Business
Sustainability is now a mainstream issue in business and this is reflected in teaching and learning across the faculty’s five schools of accounting, economics, finance, management and marketing. Specialist subjects include; Governance and Sustainability, Advocacy and Social Change, Sustainable Enterprise, Business Ethics and Sustainability, Developing Sustainable Destinations, and Managing for Sustainability.
Professor Suzanne Benn
“Sustainability is relevant to all aspects of the business curriculum, and to many aspects of our research.
The way we feel about it here in this business school is you can't just consider the financial returns alone . . . that inherent in that is consideration of other sorts of capital such as social capital, trust, collaboration . . . intellectual capital or the human capital of the workforce.
And of course that that all rests on the basis of the availability of resources which are the natural resources, so the natural capital. The value of natural capital and availability of resources.
So all those different forms of capital are emphasised to the students and incorporated in one way or another into our research projects.”
Doctor Paul Brown
“Okay, so the energy efficiency project was the integration of energy efficiency principles into a whole bunch of our subjects, both undergraduate and postgraduate.
One of our assignments which we actually did with UTS Green which was a lot of fun, where we actually had students, we gave them access to the university’s energy systems to some extent, like some building information and some energy experts, and we gave them some problems which are faced by UTS and we said: 'Hey, go and try and find a way to solve this from an accounting point of view.’
The base set of materials was schematics like building schematics and so the students were looking at who needs what data to then control energy. There is actually so many things that the students recommended that we actually had, we even had to organise a presentation at one stage. I think we had about 6, 5 or 6 groups present their recommendations and each group had maybe, I don't know 2,3,4 recommendations and they presented to senior UTS staff, and that was a lot of fun for the students.
The energy efficiency project was actually a really nice context in which we could teach students how to help organisations move incrementally towards sustainability.”
Key sustainability staff include:
- Professor Thomas Clark who teaches sustainability and corporate social responsibility
- Emeritus Professor Jenny Onyx who specialises in civil society, NGOs and social capital
- Associate Professor Deborah Edwards and Stephen Schweinsberg who both lecture in sustainable tourism
For more information contact the faculty or phone general enquiries 1300 275 887.