Bringing Business Academics Back to Their Senses: Reorienting Research and Teaching for an Unsustainable World

Introduction

In recent years, business schools in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere have begun to address both environmental issues, in general, and climate change, in particular, in both their scholarly research and classroom teaching. We are genuinely impressed at the progress this represents, having both worked on environmental issues for the past 30 years of our academic careers, and written dissertations on these issues at a time when few thought it wise to focus on the natural environment and spillover issues in business. Indeed, when we both started our academic careers, few top business and management journals accepted papers on the topic. Today, that is all different. Witness the programs, specialization, and majors in sustainable business and a rapid rise in business and environment publications, reaching thousands over the past decade. And yet, despite these advances, environmental grand challenges, such as climate change, have worsened.

The problem is that, while most business schools are catching up, their focus is all-too-often both inadequate and, at times, misguided, while, at the same time, the nature of the challenge has grown and evolved. Currently, climate change is not, in its truest sense, an environmental issue. It is a system’s breakdown. And to correct a systems breakdown, we must correct the systems that are causing it. Those systems are business, the market, and the variant of shareholder capitalism as it is presently configured. While some conveniently call climate change an “externality” or “unintended consequence,” its causes are actually embedded in those economic and social systems. We are creating the problem by misguided design.

This means that our research and teaching models, which have changed little over the past decades, are based on a reality and modernist future that no longer exist. As such, the solutions we offer are incremental at best when transformational changes are needed. While these solutions may slow the velocity at which we are heading toward system collapse, they are not reversing direction. The scope of the problem and the scale of necessary solutions do not fit within the present curricular and research environment.

For example, courses on climate change are typically inserted as electives into a core curriculum that focuses on shareholder value, limited government, and a blind pursuit of unlimited economic growth and boundless consumption. Likewise, research on climate change is based on theories and methodologies that focus primarily on human systems while providing diminished attention – or no attention at all – to the ways in which the natural systems in which they are embedded and depend are becoming inhospitable to human and other life forms, profoundly destabilizing the very social systems we study.

Should we abandon, then, the endeavor of blending business studies with those of the natural environment? We don’t think so. If we are going to address this massive challenge, then it will have to be with all levers, but particularly with some model of the market to help solve it. Markets, as we see them, are comprised of business, government, civil society, and others, and, as such, represent the most powerful set of organizing institutions on Earth. In a more ideal world, even if government retains a critical role in addressing our challenges, business must become a willing partner, turning its unmatched powers of ideation, production, and distribution to bear on what society needs at the scale it needs it. Without the power of such a market turned toward solving society’s climate change challenge, it will not be resolved.

But, which market model? The truth is that capitalism currently manifests itself differently around the world – the American model is drastically different than the Chinese or Nordic models, for example. Each has different notions regarding the role of government in the market, the responsibilities of the firm to society, the protections of the social safety net, and more. Looking to the future, as capitalism spreads and more countries grow their economies to provide for their people, capitalism will morph and evolve to reflect the needs of each specific context – ideally pulling away from the shareholder value variant to consider other perspectives. All this means that academics, through their research and curriculum, must undertake a more radical questioning of the dominant Western neo-classical world model.

While some call for the elimination of the free-market system that has dominated the global economy for decades and replacing it with a new system, that wholesale radical transformational choice is, in our view, not available to us. That level of system disruption could easily lead to political wars and societal collapses, if it could be accomplished at all. The practical reality is that every set of institutions must evolve from the institutions that precede them. A set of market institutions that address climate change must evolve from the market institutions we have today. For this to happen, we must turn our research and curricular lenses toward finding ways for this market system to evolve and adapt to our 21st-century challenges in the natural environment. The rest of this viewpoint will examine how this need puts business scholars at the forefront of addressing the climate challenge through correcting its research and teaching models.

Re-Engaging With the Full Scope of the Current Challenge

When this essay’s authors were born, there were roughly 3 billion people on Earth; today there are 8 billion, and, in 2050, likely 10 billion. Let that sink in. It took homo sapiens millennia to rise from 0 to 3 billion in numbers, and we have watched that number increase by more than 250% in our short lifetimes. We, as humans, have grown to such numbers, at such speed and with a technology of such power that we are now an animating force in the environment. Scientists have called this new era the Anthropocene – the Age of Humans – and climate change is just one of its markers. Others comprise what scientists call the nine “planetary boundaries” beyond which we should not go if we wish to maintain a safe operating system for humans and other life forms. As of this writing, we have now crossed seven.

We are causing the “sixth mass extinction,” where roughly 70% of mammals, birds, and reptiles have declined between 1970 and 2016, and as much as 30% of all present species could be extinct by 2100. We have released unprecedented amounts of nitrogen and phosphorous into our rivers and oceans through fertilizer runoff that is severely threatening marine life. Freshwater availability is decreasing rapidly, such that almost a half a billion people could experience water scarcity by 2050. Only one marker – ozone depletion – has been on the mend.

Some have suggested that the proper term for this new age should be the “Capitalocene” to call out the malignancy of capitalism. We argue that we need to model the possibilities for an emergent variant of capitalism that moves away from its obsessive focus on translating environmental concerns into the over-riding demand for economic competitiveness and only taking actions if one can make a narrowly defined “business case.” It is absurd to be spending our time making business cases not to commit planetary suicide. Instead, our attention should be directed toward a reassessment of the tenets of our capitalist systems to recognize the emerging “Anthropocene Society,” which acknowledges our newly found power within the natural environment (Hoffman & Jennings, 2018), and, in the process, a reassessment of our research and teaching.

Correcting the Research Model

In many ways, corporate sustainability research today has become merely a label for strategies actually driven by standard economic and institutional mechanisms. Scholars are forced to fit climate change and other planetary boundary work into existing theories to get published in top journals, even as those theories do not adequately address the issue. This is the strange irony: to succeed professionally, we must use theories and models that are inadequate in their ability to consider the full scope of the issue. So, it is time to ask, how can we change our research models to properly capture the scale of a crisis that risks triggering one of the largest economic and social dislocations in human history? Our answer follows on two fronts: practical theorizing and practice engagement (Norström et al., 2020).

Correcting the Teaching Model

While many business schools have added climate change to their curriculum, the guiding motivation has been to use sustainability to sell products and services (as well as business courses and degrees); like so many management crises before it, once climate change is no longer a hot topic, it will be sidelined or disappear from the curricula. Meanwhile, we continue to teach that the enduring, overriding purpose of business – as if it is some form of natural law – is to maximize their shareholders’ wealth as measured by stock price.

Newer teaching models must engage strongly with – one might say, “constructively critique” – this short-term, shareholder value proposition, offering alternatives to this and other curricular orthodoxies: the myth that endless economic growth is possible; the dismal notion that humans are inherently selfish, driven by avarice and greed; and the blind belief that efficient outcomes are always good outcomes. No one goes home and teaches their children such things. They are simply not true.

Next, it is important to make structural changes. Some schools have included modules at the beginning of their programs to teach “trans-versal” skills that span the curriculum; restructured their programs around the Sustainable Development Goals (that many scholars in this journal have studied); or integrated Indigenous place-based knowledge into their studies as a way to expand the possibilities of business education and practice. A few have even built new MBA programs with sustainability as the primary pedagogical pillar. Such efforts require strong political will and faculty support, which is not always available in the necessary abundance. In the face of such a reality, the next best step for individual faculty is to develop courses and co-curricular offerings that today’s business students increasingly demand.

Conclusion

This viewpoint makes three interconnected arguments: first, we need to tightly integrate the natural and economic systems within our research and teaching models; second, we must directly challenge the dominant model of shareholder primacy and its associated tenets; and third, we must re-engage with the world of practice.

These three arguments compel a needed reorientation of our research and teaching models that will not be easy. In fact, it leaves the sustainable business scholar with a dilemma. On the one hand, our existing academic rules and norms require that we fit the Anthropocene phenomena within existing theoretical and pedagogical models to “contribute to the field,” progress in our careers, and maintain legitimacy in the academy through tenure. But, on the other hand, we need to step outside those existing models and career paths to fully capture the magnitude and scope of the problems and discern new practical, empirical, and theoretical possibilities.

As a first step toward that reorientation, we encourage academics, just like any person on this planet, to do what they can in their daily lives to mitigate the negative effects we are having on the natural environment. It is polite, it is acceptable, but it does not really overthrow the institutions of the academy or society. As a second step, we think it is important to return to the academic ethos of 30 years ago, when scholars of environmental issues willingly resided outside of mainstream scholarship and challenged the underlying institutions of the field. True – it is more radical but also re-energizing (Hoffman & Jennings, 2018).

We acknowledge, of course, that a scholar’s stage of career is a critical contingency. More junior scholars must fit within the existing rules of the day, publishing work that will earn them tenure, while also maintaining some level of deviance from those norms to remain focused on the true nature of the challenge. However, more senior scholars can adopt the traditional role of “elder,” focusing more on helping those who come after them by defying and changing the institutions in which they are being developed.

Beyond the role of the individual scholar, there are non-governmental organization (NGO)-supported social movement efforts to change our research and teaching institutions from groups like the UN Principles for Responsible Management Education (UN PRME), the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), the European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD), the Responsible Research in Business Management network (RRBM), and more.

In the end, whether through individual leadership or mass mobilization, our ultimate objective is to question taken-for-granted models and theories, to push for institutional change in the areas of rewards, training, engagement, and selection, and to bring a renewed spirit to business school research and teaching. It is time to come back to our senses.