An empirical exploration of a business school’s effect on students’ sustainability mindsets
Limin Fu, Ananya Bhattacharya, George Derham, Glen Croy, Qudsia IftikharPurpose
Aligned with the United Nation’s Principles of Responsible Management Education, business schools are expected to incorporate sustainability education in their curriculum with an implicit assumption that graduates practice these values beyond university. This paper aims to challenge this assumption by investigating whether and how students’ sustainability values and attitudes are developed in business schools through identity theory.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors used a two-stage parallel mixed methods design in this study. Stage 1 used a quantitative, two-wave longitudinal survey, assessing students’ sustainability attitudes before and after completing a sustainability-focused course in 2021, 2022 and 2023. Stage 2 used qualitative, semistructured in-depth interviews to examine graduates’ sustainability values while at university, during their transition to employment, and in the early stages of graduate employment.
Findings
The survey results show that sustainability education may not change students’ sustainability attitudes. The findings from the interviews suggest that students’ identity as “a sustainable person” is shaped more by individuals (family values, schooling, social norms and individual financial conditions) and workplace conditions (culture and coworkers) than by business school education.
Research limitations/implications
Contrary to existing studies that promote sustainability education for developing change agents (Hesselbarth and Schaltegger, 2014; Seatter and Ceulemans, 2017), the authors found no significant change, which they explained as being due to isolated sustainability courses and the wider university context suppressing sustainability identities and opportunities. Instead, the isolated sustainability courses in business schools might demonstrate and emphasize only the dominant identity, causing a barrier to activating sustainable graduates. Contrastingly, the authors discovered that workplaces fostered sustainability-related identities through work expectations, workplace culture and substantial actions and impact communication.
Practical implications
Practically, for universities, the authors propose that there is a need to combine education for sustainability pedagogical approaches with an understanding of self-identity evolution. Appreciating that university has a diverse range of students with multiple expectations, there is ample opportunity for purposeful efforts to support sustainability outcomes for everyone through curriculum and pedagogy innovation (Mason et al., 2024). All the same, this needs to be implemented at-scale, regularly and in-depth. The authors anticipate that embedding this sustainability-related self-identity earlier will ease and accelerate the potential sustainability impacts in workplaces upon graduation.
Originality/value
By combining attitude-behavior and identity theories, the authors propose that business schools should substantively craft transformative sustainability environments enabling students’ identity development to become change agents for better business.