Exploring the (im)possibilities of organizing for sustainable development in business schools.

Amidst widening global inequalities and financial and climate crises, there have been increasing calls for business schools and management education to play a leading role in facilitating sustainable development and transformative social change (e.g., George et al., 2016; Neal, 2017). This is epitomised in initiatives such as the United Nations Principles for Responsible Education (PRME), which engages business and management schools to adopt and integrate responsible management principles in support of the Sustainable Development Goals (PRME Secretariat, 2021). In response to this, a growing body of literature focuses on questions of how and to what extent sustainable development principles have been mainstreamed in business and management programmes (Abdelgaffar, 2021; Weybrecht, 2022; The PRME Global Movement, 2021) as well as developing and sharing related pedagogical tools (Brower, 2011). Yet, despite proclaimed commitments from business and management schools, evidence suggests that the uptake and integration of sustainable development principles is fragmented and superficial (Abdelgaffar, 2021; Weybrecht, 2022); that business and management schools are, at best, slow to change and possibly even resistant to the kind of change required in commitments to sustainable development (Hoffman, 2023). Further, critical scholarship highlights the complicity of business schools and management in (re)producing poverty and inequality (Fotaki & Prasad, 2015; Kumar & Cooke, 2022), calling into question their potential to play any role in addressing such problems.