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Career Paths in Sustainability and Responsibility (Management)

Corporate Social Responsibility, Sustainability in Manufacturing, Transportation and Tourism, Regional Management, Environmental Management, Assessment and Certification

Geography and management – do they even fit together? If management is the art of identifying and distributing tasks, then it’s traditionally been about the WHAT (entrepreneurship), WHO (human resources), and HOW (innovation) of task completion. The WHERE was usually left to logistics, but they are rather the experts of routing BETWEEN location A and location B. The question of how our task distribution specifically affects B and whether this might also have an impact on A remained unanswered for a long time. As geographers are the artists of the spatiotemporal observation of social, ecological, and economic phenomena, they are well-equipped to fill this gap. Figuratively speaking, no one used to care “…if a sack of rice fell over in China…” – nowadays it can affect an entire industry.

Geographers are gradually becoming the sustainability managers of globally networked systems. The methods are borrowed from quality management (QM), and further training on this subject is also offered by testing and inspecting organizations such as TÜV and DEKRA. The typical QM career progression from “specialist” to “representative” to “auditor” probably correlates not entirely coincidentally with the academic hierarchy of bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees.

At a glance