Notes from AOM 2018

tl;dr: Management scholars need to embrace activism, not just because of the state of the world but because of the state of their field.

Every August since 2009 it is AOM season for me: the Academy of Management holds its annual meeting and around 10,000 management scholars from around the planet converge on one place for five days, filled with workshops, symposia, paper sessions and endless debates on the relevance, impacts and challenges of management as society’s dominant practice.… Read more

Educating Sustainability Management

The other day I was teaching an introductory course on Sustainaibility Management to PhD students (mostly Engineers, some MBAs, some Computer Scientists). This is always an exciting experience, many different rationalities and perspectives on the issue. We discussed a case study, the sustainability report of BMW, and some important realities of corporate sustainability became clear to me.

First, for some companies, sustainability provokes some kind of “organizational schizophrenia” i.e. they refer, in the same paragraph, to sustainability and ecological awareness as well as to the overarching goal of earning profits with even the most unsustainable products.… Read more