The theme of curriculum revisions examines initiatives by business academics to redesign management curricula toward a more responsible, embedded approach. As noted earlier, business school graduates often lag in values compared with their knowledge (Bishri, 2023). Hence, management education should be redesigned to give students more opportunities to engage with the curriculum and strengthen their values. After all, UNPRME was introduced to make business graduates richer in values and responsibilities (UNPRME, 2007). Accordingly, this theme discusses initiatives by business academics to shift toward a more responsible management curriculum through value-based courses, course and programme innovation, and cross-disciplinary integration.

In value-based coursework, the literature documents a growing effort among management educators to design courses that emphasise global social responsibility and align module outcomes with international initiatives such as the SDGs and the UN Global Compact (Russo et al., 2023; UNPRME, 2023). Specifically, educators have restructured undergraduate and graduate offerings by introducing dedicated modules in business ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) (Bishri, 2023; Christensen et al., 2007; Maloni et al., 2012; Rasche & Escudero, 2009; Young & Nagpal, 2013) and by championing specialised majors and joint tracks in sustainability (Maloni et al., 2012). To provide students with a well-rounded foundation, educators strive to balance management theory with ethics, legal liability, financial governance, and ecological stewardship (Bishri, 2023). Through these deliberate designs, educators directly enact the UNPRME principle of Values in the classroom.

Nevertheless, scholars emphasise that when educators deliver stand-alone modules, long-term impact remains constrained if courses are treated in isolation (Rasche & Gilbert, 2015). Although educators frequently introduce dedicated responsible management electives, this strategy often serves as a pragmatic compromise to circumvent institutional inertia and departmental resistance from colleagues in more conventional sub-disciplines (Rasche & Gilbert, 2015). Without broader curricular integration, educators find their efforts marginalized, leaving RME relegated to optional electives or co-curricular initiatives rather than embedded within compulsory degree requirements (Beddewela et al., 2017; Russo et al., 2023).

Academically developed scholars are more likely to embrace change, introduce innovative ideas, and design new courses and programmes that address contemporary challenges (Fujimoto et al., 2025). In this process, they are likely to collaborate with international bodies, creating opportunities for knowledge creation and dissemination. Such engagement enables business schools to cultivate leaders who are critical thinkers and visionaries, rather than merely practitioners. Moreover, other academic staff should support these initiatives (Beddewela et al., 2017; Doherty et al., 2015; Young & Nagpal, 2013). Importantly, shifting away from reliance on temporary academics toward a well-developed academic faculty strengthens business schools’ rigour and credibility (Dyllick, 2015). This, in turn, enhances their capacity to nurture and sustain responsible management education. This directly addresses the UNPRME’s purpose, values, research, and partnership in advancing responsible management education.

Cross-disciplinary integration involves collaboration across multiple academic disciplines to address sustainability challenges and provide holistic solutions. Since UNPRME focuses on equipping management education with values and sustainability, limiting it only to management education could be disadvantageous (Maloni et al., 2012). Therefore, as the research principle suggests, UNPRME should collaborate with other academic disciplines and institutions (Young & Nagpal, 2013). Because UNPRME highlights stakeholder engagement and global social responsibility, integrating management disciplines such as accounting, finance, and economics with law, political science, and the social sciences could help develop integrated, holistic solutions. As such, UNPRME’s research and partner principles could be further practiced.

In contrast, institutionalising such collaborative efforts has become increasingly challenging because most business schools view these collaborations as obstacles to the traditionally granted freedom of teaching and research (Rasche & Escudero, 2009). Moreover, while a few business academics recognise the importance of collaboration and embedded education, most focus on discipline-specific teaching (Russo et al., 2023). Research shows that not every management-related discipline gives responsible management equal prominence. For instance, academics with accounting and finance backgrounds gave responsible management the least prominence (Rasche & Gilbert, 2015).

Taken together, these findings suggest that curriculum revisions are necessary but insufficient on their own. Without complementary support for cross-disciplinary collaboration and sustained faculty buy-in, value-based courses risk remaining peripheral rather than becoming embedded practice.

UNPRME’s principles include partnership, research, and dialogue. All three principles highlight the importance of collaborating with external parties to advance more responsible and sustainable management education (UNPRME, 2007). External engagement is crucial to adopting responsible education through UNPRME. Stakeholder engagement has three dimensions: business/industry, society, and government (Bishri, 2023). Accordingly, this study critically examines the initiatives business academics undertake to collaborate with these external parties, using the codes: engagement with industry, engagement with society, and engagement with government.

Engagement with industry: In the context of industry collaboration, the literature emphasises educators’ personal agency in bridging academic concepts and practitioner realities. Rather than relying solely on formal school-level agreements, individual academics establish collaborative research projects, author applied case studies, and supervise industry-linked student theses (Bishri, 2023; Borglund et al., 2019; Stachowicz-Stanusch, 2011). Furthermore, educators enrich classroom learning by inviting corporate practitioners as guest lecturers (Bishri, 2023) and connecting students with industry mentors (Borglund et al., 2019). By actively integrating these external voices into their courses, educators help students translate theoretical frameworks into practical, real-world applications (Dyllick, 2015). Therefore, business collaborations, such as partnership agreements and Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs), are being initiated to secure training opportunities for students. These partnerships typically share research outputs through joint publications and conference presentations. This creates a bridge between academics and industry, supporting ongoing dialogue on sustainability concerns (Dyllick, 2015). Hence, principles such as Research, Partner, and Share could be achieved through this.

Engagement with government and civil society: Beyond the corporate realm, individual business academics engage with policymakers and regulators to demonstrate how governance frameworks can enforce ethical practice, contributing scholarly insights to educational policy debates (Bishri, 2023). Similarly, educators partner with civil society organizations and NGOs, embedding community-based projects and advocacy campaigns directly into their course curricula (Bishri, 2023). Through these grassroots initiatives, academics operationalise the UNPRME principles of Partner, Research, and Share, ensuring that external collaboration translates into concrete student learning (Dyllick, 2015).

Although partnerships with external parties seem timely, relevant, and practical, scholars have argued that adopting UNPRME is ambiguous. Although UNPRME aims to promote sustainability, it offers principles to follow rather than a regulatory framework. As a result, many have collaborated with external parties to produce Sharing Information on Progress (SIP) reports. Consequently, the effectiveness, purpose, and outcomes of joint efforts with industry and civil society often remain unclear (Godemann et al., 2014, as cited in Rasche & Gilbert, 2015). In addition, scholars have debated the true intentions of business academics when they engage in research. Despite efforts to engage with industry to develop solutions to real-world problems organisations encounter, academics often focus on theoretical and conceptual problems within their disciplines. As a result, UNPRME interests and academic interests may conflict (Dyllick, 2015).

This demonstrates that external engagement, though valuable, cannot replace genuine curriculum integration. Business academics therefore need institutional incentives that reward engagement alongside traditional research metrics.

One of management education’s core responsibilities is to foster societal skills (Hawawini, 2005). To address global trends and challenges, management education must move beyond developing business managers who prioritise economic considerations alone (Ghoshal, 2005; Henisz, 2011). Business Management students must therefore be prepared to engage with complex, transdisciplinary issues and collaborate with the wider community at multiple levels (Abdelgaffar, 2021; Muff, 2013). Achieving this paradigm shift requires not only curriculum reform but also a critical pedagogical transformation (Dehler et al., 2001). This transformation is vital for embedding questioning behaviours and cultivating openness to change (Abdelgaffar, 2021). It also enables students to critically examine the role and conduct of business in contemporary global phenomena (Abdelgaffar, 2021; Thomas, 2005). Consequently, pedagogical practice must incorporate innovative approaches that integrate transdisciplinary learning (Abdelgaffar, 2021; Blasco, 2012; Maloni et al., 2012; Parkes et al., 2017; Starik et al., 2017), action-oriented and participatory research (Abdelgaffar, 2021), and active engagement with external communities (Abdelgaffar, 2021; Maloni et al., 2012; Starik et al., 2017).

As a result, business school academics must adopt more reflective and adaptive approaches to teaching and learning (Abdelgaffar, 2021; Painter-Morland et al., 2016), including real-world problem-based learning, issue-centered learning, and reflective fieldwork (Abdelgaffar, 2021; Painter-Morland et al., 2016). Moreover, ‘service-learning pedagogy’ (Collins & Kearins, 2010; Young & Nagpal, 2013), operationalised through internships and collaborations with community-based expertise, fosters a more integrated and interactive learning experience. Academics also need to incorporate holistic pedagogy to create a responsible educational climate. Furthermore, to support holistic pedagogy, academics must ensure that micro-level teaching practices connect to the macro level. In doing so, they must draw on a variety of sources rather than limiting themselves to textbooks (Maloni et al., 2012; Stambaugh & Trank, 2010).

Thus, carefully assessing pedagogical methods is essential to creating responsible education in business schools (Kearins & Springett, 2003; Maloni et al., 2012). However, hidden normative cultural barriers within the curriculum can hinder the implementation of critical pedagogy in conventional management education (Blasco, 2012; Louw, 2015; Millar & Price, 2018). Moreover, personal orientations and values play crucial roles in implementing this pedagogy (Maloni et al., 2012). In practice, achieving true cross-disciplinary integration is challenging because of limited resources, awareness, and time (Rusinko, 2010). As discussed, this approach aligns with UNPRME’s purpose, values, methods, research, partnerships, and dialogue.

Collectively, these pedagogical shifts require academics to move beyond content delivery and toward facilitating reflective, values-based learning. This repositioning requires sustained institutional support because individual academics alone cannot overcome deep-rooted cultural barriers.

Academic achievement is a critical turning point in advancing responsible management education within business schools. To do so, business school academics must continually build their research capacity and professional credibility, which underpin the real-world relevance that responsible management education requires (Brown & Duguid, 2001; Clinebell & Clinebell, 2008). While external engagement treats industry partnerships separately, this internal capacity enables academics to use them effectively once partnerships are formed (Fujimoto et al., 2025). This foundation is essential for embedding responsible management principles into conventional educational practices.

Regarding research facilitation, the literature underscores that educators advance the UNPRME Research principle by redirecting their scholarly agendas toward topics that generate sustainable social, economic, and environmental value (Dyllick, 2015; UNPRME, 2007). To sustain and legitimise this scholarship, academics actively build and leverage collaborative research clusters, ethics units, and cross-disciplinary working groups (Bishri, 2023; Maloni et al., 2012; Young & Nagpal, 2013). These internal platforms provide educators with vital peer support, collaborative opportunities, and access to funding and industry support (Bishri, 2023). Therefore, through ongoing research facilitation and peer collaboration, educators build the scholarly foundation needed to embed responsible principles into their teaching and institutional practice, while external engagement focuses on sharing these findings with broader societal stakeholders.

Overall, academic development serves as the connective thread across the other three themes. Curriculum revisions, external engagement, and pedagogical change each depend on academics who continually learn and adapt.

Drawing on the literature on academics’ roles in RME, this study develops a framework that reflects their integrated roles in RME (Figure 3), emphasising how their work connects and reinforces multiple dimensions of educational transformation. At the centre of the framework, academics’ role in RME links curriculum revisions, pedagogical changes, external engagement, and academic development. The bidirectional arrows among these four areas show that each dimension reinforces the others. Together, they form a dynamic and holistic framework that positions academics as key change agents in embedding and advancing RME within higher education institutions.

This review contributes to the RME literature by shifting the unit of analysis from institutions to individual academics, addressing a gap, and conceptualising curriculum revisions, external engagement, pedagogical change, and academic development as interdependent rather than as separate initiatives. This integrated view extends prior work, which has largely treated these dimensions in isolation.

For business academics, the findings suggest that responsible management education is enacted through everyday choices in teaching, research, and collaboration. Academics can begin by embedding a single value-based module rather than waiting for a full curriculum overhaul. For business schools, the findings imply that supporting academic development through mentoring and protected time is essential. Without such support, individual academic efforts are unlikely to drive institution-wide change.

This study relied primarily on literature retrieved through Google Scholar. As a result, some relevant studies indexed elsewhere were missed. Because the thematic analysis is interpretive, the themes reflect our reading of the literature. We draw links between themes based on patterns across studies and have not tested them; these links indicate association rather than causation. Future research could repeat the review across several databases to verify and extend the framework. Empirical studies that survey or interview business academics directly would test how the framework works in practice, how individual and institutional factors interact, and whether it holds in different contexts, including developing economies. Future work could also examine the Practice principle, which the reviewed literature barely addresses.

Funding

The authors declared that no funding was received for the research, authorship, and publication of this article.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declared no conflict of interest pertaining to the publication of this article.

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