Thesis defence in Business studies

Lovísa Eiriksdóttír's dissertation with the thesis 'Being at home in business education... with sustainability.'

Examining committee: Associate Professor Jonna Lappalainen, Södertörn University, Associate Professor Julie Hansen, and Professor Fredrik Tell, Uppsala University
Main supervisor: Associate Professor Jenny Helin, Uppsala University
Co-supervisor: Professor Josef Pallas, Uppsala University
Faculty opponent: Professor Anu Valtonen, University of Lapland

Zoom link: the dissertation will also take place on Zoom. Please contact golondrian.janke@fek.uu.se for information on how to log in.

Abstract

This inquiry is about business education. At first, the intention was that it would be about sustainability in business education, but the engagement with questions of sustainability left the idea of business with deep wounds that opened up for new questions of how to take care of them.

With post-qualitative inquiry I embark on a journey, along with educators working at Stockholm School of Economics, Copenhagen Business School and Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki. These business schools have committed to be in leadership of sustainability education through PRME (Principles of Responsible Management Education). Subsequently, we together reflect on possible ways to work with business and sustainability, simultaneously, in education.

One critical discovery in this (re)search is that most of the business educators, including myself, were educating students for something we did not want to be part of, once sustainability became a frame of mind. In thinking with sustainability, we got reminded of all the darkness of our common world through exploitation, inequity and inequality. What does it mean to educate others for something you do not what to be part of?

Through reading the work of Hanna Arendt, in particular her notions of evil, thinking and love, I use essayistic writing and poetic inquiry to inspire for ways in which business education can co-exist with sustainability. In other words, to search for possibilities where we can educate into a common world. I argue that active attention towards the practice of thinking will help us connect differently through our education.

This different connection I ally with a homecoming process with business education that requires an ontology of immanence; a one-world-ontology, where we become aware of our earth-bound relational existence and consequently where it becomes impossible to educate as something we fundamentally are not.

This thesis’ aim and its contribution to the field of business studies is to lay bare and consider dangerous questions about business and its response-ability to serious sustainability troubles. Education might be the only place where those questions can thrive without the anxiety of needing to know in advance what the alternative should be.

The thesis in DiVA.