Bringing Business Academics Back to Their Senses: Reorienting Research and Teaching for an Unsustainable World

Climate change is now a focal issue within business school research and education. While laudable, the focus is both inadequate and, at times, misguided. Research and courses on climate change focus primarily on human and economic systems with limited attention to the natural systems in which they are embedded and which are becoming inhospitable to human and other life forms. A growing recognition of the Anthropocene era raises questions about the viability of this continued emphasis, exposing a mismatch between the research and teaching approach being used and the geophysical reality being studied. This presents the sustainable business scholar with a dilemma between adhering to existing academic norms for publication and promotion and challenging those norms to fully address our destruction of the natural systems that sustain us. This viewpoint examines a needed reorientation of our research and teaching models.