Unlocking the potential of responsible management education through interdisciplinary approaches

Abstract

Business schools are crucial to integrating sustainable development into management thought and practices, thereby promoting a paradigm shift toward responsible management education. Despite many business schools pledging to adopt the United Nations' Principles for Responsible Management Education, they have been criticized for failing to develop change agents toward sustainability. To fill this gap, this paper demonstrates how interdisciplinarity can be connected to responsible management education through critical and instrumental perspectives. To this end, we apply an interdisciplinarity model to 37 Principles for Responsible Management Education Schools' Reports, using content analysis, text‐mining, and network theory tools. As a result, our findings suggest: (i) a taxonomy of critical and instrumental interdisciplinary studies and (ii) a framework of Principles for Responsible Management Education schools engaged in critical and instrumental interdisciplinarity. The framework we develop can serve as a diagnostic and prognostic tool for assessing how interdisciplinary can improve responsible management education in business schools. Our findings contribute to theory advancing research on the intersection of responsible management education and interdisciplinary approaches.