AMBITION | BE IN BRILLIANT COMPANY
1. Management education should make ‘critical studies’ a central part of its curricula. Through critical studies, students can scrutinise the assumptions that underpin what is considered to be ‘normal’ corporate conduct, successful business models, and contemporary business and society relationships. Critical scrutiny of these assumptions will also strengthen students' understanding of existing power structures in economy and society and the political nature of sustainable development. This may include studying degrowth – defined by economic anthropologist, Jason Hickel, in the book Less Is More – as a socioeconomic approach towards restoring the balance between the global economy and the living world in a way that reduces inequality and improves human wellbeing. Engaging in critical studies would also include a thorough reflection on the roles and responsibilities of Business Schools, the worldviews that govern their knowledge production and dissemination activities, and what direct and indirect impacts Business Schools have on society. 2. Management educators should stimulate their students' moral imagination in order to envision new ways to address moral problems and find solutions for our world's grand challenges. Moral imagination challenges us to build empathy and solidarity with those who might not be considered parts of our
loss accounts', 'true pricing', 'ecosystem services', 'the business case for sustainability', and 'nature-positive economic recovery'. In fact, sustainability only seems to be acceptable when it has a business case, hence protecting the regime's vested interests, be they: reducing operational costs; the ability to attract and retain talent; developing new markets; and/or building or restoring corporate reputation. This has given rise to an obsession with the concept of ‘green growth’ in business, government and NGO circles – a fallacy which revolves around ever-growing economies without fundamentally changing business models and economic models. However, as Professor Steve Keen of University College of London's Institute for Strategy, Resilience and Security has recently argued, the neoclassical economics of climate change are appallingly bad, with economists being overly optimistic about the economic damage from climate change. As he writes in a 2020 paper in Globalizations : 'If climate change does lead to the catastrophic outcomes that some scientists now openly contemplate, then these neoclassical economists will be complicit in causing the greatest crisis, not merely in the history of capitalism, but potentially in the history of life on Earth'. Speaking about catastrophic outcomes, the 2020 report, Fatal calculations: How economics has underestimated climate damage and encouraged inaction , concluded that 'the economic damages by not acting may be so large as to be unquantifiable'. When that is the situation, why worry about building a business case? Additionally, despite policy rhetoric, there is no empirical evidence on resource use and carbon emissions that supports green growth theory. How Business Schools can step away from current approaches to sustainability
24
‘The problem with management
education's provision of sustainability is that it has tended to convey the wrong message to students’
With Business Schools being part and parcel of the factors that have caused the systemic crisis producing the Covid-19 pandemic and some of the pernicious corporate behaviour
that emerged amid it, management education needs to take a radical step away from the dominant way it approaches sustainability. There are three
courses of action in this direction that Business Schools should take:
Made with FlippingBook - Share PDF online