The concepts of Ethics, Social Responsibility and Sustainability have become one of the cornerstones of management curriculum over the last decade. This has also been pushed by accreditation bodies like AACSB and EFMD, which have included Responsible Management Education (RME) in their standards. Global bodies like UN PRME have created a framework for RML for the Business Schools to adapt to their contexts and execute.

However, the curriculum, delivery and inherent attitude of the Business Schools are economic and driven by capitalist concerns. Hidden curriculum (HC) first appeared in scholarly discourse in 1968 and was soon adopted by various scholars to define implicit dimensions of learning environment, biases, rules, expectations and values. It is a socialisation process through which learners tacitly absorb values, behaviours and norms.

Scholars have argued that business school culture implicitly promotes the tenets of neoliberalism and capitalism as a realistic approach. The Business School students who pay a high fee have an expectation of certification and enhanced earnings, and this produces a parallel narrative to the explicit curriculum, which has components of RME. The concept of self-interest as an implicit principle is believed to have thwarted or contradicted the formal curriculum goals that promote ethics, responsibility and sustainability.

The concept of HC also permeates to institutional governance that creates paradoxes, tensions and tradeoffs. Scholars have posited that management students instinctively would not relate to RME goals, let alone adopt the same. The HC of the business schools driven by neoliberal rationality would continue to assume students as market actors who would respond to the call of capitalist concerns. The principles of RME are still inadequate as a panacea to this long shadow of HC in Business Schools.

The marketisation of higher education has given rise to students’ “commodified needs” like employability, good grades and certification that are in direct conflict with academic rigour that espouses developing critical and higher-order thinking. The concept of return on investment (ROI) for higher education has given rise to the concept of students as consumers.

This led to a pedagogy of pacification that failed to stretch students outside their comfort zone. Education, influenced by HC, has moved from a public good for all citizens into a private good for a few who seek credentials to improve their status. In this thinking, the teaching of RME would just remain a superficial effort for institutions as a tokenised badge for “Institutional Peacocking”.

Debdutta Choudhury is the Associate Dean of Accreditations at Woxsen University.