Wrestling with the “sustainability” conundrum: considering ways forward for the business school curricula – the DBA as a solution?

Sustainability remains a vital grand challenge for the 21st century. In spite of multifarious initiatives, actions and ambitions it, in many instances, finds itself at an impasse. While there is evidence of some innovative valuable and positive thinking and practice taking place in some business school (BS) curricula, nevertheless, there remains a significant number of BS programmes which, all-too-often, continue to operate embedded and implicit calcified curricula comprised of modernistic educational approaches and introspective institutionalised research regimes. Such contexts are commonly predicated on producing students who, often unwittingly, focus on capitalistic reductionistic targets, profit and their career in spite of purported ideals. This is not to say that many students are not equally concerned with values and alternatives sustainability models – especially as new generations and thinking emerge. Nevertheless, BSs find themselves at the epi-centre of this challenge and, indeed, they must even take a degree of the responsibility for, at the very least historically, for engendering some of the sustainability dilemmas. This chapter considers this problematic status quo using a framework of organizational ambidexterity and promotes the DBA as a potent way of responding to this intractable conundrum.