Abstract:

In 2007 the The Principles for Responsible Management Education were created by a group of international universities and business school in 2007 (PRME, 2018). The objective of PRME is to develop guiding principles that can guide institutions in the implementation of a sustainability strategy. In that sense, there are six guiding principles that universities and business school need to follow in order to PRME initiative. In the pursuit of these principles institutions should implement a series of actions and practices in the following domains: research, curricula, teaching methodologies and institutional strategies. PRME participants should generate reports were they show their individual progress.

Several authors have studies the strategies that institutions have followed in the pursuit of PRME principles (e.g., Godemann et al., 2014; Young and Nagpal, 2013; Stachowicz-Stanusch, 2011).

The literature shows that PRME participants’ practices can be classified in four main areas:
(1) operations,
(2) partnerships,
(3) teaching and
(4) research.

A review of the literature shows that most institutions have mainly generated actions on the first two areas. In addition, the fourth area is the less developed (Godemann et al., 2014). A description of the action taken in each area is provided in the following lines. First, the operations area includes practices related to greening the campus or waste reduction action programs. Second, in the case of partnerships, institutions have developed collaborative agreements with stakeholders such as NGOs or CSR firm’s departments. Third, the teaching domain considers the inclusion of the concept of sustainability topics in the curricula. Finally, the research area includes developing research on the topic of sustainability.

To sum up, the current literature on the topic summarizes and integrates the efforts of PRME institutions to implement a sustainability strategy. However, little is known about the evolution of these strategy and efforts. For instance, there is evidence that in the last years new conferences exclusively focusing on 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 efforts are starting to being put in different areas.

Our objective is to study the evolution of the actions and practices that PRME have implemented to follow the guiding principles of PRME. To achieve this objective, we have analyze the PRME reports of adhered institutions using content analysis.

Keywords:

PRME, Universities, Sustainability.