A NEW PARADIGM FOR BUSINESS EDUCATION, GLOBALMOVEMENT.NET, AND THE MACARTHUR FOUNDATION: Business Schools Leading for a Sustainable World

This abstract outlines the theme of a workshop that will offer an action-focused dialog about continuing the transformation of business education to deal with global warming and the role of business in creating a sustainable/flourishing/-regenerating world. The workshop builds on the 2011 Jesuit Task Force Special Report on Ecology (Healing a Broken World), IAJBS and CJBE initiatives that started at the 2018 World Forum, Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’, the New Paradigm for Business Education, and many related initiatives and activities. The goal of the workshop is to inspire, encourage, and support participants and others as they take action to transform global business education – making it a sleading force for creating a sustainable, socially just, poverty-alleviating world. The urgent need to transform business education and provide tools for students and businesses to take immediate action to deal with global warming is a key theme of the workshop. The workshop will feature the work of the IAJBS and CJBE, progress on the New Paradigm for Business Education, a series of MacAthur Foundation 100&change applications, and initiatives by the International Humanistic Management Association and globalmovement.net. IMPORTANCE OF THE TOPIC In 1986 the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere passed the 350 ppm figure the scientific community largely agreed would be the point where significant global warming and climate change effects would become increasingly severe. We are now experiencing increasing numbers of destructive events driven by global warming, climate change, and related aspects of global unsustainability. One way of looking at our situation is to think in terms of five major global challenges of the 21st Century. (1) Dealing with global warming and the many aspects of global unsustainability in general, (2) Avoiding nuclear Armageddon, (3) Becoming the kinds of beings who can live on this planet without destroying it, (4) Producing, distributing, and consuming the goods and services we need to flourish without destroying, and hopefully healing, the planet, and (5) Creating a set of global economic, political, cultural, etc. systems that enable all of us to flourish as a species with no one left out. For at least four of these five challenges, business schools as a whole, and every faculty member as an individual, can play valuable roles in figuring out how to meet them. We can start meeting these challenges by focusing our research, teaching, and activism on collaborating and taking immediate action on these challenges. Some individuals and schools are already starting to do exactly that. The global situation is beyond urgent (New York Times, February 28, 2022, “Climate change is harming the planet faster than we can adapt, UN warns”: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/28/climate/climate-change-ipcc-report.html) but transforming business education and committed activism by faulty, students, and others may be the most promising possibilities for slowing, and hopefully reversing, environmental and societal destruction.