AMBITION | BE IN BRILLIANT COMPANY
community – for instance, precarious workers, future generations, and natural ecosystems. This resonates with what philosopher, Mark Johnson, writes in his book, Moral Imagination , that we, 'must be able to imagine new dimensions for our character, new directions for our relationships with others, and even new forms of social organisation'. To develop this ability, creating and experimenting with new narratives about the role of business and society to ignite novel courses of action is crucial. Management educators should neither refrain from confronting their students with controversial opinions and stances, including those from other scientific disciplines, nor from initiating debate. Art can play an important role here, as it possesses the capacity to create meaning and stimulates us, 'to see more, to hear more and to feel more of what is going on within us and around us. Art is shocking, provoking and inspiring', as former MIT Sloan management professor, Edgar Schein wrote. Based on such insights, Slovenia's IEDC-Bled School of Management has set out to integrate the arts into management research and teaching, exploring an arts-based pedagogy and artistic business learning inspired by poets, philosophers, architects, and dancers. 3. Business Schools should engage in systemic activism. Systemic activism, as opposed to issue- based activism, recognises the complex and
interconnected nature of modem problems and assumes that change is necessary on many levels. The way the Covid-19 pandemic has unfolded, touching virtually all realms of life, is a vivid illustration of this. As is the climate crisis, which has impacts on poverty, which affects gender equality, which affects education, which affects decent work, and so on. Moreover, research shows that the global north has contributed 92% of CO2 emissions in excess of planetary boundaries, while the global south, that will experience the worst consequences of climate breakdown, has only contributed 8%. Systemic problems eschew single-issue solutions – they require a rethinking of economic, political, social, judicial, and cultural systems. Business Schools should embrace the moral and political agenda that underpins the transition to a sustainable economic model and make campaigning for furthering that agenda their priority. A deeply moral question Of course, one could argue that Business Schools should take a neutral position towards challenges of a moral and political nature as 'independent' institutions that produce and convey management knowledge. It should be recognised, however, that taking a neutral position is also enacting a political agenda, particularly in the face of the rampant ecological and social breakdown, in which business plays an important role.
Sustainability is not a concurrent perspective on corporate strategy, but a deeply moral and political question about how we want to live. In any case, who would say that teaching and research are value- free? Discussions about the hidden agenda of management education should sound all too familiar to anyone working in a Business School. Here, too, silence is violence. Business Schools should push themselves to identify the leverage points for societal change – and given the fact that they are the proverbial spiders in the web when it comes to understanding the impacts of the role of business in, and on, society, this should not be too difficult. Management educators, in turn, should recognise the potential of activism as a source of rich learning experiences. Business Schools should acknowledge that because, as Indian novelist, Arundhati Roy wrote in 2020: 'Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.' We should enter the new reality as soon as possible. That cannot be done in silence. The post-pandemic Business School is activist.
25
This article was published in 2020 in Th&ma Hoger Onderwijs (themahogeronderwijs.org) and has been adjusted for publication in AMBITION .
LARS MORATIS & FRANS MELISSEN are holders of the Chair in Management Education for Sustainability, a joint initiative of Antwerp Management School and Breda University of Applied Sciences. They are also co-creators of the concept of ‘sustainability intelligence’.
LARS MORATIS
FRANS MELISSEN
Made with FlippingBook - Share PDF online