Student-Led Organizing for Sustainability in Business

Abstract

This article examines how Masters of Business Administration (MBA) students, at the height of the Occupy Wall Street movement (Occupy), strove to organize socially and environmentally sustainable business practices. We asked: what kinds of learning were supported through student-led organizing, and how? We designed a multi-sited case study that followed seven focal students across contexts as they engaged with an international student network focused on reorganizing for environmental and social sustainability. We drew on methods of ethnography and discourse analysis to detail the “how” of learning as part of student-led organizing for more sustainable business practices. We found that students were learning about changing forms of business and used their learning from conferences, protests, and experiences outside of the classroom to press for changes in the business school curriculum. Students were making visible for each other the knowledge infrastructure of the school and sought to change social and material practices that sustained it. Their work entailed individual actions to change class assignments and speak to professors about changes to business practices and collective efforts to change the way business schools incorporated environmental sustainability into every existing concentration. This case contributes to a growing body of literature on understanding what and how students in an elite network learn in tumultuous times and through collective efforts to resist structural injustice.

Acknowledgements

This article is the product of many insightful and generous contributors. Thank you to the participants in the study for spending many hours with us and extending your trust to us as we studied your organizing efforts. We are also grateful to Shea’s dissertation committee for their support of this interdisciplinary project. In particular, thank you to Kris Gutiérrez and Margaret Eisenhart for your close reading and critical feedback. Fred Peck and Nathan Canney were also thoughtful contributors to the data collection process. Thanks also to Shirin Vossoughi, Siamak Vossoughi, and Jordan Jurow for reading and providing feedback on manuscript drafts. Finally, thank you to Kevin O’Neill for his commitment to the project; and to the anonymous reviewers for their time and thoughtful feedback along the way.