Business Schools and Sustainability: A Promise Unfulfilled

Abstract

"Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man" (anonymous). With the recent financial crises and associated corporate collapses combined with the seemingly unstoppable environmental degradation at the hands of organisations, the external environment for Management Accounting education around the world has not been very conducive. Society is expecting a change that will shift the current management accounting education paradigm to a more robust one, which could not only solve the current problems facing the environment and the financial world but also ensure such problems are not repeated in the future. Business schools around the world are being blamed for producing graduates whose unethical and immoral decisions have contributed if not resulted in these problems. This conceptual paper appeals to policy-makers and argues a case to identify and address the root cause of the problem. Business schools claim they have imbedded ethics and its significance in business decision-making into their curricula, but apparently this has not been reflected by these Schools' graduates in their routine decision-making in organizations. Thus, we argue that ethical behaviour in most cases cannot be taught in adulthood; and ethics taught at the business schools will not be implemented by their graduates in their practical life if ethics has not been inculcated into their very personalities at an early age. In this conceptual paper we suggest two remedies for ensuring smooth and efficient functioning of markets on a long-term basis: first, transformative teaching and learning activities that inculcate ethical behaviours into students should be implemented at secondary schools that feed universities with potential business graduates and develop personalities and mindsets that dominate students' behaviour throughout their life, and then reinforced at universities; second, conducive corporate governance environment within business organizations that encourages and fully supports ethical decisions - the first being the pre-requisite for the second.