The Deployment of Sustainability in the Higher Education Business Studies Curriculum: Centrality, Pervasiveness and Practical Teaching and Learning

Abstract

This piece examines the deployment of sustainability values in the business degree curriculum, in terms of its centrality, pervasiveness, staging and teaching and learning methods. Following an initial review of the meaning of sustainability with reference to business studies, the piece pursues discussion of sustainability’s position in the business studies curriculum, using pedagogic and regulatory elements and in particular, application of the emerging curriculum design paradigm of the threshold concept criteria. This curriculum design conceptual application is taken forward through discussion of evidence based studies on the deployment of sustainability in the HE business curriculum, including specific experiences in the authors’ own business school. Whilst sustainability within business fulfils the bulk of threshold concept criteria, the breadth of its integrativity in practice extends beyond the subject discipline such that the boundedness criterion of the paradigm does not apply. Furthermore, its discipline transformativity in the same criteria paradigm indicates that it should be deployed at the post-introductory level in business studies.