Responsible Management Education

The PRME Global Movement

Principles for Responsible Management Education

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000533156
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Formazione aziendale
• Index: Business

The ebook is fully Open Access.

Written by many of the key influencers at the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME), the book focuses on advancing sustainable development into education, research and partnerships at higher education institutions and, specifically, at business schools, with the purpose of educating responsible leaders for today and tomorrow.

The book serves as a concrete source of inspiration for universities and other stakeholders in higher education on structures, processes and content for how to advance responsible management education and sustainable development. It articulates the importance of key themes connected with climate change, gender equality, anti-corruption, business for peace, anti-poverty and other topics that are related to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The book emphasizes the significance of local–global interaction, drawing on local action at management schools in combination with global knowledge exchange across the PRME community. In addition, the book clearly demonstrates the background, key milestones and successful achievements of PRME as a global movement by management schools in collaboration with a broader community of higher education professionals. It exemplifies action in various local geographies in PRME Chapters, PRME Working Groups and the PRME Champions work to advance responsible management education. The authors of the book are all globally experienced deans, professors, educators, executives and students with a global outlook, who are united to advance responsible management education locally and globally.

The book will be invaluable reading for university leaders, educators, business school deans and students wanting to understand and embed responsible management education approaches across their institutions and curricula.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Part I PRME INTO THE DECADE OF ACTION

Mette Morsing

DOI: 10.4324/9781003186311-1

As a point of departure, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, in the Foreword, signals his support and reminds us of the urgency of PRME’s role to nurture responsible leaders to achieve the SDGs. Part I begins with a chapter (Chapter 1) by Mette Morsing, Head of PRME, who takes stock of the urgent need “towards transforming leadership education.” In Chapter 2, Sanda Ojiambo, CEO and Executive Director of UN Global Compact, makes a supportive statement of how PRME serves as an initiative of the UN Global Compact and discusses PRME’s important role in facilitating collaboration between academia and business, foreshadowing the many new collaborative initiatives between UN Global Compact and PRME. In Chapter 3, Ilian Mihov, Dean of INSEAD and Chairman of the PRME Global Board since 2020, builds on the role that PRME can play in facilitating business to serve as a “force for good”. He provides the much needed optimism and inspiration about PRME’s role in transmitting ideas through advocacy, collaboration with the UNGC and knowledge exchange. In Chapter 4, Danica Purg, President of IEDC – Bled School of Management and President of CEEMAN, discusses the recent process and importance of setting a new strategic direction for PRME based on her crucial role leading PRME’s Interim Management Council 2020–2021 and accordingly resetting PRME ambitions. Subsequently, in Chapter 5, Jonas Haertle, Former Head of PRME, looks back on PRME’s evolution since its launch by Ban Ki-moon, former UN Secretary-General, at the UN Global Compact Leaders Forum Summit in Geneva, Switzerland in 2007. Haertle traces the history, start and growth of PRME through the lens of systems leadership, calling on PRME to take collective action, engage in new and innovative approaches, collaborate with networks of diverse stakeholders and develop strategies that are adaptive and flexible. This is followed by a chapter by another significant individual of the PRME movement: Professor David L. Cooperrider, Case Western Reserve University. In Chapter 6, he informs us of our understanding of the future by providing the context for PRME’s emergence, its “Peter Drucker moment” and the corresponding ideas that came to be part of its “DNA.” Part I concludes with a carefully investigated challenge put forth by Professor Jim Walsh, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, and PRME Global Board Member, to consider PRME’s global footprint over the last 13 years. He shows that there is a large disparity between business and management school signatories in the Global North and Global South. While Jim reminds us that the “Road to Love is Never Smooth,” his critical questions provide motivation for PRME to deliver on its promises in the Decade of Action.

1 PRME – PRINCIPLES FOR RESPONSIBLE MANAGEMENT EDUCATION Towards transforming leadership education

Mette Morsing

DOI: 10.4324/9781003186311-2

1.1 The need for leadership education to focus on societal betterment

Business school education plays a fundamental role for the business strategies, economic tools and decision-making frameworks that are put into practical business reality every day by managers in millions of businesses today. Indeed, the reach of business school is unprecedented with millions of undergraduate and graduate students as well as professional leaders engaging in leadership and executive training at business schools.

With a UN mandate in 2017, the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME), an initiative of the United Nations, is set into existence to raise the sustainability profile of business schools around the world. Today, we are a UN movement of more than 800 signatory schools with access to an ever-evolving network of around 3 million students and 200,000 faculty. According to recent estimates, more than 15,000 business schools exist in the world today (see Jim Walsh’s chapter in this book). Unfortunately, no such assessment of the total number of business school students at a global scale at any moment in time seems currently available. But the number of business schools in the world and the impact that they have on students is daunting to imagine. The impact on the direction of the world that our students have is ultimately the goal of PRME. Our students can change that direction for the better as they enter private and public organizations to make influential decisions and create real on-the-ground economic impact for social and environmental life.

Business education comes with a huge opportunity to change the world. As a voluntary initiative, Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME), with more than 800 signatory schools and universities in support of education, research and operational activities toward responsible management and sustainable development, provides a promising global platform. Leadership education institutions are the centerpiece on the ‘supply side’ of business talent. This is where business mindsets and frameworks are cultivated, challenged and advanced. This is where new ideas can be scaled and can contribute to form the direction of the world.

One important centerpiece informing leadership education concerns the ongoing debate on what the purpose of business is. In this debate, the introduction of the stakeholder model in the early 1980s (Freeman, 1984) was a turning point. Importantly, it redirected the debate from a focus on serving shareholders, the legal owners of the corporation, to emphasize the purpose as being serving stakeholders more generally.

Today, the stakeholder model is being redefined. Putting the corporation at the center of the stakeholder model was the norm in the early days when the stakeholder model was first introduced to management scholarship. This stakeholder model from the 1980s presents a corporate-centric model and does not necessarily question the ‘growth assumption’ as a corporate goal. It is supportive of an economic logic, where the corporation takes into consideration its stakeholders in order for itself to grow. Today, there is a new urgent request from not only businesses but from business school students to challenge the global assumption of growth and the positioning of the corporation at the center of such a model. Recently, this has been referred to as ‘purpose-driven business’.

The notion of ‘purpose-driven business’ defines the purpose of business as first and foremost being in the service of society. The ultimate goal of any business – independent of size, industry or geography – is to serve societal betterment. This changes the positioning of business as being at the center of the stakeholder model. If the ultimate purpose of business is to serve society, society must be at the center of the model and business is one of the many stakeholders working with a goal of improving society.

In our education of leadership students, we need to rewrite the curriculum to fit this purpose. Our students must develop a mindset where society is at the center of the stakeholder model and the frameworks, analyses and models they are taught must serve this ‘society-centric’ redefined stakeholder model.

Putting society at the center has a number of implications for the way we teach business. It challenges the basic ethical standards for norms of trust, responsibility and fairness that guide managerial practice. And it challenges what is considered ‘success’ in business and how to become an accomplished ‘responsible leader’.

1.2 The idea of leadership education and the professionalization of the ‘manager’

The idea of responsible leadership is not new. In fact, the idea is at least as old as the business school itself. The establishment of North American business schools in the early 20th century with an ambition of professionalizing management came with an articulated effort to frame business education as ‘possessing a higher purpose than mere “moneymaking”’ (Khurana and Penrice, 2010: 5). Just as education of medical doctors and lawyers installed a sense of social duty for society in their students, so too were ideas about educating a ‘socially conscious leadership for the nation’ (ibid) and expectations to train business professionals to take into consideration social implications of their occupation and to develop a ‘heightened sense of responsibility’ (ibid) specifically articulated for business education. In the European university system that came to be a role model for the European business school, the 18th-century German Humboldtian idea of higher education emphasized the dual purpose of Bildung and Ausbildung. The basic ambition of Humboldt was – for the betterment of society – to educate people to become world citizens with a holistic outlook, to become autonomous individuals developing their own reasoning powers to decide between right and wrong (Bildung), while at the same time providing them with more specific professional skills required through schooling (Ausbildung). Ingrained in the Humboldtian ideal was the acknowledgment of being skillful and ‘well-informed’:

There are undeniably certain kinds of knowledge that must be of a general nature and, more importantly, a certain cultivation of the mind and character that nobody can afford to be without. People obviously cannot be good craftworkers, merchants, soldiers or businessmen unless, regardless of their occupation, they are good, upstanding and – according to their condition – well-informed human beings and citizens. If this basis is laid through schooling, vocational skills are easily acquired later on, and a person is always free to move from one occupation to another, as so often happens in life.

Quoted in Profiles of educators: Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) by Karl-Heinz Günther (1988; doi:10.1007/BF02192965)

Management education has been critiqued for having become a matter of training ‘business technicians’, as Joseph Willits, Wharton School’s former Dean, put it many years ago. His ambition was to make it clear that educating business leaders with ‘a sense of statesmanship’ had become underappreciated yet was most urgently needed to develop healthy societies (Willits [1934] cited in Khurana and Penrice, 2011: 5/6). Along the same lines of critique, the value of business schools’ existence has been questioned profoundly (Parker, 2018). The critique points to the ideology and norms business schools set for students and alumni to focus primarily on their own personal rewards as the most important goal instead of teaching them how to make business a leverage to address the global challenges. Basically, it is argued, business schools are educating managers to favor shareholder value and deprioritize societal development. Others argue that the reason for why the world is not on track to achieve the SDGs is that ‘sustainable development’ is not a self-organizing property of market-based economic systems, which some market economists tend to promote and which, oftentimes, permeate the curriculum. As stated in the TWI2050 Report,

Market-based economic growth alone is rarely socially inclusive and environmentally stable. Without countervailing policies, markets are often reasonably efficient but also highly...