Unlocking the potential of broad, horizontal curricular assessments for ethics, responsibility and sustainability in business and economics higher education

Abstract

As business education around the world is becoming increasingly focused on integrating ethics, responsibility, and sustainability (ERS) into curricula, measuring and disclosing ERS inclusion in course content is becoming a pressing task. This article provides insights on how a ‘broad, horizontal’ approach to ERS curricular assessments can inform internal strategy development in higher education. The results of a case study at a Belgian university show that such an approach better captures the contributions of a business/economics faculty in integrating ERS themes in course content. The case highlights how such an approach yields insights useful for internal strategy development (i.e., by identifying programmes with high and low levels of integration, and by understanding how variables, such as instructor characteristics or specialised ERS programmes, affect levels of integration). As business/economics higher education comes under increasing pressure to conduct ERS curricular assessments (e.g., for accreditations, rankings, etc.) it is important to reflect on how and why such assessments are carried out.

Keywords:

• Responsible management education
• education for sustainable development
• business schools
• sustainability assessment
• curricular assessment

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Maria Smirnova, Clément Buron, Tine Van Calster, and the anonymous reviewers for their contributions to this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Talia Stough

Talia Stough is a doctoral candidate at the KU Leuven Faculty of Economics and Business. She obtained her Bachelor in Environmental Studies with a minor in Latin American/Latino Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz (2007) and her Master degree in International Business Economics and Management from the KU Leuven (2014). She serves as the Sustainability Coordinator of the KU Leuven Faculty of Economics and Business.

Kim Ceulemans

Kim Ceulemans is an Assistant Professor at TBS Business School (Toulouse, France) in the Department of Management Control, Accounting and Auditing. Her research interests are in sustainability management, assessment and reporting, and her work is mainly focused on how higher education institutions manage and integrate sustainability issues in their curricula, research, outreach activities, and daily operations. She has obtained her PhD at KU Leuven University in Belgium and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Gustavson School of Business, University of Victoria, Canada. Before obtaining her PhD, she has worked as a sustainability coordinator at a Belgian university, where she, amongst others, led the sustainability reporting process for the organization.

Valérie Cappuyns

Valérie Cappuyns obtained a Master degree in Bio-science Engineering in 2000, and a PhD degree in Sciences in 2004 at KU Leuven (Belgium), where she also was a post-doctoral researcher until 2006. After working for one year as a junior researcher at the Scientific Institute for Public Health, she returned to KU Leuven, where she is currently working as professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business. She teaches several courses in the field of environmental sciences in the Environmental Health and Safety Management bachelor and master programme. Research interests include sustainable management of contaminated sites, sustainability in higher education, life cycle analysis, environmental impact assessment and environmental geochemistry (chemical and mineralogical characterization of (heavy metal) contaminated soils, sediments, and waste materials). She is the (co)author of more than 60 publications in international peer-reviewed journals.