Gender and Sustainable Management Education: Exploring the Missing Link

This chapter discusses the link between gender and sustainable management education. Management education has been persistently questioned for failing to speak adequately to management practice (e.g. Pfeffer and Fong, 2004). In the context of social and environmental crises the role of business in society is being called into question as corporations are increasingly confronted with managing and responding to expectations of a society alerted to the environmental and social risks associated with economic development (Davis and Stephenson, 2006). More recently, these critiques have focused on the role and responsibilities of the business school in educating senior executives (Ghoshal, 2005) and brought an understanding of unacknowledged and unresolved contradictions to produce a morally and ethically uplifting pedagogy which ‘is never neutral, but rather is inherently political in all its aspects’ (Freire, 1998: 91). At the forefront of this re-evaluation of management education is an increased concern with sustainability which challenges the idea that management should be defined according to market principles alone because these are not the only or even the exclusive principles and beliefs that shape the comprehensibility or content of management practice (Blowfield and Murray, 2011; Henisz, 2011).