Top business schools legitimacy quest through the Sustainable Development Goals

Abstract

An organization acquires legitimacy when it operates in an appropriate and desirable manner, satisfying the stakeholders' needs and expectations. Stakeholders claim to business schools sustainable and responsible management, knowledge transfer and research. In the last years, business schools adopted Corporate Social Responsibility as guideline of an integrated and holistic approach for their legitimation process. The aim of this research is to understand how business schools are reacting to the criticism that affects them and how they are reshaping their strategies in order to fulfill stakeholders’ expectations, and to confirm which UN Sustainable Development Goals are the most cited in the sustainability reports of the best business schools in the world. We perform a content analysis of the latest sustainability reports published by the top 50 business schools, analyzing the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals. We highlight that business schools focus social responsibility strategies mainly to define the professional standards to train future leaders qualified to manage organizations with a social, economic and environmental positive impact for all the stakeholders and capable to shape a better world.

Keywords

• Legitimacy
• Corporate social responsibility
• Ethic
• Sustainable development goals
• Business school
• High education