Teaching Action Research for Social Sustainability in the Workplace

At its core, social sustainability is about proactively identifying and managing business impacts on people because companies affect what happens to employees, workers in the value chain, customers, and local communities. However, the pursuit of financial growth by businesses often undermines the conditions people face, for instance, decent work conditions for employees. This happens when businesses, in their pursuit of growth, fail to provide living wages, impose excessive productivity targets, deprive employees of a voice in formulating work policies, and engender dysfunctional and non-collaborative work cultures. To address this troubling tendency, business leaders at all levels of the organization need skills in transformative social workplace action in order to achieve business goals in ways that positively enhance human flourishing in the workplace. This chapter presents management action research (MAR) training—on identifying workplace issues, planning, taking action, evaluating, and reflecting—that enables learners to address the above-mentioned decent work challenges. As such, MAR training, supported by critical realism in line with humanistic management, can contribute to the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 8 on Decent Work and Economic Growth, in terms of promoting inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment, and decent work for all. This chapter presents the philosophical, conceptual, and skill components of MAR, as well as basic approaches for its teaching. Illustrative examples of applying MAR for promoting social sustainability in business, built upon the experience of De La Salle University’s MBA program, further enable educators to adopt MAR in their teaching.