Designing Effective Sustainability Assignments: How and Why Definitions of Sustainability Impact Assignments and Learning Outcomes

Abstract

The importance of, and interest in, sustainability in management education has increased significantly over the past three decades. However, the definition of sustainability remains complex and elusive, thus creating significant issues for sustainability instruction, assignment design, and student learning. We reviewed definitions and use of sustainability and corporate social responsibility (CSR) nomenclature from academics, corporations, and business and society course textbooks. The evidence is clear that sustainability and CSR are commonly and frequently used interchangeably not only in academic research and the classroom but also by textbook authors and business reports. Using a sustainability assignment gone wrong, we present data and analysis showing that this lack of definitional clarity and intermingling of the concepts of sustainability and CSR led to problems with student learning and outcomes from the assignment. Student work was heavily influenced by corporate terminology, which superseded textbook, nomenclature, and classroom instruction. We call for future research to delve into the issue of clarifying the definitional complexity and conflation.

Clarifying the Concept of Corporate Sustainability and Providing Convergence for Its Definition

“…According to the Brundtland report-the first document that introduced the "sustainable development" concept [12]-businesses are said to have a crucial role in managing the impact of population in ecosystems, resources, food security, and sustainable economies in order to decrease the pressure society places on the environment (WCED), 1987. As reported by many authors [1,[13][14][15][16], the origin of the corporate sustainability concept is often linked to the Brundtland report's definition of "sustainable development" as "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability for future generations to meet their own needs". Despite the popularity of the Brundtland's definition, its efficacy in giving practical guidance to organizations has often been questioned.…”

“…Meuer et al [2] argued that the ambiguous impact of corporate sustainability relates to lack of clarity around the essence of CS. The lack of definitional clarity and the conflation of sustainability, corporate social responsibility, and similar terms give companies significant freedom to choose the sustainability items that best fit their corporate interests [13]. Until researchers can clearly differentiate between corporate sustainability from noncorporate sustainability practices, it will be difficult to evaluate whether firms are seriously embracing corporate sustainability objectives or simply engaging in greenwashing practices [24].…”

“…The consequences over the absence of conceptual clarity are well documented [2,8,13,16,[22][23][24] and were made explicit at least ten years ago by Smith and Sharicz [25]: "The lack of clear definition means that there are no clear and unanimous guidelines of how companies should adopt sustainability". Subsequently, there has been an effort in the research focus to clarify the different interpretations of corporate sustainability and to integrate the various viewpoints.…”

The Role of Value Stream Mapping in Healthcare Services: A Scoping Review

“…One of the main goals pursued with the VSM is to improve some key performance indicators (KPI) of the organization. In this work, we are going to group them into three main pillars: operational, environmental and social indicators [25][26][27][28][29]. For example, for operational indicators, among others, the following have been used [24,[29][30][31][32]: clinical quality, cost reduction, patient safety, organizational responsiveness, lead time, delivery performance, process time, inventory level, equipment performance, reducing delays, error rate, service quality and patient satisfaction, and for environmental indicators [26,30]: waste insofar as they cannot aggregate outcomes and the VSM intervention is rarely presented separately.…”

Sustainability of Youth Careers in Romania—Study on the Correlation of Students’ Personal Interests with the Selected University Field of Study

“…Currently, the concept of sustainability has been debated worldwide for the last 30 years and has multiple meanings [6]. The concept of sustainability has expanded and can be found on three levels: economic sustainability [7], political sustainability and social sustainability [8,9] but at the same time, sustainability can be associated with any system of activity, including education.…”