Barriers to Sustainability in Management Schools: a Bourdieusian Explanation

Abstract

The aim of this theoretical paper is to ascertain, through Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptual apparatus, the barriers preventing effective sustainability in Management Schools. In this sense, this paper argues that barriers emerge because of a dissonance between students’ habitus and sustainability principles and their related contents. Such processes would not allow them to be aware of and recognize the contents related to sustainability in the same way as those based on neoclassical economic thought, which takes root in their minds as they are constructed, produced and reproduced across the most diverse standard environments of socialization. The focus was, therefore, to explain these barriers in the light of Bourdieusian epistemology, showing the dynamics that make them appear and providing an analytical instrument to enable a better understanding of the social relations that foment them.