Steve Kennedy

Responsible management education in UK business schools: Critically examining the role of the United Nations Principles for Responsible Management Education as a driver for change

As examinations of the ethics of business practice have increased so too have questions regarding the role of business schools. A key aspect of this re-evaluation has been the emergence of the United Nations Principles for Responsible Management Education, reflecting the growing emphasis upon ‘soft regulation’ and voluntary action within new governance frameworks around responsible business practice. This article focuses upon the changing nature of responsible management education within UK business schools and examines the potential role of Principles for Responsible Management Education in shaping these developments. The article examines the findings of two surveys of responsible management education conducted in 2006/2007 and 2009/2010, and qualitative data derived from case studies of five Principles for Responsible Management Education signatory schools. The article questions whether there is any direct evidence for Principles for Responsible Management Education as a driver of curriculum change. It suggests that its primary impact may lie with its facilitative capacity and the ability of active faculty members in utilising this capacity.

Stakeholder Management for Sustainable Development Implementation: The Case of a Sustainable Urban Drainage System

Sustainable development has been widely supported as the concept upon which the future, if we are to have one, must be founded. As such and simplistically, it has often been expected that changes in behaviour at the local level would become evident as sustainable development becomes more entrenched in thinking and practice. Unfortunately, a failure to detect the occurrence of such changes gives rise to the notion that the concept of sustainable development is substantially problematic to translate from thought into action. This has led to greater attention on the procedures of sustainable development implementation (Lafferty and Langhelle, 1999b) and to its examination using new lenses for consideration and enquiry (Gladwin et al., 1995). This paper uses stakeholder thinking to analyse a case study of a local-level implementation of sustainable development, in the form of a sustainable urban drainage system in Sheffield, England. The paper utilises stakeholder thinking to examine the roles of stakeholders in the case in order to analyse the distribution of the impacts of the implementation and by doing so to better understand the process of implementation. The paper demonstrates the complexity of stakeholder relationships, interactions and processes of engagement (Georgakopoulos and Thomson, 2008) in that, although the analysis suggests the implementation to represent an ‘all stakeholder win’, it also highlights that each stakeholder has the power to both impede and facilitate the process. A confused ‘collective responsibility’ situation between stakeholders is identified, judged to lack real accountability and to be creating inertia. From these findings the paper gives consideration to alterations to create real world change towards more favourable conditions for sustainable development implementation.