This study sought to understand the evaluations of business students about the social and environmental management in these dimensions: 'importance of knowledge in the field', 'importance of practice in the field', and 'future intentions of involvement with the field' and its relationship with personal values (selected dimensions were 'anthropocentric conservatism' and 'perception of domination over nature'). The initial propositions are that there would be a negative relationship between dimensions of personal values with the evaluation of the importance and intentions of involvement in social and environmental management. We conducted a field study with data collected from 193 undergraduate students in Business Administration from higher education institutions in the states of Ceará, Paraíba and Rio de Janeiro. Initially was performed a test of the psychometric properties of the scales used by Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and the measurement of Cronbach's alpha to check its reliability. For the analysis of propositions, were verified descriptive statistics (means and standard deviations) for the evaluation that respondents made about the dimensions studied. Later the two propositions were tested through bivariate analysis procedures (Pearson and Spearman correlations). In addition, the difference between the means by gender and by type of institution were verified through Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). By the results of the analyzes, it was found that there is a negative relationship between the anthropocentric conservatism and the evaluation that business students do about the importance of social and environmental management in the course, and also their interest in involvement with the field in the future. Moreover, and contrary to expectations, the evaluations of interests have showed no relation with perception of domination over nature. With regard to gender and type of institution, there were significant differences only in the dimensions of the evaluation of social and environmental management to women and students of private institutions demonstrating a greater appreciation of the field. There were no significant differences in the dimensions of personal values. The results brings advances in the understanding of the factors influencing the interest of future managers in relation to social and environmental management.
Social Environmental Management; Personal Values; Environmental Education; Business Administration Course; Undergraduate Students
