Overcoming human stupidity, sustainability, deafness and nature blindness? Dynamizing IB education to face survival urgencies

Sergio A. Castrillón-Orrego

Chapter 23 in The Elgar Companion to International Business and the Sustainable Development Goals, 2026, pp 458-469 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter critically examines the shortcomings and some imperative challenges of contemporary international business (IB education), purposefully fostering humankind comprehensive blossoming and sustainable development. Recalling dire signs and negative impacts of IB, this chapter explores how warnings of disaster and realistic threats to humankind's survival can be acknowledged and turned into beacons of hope. By implementing a critical framework for research (Alvesson and Deetz), we will delve into potential triggers of change, proposing vectors for dialogue, highlighting circular causalities and hidden connections (Capra, 2002), and potentiating reflections on identity; selfish and ethnocentric perspectives that lead to exclusion and toxic non-cooperative behaviors, can be reasonably replaced by enlarged collaborative relations. We argue that all stakeholders must gain holistic awareness about the widened range of potential business impacts, the restrictive perceptions on the effects of business, and even more, on the selfish, short-term orientation of short-sighted business. Anything else, is just madness.

Keywords: Sustainability challenges; Transformations; Survival urgencies; Development Goals; Integrative learning; Critical thinking (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781035348473
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