Developing sustainability learning in business school curricula – productive boundary objects and participatory processes

Abstract

Sustainability learning is holistic and complex as it draws on diverse disciplines and can be interpreted differently within individual pedagogies. Embedding sustainability across and within business schools relies on developing suitable boundary objects. These may include representations such as models, frameworks or classificatory schemes that are malleable enough to be adapted for use within the disparate disciplines and pedagogies, yet durable enough to be recognisable and to maintain consistency across them. Boundary objects thus allow the sharing of ways of knowing or practice across various social boundaries. This paper outlines how participatory curriculum development processes can enable sustainability to be embedded in a business school curriculum. Distinct phases of the process were marked by different ways of knowing, as disciplinary-specific academics developed and embedded sustainability into and across curricula. Boundary objects were both outcomes and productive facilitators of this process. They acted as catalysts and attracted ongoing processes of dialogue, debate and meaning-making between these academics. The institutional context provided enabling conditions to legitimize outcomes from the participatory process. The process may be replicable in other business schools by the use of boundary objects.

Keywords:

• Sustainability
• curriculum
• participatory process
• multidisciplinary
• transdisciplinary
• boundary objects

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Melissa Edwards

Dr Melissa Edwards is Director of Executive Programs and a Research Director at the Centre for Business and Social Innovation in the UTS Business School. She was a lead CI on Australian Government Office of Learning and Teaching project to develop a Community of Practice to share excellence in Sustainability Education through an online platform (www.sustainability.edu.au) for which she was awarded a finalist in the Green Gown Awards for Excellence. She has led several cross- and trans-disciplinary teams to embed sustainability into business school curricula, including the development of a foundation undergraduate subject that challenges students to address ‘wicked problems’ and to design sustainable entrepreneurial solutions for which she received a University T&L Citation. She currently chairs the UTS Business School cross-faculty Sustainability Working Party and is a member of the University Sustainability Research Committee. She co-chairs the Sustainability and Social Issues in Management stream at the Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management conference (2014-19) and has collaborated to develop a stream of research regarding Sustainability in Management Education (SiME) at the prestigious Academy of Management Conference. She has published on sustainability in business research in journals such as Organization and Environment and Business, Strategy and Environment.

Paul Brown

Dr Paul Brown is a Senior Lecturer in Accounting in the UTS Business School and creative intelligence in the Faculty of Transdisciplinary Innovation. Paul specializes in production economics, innovative management practices and sustainability, and teaches management accounting, and creative intelligence and innovation. Paul has contributed to teaching and development teams for a range of courses which have been recognised as ground breaking, including the award-winning Bachelor of Creative Intelligence and Innovation. His teaching approach enables learning to iterate between divergent (creative) and convergent (analytical) modes, while being focussed on solving some of society’s most challenging problems. He completed his PhD in 2009 and since his research revolves around the question of: How can organisational activity be structured and managed so as to be sustainable, within a sustainable global economy? Examples of two applied research projects are the Leadership & Change for Energy Efficiency in Accounting & Management, funded by the NSW Office of Environment & Heritage; and, Accounting for value chain sustainability and competitive advantage, funded by the Australian Government Cotton Research and Development Corporation. Paul serves on the board of the Environmental Defenders Office NSW, which is an innovative community legal centre specializing in public interest environmental law.

Suzanne Benn

Suzanne Benn is a Professor in the UTS Business School. She specialises in sustainability in the context of business, including in business education for sustainability. She has authored three books and more than 100 academic articles on associated topics.

Christopher Bajada

Christopher Bajada is an Associate Professor of Economics at the UTS Business School, University of Technology Sydney. Chris has taught economics in a variety of undergraduate and postgraduate economics courses for which he was awarded the University of Technology Teaching Excellence Award and a National Teaching Award for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning in Australian Higher Education. As Associate Dean (Teaching and Learning), Chris was instrumental in leading the change in the business school curriculum to incorporate sustainability across several undergraduate and postgraduate business courses. Chris has also worked on various projects in the area of sustainability including modelling the economic value of algae production and education focused research for the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage to develop strategies for improving energy efficient training for NSW organisations. Chris’s research spans both micro and macroeconomics, with a special interest in the tax compliance. He has worked with the Australian Taxation Office as a member of the Cash Economy Task Force and his research has attracted national publicity. Chris has also published in the areas of curriculum design, circular economy, and management practices and their impact on productivity.

Robert Perey

Dr Robert Perey is a Research Associate with the Centre for Business and Social Innovation in the Management Discipline Group at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. Previously, he was a Program Manager in the Australian Research Institute in Education for Sustainability at Macquarie University, Sydney. His work is transdisciplinary focusing on organisational and societal change. He has worked on projects ranging across biodiversity awareness in Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Communities (CALD); sustainability case study development for inclusion in MBA programs; investigating emerging business models, which promote circular flows of resources that now include waste as a valuable product; and designing and facilitating the series of degrowth professional development workshops at the Academy of Management conferences since 2011. His work is published in books and journal articles, and his research interests centre on ecological sustainability, complexity, social imaginaries, aesthetics, and the degrowth economy.

Deborah Cotton

Dr Deborah Cotton is a Senior Lecturer in the Finance Discipline of the UTS Business School and teaches ethics and sustainability in finance and corporate finance. She has a PhD in Applied Finance for a thesis titled the Efficacy of Emissions Trading Schemes (2015). Her research interests include environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues in investment decisions. She was a lead investigator for the Social Impact Investment Market Study for the Department of Social Services in 2018. Within ESG her main interests include gender issues, human rights and climate change. She has worked with the Responsible Investment Association Australasia on an Investor Toolbox on Human Rights for practitioner use. She is a founding member of the Investing for Impact Initiative in the UTS Business School. She has recently published an ambiguity and risk and econometric analysis of Australian emissions markets and electricity prices in Energy Policy and the Journal of Finance and Risk Perspectives. Prior to this she published on carbon and energy prices in the Australasian Journal of Environmental Management, and on carbon trading in The Finsia Journal of Applied Finance. She has presented papers on climate change at conferences in Australia, China, Brazil, Greece and the United Kingdom.

Walter Jarvis

Dr Walter Jarvis is the Director of the UTS Master of Management and a researcher and educator in leadership, corporate governance, and stewardship. His research investigates decision-making in business, foregrounding as a premise to management the moral-relational accountability of business leaders to regain public trust in enterprise management. In his research and teaching he draws on 20 plus years general management and consulting experience with local and international corporations, as well as formal qualifications in education and management learning. He coordinates and lectures subjects across management, leadership and stewardship. He has collaborated with Natalia for over 6 years on the development and design of a core post-graduate management subject (Managing, Leading and Stewardship) which has been recognized for its contribution to cultivating students’ moral accountabilities by a UTS Learning & Teaching citation. He has published on the cultivation of moral accountability in the Journal of Business Ethics Education (2016), on Threshold Concepts in the Business School Curriculum in Education and Training (2016), on The Impact of Corporate Governance on Compounding Inequality in Critical Perspectives on Accounting (2019) and has an article on Stewardship undergoing revision for the Academy of Management Learning and Education.

Gordon Menzies

Gordon Menzies is an Associate Professor of Economics at UTS. He is a Commonwealth Scholar who read Economics at Oxford, and holds various awards related to his own postgraduate work, and his teaching and research at UTS. He introduced Environmental and Resource economics into the curriculum at UTS.

Ian McGregor

Dr Ian McGregor is a Lecturer at UTS Business School. He has extensive experience in embedding sustainability in curriculum not only within UTS Business School but also within a Global Governance subject in the Global Studies degree for which he led the development. He has included environmental and social sustainability in both undergraduate and postgraduate strategy subjects and worked with colleagues in the UTS Business School to assist them in incorporating sustainability into the subjects that they were coordinating and/or teaching. His PhD thesis focused on the global politics of climate change and he was a Board Member of Climate Action Network Australia (CANA) for 5 years and continues to actively contribute to working groups within Climate Action Network (CAN) International. He has attended 7 UN Climate Summits, 5 as an Expert Advisor on the negotiations to one of the Least Developed Countries. In 2016, he was recognised with a “Green Hero” award by UTS for his work on Climate Change both at UTS and beyond. Climate change issues feature strongly in his teaching and ongoing research and he was co-author of a book chapter published on Climate Change Impacts on Small Island Developing States in a Cambridge University Press book on Climate Change and Ocean Governance.

Katrina Waite

Katrina Waite Katrina is a lecturer and academic developer in the university's central teaching and learning unit. She works with academics and professionals in the development of curriculum. She also supports academics in developing teaching and learning approaches which foster interaction, with a focus on approaches which work well in culturally diverse classes, and which minimise subtle gender discrimination. Current research interests include the practice of curriculum change within higher education, and in particular, business and management education. She has undertaken research on the inclusion of ethics into business curriculum, and has worked on the development of interdisciplinary business subjects. She is also a member of the project team for the national Office for Learning and Teaching  Project 'Student Engagement in university decision-making and governance - towards a more systemically inclusive student voice'.