GLOBAL AND LOCAL CHALLENGES IN THE AGE OF UNSUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

The technological and economic progress of the past fifty years has not smoothed out the social gaps or solved the serious issues concerning the unsustainable development that were already known half a century ago. On the contrary, they get worse. Even in the most advanced western countries, social cohesion is undermined by the fact the attempts to answer to the demand for more sustainable lifestyles and, in general, for a better quality of life, lack effectiveness or have not found, to date, adequate dissemination.
The changes in the social and economic ecosystem provide a key to understanding the increasing cases of governance failure, both among companies and institutions. While rethinking its own paradigms and its system of values, the management discipline must give up the traditional techno-centric approach and contaminate itself with contributions from the humanities and social disciplines, in order to put people and society at the center of its own value system.
Within this framework, this course aims to provide an overview of the complex intertwining between socio-economic evolution and sustainability of socio-environmental development.

This course and the other two courses of the Minor it is part of, are integrated and coordinated to offer the following educational objectives: a) creating awareness about the social and environmental challenges that traditional management leaves unsolved; b) providing basic notions about the development of entrepreneurship and leadership, oriented towards social sustainable innovation; c) to describe the most recent models of social innovation, smart communities and smart cities, as well as the link between these models and the value systems of the communities; d) to teach basic theoretical and practical tools to study people’s behavior, to understand the psychological determinants of choices and, consequently, to adopt the most suitable policies to spread the adoption of "smart" and sustainable lifestyles.

The course is aimed at all students of the University's three-year degree courses, with the exception of students enrolled in courses in the business area.

Global and local challenges in the age unsustainable development
Forget about Scrooge: evolution and pitfalls of traditional managerial paradigms
Towards a sustainable management paradigm
Participatory management through system dynamics analysis
Case studies & laboratory activities

The reference texts and the material for the case studies and practical exercises will be available on the Moodle platform at the beginning of the course. No text purchase is required.

Students will be evaluated on the basis of: a) group work carried out during the course and presented in class (50% of the evaluation), b) individual work carried out at the end of the course on topics agreed with the professor (50% of the evaluation).

Lectures, classroom discussion, case studies, exercises and workshops in class.

English

written and oral

This subject deals with topics related to the macro-area "Cities, infrastructure and social capital" and contributes to the achievement of one or more goals of U. N. Agenda for Sustainable Development