Teaching Management Responsibility Under Contested Governance

Business schools, implementing the Responsible Management Education (RME), have their graduates employed by organizations, which are often characterized by contested governance. Its structural conditions reward documented procedure over substantive responsibility. We apply the adaptive compliance framework to this setting and ask what happens to managerial responsibility when business schools operate under the same pressures. We argue that contested governance pushes responsibility toward procedural proof, narrow managerial agency, and understanding of ethical concerns as a private matter. RME cannot dissolve these pressures fully, but it can keep alive the professional language that managers need to resist them. The paper develops a conceptual model and sets out propositions and indicators for further empirical research.