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My name is Liz Walley and I am a Senior Lecturer in Sustainable Business here in the Business
School, so MMU Business School. That means I do units: undergraduate units, full time,
part time, postgraduate units. They are all in versions of sustainable business so my
whole teaching in on business and sustainability. (Q: Can you describe your main are of work?)
Well the main thing is developing and delivering these specialist units in Sustainable Business.
So it often involves recruiting or encouraging other staff to get involved in the subject
area and developing them in that subject. And then there are other sustainability in
the curriculum activities that we get involved in, like workshops and so on.
In terms on the place of sustainability has in the curriculum or my views on that, it
is clearly influenced by the fact that we are in a Business School. So we are talking
about how significant is it for business, and it is hugely significant because people
say, don't they, that business is clearly a big part of the ecological problem and a
big contributor to it. But it is also, of course, part of the solution, so that is why
it is so important. I've always felt that sustainable business should be a subject that
Business Studies students study like any other, like Accounting and Finance and Marketing
and so on. They should feel that is part of what they need to know if they are going to
get a job in business. Businesses are doing... some particularly are doing an awful lot in
this area. For some it is key to their cooperate strategy. It is their strategic direction
to be sustainable businesses. Not many companies do that, but some. So Business students need
to be eco-literate. And in fact it is a kind of 'USP' (unique selling point) for them because
if they are both business and sustainability literate, that does open a lot of doors for
them. I don't think of it as an optional extra. It used to be just done as an option for people
but now it is... in our big business degree is it a core unit. And of course it is university
policy now for it to be in a core unit at every level in every degree at the university.
The best practice these days on this question of whether you have stand-alone units in sustainability
or whether it is embedded across the curriculum, best practice is, or experts are saying we
should have both. I mean it is not either/or, it is both. Obviously, I am interested in
the stand-alone units; that is what I want to teach. And the benefit of it is that you
can go into a lot of depth. If you have a whole two-term unit on Business and Sustainability
you can not just cover what the issues are but you are also looking at how businesses
respond, you know, what policies and practices can businesses employ to address sustainability
issues and indeed, how good are they at doing it. So typical assignments are about evaluating
company responses to the sustainability agenda. So we have got lots of scope to go into depth.
One of the benefits of having a core unit in Business and Sustainability is that is
actually gives them (general Business degrees) a bit of a unique selling point. A general
business degree is a bit generic otherwise. It does a bit of everything. But I know that
the course leader used to say to me that at open days one way to distinguish our general
Business degrees from Accounting and Finance and Marketing and HRM and so on was the fact
that it had this core unit in sustainability. There definitely have been challenges in the
past, not so much now, but in the past yes. The processes of curriculum design are very
important. You have to understand how new degree programs, and be involved in, the design
of new degree programs and be there for all the meetings that they have, which is quite
hard to do to be honest! And you have you to keep making the case for it. It sort of
a question of persistence to some extent. People in the past haven't come to me and
said 'Please can you design...' I've gone to a meeting and said 'Why don't we have a
sustainable business unit in this degree?' So it has, in the past, involved a lot of
me being proactive and making sure that I am there at the right time to be able to promote
this subject as being part of our degrees. I think what has motivated me to spend my
time doing this subject is, first of all, I find it a very interesting subject but also
it is just so important isn't it? To the future to not only current business but future manifestations
of business, to future generations that we try and encourage business, work with business,
within business to develop a more sustainable world. I mean that is really important for
the future of the planet so it feels like it is something worthwhile to do.