Business schools, and universities providing business education, from across the globe have increasingly engaged in responsible management education (RME), that is in embedding social, environmental and ethical topics in their teaching and research. However, we still do not fully understand the institutional pressures that have led to the adoption of RME, in particular concerning under-researched regions like Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Hence, we undertook what is to our knowledge the most comprehensive study into the adoption of RME in CEE (...) to date (including 13 countries: Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovenia and Ukraine). We find that, with regard to RME, isomorphic pressures seem to shape teaching and research in different ways, which suggests that the idea of a holistic approach to RME, promoted by, for example, the Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME), needs to be revisited; rather, different trajectories of organizational engagement may emerge for each principle. As a contribution to institutional theory, we discuss how a highly fragmented organizational field—like RME with its multiple dimensions—impacts on notions of actor centrality, where actors achieve centrality with regard to some dimensions of the field but fail to do so for others. In particular, we found that the European Union holds centrality in the area of RME teaching, but not in RME research. Our findings thus suggest that the concept of field centrality needs further clarification. (shrink)

The aporia inherent in Kojève’s discussion of the end of history stems from the temporality implicit in the moment of inscribing the end of history in philosophy. Hegel’s Phenomenology as the unfolding of absolute knowledge stands at the last moment in history, without necessarily constituting its end. Reading the post-NEP Soviet ideology through Kojève demonstrates that the doctrine of “socialism in one country” similarly situates itself outside historical time as history’s last moment, marked by the coincidence of being and concept, (...) the disappearance of negation, and classless society without an historical agent. In the reconceptualization of labor in Stalinist ideology as a temporalization of being without negation, the representation of time in five-year plans radically reinvents temporality as a suspension of history in the perpetual deferral of its end. Going beyond Kojève, the immanent logic of temporality of five-year plans enables a non-teleological reading of Hegelian philosophy with regard to the status of its method and the function of the end of history. (shrink)