Business ethics, CSR, sustainability and the MBA

Abstract

AbstractThe issues of business ethics, corporate social responsibility and sustainability have come to attract increasing attention in management education in recent years, at least from the perspective of potential employers, accrediting bodies and business school alumni. This paper examines the extent of penetration of these three subjects in to global MBA curricula through an examination of course content and structure pertaining to the Financial Times Global MBA Rankings top 100, the Australian Financial Review BOSS top 17 ranked Australian MBAs, and the seven MBA programmes currently offered by universities in New Zealand. The findings reveal that: a variety of delivery modes are utilised; while the teaching of ethics has achieved considerable penetration, only about fifty percent of MBA programmes include it as a required subject (and even then it may only constitute part of a larger subject); and that the teaching of sustainability has achieved much lower penetration, with only six percent of MBA programmes examined incorporating the topic into their core curriculum. Implications for the design of MBA programmes and future research directions are then discussed within the context of a business environment in which increasing prominence is being given to these subject areasx.