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Teaching Business Sustainability
 From Theory to Practice

 Edited by Chris Galea
Saint Francis Xavier University, Canada
August 2004 | 234 x 151 mm | Hardback | 342 pp |
ISBN 1 874719 54 3 | £40.00 US$75.00

 
Brief description
 
Table of contents

About the editor

 
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 forthcoming second volume which will provide educators of sustainability with a series of case studies, role plays and experiential exercises.

 Teaching Business Sustainability will be 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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Contents


Introduction
Chris Galea, Saint Francis Xavier University, Canada


PART 1: THEORY, CRITIQUE AND IDEAS

1. MMental models @ work: implications for teaching sustainability
John Adams, Saybrook Graduate School, USA

2. Teaching sustainability: a critical perspective
Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee, University of South Australia

3. Can publicly traded companies achieve environmentally and socially sustainable operation?
Tom P. Abeles, Sagacity Inc., USA

4. The business of development: linking profits and principles to address global development challenges
Pepukaye Bardouille, McKinsey & Company, Denmark

5. Is the MBA sustainable? Degrees of change
Suzanne Benn and David Bubna-Litic, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia

6. Integrating business and environmental education
Steven R. Elliott, Raymond F. Gorman, Timothy C. Krehbiel and Orie L. Loucks, Miami University, USA; O. Homer Erekson, University of Missouri–Kansas City, USA; H. Gregory Hume, TECHSOLVE, USA

7. Social sustainability
David K. Foot, University of Toronto, Canada; Susan Ross, Golder Associates Ltd, Canada

8. An international comparison of environmental concern among business students
Michael Schaper, University of Newcastle, Australia


PART 2: LEARNING FROM CURRENT PRACTICE

9. Sustainability education: the experience of HRH the Prince of Wales’s Business and the Environment Programme
Polly Courtice and Jonathon Porritt, Business and the Environment Programme, UK

10. Approaching sustainability through a business–science synthesis
Steven R. Elliott, Raymond F. Gorman, Timothy C. Krehbiel, Orie L. Loucks and Allan M. Springer, Miami University, USA; O. Homer Erekson, University of Missouri–Kansas City, USA

11. Environmental actions, attitudes and knowledge: making a difference through university education? The case of Middlesex University Business School
Diane Holt, Middlesex University Business School, UK

12. Mainstreaming sustainability issues in core undergraduate management education: the ‘Social Context of Business’ course at McGill University
Kariann Aarup, McGill University, Canada

13. The Environmental Enterprise Corps: educating MBA students about sustainability
Gillian Rice, Thunderbird, The Garvin School of International Management, USA; Amy Sprague, World Resources Institute, USA

14. Partners in learning: how a business school and a company worked together to advance sustainability
Thomas L. Eggert and Dan Anderson, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA; Ronald Meissen and Verie Sandborg, Baxter International Inc., USA

15. Matching form to content in educating for sustainability: the Master’s course in Responsibility and Business Practice
Judi Marshall, University of Bath, UK


PART 3: TOOLS, METHODS AND APPROACHES

16. Making sense of corporate responsibility tools
Sasha Courville, Regulatory Institutions Network, Australian National University

17. Teaching sustainability: whole-systems learning
Molly Brown, Intermountain Synthesis Center, USA; Joanna Macy

18. Corporate education programmes for sustainable business: communicating beyond the green wall
Trudy Heller, Executive Education for the Environment, USA

19. The neo-Socratic dialogue: a method of teaching the ethics of sustainable development
Beate Littig, Institute for Advanced Studies, Austria

20. Sustainability in a business context
Kathleen Wood, Maria Bobenrieth and Faye M. Yoshihara

 21. Teaching sustainability in business schools: why, what and how
Bob Willard, University of Toronto, Canada

22. Population, business and sustainability
David K. Foot, University of Toronto, Canada

23. Teaching sustainability: challenges, methods and tools
Darcy Hitchcock and Marsha Willard, AXIS Performance Advisors Inc., USA

List of abbreviations
Author biographies
Index
 
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About the editor

Chris Galea is a father, educator, outdoor enthusiast, builder, sailor and entrepreneur. He currently teaches at the Gerald Schwartz School of Business at St Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. He was also part of the founding faculty of the Sustainable Enterprise Academy at the Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto. Much of his doctoral and current research is in the area of management learning as it relates to sustainability. Chris lives by the ocean surrounded by land he cherishes and people he cares about.
 

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