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Neo-institutional theory suggests that organisations change occurs when institutional contradictions, caused by exogenous and endogenous dynamics, increase over time to the point where change can no longer be resisted. Human praxis will result, but only when sufficiently powerful interests are motivated to act. This paper aims to examine the role that the accreditation of business schools can play in increasing institutional contradictions and hence fostering organisational change towards stakeholder engagement and engagement with social responsibility and sustainability issues. Numerous accreditations are promulgated within the higher education and business school contexts and a number of these relate to, or have aspects that relate to, ethics, social responsibility and sustainability.

The paper first analyses the take up of accreditations across UK business schools and then uses a case study to illustrate and explore stakeholder engagement and changes related to ethics, social responsibility and sustainability linked to accreditation processes.

Accreditations are found to be an increasingly common interest for UK business schools. Further, a number of these accreditations have evolved to incorporate issues related to ethics, social responsibility and sustainability that may cause institutional contradictions and may, therefore, have the potential to foster organisational change. Accreditation alone, however, is not sufficient and the authors find that sufficiently powerful interests need to be motivated to act and enable human praxis to affect change.

This paper draws on previous research that considers the role of accreditation in fostering change that has also been carried out in healthcare organisations, public and professional bodies. Its findings stem from an individual case study and as such further research is required to explore whether these findings can be extended and apply more generally in business schools and universities in different contexts.

This paper concludes by recommending that the newly established UK & Ireland Chapter of PRME encourages and supports signatory schools to further embed ethics, social responsibility and sustainability into all aspects of university life in the UK. This also provides an opportunity to engage with the accrediting bodies in order to further support the inclusion of stakeholder engagement and issues related to this agenda in their processes.

This paper contributes by introducing accreditation as an institutional pressure that may lead indirectly to organisational change and supports this with new evidence from an illustrative case study. Further, it draws on the role of institutional contradictions and human praxis that engender organisational change.

The purpose of this paper is to capture, codify and communicate an implicit change‐management process to embed corporate responsibility and sustainability at the Cranfield School of Management.

To explain the (on‐going) change‐management process, the authors retrospectively applied change‐management literature to the implicit process in which they have, themselves, been intimately involved.

The implicit change‐management process had unconsciously mobilized a variety of tactics identified in the change‐management literature; a more explicit articulation of the “as‐is” and “desired” states, and a more explicit, systematic and regular communication of the journey and goal, might have enabled faster progress. However, the nature of a highly autonomous and decentralized organization, such as an academic institution, means that sustainable change management may be slower than in commercial institutions.

The authors have been closely engaged in the change‐management process they describe and, inevitably, have unconscious biases and partial perspectives. Nevertheless, as a frank and self‐critical account of a five‐year‐plus process, it can assist other academic institutions.

As more business schools seek to embed corporate responsibility and sustainability, the case study identifies a series of potential change‐management tactics.

The paper applies a change‐management model to examine how one school of management is tackling how to embed corporate responsibility and sustainability into its research, teaching, advisory services and its own operations.

This paper proposes the development of a student-led pedagogic tool in an undergraduate development economics module offered in a UK business school. It uses the developing country informal sector as an illustrative example. The informal sector plays a huge role in contributing towards job creation, income generation, and poverty alleviation in developing countries. The overall goal of the tool is to propose recommendations of mechanisms that can be used to incentivise the informal sector to embed responsible management in their practice. The tool is to be jointly developed with students and other stakeholders in a developing country. Students are expected to acquire skills related to researching pertinent topics in the development economics field, critiquing policies and frameworks developed by global intergovernmental organizations such as the United Nations, and engaging with global stakeholders who are directly and indirectly impacted by these policies and frameworks. The paper highlights the connection between development economics, the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the United Nations (UN) Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME). The development of the tool also provides an avenue for business school students to bridge current gaps in educational institutions in developing countries in engaging with the PRME. The activities discussed in the paper present opportunities for business schools to be innovative and flexible in how they deliver responsible management education. This can ultimately expand the diversity of stakeholder involvement in contributing towards the SDGs and responsible management.

The chapter examines the role of the UN Global Compact inspired Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) initiative, how it operates, and the role that signatory schools and regional chapters play in its continued development and evolution.

The chapter conceptualizes the PRME engagement model (a learning network, reporting to stakeholders, commitment to continuous improvement), and uses three case vignettes to illustrate the type of programs and activities that signatory schools and regional chapters have developed and how these endeavors contribute to PRME’s evolution and development.

As a way of thinking about the ability of PRME to achieve its intended goals, it is important to look at higher education (thought leadership) within the context of the world of practice in both business (practice leadership) and civil society (practice leadership). PRME signatories and regional chapters need to more fully engage in this “sustainable praxis triad,” extending the growing network of signatories and chapters within the academic community to include businesses and civil society organizations.

The chapter focuses on three vignettes to illustrate different activities and involvement in PRME signatory schools and regional chapters. More extensive comparative analysis across business schools and regional chapters throughout the world is needed to ensure broader dissemination of current practices and innovations.

Beyond teaching and a focus on the current generation of students, PRME has the potential for more immediate impact through student-based consulting activities, the transfer of research results to the business community and larger society, and ensuring that university campuses and operations are exemplars of sustainable practice. PRME signatories and regional chapters can work to ensure that relevance and rigor in research are not polar extremes but rather as praxis – the integration of academic thought leadership with needed stewardship and practice leadership in the larger society.

Transparency and communication are important first steps for change. As business schools and universities openly share their research, curricula and pedagogical innovations, and best practices for their campus operations, they contribute to a vivid and stimulating intellectual climate, through which society and all stakeholders will benefit. PRME can facilitate the ability of higher education to serve as a nucleus and crystallization for innovative solutions for a more sustainable future.

PRME is still a relatively young initiative. First evidence shows that the PRME initiative is successfully contributing to educating a new generation of managers who are better prepared for the global challenges of sustainable development.

Mexico currently faces serious social scarcities and businesses are under pressure. The alternative lies in improving company performance through education. It is important to educate future entrepreneurs and managers within a corporate social responsibility (CSR) framework and expose them to the stakeholder theory. This chapter argues that educating socially responsible management students is the touchstone strategy for addressing the big challenges that twenty first century organizations face. This chapter first defines the CSR concept, relating it to organizations’ role in fulfilling society’s expectations, demands, and requirements. Second, it sets forth why CSR is a strategic tool for management and a moral obligation for companies. Finally, it argues for the importance of including CSR and the stakeholder theory in the curriculum of all management faculties and programs.

Sustainability is one of the leading challenges of our age, and higher education plays a vital role in supporting the implementation of sustainability initiatives. There has been substantial progress in business schools introducing sustainability into courses with extant literature detailing case studies of sustainability education and student perceptions of their learning. The purpose of this paper is to address the gap in literature from educators' perspectives on their experiences of introducing sustainability teaching using specific teaching tools for sustainability.

This paper presents a case study on a sustainability teaching tool, WikiRate, that was embedded into business and management courses at seven higher education institutions from across the globe. Interviews were conducted after course delivery to gain insights into the practical challenges of designing and implementing a sustainability education activity.

The findings show that educators perceive sustainability as a complex issue, presenting a challenge to teaching in university systems whose normative curricula are rooted in instrumental problem-solving. Furthermore, educators described challenges to their own learning in order to implement sustainability into curricula including the need for compromises and adaptions.

This empirical study reports on educators' experiences embedding sustainability into their courses through an innovative teaching tool, WikiRate. This paper has implications for reframing how we can approach sustainability education and presents discussion ways to teach complexity without reduction or simplification.

This paper aims to explore if, and how, business schools globally have been engaging their students in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), both inside and outside the classroom, since the SDGs were agreed upon in 2015 until mid-2020.

The data is collected from information submitted as part of reporting requirements to the United Nations Principle for Responsible Management Education over the time in question. This paper outlines the range of approaches being reported on which specifically relate to students and explicitly mention the SDGs.

The results show that although there are a growing number of innovative approaches that could become the basis for the way management education approaches the SDGs moving forward, the majority of schools are not engaging their students in the SDGs. Of those schools that are, most offer limited evidence of it being embedded into the core of what students are learning or of it being approached in an interdisciplinary way. Business graduates are not being exposed to the SDGs in a way that connects them to “business as usual”. This is a missed opportunity for the students, the universities and the global community, given the important influence that management education, and the business sector by extension, has the realisation of the goals.

The results can help inform and inspire higher education institutions to engage students in the SDGs. A methodology to measure the degree of engagement is presented, which can then be used as a tool to benchmark progress.

With more than 332 signatories, the United Nations Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) is probably the most solid initiative to inspire and champion responsible business education globally. The purpose of this paper is to examine the activities undertaken by the first intake of signatories – universities and business schools – with regard to each of the six principles (offering a systematic analysis and “distilled” categorization of those initiatives). It also aims to evaluate the difficulties and tensions that may be entailed in integrating PRME in both the strategic intent and daily operations of educational institutions, and how to overcome some of these. Finally, it aims to offer a critical reflection on the “non‐compliance and non regulatory/measurement” nature of PRME (the initiative assumes that signatories act on the basis of principled pragmatism), offering suggestions for improving the reporting mechanism on which the whole initiative is based.

The authors analyze the first 100 “Sharing Information on Progress” (SIP) reports uploaded to the PRME web site. These reports are the main mechanism established by the PRME Secretariat to build learning and accountability and allow signatories to communicate their progress. Elements from grounded theory and other qualitative analytical approaches were used to allow themes to emerge from within the (often messy and irregular) data from the reports. Graphical representations are also used.

Activities undertaken by PRME signatories are portrayed for each of the six principles: principle 1 on purpose (capabilities of students); principle 2 on values (incorporated in curriculum and academic activities); principle 3 on learning approaches; principle 4 on research (with sustainable, social, environmental and economic value); principle 5 on partnership (interaction with business managers); and principle 6 on dialogue (among key stakeholders). Tensions regarding ideology, integration and implementation are also identified, as well as possible weaknesses, e.g. on integrity, quality and reporting policies, in the current “SIP” framework.

This paper is the first scholarly work depicting comprehensively the activities of PRME signatories worldwide.