Abstract
In this paper we discuss ‘sustainable management’ which is being advocated by some in the business community. It may be that a professed commitment to sustainable development is merely a way for contemporary businesses to continue with ‘business as usual’ behind its façade. We believe that if business practices are to change, then education must change to allow students to live the ‘good’ lives promoted both by early philosophers and now by those professing the merits of sustainable development. The sustainable development paradigm, if adopted fully, may result in the best of business decisions being made; it may provide humankind with a way to avoid the self-destruction which has been threatening throughout the 20th Century. Sustainable management requires business decision makers to consider how their decisions will affect the social and natural environments as well as their organisations’ profitability. It encourages a moral approach to business decision making and requires managers to recognise that genuinely long-term decision criteria will ultimately benefit their businesses, their societies, the natural environment and humankind. Although sustainable management is promoted as a ‘new’ paradigm, we argue that its principles should have been promoted through our educational systems for many centuries; they have not been.
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We acknowledge that life in Athens was not ‘perfect’; women had no political rights and slavery was accepted. However, we wish to focus on the merits of Athenian life here.
See Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment (PCE) SEE CHANGE: Learning and Education for Sustainability p. 43, PCE Wellington 2004
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See UNESCO Declaration of Thessaloniki, Greece 8–12 December 1997. Available at www.Unesco.org/iau/ tsfd_thessaloniki.html [Accessed May 2003].
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Some of our readers may be in general agreement with this statement and understand its relevance to those delivering primary education to our children; they may consider it irrelevant to those who are teaching Management in tertiary education. We urge them to think again.
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For example The Economist, February 8 1992, p. 62, describes the thinking of Lawrence Summers, Chief Economist with the World Bank, who believes that economic arguments necessitate the emigration of dirty industries to the less developed countries of the world. He provides economic arguments that he uses to support this opinion, and similar offences against humankind.
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For some evidence of this see T. Pauchant In Search of Meaning. Josey-Bass: San Francisco 1995.
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Kelly, M., Oliver, G. Wisdom and Ethics in Management: The Educational Society and Sustainability. Philos. of Manag. 6, 107–116 (2007). https://doi.org/10.5840/pom20086239
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.5840/pom20086239