Thanks to Nicolaj Tofte Brenneche for the contribution on "Sustainable Business Education"
As a researcher of the integration of humanities, arts and social
sciences in management education, I’m always interested in how people think and
talk about change. And transformation, innovation and change are very much in
the air in higher education today, and especially in business education. Management
educators face a host of pressures – including a growing chorus of critics, demanding
that business schools better prepare the next generation of business leaders to
engage with the pressing societal issues of our times.
As a European participant in the Aspen Undergraduate
Business Education Consortium, I had a unique
opportunity to get a first-hand look at how the relationship between business
education and society is being discussed in the U.S., and how this differs from
the European discourse. Distinguishing how American and the European educators
think and talk about change in management education gives us the opportunity to
build on the best of each approach.
Simply put, in a European context, we tend to focus on institutional
change as a way to renew business school education. In the U.S., emphasis is
put more on individuals making changes.
The focus on entrepreneurial initiatives within U.S. business schools comes
with several advantages. A remarkable accomplishment by a business leader, a
professor, a dean or a student inspires us all – and makes for a great story.
Moreover, entrepreneurial initiatives can be an effective avenue to drive
change – especially when faculty members are faced with the bureaucracy of
large academic institutions. At times, however, the benefits of celebrating
individual accomplishment come at the cost of losing sight of higher order
engagement.
As it happens, an analogy can be found in what we actually teach
students. Many business ethics courses and textbooks are guided by an
aspiration to strengthen the moral integrity of the individual business student.
While certainly an admirable goal, this approach risks neglecting rigorous investment
in learning the ethical wisdom built into how institutions have been created,
reformed and dismantled over time (in e.g. the field of accountancy, regulation
of financial markets, labor union structures, environmental acts, and many
others). We need to attend to such collective levels of engagement not only in
how we teach business students about how business and society are intertwined,
but also in how we ourselves problematize and pursue reform agendas in the
business education sector.
We might, therefore, attend more ambitiously to the many questions
pertaining to an institutional level of engagement including the way we
construct systems of quality assessment of business education, how we organize
research environments, how we evaluate career performances to embrace more
interdisciplinary and problem-based research agendas, and so forth. We need to
ask ourselfes how the institutional frameworks of business schools today help
deliver on rethinking the commitment of business education to creating societal
values? How might we conceptualize such values? How does the conventional ‘core
curriculum’ of business education reflect such commitments? What are the main levers
of institutional commitment that will push systemic innovation?
In Europe, such questions tend to be more frequently asked than I found
in (my admittedly brief encounter with) the U.S. discourse. Originating from
Denmark and now living and working in Switzerland, I have been exposed to
business school settings marked by clear societal commitments. This is
immediately visible in a high share of tax funding and political involvement in
the strategic governance of the business schools. But more profoundly, the commitment
to societal values reflects deeply rooted ideas about the political, cultural
and economic intertwinement of business and society. A flipside of the coin is a
tendency to become custodians of tradition and convention rather than curating
new ideas and programmes. We too struggle with balancing entrepreneurial action
with societal cohesion.
Juxtaposing the U.S. and European debates on the future of business
education, it is clear to me that we depart from very different traditions and
cultures. Historically, many impulses of business school reform have travelled
from the U.S. to Europe. However, at the current moment, marked in part by the Aspen
Undergraduate Business Education Consortium, a new type of conversation
across the Atlantic might be staged. In such a conversation, the U.S. spirit of
entrepreneurship and the European commitment to values of society might prove
to be a powerful combination – allowing us to pursue the revitalization of
business education as both an entrepreneurial and societal project. The stakes
are too high to choose just one approach and ignore the other.
