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- Title
Business School Legitimacy and the Challenge of Sustainability: A Fuzzy Set Analysis of Institutional Decoupling.
- Authors
SNELSON-POWELL, ANNIE; GROSVOLD, JOHANNE; MILLINGTON, ANDREW
- Abstract
Business schools face growing institutional pressure to respond to the sustainability agenda, especially since the financial crisis highlighted the need to educate business leaders who engage with issues beyond a profit imperative. Although business schools increasingly signal their engagement with global issues, such as sustainability, there are also suggestions that they decouple their espoused commitments from their practices. Rather than institute actual change and include sustainability in organizational activities, business schools may merely indicate that such change is taking place. We examine the key organizational and strategic conditions under which business schools decouple their sustainability policies from their practices. We draw on interviews with 40 deans of U.K. business schools and analyze the data using fuzzy set (fs) qualitative comparative analysis (fs/QCA), a method that investigates combinations of individual conditions. We find evidence to suggest that tight coupling is associated with small, prestigious business schools and that decoupling is associated with business schools that are large, wealthy, or lacking in expertise. We discuss the implications of these findings for business school legitimacy and institutional theory.
- Subjects
UNITED Kingdom; BUSINESS school administration; SCHOOL administration; SOCIAL sustainability; BUSINESS education; FUZZY sets; DECOUPLING (Organizational behavior); SUSTAINABLE development -- Social aspects
- Publication
Academy of Management Learning & Education, 2016, Vol 15, Issue 4, p703
- ISSN
1537-260X
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.5465/amle.2015.0307