Managing Tensions of Being a Business School in a Laudato Si’ University

“In May 2021, the Vatican Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development asked the International Association of Jesuit Universities (IAJU) to respond to the environmental crisis by taking charge of the university sector of Pope Francis’ 7 Year Journey Toward Integral Ecology for the universal church.” This important work comes as part of the movement towards operationalizing integral ecology, a concept Francis introduced and elaborated on in his encyclicals Laudato Si’ and Laudato Deum, as well as in his other work, such as Querida Amazonia. On the one hand, this is a welcome development, as it strengthens the movement towards responding to the environmental concerns we face. On the other hand, however, Catholicism, and Christianity more broadly construed, has also been critiqued for its anthropocentrism that has contributed to the environmental harm human beings have caused. This is especially an issue for business schools in Catholic universities who are in the process to become Laudato Si’ Universities, as there is the additional tension of managing profits and consumption alongside concern for the environment and people, from a theological perspective. Managing these tensions has not been as explored in related literature, especially given the religious dimension of the business school and university. The data for this study will be from a baseline study on becoming a Laudato Si’ University that is being conducted from 2023-2024. Currently, we are creating the instruments to gather the data and identifying the participants. It is a mixed methods study that will use surveys and focus group discussions to draw out the practices, perceptions, and attitudes of the various members of the business school in the university towards sustainability and becoming a Laudato Si’ University. The subsequent paper will tease out the tensions that arise from the data, especially in people’s attitudes and practices toward sustainability. This paper thus seeks to explore how to manage these tensions, adding on to the Laudato Si’ framework for Jesuit business schools in their respective universities, by putting these into dialogue with the framework of Elona Hoover and Marie Harder on managing the hidden complexities of organizational change in universities. The paper will employ resources such as Hoover and Harder’s framework to help Jesuit universities, especially their business schools, navigate the tensions of Catholic social thought on the environment, in being a university steeped in religious tradition.