Business School Legitimacy and the Challenge of Sustainability: A Fuzzy Set Analysis of Institutional Decoupling

Business schools face growing institutional pressure to respond to the sustainability agenda, especially since the financial crisis highlighted the need to educate business leaders who engage with issues beyond a profit imperative. Although business schools increasingly signal their engagement with global issues, such as sustainability, there are also suggestions that they decouple their espoused commitments from their practices. Rather than institute actual change and include sustainability in organizational activities, business schools may merely indicate that such change is taking place. We examine the key organizational and strategic conditions under which business schools decouple their sustainability policies from their practices. We draw on interviews with 40 deans of U.K. business schools and analyze the data using fuzzy set (fs) qualitative comparative analysis (fs/QCA), a method that investigates combinations of individual conditions. We find evidence to suggest that tight coupling is associated...