Abstract:

The Principles for Responsible Management Education were developed in 2007 by a group of academic representatives and leaders from universities, business schools and institutions coming from different countries (PRME, 2018). The objective of PRME is to develop guiding principles that serve as a basis for the pursuit of sustainability goals in the academic arena. There are six guiding principles that institutions that aim to adhere to the PRME initiative should align with. In this alignment process institutions should develop actions and implement practices in the research, curricula, teaching methodologies and institutional strategies domains. In addition, signatories are encouraged to disclose information in a regular basis regarding their individual progress.

The literature on management education has studied the initial strategies followed by the institutions that originally added to these principles (e.g., Godemann et al., 2014; Young and Nagpal, 2013; Stachowicz-Stanusch, 2011). These papers show that signatories’ actions can be classified in four main areas:
(1) operations,
(2) partnerships,
(3) teaching and
(4) research.

According to the current literature, most of the signatories have mainly focused their actions on the first two areas; while the less developed area is the fourth (Godemann et al., 2014). Operations entail actions related to the greening of the campus facilities or waste reduction. In the case of partnerships, signatories have developed partnerships with stakeholders that involve different forms of interactions such as agreements with CSR departments or collaboration agreements with NGOs. Teaching activities include incorporations of sustainability topics in the curricula by adding modules or subjects specifically focused on ethics and values or by modifying the syllabus of existing ones to include these concepts. Finally, research activities on sustainability topics have also been mentioned.

The current literature on the topic shows and summarizes the initial efforts to integrate PRME principles in business schools and universities. However, less is known about the evolution of their efforts and strategies in the field. For instance, there is evidence that in the last years new forums and conferences around the concept of sustainability and business ethics are being organized (e.g., the European Operations and Management Association (EurOMA) has included a specific track on Sustainability in its main conference and has also launched a specific forum on the topic). This shows that actions are increasing in the previously underdeveloped research domain.

In line with this, our objective in this paper is to study the evolution of the strategies followed by signatories for adhering to the guiding principles of PRME. The actions included in the progress reports of institutions that have been adhered to the PRME principles for several years have been analyzed using content analysis. We expect to provide insights on the evolution of their actions and provide a framework for the deployment of sustainability strategies in the academic field.

Keywords:

Higher education, PRME, business school.