Sustainable Development at Universities as Viewed Through the Lens of the PROMISE Framework for Sustainability

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to explore how North American business schools integrate the concept of ‘sustainable development’ in their graduate business curricula, how their curricula serve students’ needs for sustainability-related knowledge and the avenues by which this knowledge is transmitted and acquired. A ‘purposive’ sample was used—the North American business schools in Aspen Institute’s “Top 100 ranking”, which ranks those MBA programs and business schools throughout the world that “work to integrate the social, environmental and economic realities of business into management teaching and research.” The final sample was a ‘saturation sample’ made of forty schools. Based upon the term of “education for sustainability” (UNESCO 2014), data was collected through their Websites and from their program’ brochures. Their graduate curricula and the content of all of their graduate courses were analyzed in order to identify sustainability-related topics. Then, the data was sorted by category according to the PROMISE Framework’s dimensions of sustainability (developed at MIT Sloan School of Management and Jay 2014). The paper presents the descriptive statistics of the programs, courses and sustainability-related topics. Then, the implications for theory building and curriculum development, as well as ways to achieve transferability of the results, are discussed.