Institutional pressures and the adoption of responsible management education at universities and business schools in Central and Eastern Europe

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.