Thanks to Nicolaj Tofte Brenneche for the contribution on "Sustainable Business Education"

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.