Acknowledging the roles and responsibilities of business in society and the importance of realizing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), contemporary management education is characterized by the integration of a rich palette of initiatives in the field of Responsible Management Education (RME). It is important though to recognize that these initiatives, however laudable, so far represent rather basic, and thus insufficient, ways of truly integrating sustainability into management education. This Provocation to Debate essay therefore identifies three perspectives for bolstering RME through the SDGs: (1) addressing the fact that SDGs incorporate trade-offs, tensions, and paradoxes; (2) realizing the SGDs implies engaging in systemic activism; and (3) embracing the SDGs comes with emotional affect. As such, this essay is an invitation to critically reflect on the roles and contents of management education in spurring sustainable development and to engage in a meaningful discussion about the value and the limitations of the SDGs for advancing the RME agenda.
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Business Schools, Leadership and Sustainable Development Goals: The Future of Responsible Management Education is the sixth book in the series Citizenship and Sustainability in Organizations. It contains chapters from various scholars and practitioners in the field of responsible management education (RME). Through introspection, through celebrating successes and learning from failures (retrospection) and through looking forward (prospection), it aims to inspire a future of management education and leadership development that demonstrates its relevance to sustainable development. In doing so, it touches upon the grand societal challenges of our time, as illustrated by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and discusses how business schools, and other providers of management education, could and should contribute to overcoming these challenges. It argues that management education needs to educate future leaders in a way that no longer hampers but truly accelerates the process of sustainable development. This book offers a collection of thought-provoking ideas, vivid stories (including personal accounts and experiences), and appealing and engaged forecasts, visions and ideas about management education and leadership development for sustainability. Hence, it is a must-read for anyone interested in or involved in RME.
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This article is a comment on the article “Decoupling Responsible Management Education” (Journal of Management Inquiry) by Andreas Rasche and Dirk Ulrich Gilbert. Based on a survey conducted in 2014 among Dutch MBA program managers from academic universities and universities of professional education and public and private institutions, it gives some additional color to their article by shedding some initial empirical light on the propositions. The findings allow for speculating on business school behavior in the context of engaging in the responsible management education (RME) agenda and identify several avenues for further empirical research and theoretical conceptualization. Although the larger part of this constructively intended comment focuses on RME and business schools, it also addresses aspects of decoupling more generally.
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From the article: "The object of this paper is to explore the actual practice in project management education in the Netherlands and compare it to reference institutions and recent literature. A little over 40% of the Higher Education institutions in the Netherlands mentions PM education in programs and/or courses. A total of 264 courses, minors and programs in the Netherlands found. In reference institutions 33 courses and programs are found and 36 publications deal with actual teaching of project management in Higher Education. Comparing these sources finds traditional methods of teaching and testing, a roughly comparable focus on subjects and an unsupported high claim of learning level, while the number of credits assigned to project management is relatively small. There is a strong focus on planning without execution, which is critiqued as is the promoted Project Based Learning."
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There is an urgency and need to develop an innovative strategic approach for organizations to develop a sustainable organization for the future, in which they are able to respond resiliently to major environmental challenges and changes in the short term and adjust the management of the organization. On the same time, in this strategic approach learning and transforming accordingly in the long term is involved as well. This approach will give organizations the opportunity to operationalize their boards’ and stakeholders’ ambitions to build a responsible business, with focus on governance elements, as well as interaction with social and environmental factors, risk, and strategy from a holistic view. In education, students could work with this approach in future projects for real companies.
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The increasing importance of CSR within the business context has led business schools to consider their essential role in this development and to positively contribute to this through responsible management education. It is unclear, however, whether business schools are preparing their students sufficiently to know how to deal with CSR issues throughout their careers effectively and to avoid irresponsible behavior as future leaders. Since comprehensive empirical data has been lacking sofar, this chapter reports on a baseline study into responsible management education in the Netherlands. In addition to a case description about the attention for CSR by the Open University The Netherlands, it presents original data about the state of responsible management education in the Netherlands. A survey was administered to general MBA program managers in the Netherlands addressing issues such as the level and way of integration of CSR into MBA programs, teaching methods used, student interest in CSR education, and the main drivers and obstacles for integrating CSR into management education. Both public and private business schools as well as research-oriented universities and universities of professional education were included in this research. Our findings indicate, among other things, that the majority of MBA programs that are offered in the Netherlands have integrated CSR into the curriculum, although most MBA programs appear to educate their students about CSR through traditional teaching approaches and dominantly use so-called saddle bag approaches to CSR integration in MBA programs.
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This paper describes a study into consumers' reasons for buying socially responsible (SR) products, such as Fair Trade products and organic meat. As opposed to other studies, we use a qualitative approach based on 25 in-depth interviews and include several different products in the research. This leads to several new results, such as: (1) buying SR products is perceived as an imperfect moral duty; (2) low quality of SR products is a dissatisfier, but high quality not a satisfier; (3) the attitude towards SR products is related to the reputation of charitable funds; (4) the demand for SR products is negatively related to the frequency of purchasing SR products; (5) reflection on SR products raises the demand for SR products; (6) consumers that have witnessed the social problems that SR products aim to alleviate purchase more SR products. Finally, we find that the demand for different SR products is correlated: if a consumer buys one SR product, it is more likely that (s)he purchases other SR products as well.
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More than 25!years after Moore’s first introduction of the public value concept in 995, the concept is now widely used, but its operationalization is still considered difficult. This paper presents the empirical results of a study analyzing the application of the public value concept in Higher Education Institutions, thereby focusing on how to account for public value. The paper shows how Dutch universities of applied sciences operationalize the concept ‘public value’, and how they report on the outcome achievements. The official strategy plans and annual reports for FY2016 through FY2018 of the ten largest institutions were used. While we find that all the institutions selected aim to deliver public value, they still use performance indicators that have a more narrow orientation, and are primarily focused on processes, outputs, and service delivery quality. However, we also observe that they use narratives to show the public value they created. In this way this paper contributes to the literature on public value accounting.
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This study investigated perceptions of organizational change management among executive coaches working with British higher-education leaders and factors that make leaders effective when managing change. This basic qualitative research used semi-structured interviews with eight executive coaches selected through purposeful sampling. As main challenges to efficient, inclusive change management, participants mentioned leaders’ lack of a strategic vision or plan, lack of leadership and future leader development programs, and lack of clarity in decision-making. They recognized that leaders’ academic and professional profiles are positively viewed and said that, with coaching and support in leadership and strategic planning, these people can inspire the academic community and promote positive change. Additional emphasis was given to the role of coaching in the development of key soft skills (honesty, responsibility, resiliency, creativity, proactivity, and empathy, among others), which are necessary for effective change management and leadership in higher education. The paper’s implications have two aspects. First, the lessons of the actual explicit content of the coaches’ observations (challenges to efficient change management and views of leaders); second, the implications of these observations (how coaching can help and what leaders need).
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From the article This paper describes a joint effort by two educational and scientific institutes, the HU University of Applied Sciences and Utrecht University, in designing a BPM course that not only transfers theoretical knowledge but lets students also experience real life BPM-systems and implementation issues. We also describe the implementation of the developed module with an indication of its success: it is now running for the fifth time, and although there continue to be points for improvement, over the years several scientific papers in the BPM domain resulted from the course, as well as a reasonable amount of students started their final thesis project in the BPM-domain.
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