Critical Responsible Management Education

Responsible Management Education has emerged as a significant topic in global discussions, particularly about advancing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs represent a set of objectives aimed at guiding governments, companies, and societies toward a more sustainable and inclusive world. The belief is that through Management Education, future managers will be better prepared to lead organizations more responsibly and contribute to achieving the SDGs. However, while the idea of influencing behavior through education seems logical, it fails to address the pervasive influence of capitalism and neoliberal thinking within and outside business schools. This paradoxical view opens room for the argument of those who state that responsible organizations could be more profitable because they are responsible. However, studies show that adopting Environmental, Social, and Governance - ESG practices might make organizations less profitable. In this sense, many organizational practices are criticized for promoting greenwashing and SDG-washing, trying to manage their image as responsible for adopting questioning practices. In this paper, I address a critical discussion on Responsible Management Education, problematizing the idea of “Responsibility” by drawing on the Ethics of Care. The argument for discussing responsibility in Management Education lies in the different understandings of what it means to be “responsible.” My contribution lies in two points. The first is reinforcing the critiques of the incompatibilities of Responsible Management Education under a capitalist-neoliberal view that drives business schools and organizations in general. The second is to propose an alternative moral/ethical understanding of the idea of responsibility able to tackle the dominant capitalist-neoliberal inside and outside business schools. It is a Response-able Management Education that, beyond its care features, also has a decolonial and intersectional basis. Without recognizing values and conflicts of interest in societies, businesses, and Management Education, we will not move SDGs and PRME from a discourse to practice.