Moving Responsible Management Education Beyond the Rhetoric

For more than thirty years, business schools have been integrating concepts of ethics, responsibility, and sustainability into management and economics education. Responsible Management Education (RME) is an umbrella term that covers a broad swath of activity that ultimately aims to equip business school graduates to tackle the issues and dilemmas they will be faced with as managers. While RME has received increasing attention over the last three decades, our understanding of the effectiveness of varying interventions is in its infancy. The lack of a common theoretical framework, exacerbated by the contested nature of RME, has been a major barrier for a more prolific vein of empirical research into the effect of RME interventions. This has left the field of RME ripe with prescriptions for, and descriptions of educational interventions, but sparse of insights into what effect these have. As such, RME remains open to the enduring critique that it does not move past rhetoric. In this research, we use Intervention Mapping (IM) techniques to develop a multilevel summary framework for effective RME, while still respecting the plurality of conceptualization as to what RME should be. To do so, we map the context in which RME intervention occur, then deconstruct what the desired outcomes of educational interventions should be from a behavioral change perspective. The resulting framework can be used to inform the design of RME interventions and lends coherency to empirical research measuring the effect of RME research. As such, this research fosters the movement of RME past rhetoric and towards theoretically-driven design and measurable results.