A Systems Approach to Business Sustainability Education

The worsening and urgency of societal challenges, such as the climate emergency and biodiversity loss, have triggered questioning of the effectiveness of business sustainability teaching and the capabilities business students acquire. Multiple scholars have now called for a systems approach to business sustainability education to provide business students with a more holistic and relational understanding of firms as situated within complex adaptive systems. Yet, for many business educators, this may entail engaging with relatively unfamiliar theory and shifting deeply ingrained teaching habits. We aim to help educators overcome these hurdles to adopting a systems approach in their classrooms. First, we identify six concepts central to business sustainability courses. Second, we utilize the concepts to unpack a systems approach to teaching business sustainability and compare it to a traditional firm-centric approach. Finally, we offer four pedagogical practices that are aligned with the systems approach to teaching business sustainability and illustrate these with a variety of examples.