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Record W4410242312 · doi:10.3390/standards5020013

Adopting Sustainability Competencies in Management Education—A Scoping Review of Progress

2025· article· en· W4410242312 on OpenAlex
Patricia MacNeil, Anshuman Khare

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueStandards · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicSustainability in Higher Education
Canadian institutionsAthabasca UniversityDalhousie University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSustainabilityEngineering ethicsBusinessEngineering managementKnowledge managementProcess managementEngineeringComputer scienceEcologyBiology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

There is growing urgency to address society’s complex issues, many of which are incorporated within the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Higher education has a special role and a responsibility to support and promote these goals and to prepare students for the complex challenges they will face as future leaders. The SDG framework helps students understand SDGs, but special competencies are necessary to address them effectively. Sustainability competencies (SCs) impart the personal/emotional development missing from current programming, but higher education institutions (HEIs) have been reluctant to introduce them into their curricula. Meanwhile, graduating students are ill-prepared for the complex problems, such as sustainability, that they will face as new managers and leaders. Our research question focused on identifying essential evidence that would support the implementation of SCs in HEIs. Our purpose was to raise awareness of the need for action in improving sustainability education and to assist in moving the issue forward. To enhance reading, we purposefully included multiple sections that capture and highlight the essential information. We employed a scoping review (SR) to scope out the relevant literature that supported a credible model for SCs and determine whether consensus was evident among scholars for such a model. Contrary to a commonly expressed theme in the literature, the results revealed that scholarly opinion had converged around a framework proposed by Wiek, Withycombe and Redman in 2011 and their 2021 update. A thematic analysis identified the key barriers preventing integration in HEIs, including the absence of a comprehensive policy to direct the implementation and sustain the change. We discuss these barriers and how they may be addressed. Integrating SCs into ME responds to SDG 4 (quality education). The results are intended to generate action regarding the need to integrate SCs in ME—sooner rather than later. The conclusions drawn respond to SDG 4 (quality education). The study serves to increase awareness of the issues and barriers preventing the much-needed transformation of ME in HEIs and stimulate discussion and potential action. Further research may involve a systematic review to inform much-needed policy and implementation.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.004
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.727
Threshold uncertainty score0.998

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0040.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.011
GPT teacher head0.438
Teacher spread0.427 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it