One of the curious things of our sophisticated, yet superficial, information age is that the official websites of most business schools (and institutions) look glossy and appealing. It becomes difficult to evaluate the quality of their products or services.
Take, for example, the website of one business school in an Australian university.
It is a well-organised, easy-to-use guide for prospective students. It indicates under the rubric ‘Research’ that the school:
‘…is committed to conducting leading-edge research, resulting in the creation of new knowledge that enriches our teaching, fosters social and economic outcomes, and has relevance and importance locally, nationally and internationally.’
Of course, it is easy to dismiss this as a motherhood statement, variations of which can be found on innumerable websites. But the statement is nevertheless revealing because it indicates that the school’s research aims at fostering ‘social’ outcomes, among others. In this context, it becomes propitious to determine whether this trend is compatible with the traditional functions of business schools – training people to become profit-oriented managers, managing the economic and financial resources of their companies, serving the interests of their shareholders, and providing goods and services for consumers.
It is notoriously difficult to accurately measure the extent to which research fosters ‘social’ outcomes.
In this context, ‘social’ is an empty vessel, the meaning of which must be filled in by an institution’s researchers.
However, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) – an organisation established in 1916 to accredit business and management degree programs – released its new standards for the accreditation of business schools in 2020. These standards may help in a determination of the kind of ‘social’ research that business and management schools are exhorted to conduct for the purpose of fostering ‘social’ outcomes.
The release of the standards coincided with the disruption caused by the Covid pandemic, which resulted in a shift from in-class instruction to an online or hybrid teaching model, allegedly coupled with a focus on student engagement and wellness.
These new standards seek to goad business schools into acting as promoters of the ‘societal good’ – a systemic shift that fundamentally transforms traditional business education and evidences their commitment to improving the world.
The impetus for this shift was the adoption, in 2015, by the United Nations (UN) of a report, entitled Transforming our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The report was followed by the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which contains 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs). Among them are ‘gender equality’ (goal 5), decent work and economic growth (goal 8), and ‘climate action’ (goal 13).
In 2023, the Times Higher Education published the SDG impact rankings of universities globally. Interestingly, for the second year in a row, Western Sydney University obtained a near-perfect score and remained on top of the rankings. The University of Manchester, the top European institution in the rankings, came second.
The AACSB confirms that, ‘Many schools use the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as their framework for naming their focus area related to societal impact.’ This is also vindicated by a research survey, in a European business school context, by Wilfred Mijnhardt, Elliot Davis, and Colin Nelson. They counted ‘a total of 403 publications’ dealing with SDGs published by the 73 AACSB-accredited schools. Revealingly, the schools in the survey published only 180 publications related to the economy layer (goal 8), which ‘are cornerstones of business education and research and in line with the traditional focus of business schools’. They surmise that this ‘reflects an emphasis on important societal issues within the academic outputs of these schools and highlights their contributions to addressing key social challenges as represented by the SDGs’. These authors also point out that the growing emphasis on societal impact in business schools’ education ‘could be a reflection of a wider shift toward socially responsible and sustainable business practices’. Not surprisingly, their research reveals that there is a correlation between resource allocation and SDG-focused academic outputs.
In collaboration with Dialogic, the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University in the Netherlands has developed the SDG Metrics that serve as a benchmark for AACSB-accredited business schools. The SDG-related mapping is based on data used for the Chartered Association of Business Schools (CABS) journal articles benchmark dashboard. The dashboard’s primary objective is to assist business schools in the development of a better strategic understanding of SDG-related research, and to promote the development of data-driven and evidence-based impact narratives.
However, the fact that there is neither a clear understanding nor agreement on the evaluation of ‘societal impact’ research or its dimensions presents a major challenge for business schools. The challenge lies in these schools’ ability to respond appropriately to the SDG goals to gain accreditation, which is a difficult, sometimes insurmountable, process. According to the 2023 State of Accreditation Report, only around 6 per cent of the world’s business and management schools have received business accreditation from AACSB International.
As ‘the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) movement is sweeping through corporations and business schools alike’, heralding a significant shift towards a more socially conscious business approach, the taking of initiatives that fosters research in business schools’ core areas becomes a challenge and requires courage to defy the AACSB rankings fascination.
As is well-known, the focus of business schools on rankings and standards rankles academia, especially if the pursuit of these goals impacts on academic freedom and academics’ choice of research, and because it detracts from the traditional function of business schools – to train people in the management of institutions, economic and financial analysis, profit-making, and governance. But the race to gain international ‘accreditation’ from relevant accreditation bodies (and AACSB is only one among many) has now truly hijacked the direction of business schools, as evidenced by their present SDG-related research focus.
Despite the significant shift towards a more socially conscious business approach, a challenge for business and management schools is thus how to focus on their traditional research, teaching, and service functions, which may be impeded by the present SDG-related research trend. But the reality is that the rankings race now effectively imposes an obligation on business and management schools to contribute to research that has a ‘societal’ impact. With the updated AACSB standards, schools are coaxed into taking, and reporting on, initiatives that create such an impact and embrace a vision on the ‘societal’ direction of their research.
However, business schools need more than even an ambitious vision to achieve this goal. Indeed, there is no guarantee that business schools will be able to align their research with its traditional function and still meet the challenge of promoting the UN’s SDG goals.
