Business School Legitimacy and the Challenge of Sustainability: A Fuzzy Set Analysis of Institutional Decoupling

Abstract

Business schools face growing institutional pressure to respond to the sustainability agenda, especially since the financial crisis highlighted the need to educate business leaders who engage with issues beyond a profit imperative. While business schools increasingly signal their engagement with global issues, such as sustainability, there are also suggestions that they decouple their espoused commitments from their practices. Rather than institute actual change and include sustainability in organizational activities, business schools may merely indicate that such change is taking place. This study examines the key organizational and strategic conditions under which business schools decouple their sustainability policies from practices. We draw on interviews with 40 deans of UK business schools and analyze the data using fs/QCA, a method that investigates combinations of individual conditions. We find evidence to suggest that tight coupling is associated with small, prestigious business schools and that decoupling is associated with business schools that are large, wealthy or lacking in expertise. We discuss the implications of these findings for business school legitimacy and institutional theory.

The entrepreneurial university as an engine for sustainable development

“…The obstacles to integrating a wider sustainability strategy is aligned with Etzkowitz's (2014Etzkowitz's ( , 2016 highlighted challenges of the entrepreneurial universities towards serving a social mission and becoming engines of growth. Snelson-Powell et al (2016) conclude that failure to implement sustainability could subject [HEIs] to legitimacy risks, if the lack of operational engagement is later exposed. Thus, the recommendations offered by Mader and Rammel (2015) Another dimension is what Dawe et al (2005) mention in a report for the Higher Education Academy (HEA) concerning sustainability 'literacy' of students in different academic disciplines over a sixmonth period.…”

“…Moving beyond the common but narrowed-down approach of the entrepreneurial universities focusing on spin-offs, this paper advocates that entrepreneurial universities as HEIs can be considered to be a key catalyst for a sustainable society (IARU, 2016). Indeed, HEIs may serve as institutional moral reinforcers (Hanson et al, 2017) and be subject to legitimacy risks if significant issues in society are not effectively pursued (Snelson-Powell et al, 2016).…”

Sustainability Centres and Fit: How Centres Work to Integrate Sustainability Within Business Schools

“…Consider curriculum development, a longstanding area of research in the literature on sustainable business education. Sustainability topics have been addressed through individual stand-alone courses, degree specialisations and electives, and built into the core curriculum (Rusinko 2010;Snelson-Powell et al 2016). Such diversity in the adoption of sustainable business education can be explained in part through the various strategic, structural and cultural barriers faced by proponents in different settings (Solitander et al 2012).…”

“…And despite the pressure from accreditation agencies to embed sustainability across business school programmes, clear templates for the design and implementation of sustainability education are hard to come by (Rasche and Gilbert 2015). These barriers may hamper substantive integration of sustainability topics within business school education (Rasche and Gilbert 2015;Snelson-Powell et al 2016). According to a recent survey, only 42% of deans and 37% of faculty believe that business schools have formulated an appropriate response to the integration of sustainability issues (ABIS & EFMD 2013, p. 1).…”

Efetividade no nível interorganizacional de uma rede para a educação em gestão responsável

“…A adesão da escola muitas vezes se inicia como um esforço de legitimação na agenda do desenvolvimento sustentável, pela instituição de ensino perante sociedade, ensejando posteriormente uma transformação efetiva das práticas educacionais (Moratis, 2016;A. Rasche & Gilbert, 2015;Snelson-Powell, Grosvold, & Millington, 2016).…”