Critical and Instrumental Perspectives of Interdisciplinarity for Business Education

Abstract

Sustainable Development Education is considered one of the main vectors for a sustainability transition. Sustainability is a broad field, inherently occupied by different knowledge areas that drink from each other to address the complexity of safeguarding the biosphere for the current and future human and nonhuman inhabitants. With the advent of new frameworks addressing sustainable development under a wider and more detailed lens, such as Aichi Targets, Millennium Development Goals, and ultimately the Sustainable Development Goals, the call for interdisciplinarity becomes even more needed. Interdisciplinarity can be seen as combining methods, theoretical approaches, and epistemological perspectives in diverse working groups for problem-solving; interdisciplinarity can also assume a critical perspective, grounded on the real-world problem needs. We assume that critical and instrumental perspectives, combined in the higher education milieu, can be the answer for educating leaders that hold the theoretical repertoire and the practical competencies that enable them to be agents of changing realities.