Awanis, Sandra and Fujimoto, Yuka and Khan, Hina (2025) Greening the Future : Cultivating Green Skills Assemblage in Management Education. In: Academy of Management, 2025-07-25 - 2025-07-29, Bella Center.
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
As the urgency of global sustainability challenges intensifies, the role of green skills in enabling systemic transformation has gained prominence in policy and education discourses. Yet, green skills remain conceptually ambiguous and often narrowly defined in technocratic, STEM-centred terms. This study addresses this gap by investigating how stakeholders in an autonomous Malaysian state identify, prioritise, and legitimise green skills to support the development of sustainable industries, governance, and social movements. Drawing on assemblage theory, we conceptualise green skills as emergent, relational, and context-specific, as formed through the interplay of human/expressive and non-human/material factors. Our qualitative findings present a stakeholder-driven typology of green skills, comprising both foundational and transformational green skills that address region-specific sustainability deficits. We highlight how stakeholders engage in interpretive and strategic practices to justify green skills priorities, evaluate initiatives through a “possibility versus feasibility” lens, and legitimise skills through formal and informal mechanisms. This study contributes to management education by reframing green skills as part of a socio-material assemblage rather than a fixed list of individual attributes. We argue for a shift in pedagogy toward context-sensitive, interdisciplinary, and systems-based approaches that prepare learners to lead sustainability transitions.