Taking the World Seriously

On the difference between teaching about sustainability and actually reckoning with it.

Business schools have learned to speak sustainability fluently. The language is everywhere: SDG mapping, responsible management frameworks, net zero commitments, purpose-driven leadership. It passes audits. It looks good on accreditation documents. And much of the time, it leaves the underlying logic of management education completely intact.

Taking the world seriously means something harder than that. It means letting the actual state of the world, the climate, the inequality, the accelerating uncertainty, change what we teach, how we teach it, and what we're willing to refuse. Not as a module add-on or a values statement, but as an ethical commitment that runs through every pedagogical choice.

This pillar sits with that challenge. It doesn't have clean answers. But it takes the questions seriously.

The problem with performative sustainability

There's a useful distinction between sustainability education that is about the world and sustainability education that is for and with the world. The first produces graduates who can identify ESG metrics and recite the SDGs. The second produces graduates who feel the weight of the situation, who understand their own complicity in it, and who have developed the ethical muscles to act differently.

Most business school sustainability provision sits firmly in the first category. The content changes, case studies on circular economy, guest speakers from B Corps, modules on responsible HRM, but the underlying relationship between student and knowledge stays the same. Students learn about sustainability the same way they learn about any other management topic: at a safe analytical distance.

Teaching Otherwise in the Business School: Trends That Need Disruption names this problem directly. Business schools optimise for metrics, and sustainability has become just another metric. The question this pillar keeps returning to is what it would mean to stop optimising and start reckoning.

What reckoning looks like

When Management Education Gets Its Hands Dirty is probably the clearest articulation of this on the site. Reading Dallyn et al's work on compost as curriculum, it makes the case for connecting students to the slow, material, unglamorous work of ecological thinking rather than the polished language of corporate sustainability. Literal compost bins as a pedagogical move. Students with their hands in soil rather than their eyes on case studies. The point isn't the composting. It's what happens when learning becomes embodied, local, and real rather than abstract, global, and managed.

Nothing Makes Itself: Thinking with Haraway's Challenge to "One" takes a different angle on the same territory. Haraway's insistence that nothing is self-organising, that everything emerges through relationship and interdependence, is a direct challenge to the individualism that runs through most management thinking. If nothing makes itself, then the heroic leader, the autonomous entrepreneur, the self-sufficient organisation are all fictions. Teaching otherwise means making that visible.

Field Note: Sustainability Mindset Indicator Reflections is more personal: a direct engagement with what it actually means to assess not just sustainability knowledge but sustainability consciousness, the deeper patterns of how we think, feel, and act in relation to our planetary moment.

Getting outside

One of the recurring moves in this section is literal: getting students out of the building.

Nature Walk for Environmental Connection makes the case for spending entire sessions outdoors, not as a nice change of scene but as a pedagogical choice. Connection to place is not a soft outcome. It is foundational to the kind of ethical reasoning that sustainability education is supposed to develop. Students who have never been asked to notice the world they're standing in will struggle to take it seriously when it appears in a case study.

This is a small and obvious move that most management educators haven't made, because it falls outside what a lecture theatre or seminar room is supposed to contain. Teaching otherwise often starts with exactly this kind of refusal: a decision that the container itself needs to change.

On HR specifically

This pillar has a particular relationship to HRM, because HR professionals are among the people most positioned to either reproduce or challenge the conditions that make unsustainable work possible. Wellbeing programmes that paper over workload problems. Diversity initiatives that don't touch structural inequality. Performance frameworks that optimise people alongside any other resource. These are not edge cases. They are standard practice.

When HR Education Becomes World-Making argues that HR education shouldn't just prepare people for the future of work. It should help them question what work is for, and imagine what it could become. That's a different brief than most HR programmes are currently operating from.

Taking the world seriously, for HR students, means being honest about the gap between the profession's stated values and its structural function, and developing the ethical clarity to work in that gap without simply accepting it.

What this is not

This pillar is not a call for despair, or for a politics that students have to share before they can engage. It's not a series of lessons on why capitalism is bad. The posts here are written for educators working within existing institutions who want to create conditions for more honest, more grounded, more ethically serious engagement with the world as it actually is.

The argument is simple: if we're going to ask students to think about sustainability, we should do it in a way that might actually change something. In them, first. And through them, eventually, in the organisations and systems they'll inhabit.

These posts don't offer a syllabus for saving the world. They offer some honest thinking about what it means to teach as though the world matters.