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In the last decade, business schools around the world have become increasingly engaged in reflecting on their role in the development of ethical and responsible business leaders. Based on the global movement towards sustainable development and social responsibility among corporations, the discourse in business education also started including concepts such as responsible management education and academic social responsibility. Just as the corporate world is shifting away from a narrow perspective on its responsibilities, in which the only "social responsibility" of a business was to maximize profit (Friedman, 1970), business schools and their leadership have also realized they can (and should) do more than teach business fundamentals in a limited, shareholder dominated context.
It is now clear that if we are to move towards a more sustainable world, business schools have a responsibility to provide current and future practitioners with a different type of education, grounding traditional business functions in ethics and accountability (Cornelius, Wallace, and Tassabehji, 2007). This emphasis is all the more important because studies have shown that business students are less ethical (Ferraro, Pfeffer, and Sutton, 2005; Smyth and Davis, 2004) and more corruptible (Frank and Schultz, 2000) than other students. Wave after wave of corporate scandals has led many observers (cf., Adler, 2002; Crossan, Mazutis, and Seijts, 2013; Evans, Trevino, and Weaver, 2006; Giacalone, 2007; Gioia, 2002; Ghoshal, 2005; Smyth and Davis, 2004; Swanson and Frederick, 2005) to also argue that business schools should be held accountable for their failure to develop ethical and responsible business leaders - demanding change in business education.
A shift is happening. In early 2014, over 540 schools were signatories to the UN-supported Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME), an initiative that aims to globally inspire and champion responsible management education through research, engagement, and thought leadership. Based on these schools' "Sharing Information on Progress" reports' one can see the commitment of hundreds of business schools towards ethics, corporate social responsibility (CSR), sustainable practice, and responsible management education.
One of the drivers of this shift is demand from business students themselves, who have growing expectations towards responsibility and responsible management education (Haski-Leventhal, 2012). This growing awareness is promising because business students, who collectively constitute the future leadership of our corporations, are a critical stakeholder group within the...