Teaching Sustainability to Business Students

Teaching sustainability to business students: Shifting mindsets

by Wendy Stubbs and Chris Cocklin

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This article defines a framework for the different firm-level sustainability in order to

help MBA student to question themselves and understand the different perspectives linked

to these levels.

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The first thing we need to do is define what is sustainability in a firm. Sustainability

can be found throughout different elements, the social element, the governance element

and the one most interesting us in this article, the environmental element. Composed by

matters like pollution, climate change or ecosystem disruption, the environmental

sustainability is the main issue of the article. It represents the degree of involvement of any

firm for the protection of environment while doing business. As everybody know, many

firms are making «efforts» in that way but their involvement can greatly differ following its

sustainability model.

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The neoclassical business model can be consider as the liberal way to treat

sustainability in a business, where the individual growth and well being are more important

than the respect of the environment and the community. The most important goal for a

neoclassical is profitability and financial performance. It simply considers that the

economic growth has no limit thanks to the free market system and the constant rise of

consumption in our society. This growth is linked to a development of technology which will

provide a way to take care of the pollution and waste created during the process. There is

plenty of raw resources for the system and this model does not care about its limits.

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It is a state of mind easily understandable, respect the environment when doing

business has a cost, and often an heavy one. This is the main reason why many firms,

mainly seeking for profitability and results, do not make effort in order to create more

sustainable process of production. Not only conserving resources is...