may be far
less visible to the public and not nearly as mediagenic. A more nuanced instance of pandemic parasitism is the online campaign that Unilever ran for its beauty brand, Dove, over the past months. The company used iconic images of worn-out nurses and doctors, marked by the protective equipment they had worn for hours and hours while treating Covid-19 patients – arguably intended to demonstrate that the company cares for these healthcare workers and to support the message that they provided free products for the pandemic's heroes. Whereas this could easily qualify as opportunistic corporate behaviour and one could question why such an engagement would need to manifest itself as a brand campaign, management students are familiarised with such behaviour under the sustainable guise of cause-related marketing. Teaching all too shallow conceptions of the roles and responsibilities of companies with regards to sustainability implies that Business Schools should share in taking the blame for such examples of corporate behaviour in times of social upheaval.
is seen for what it is: a symptom of a systemic crisis. Essentially, the pandemic boils down to a deeply disturbed and unsustainable relationship between humans and nature that is fuelled by an obsession with growth and short-term economic gain, firmly rooted in a neoliberal worldview. Central to this worldview is colonising nature, depleting natural resources, seeing human beings as production factors, reducing animals to raw materials, and seeing society as serving corporate interests. It is a worldview that propagates a culture of institutionalised exploitation. Privatising profits and socialising costs are the name of the game. Societal challenges are, first and foremost, business opportunities. Climate change, biodiversity loss, and poverty are inevitable collateral damage. This worldview has become so normalised and pervasive in contemporary business culture – and reproduced by Business Schools - that it has distorted the true meaning of sustainability: ‘sustainability’ is no longer a form of social criticism or a notion that exemplifies the importance of building an ecologically sound and equitable society for current and future generations alike, but is framed within a political ideology that essentially runs counter to it. No wonder that this has led Business Schools to adopt and create a language of popular sustainability newspeak that includes concepts such as 'environmental profit and
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A deeper crisis: a culture of institutionalised exploitation
The existential crisis for Business Schools that the Covid-19 pandemic reveals runs considerably deeper than these examples, though. This becomes clear when Covid-19
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