In a world where corporate governance scandals have become the
everyday, the role of business schools in producing the managers of
today - and tomorrow - has come into sharp focus. Today's managers
and the MBAs that will follow them are in need of an education that
grounds business ethics and the overarching concerns of sustainable
development into the curriculum. As some, but by no means all,
organisations are coming to realise, bad performance in
environmental protection, labour practices and human rights is no
longer a "soft" issue but one that can hit the bottom line with a
vengeance. So, what is the state of the art in teaching business
sustainability worldwide, and what teaching practices and tools are
achieving successful results? This book begins to answer these
questions and more.There are many challenges facing educators in
the field of sustainability. It is an evolving field still in its
infancy as a management discipline; and there is also the need to
combat the unstated but often underlying assumption that many
environmental and social issues represent non-valued-added effort.
Teaching Business Sustainability acknowledges this problem, while
helping students explore the various ways in which the theoretical
value of business sustainability can result in valuable and
value-added practical outcomes.A wide mix of approaches is
therefore indicated; while many of these are experimental and on
the leading edge of management learning, they all share an
experiential (and often a team-based) element, and attempt to bring
together the theory in a way that makes it relevant to
practitioners in the field. The implication is that, whenever
possible, educators need to link the learning to the students'
immediate and pressing "real-world" realities. This applies equally
to undergraduates or high-level executives. However, in the absence
of immediate examples of such realities (as may often be the case
in undergraduate settings) educators need to introduce
experientially based approaches that recreate such settings in the
classroom.The book also argues the case for holistic and
interdisciplinary learning. It is clear from much of the literature
on sustainability that the concept does not easily lend itself to
being pigeonholed and that it crosses many of the functional areas
of business. Indeed, it goes beyond just business learning to
encompass many fields such as ecology, engineering and biology. If
students are to move beyond the narrow perspective that
conventional business studies often entail, they need to be
introduced to the wider vision that an interdisciplinary approach
engenders.The final point that emerges from this collection is that
experiential learning of business sustainability often can, and
should be, fun! Be it a heated exchange in a case-study discussion,
a role-play exercise or a hands-on student consulting project, much
experiential learning seems to excite the imagination of the
students and to release their creative juices.The 23 contributions
to Teaching Business Sustainability have been divided into three
thematic groups. In the first section, 'Theory, Critique and
Ideas', the authors explore and critique some of the overarching
ideas and thinking behind the teaching of sustainability. The next
section, 'Learning from Current Practice', contains the experiences
of a number of educators and the successful and leading-edge
approaches that they have used. The final section then outlines
tools, methods and approaches that can be used to teach business
sustainability. This last section also serves as an introduction to
a second volume - Teaching Business Sustainability Vol. 2 - which
provides educators of sustainability with a series of case studies,
role plays and experiential exercises. Teaching Business
Sustainability is an invaluable resource both for educators working
in a wide range of academic disciplines, looking for inspiration
and guidance on how to teach business sustainability, as well as
for organisations looking to reinvigorate internal management
education programmes to factor in corporate responsibility and
sustainability issues.
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