Student Perception on Hidden Curriculum – An Implementation Challenge on PRME Principles

Over 800 business schools across 96 countries are signatories of Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME). PRME guidelines stand as a fundamental framework to deliver management education with an underlying responsibility. Responsible Management Education (RME) has been defined as “descriptor for efforts aimed at embedding reflections about corporate responsibility (i.e., the social impact of businesses on society), environmental sustainability (i.e., the contribution of firms to a sustainable economy), and ethics (i.e., reflections about right and wrong in the context of business situations) into business schools’ educational practices”(Rasche and Gilbert 2015; Forray and Leigh 2012; Laasch and Conaway 2015).

?RME has been a subject of interest among education and pedagogical researchers for a decade and a half to gauge its efficacy and impact. One fact researchers agree upon is that signing PRME does not indicate change but depends on local level implementation where barriers and enablers are embedded in organisation’s culture. The implementation has been mainly on the School’s curricular design or pedagogical methods rather than creating a full fledged RME tool (Hogdal et al 2019). A survey among faculty across USA revealed an interest in RME electives but not too much interest on dedicated research (Maloni etal 2012). Also the Hidden Curriculum (HC) of the business schools which comprises of an implicit capitalist and neo liberal objective (homo oeconomicus) makes the more explicit curriculum on RME superficial or something to “tolerate for a while” in the eyes of the faculty and the students. Though RME has a wide space for critical reflexivity to bring about an attitudinal change, but it is yet to challenge the principle of capitalist realism (Fougere & Solitander, 2023). In fact, many of the RME principles are described “buzzword” or “posh word” among students (Hogdal et al, 2019). In the same study many students felt that RME concepts are common sense and does not require to be part of a formal curriculum. The authors found a connotative decoupling or misalignment in terms of what the actors say they would do and what the actors actually do. The decoupling between explicit and tacit language of the stakeholders leads to irrelevance in the eyes of the students. The other challenge is that there is no one single method to make all individuals moralistic enough to make the world a better place (Friedland & Cole, 2019). Also converting the business school students in “homo virtus’ may be overburdening the students with unrealistic expectations. Also, the students are expected to serve the interests of industry that have a history of deferring their burden of responsibility (Chamayou, 2021; Karpf, 2021; Linhart, 2011). Thus it requires more than just curricular interventions to increase student sensitivity to RME and creating a more balanced responsibility outcomes.