John Blewitt

Can accreditation help a leopard change its spots?: Social accountability and stakeholder engagement in business schools

Purpose: 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. Design/methodology/approach: 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. Findings: 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. Research limitations/implications: 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. Practical implications: 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. Originality/value: 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.

Higher education for a sustainable world

Purpose: The paper aims to explore the nature and purpose of higher education (HE) in the twenty-first century, focussing on how it can help fashion a green knowledge-based economy by developing approaches to learning and teaching that are social, networked and ecologically sensitive. Design/methodology/approach: The paper presents a discursive analysis of the skills and knowledge requirements of an emerging green knowledge-based economy using a range of policy focussed and academic research literature. Findings: The business opportunities that are emerging as a more sustainable world is developed requires the knowledge and skills that can capture and move then forward but in a complex and uncertain worlds learning needs to non-linear, creative and emergent. Practical implications: Sustainable learning and the attributes graduates will need to exhibit are prefigured in the activities and learning characterising the work and play facilitated by new media technologies. Social implications: Greater emphasis is required in higher learning understood as the capability to learn, adapt and direct sustainable change requires interprofessional co-operation that must utlise the potential of new media technologies to enhance social learning and collective intelligence. Originality/value: The practical relationship between low-carbon economic development, social sustainability and HE learning is based on both normative criteria and actual and emerging projections in economic, technological and skills needs.

Education for sustainable development, natural capital and sustainability: Learning to Last

This paper explores the use of metaphor in public policy and learning as a context for a reflective discussion of a nationally funded initiative focusing on the dissemination of good practice in education for sustainable development in the UK’s post‐16 sector. Learning to Last was the first, and so far only, project of its kind. Its conception and management epitomised the use of the toolkit metaphor, and reinforced and reproduced the instrumental rationality characterising educational governance and public management in the UK. The potential for metaphor or metaphorical concepts such as natural capital to articulate and stimulate new ways of thinking and behaving or even possibly offering a glimpse of a paradigmatic shift in institutional policy and practice relating to education and sustainability was not fully realised.This paper explores the use of metaphor in public policy and learning as a context for a reflective discussion of a nationally funded initiative focusing on the dissemination of good practice in education for sustainable development in the UK’s post‐16 sector. Learning to Last was the first, and so far only, project of its kind. Its conception and management epitomised the use of the toolkit metaphor, and reinforced and reproduced the instrumental rationality characterising educational governance and public management in the UK. The potential for metaphor or metaphorical concepts such as natural capital to articulate and stimulate new ways of thinking and behaving or even possibly offering a glimpse of a paradigmatic shift in institutional policy and practice relating to education and sustainability was not fully realised.

Education for sustainable development, governmentality and Learning to Last

As Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) slowly moves up the UK Governments policy agenda, practical implementation issues are increasing in significance. This paper offers a retrospective reflective account of a major national ESD initiative, Learning to Last, funded by the Quality and Standards Directorate of the Learning and Skills Council. At the centre of the Learning to Last experience was a tension between a managerialist approach to project development, common within the Learning and Skills sector, and an ecological, networked and synoptic methodology more in keeping with and sympathetic to the values of ESD. Applying the concepts of ‘governmentality’ and new public management, Learning to Last is viewed as a target and output driven initiative offering restricted opportunities for creative development and conceptual learning. Only with a more reflective and reflexive engagement with sustainability and learning will the possibilities of achieving a more sustainable future and of negotiating our ‘society of government’ be realised.As Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) slowly moves up the UK Governments policy agenda, practical implementation issues are increasing in significance. This paper offers a retrospective reflective account of a major national ESD initiative, Learning to Last, funded by the Quality and Standards Directorate of the Learning and Skills Council. At the centre of the Learning to Last experience was a tension between a managerialist approach to project development, common within the Learning and Skills sector, and an ecological, networked and synoptic methodology more in keeping with and sympathetic to the values of ESD. Applying the concepts of ‘governmentality’ and new public management, Learning to Last is viewed as a target and output driven initiative offering restricted opportunities for creative development and conceptual learning. Only with a more reflective and reflexive engagement with sustainability and learning will the possibilities of achieving a more sustainable future and of negotiating...

Ignorance was bliss, now I'm ignorant and that is far more difficult:transdisciplinary learning and reflexivity in responsible management education

Purpose – The collapse of world economic systems brought the interconnectedness between business and global events sharply into focus. As Starkey points out: “leading business schools need to overcome their fascination with a particular form of finance and economics […] to broaden their intellectual horizons […] (and to) look at the lessons of history and other disciplines”. The purpose of this paper is to provide evidence from three years of research on the Aston MBA suggesting that an emphasis on developing capabilities within a far broader, connected and reflexive business curriculum is what business students and practitioners now recognise as an essential way forward for responsible management education. Design/methodology/approach – This research paper examines the reflective accounts of 300 MBA students undertaking a transdisciplinary Business Ethics, Responsibility and Sustainability core module. Findings – As Klein argues, transdisciplinarity is simultaneously an attitude and a form of action. The student reflections provide powerful discourses of individual learning and report a range of outcomes from finding “the vocabulary or the confidence” to raise issues to acting as “change agents” in the workplace. Originality/value – As responsibility and sustainability requires learners, researchers and educators to engage with real world complexity, uncertainty and risk, conventional disciplinary study, especially within business, often proves inadequate and partial. This paper demonstrates that creative and exploratory frames need to be developed to facilitate the development of more connected knowledge – informed by multiple stakeholders, able to contribute heterogeneous skills, perspectives and expertise.

Critical practice and the public pedagogy of environmental and conservation media

This article addresses the reluctance of mainstream corporate and commercial media to critically address major environmental and conservation issues. The resulting public pedagogy largely reproduces the neoliberal ideology informing much conservation practice and discourse. Nonetheless, the media retains an unrealised critical educative potential that needs to be drawn upon by critical media practitioners and educators. To do this, educators need to be cognisant of the phenomenological experience of spectatorship, the aesthetic form and relational contexts of media consumption, production and informal learning. Referring to the work of Vivian Sobchack, Henry Giroux, Pierre Bourdieu and Gilles Deleuze, the article argues that if critical practitioner-educators apply an analytic framework informed by critical realism, counter-hegemonic elements found within corporate and independent media productions and conservation initiatives may be rearticulated and re-presented in a more positive manner. For this to occur, critical media practitioners-educators need to recognise that feasible political and normative alternatives are both available and practically possible. The article ends by discussing some relatively recent non-fiction productions that express a commonality between human and non-human animals and so form the basis of a critical environmental education-media practice.

The media, animal conservation and environmental education

Natural History filmmaking has a long history but the generic boundaries between it and environmental and conservation filmmaking are blurred. Nature, environment and animal imagery has been a mainstay of television, campaigning organisations and conservation bodies from Greenpeace to the Sierra Club, with vibrant images being used effectively on posters, leaflets and postcards, and in coffee table books, media releases, short films and viral emails to educate and inform the general public. However, critics suggest that wildlife film and photography frequently convey a false image of the state of the world’s flora and fauna. The environmental educator David Orr once remarked that all education is environmental education, and it is possible to see all image-based communication in the same way. The Media, Animal Conservation and Environmental Education has contributions from filmmakers, photographers, researchers and academics from across the globe. It explores the various ways in which film, television and video are, and can be, used by conservationists and educators to encourage both a greater awareness of environmental and conservation issues, and practical action designed to help endangered species. This book is based on a special issue of the journal Environmental Education Research.

The Future of the Public Library: reimagining the moral economy of the 'people's university'

New media technologies, the digitisation of information, learning archives and heritage resources are changing the nature of the public library and museums services across the globe, and, in so doing, changing the way present and future users of these services interact with these institutions in real and virtual spaces. New digital technologies are rewriting the nature of participation, learning and engagement with the public library, and fashioning a new paradigm where virtual and physical spaces and educative and temporal environments operate symbiotically. It is with such a creatively disruptive paradigm that the £193 million Library of Birmingham project in the United Kingdom is being developed. New and old media forms and platforms are helping to fashion new public places and spaces that reaffirm the importance of public libraries as conceived in the nineteenth century. As peoples universities, the public library service offers a web of connective learning opportunities and affordances. This article considers the importance of community libraries as sites of intercultural understanding and practical social democracy. Their significance is reaffirmed through the initial findings in the first of a series of community interventions forming part of a long-term project, ‘Connecting Spaces and Places’, funded by the Royal Society of Arts.

What’s new pussycat? A genealogy of animal celebrity

Animal celebrity is a human creation informing us about our socially constructed natural world. It is relational, expressive of cultural proclivities, political power plays and the quotidian everyday, as well as serious philosophical reflections on the meaning of being human. This article attempts to outline some key contours in the genealogy of animal celebrity, showing how popular culture, including fairground attractions, public relations, Hollywood movies, documentary films, zoo attractions, commercial sport and mediatised moral panics – particularly those accompanying scientific developments such as cloning – help to order, categorise and license aspects of human understanding and feelings. The nature of [animal] charisma and celebrity are explored with assistance from Jumbo the Elephant, Guy the Gorilla, Paul the clairvoyant octopus, Uggie the film star, Nénette the orang-utan and Dolly the sheep. It argues that the issue of what it is to be human lies beneath the celebritised surface or, as Donna Haraway noted, the issue ‘of having to face oneself’.

Sustainability: A Dialog of Values

Sustainable development and sustainability are related concepts whose origins can be traced to the nineteenth century but have gained increasing prominence from the middle years of the twentieth century. Increasingly, scientists, business leaders, academics, politicians, and other leaders have recognized that the dominant model of industrialization, economic growth, and development was exceeding the natural biological limits of what the planet could practically sustain. This has led to a series of ongoing international conferences attempting to envisage theories, concepts, and practices that could reconcile sustainability with a development “that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”