Interdiciplinary Education And Sustainability In Business Administration Courses: Challenges And Perspectives

Authors

  • Jacques Demajorovic Centro Universitario FEI
  • Helio Cesar Oliveira da Silva Centro Universitario SENAC

Keywords:

Educação, sustentabilidade, administração, interdisciplinaridade, mercado

Abstract

The incorporation of education for sustainability in the formal curriculum as a tool that encourages individuals to reflection and action on the challenges of sustainability has proved to be a complex task in many different fields of knowledge. This is particularly evident when considering the structures of the curricula of traditional courses. This article aims to identify challenges for the incorporation of sustainability topics in business schools and verify how this influences the careers of undergraduates of a course in Business Administration focused on Environmental Management. The methodology process included sending a questionnaire to the first two graduating classes of the course and conducting a focus group for further discussion of the results collected in the first phase. The results show that students recognize the interdisciplinary practices as central elements in their training process, contributing to the development of professional skills for a manager compromised with environmental responsibility. The skills most mentioned by the undergraduates were working in teams and dealing with social actors. Moreover, research indicates a great challenge for these graduates. The market continues to understand the challenges of sustainability as technological one, disregarding the contribution of business administration professionals to overcome social and environmental problems. Therefore, the priority is to hire engineer’s technical professionals. In this context, the challenge is  much larger than just incorporate sustainability content in the business curriculum. It is also important to understand how managers committed to the social and environmental issues could be legitimated in order to their effective integration in organizations.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biographies

Jacques Demajorovic, Centro Universitario FEI

Doutor em Educação pela USP

Helio Cesar Oliveira da Silva, Centro Universitario SENAC

Dortor em Comunicação e Semiótica pela PUC/SP

Downloads

Additional Files

Published

2012-08-01

Issue

Vol. 13 No. 5 (2012)

Section

Human and Social Management

License

Once the papers have been approved, the authors will assign their copyrights to this Journal.  The Copyright Assignment Conditions include:

1.  The Mackenzie Administration Journal holds the rights to all the papers published therein through assignment of copyright. 

2.  The author retains moral rights to the paper, including the right to identify the author whenever the article is published.

3. As of July 1, 2015 RAM adopted the CC-BY license standard (Creative Commons– BY). Authors are allowed to copy, distribute, display, transmit and adapt articles. Authors must attribute to RAM explicitly and clearly an article’s original publication (with reference to the journal’s name, edition, year and pages in which the article was originally published), yet without suggesting that RAM endorses the author or its use of the article. Contents are released by means of the CC-BY license to fully inter-operate with a variety of different systems and services, including for commercial purposes. In case of an article’s reuse or distribution, authors must make the article’s licensing terms clear to third parties. CC-BY criteria follow open access policies by major OA (Open Access) publishers and journals, such as PLoS, eLife, Biomed Central and Hindawi, among others.

4.  When formally requested by the author, this Journal may allow the paper to be published as a chapter or part of a book.  The only requirement is that prior publication in this Journal (Journal name, issue, year and pages) must be clearly and explicitly shown as a reference.