Greening the MBA, not greenwashing it
Greening the MBA, not greenwashing it
Management education often prioritizes technical business disciplines over transdisciplinary approaches, leaving students ill-equipped to navigate complex, modern challenges. Integrating fields like literature fosters holistic thinking, enabling future leaders to understand human behavior and market dynamics beyond mere financial metrics. While sustainability remains a prevalent buzzword, many institutions engage in superficial adoption rather than deep structural integration. This highlights a critical greenwashing risk where environmental commitments are signaled through visible but limited actions, such as campus recycling initiatives, without fundamentally reshaping curricula or operational values to reflect genuine ecological responsibility. Furthermore, the emotional and psychological well-being of students is frequently neglected in favor of rigorous, traditional pedagogies. True leadership requires social sensitivity and emotional intelligence, which cannot be cultivated through standard, high-pressure frameworks. Accreditation bodies must also move beyond rigid standards to recognize authentic innovation, ensuring that educational practices align with broader ethical and societal needs rather than mere compliance. This article underscores the gap between stated educational values and actual practices, revealing how management schools may claim holistic, sustainable, and empathetic formation while delivering narrow, technically focused, and emotionally detached training. Such discrepancies exemplify greenwashing in education, where the appearance of comprehensive reform masks a continued reliance on outdated, exclusive, and superficial methodologies that fail to address the complex human and environmental realities of the modern business world.
Source: thehindubusinessline.comPublished on 2023-05-10