Dorotea Rossi Kriscak

Abstract: 

Business schools increasingly modify their curricula to include and address sustainability in response to the public's growing concern about environmental degradation and the calls for a shift to a more sustainable society. Equal interest in the phenomenon and how to best integrate sustainability in management education has emerged among scholars. However, extant literature remains fragmented, as it fails to integrate insights effectively. The diverse range of theoretical perspectives adopted and used by academics leads to a scattered and uncoordinated research landscape, which lacks a unified approach. Furthermore, the literature is characterised by a significant amount of redundancy, with numerous studies addressing similar topics while leaving significant gaps in other areas. Additionally, this review finds that prior studies placed heavy reliance on professors’ and HEI administration’s views of sustainability in management education, neglecting perspectives from other stakeholders involved.

Hence, based on an integrative literature review, we examines the state of the art of the field, looking at what do we know and don’t know about how sustainability is embedded in business schools. Our findings indicate that significant strides have been made in justifying and emphasising the necessity for business schools to integrate sustainability into their curricula, defining what this integration should touch upon, what prevents it, and teaching methods. However, little attention has been paid to the process of implementation itself, especially in terms of its temporal evolution and the role of change agents in this process, and in providing concrete guidelines and examples of business-related courses in which sustainability has been integrated.

To integrate the literature, we offer a multi-level, multi-stakeholder research framework emphasising the pivotal role of different actors and shed light on future research avenues by highlighting under researched stakeholders, such as students and student-led associations. Our review contributes to theory by providing an integration of the heterogenous body of literature and highlighting the multi-stakeholder nature of embedding sustainability in business education, thus providing concrete directions for future research.