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ABSTRACT
Sustainability is a key issue for organizations in the twenty-first century as they increasingly acknowledge that their policies and practices have social and/or environmental consequences. Accordingly, many companies are implementing elements of sustainability into their business practices. There is an increasing recognition that sustainability-related subjects need to be included in the curricula. One current debate is whether sustainability should be integrated as a core course or whether it should be taught as standalone elective subjects. Teaching sustainability as standalone units may lead to the educational disconnect between the curricula and the social and environmental externalities. This paper seeks to understand the gaps that exist in the Curriculum and the sustainability perspectives and reconcile the same. In order to understand the sustainability perspectives, senior management executives and senior academicians were interviewed through a structured interview schedule. A questionnaire was designed for the students in order to understand their views on the importance of sustainability in management and management education.
Keywords: Sustainability, Management, Education, Global Economic System, Teaching.
INTRODUCTION
Sustainability is a key issue for organizations in the twenty-first century as they increasingly acknowledge that their policies and practices have social and/or environmental consequences. Accordingly, many companies are implementing elements of sustainability into their business practices. In step with this trend is the increasing recognition that sustainability-related subjects need to be included in the curricula of business courses, particularly MBA programs. Recent research into sustainability education in the top 50 global MBA programs shows that over seventy percent of them offer one or more units on sustainability related topics (Christensen et ah, 2007). One current debate is whether sustainability should be integrated into core course offerings for MBA students or whether sustainability should be taught as standalone elective subjects (Christensen et ah, 2007, Tilbury et ah, 2004). One potential danger of teaching standalone sustainability units is the educational disconnect that may arise between the free-market focus of MBA curricula and the social and environmental externalities associated with the operations of free-markets as they are currently constructed.
For more than a century management education has fostered the development of leaders with their immense creation of output that we now see as unsustainable. If we wish to avoid a time of tumultuous environmental crisis in global...