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Critical and Instrumental Perspectives of Interdisciplinarity for Business Education

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The Route Towards Global Sustainability

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Abstract

Sustainable Development Education is considered one of the main vectors for a sustainability transition. Sustainability is a broad field, inherently occupied by different knowledge areas that drink from each other to address the complexity of safeguarding the biosphere for the current and future human and nonhuman inhabitants. With the advent of new frameworks addressing sustainable development under a wider and more detailed lens, such as Aichi Targets, Millennium Development Goals, and ultimately the Sustainable Development Goals, the call for interdisciplinarity becomes even more needed. Interdisciplinarity can be seen as combining methods, theoretical approaches, and epistemological perspectives in diverse working groups for problem-solving; interdisciplinarity can also assume a critical perspective, grounded on the real-world problem needs. We assume that critical and instrumental perspectives, combined in the higher education milieu, can be the answer for educating leaders that hold the theoretical repertoire and the practical competencies that enable them to be agents of changing realities.

This chapter is a revised and improved part of the theoretical framework of the author’s dissertation thesis: “Martins (2021)”.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Sao Paulo (USP), Sao Paulo, Brazil

    Flavio Martins

  2. Department of Management, Foscari University of Venice, Venice, Italy

    Luciana Cezarino

  3. University of Sao Paulo (USP), School of Economics, Business Administration and Accounting at Ribeirao Preto, Department of Management, Sao Paulo, Brazil

    Lara Liboni

Authors
  1. Flavio Martins
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  2. Luciana Cezarino
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  3. Lara Liboni
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Environmental Studies, PGDAV College, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India

    Pardeep Singh

  2. International Foresight Centre, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia

    Yulia Milshina

  3. School of Science and Technology, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

    André Batalhão

  4. School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India

    Sanjeev Sharma

  5. Faculty of Science and Technology, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Bangi, Selangor, Malaysia

    Marlia Mohd Hanafiah

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Martins, F., Cezarino, L., Liboni, L. (2023). Critical and Instrumental Perspectives of Interdisciplinarity for Business Education. In: Singh, P., Milshina, Y., Batalhão, A., Sharma, S., Hanafiah, M.M. (eds) The Route Towards Global Sustainability. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10437-4_9

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