PUTTING PARADIGMS INTO PRACTICE TO TRANSFORM BUSINESS EDUCATION

This paper builds on and celebrates business education transformations being pioneered by the IAJBS/CJBE-led New Paradigm for Business Education, GlobalMovement.net, and other initiatives. The paper reports how these initiatives are working to transform what business schools teach, what they research, how they create learning and skill-development, and how they engage the world. The paper describes research and processes that create alternatives to the neoliberal/shareholder-primacy paradigm upon which most of the world’s business education is currently based and which reduces business contributions to society and threatens human survival. Importance of the Topic The paper is informed by the 2011 Jesuit Task Force Special Report on Ecology (Healing a Broken World); initiatives created at the 2009 IAJBS/CJBE World Forum at XLRI; Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’; and the recent United Nations IPCC Climate Change 2022 report. These and other resources emphasize the severe threats to the world’s interconnected ecosystems and thus to our own and other species To adapt to increasingly severe consequences of how businesses and our lives are conducted, business education must confront the destructiveness of traditional business practices and provide alternative ways to build survivable-commerce, socially-just employment, poverty alleviation, and human flourishing. We must move quickly to develop new curricula development and research processes that are innovative and inspire rapid-paced collaboration. And we must find ways to enable traditional processes to develop bold new curricula faster. The paper also reports how individuals and organizations are using crowdsourcing processes to discover and share ways to make rapid changes in business education. Stages of Research In exploring progress on various initiatives to transform business education, the paper reports secondary research, executive interviews, expert interviews, conference presentations, and collaborative conversations with experts in business education, climate change, global supply chains, art, entertainment, and entrepreneurial innovation. The paper pays particular attention to the IAJBS/CJBE New Paradigm and globalmovement.net initiatives. It includes reports on examples, cases, and “stories” of those who have been attempting to transform business education from within their organizations. The paper summarizes themes and theoretical perspectives gained from these activities and proposes how those ideas may be used to launch new innovations and collaborations. Inspired by the work on the New Paradigm for Business Education, International Humanistic Management Association, and MIT Presencing Institute’s u.lab 2x series, the paper shares how globalmovement.net and other organizations are grappling with an approach that might be called “rapid-prototyping action-research (RPAR)”. It shows how an application to a possible 2023 MacArthur Foundation 100@change $100 million competition is part of an emerging RPAR approach, and how individuals, teams, and schools might join that 2023 application. Preliminary Results Initial research reveals great interest among some business educators to transform dramatically what and how they teach and learn. Innovative programs already in place demonstrate interest among students and businesses for programs that are forward-looking and transformative. The paper will report concepts used by these innovators and encourage collaboration to move from talking about transforming business education to putting ideas into action.