Sustainability and sustainable development goals in business higher education research: a systematic literature review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It has become critical for businesses to integrate sustainability to remain relevant in a world under threat from biodiversity loss, climate change, and social inequality. Business schools seek to understand how their education programs influence sustainability and the achievement of the sustainable development goals (SDGs). This study explores the trajectory of research on sustainability and SDGs within business higher education over the last decade through a systematic review. We identified key research themes and teaching approaches adopted to integrate sustainability and SDGs across business disciplines, including Management, Finance, Accounting, Entrepreneurship, Marketing, and Supply Chain Management. The review highlights a predominant focus on Europe and SDG 4: Quality education and reveals a lack of consensus on sustainability competencies crucial for guiding future research. This gap calls for a shift in research focus towards global collaboration, interdisciplinary initiatives, and the comprehensive integration of SDGs into business education. Further studies must challenge existing paradigms, and educational leaders must foster cooperation among business schools and key stakeholders, including students, institutional leaders, government entities, ministries, and industries to ensure a paradigm shift can transform business education. Such efforts are essential for advancing education that not only prepares business leaders but also contributes meaningfully to sustainability.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.019 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".