Sustainability at business management course: enade reflects this education?

Abstract

After several worldwide environmental catastrophes and unending discussions about the need of a more sustainable development, many organizations are concerned about sustainability and perceived its importance for a better company performance. In this sense, the way this topic of sustainability is inserted on educational training of new leaders is a preoccupation on teaching process of Business Management courses in Brazil. Besides, Brazilian government enforces this insertion as per the National Curricular Directive for the Environmental Education (Resolution no. 02/2012 – CNE/CP), replying a demand from both society and market / organization. In this way, higher education institutions (HEI) embody sustainability in its Pedagogical Course Project (PPC in Portuguese) of Business Management in a transversal form, as a content component of curriculum or by their combination. As this is a new topic and having a demand from the market for trained leaders in sustainability, this paper evaluated, based on results of ENADE test from 2012 specific for the Business Management Courses, if the students who finished the Course in that year and performed the test knew topics regarding sustainability. This research is performed with communication modality, descriptive type, bibliographic and documental nature, used the collection of secondary data as method for data collection. With the use of descriptive statistics and means comparison, the performance of HEIs was explored by different perspectives, evidencing that sustainability is still not consolidated on future leaders training, showing a certain fragility in relation to the comprehension of students about business and sustainability. Suggestions for future studies are indicated to improve the founded results.