Principles of Responsible Management Education

Abstract

Business and management education has received stark criticism over the last decade on a number of grounds including the extent to which it is producing leaders and managers who are effective, efficient, and more importantly, ethical (Ghoshal, 2005). This includes the claim that business and management education is not doing enough to promote the sorts of awareness and capacities for sustainability which transpire into practice (Crawford-Lee and Wall, 2018). Indeed, there is an ongoing view that current forms of business and management education promote dispassionate and detached perspectives in favour of profit, despite the development of social responsibility and triple bottom line paradigms (Wall, 2017; Wall, Tran and Soejatminah, 2017). Empirical work now seemingly supports this with evidence which suggests that business and management students are less ethical and are more corruptible than students from other disciplines (e.g. Haski-Leventhal, 2014), and that the Master of Business Administration (MBA) – the supposed flagship postgraduate programme of business schools – produces graduates which are demonstrably more self-serving than others (Miller and Xu, 2016).