Learning From Poverty: Why Business Schools Should Address Poverty, and How They Can Go About It

摘要

In the past few years, business schools have begun to address poverty issues in their teaching, learning, and curricula. Although this is a positive development, the arguments for reconfiguring education programs to address such matters remain undeveloped, with much of the impetus for such endeavors rooted in calls for social responsibility in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (formerly the Millennium Development Goals), the Social Compact, the Principles for Responsible Management Education and benchmarks such as ISO 26000. In this article I seek to clarify the pedagogical grounds for integrating poverty issues in management education by examining the intellectual and personal development benefits of doing so. By critically discussing four thematic modes of business involvement in poverty reduction, I show how such initiatives can be used as lenses through which to view complex and often paradoxical interconnections between socioeconomic and environmental systems. Thus I conclude that a consideration of poverty issues is not a marginal matter, but is key to grasping the 21st century complexities of global business and management.