Teaching sustainability to business students: shifting mindsets

Purpose – This paper seeks to describe a framework used to help MBA students understand and reconcile the different sustainability perspectives. Design/methodology/approach – A review of the corporate sustainability literature is undertaken to develop the sustainability framework. Findings – The sustainability framework relates basic concepts and assumptions within the ecocentric, ecological modernization and neoclassical paradigms to organizational practice and behavior. For the most part, the MBA students have only been exposed to neoclassical economic thinking within the other MBA subjects. The aim of the sustainability framework is to shift the students’ thinking by engaging with sustainability from different perspectives, rather than presenting one version of sustainability to them. The framework has proven to be useful in developing critical and reflective thinking and discussion. Originality/value – The paper provides a summary of sustainability concepts as applied to business practices and describes how this is used in teaching sustainability to business students.