Leadership Strategies for Promoting Social Responsibility in Higher Education by Sengupta Enakshi;Blessinger Patrick;Mahoney Craig;

Author:Sengupta, Enakshi;Blessinger, Patrick;Mahoney, Craig;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
Published: 2020-06-11T00:00:00+00:00

Research

The implementation of sustainability into a HEI’s research agenda is an important factor in embedding sustainability into management education. Matten and Moon (2004) highlighted that HEIs that pioneered RME have significant numbers of researchers within the field and confirm the strong role that research activities have for embedding sustainability in education. Research is one of the categories for which stakeholders of HEIs are increasingly asking HEIs to demonstrate their impacts on SD. Findler, Schönherr, Lozano, and Stacherl (2018) have argued that the assessment of impacts on SD is a complex exercise because impacts materialize along complex pathways, particularly in the area of research and education. This was recently showcased in the exercise of the Financial Times (Jack, 2019a) who asked more than 220 business schools to submit examples of ways in which they were delivering societal impact.

As sustainability is a complex topic, inter-disciplinary research projects should be engaged in providing a more holistic view on the relevant issues and offer the best quality research results possible (Godemann, Bebbington, Herzig, & Moon, 2014). Therefore, the establishment of new research centers is proposed to bridge the gap between different institutions, disciplines and businesses and to fulfill the demand in solving practical sustainability issues (Elobeid, Lele, & Kaifi, 2016).

Transdisciplinary research takes this mission a bit further by involving researchers from different disciplines and non-academic stakeholders to develop solutions accounting for norms and based on ownership and legitimacy (Lang et al., 2012). Therefore, more practice-oriented research in collaboration with businesses and other external stakeholders is needed to sound the developed strategies with the norms and goals in society to ensure an impact of the research. As a final thought to this section, actively engaging students in research activities and projects is an important aspect of their education that serves to more deeply engrain what they are learning and as such should be integrated into curricula (Kueffer et al., 2012).

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