Integrating sustainable development into operations management courses

Paper in proceeding, 2009

It is widely acknowledged that sustainable development aspects should be integrated into operations management (OM) education. Based on experiences from teaching at Chalmers University of Technology, we have identified the following challenges related to this: How the main teacher should teach a subject which is not his or her primary area of competence, OM textbooks seldom address sustainability issues, sustainability takes a much broader perspective than OM, and how to integrate sustainability aspects into different courses while preserving these aspects’ holistic character.