Institutional Sustainability Pressures in the Classroom: A Gamified Experiment Case for Apparel Supply Chain

This paper addresses the pedagogical challenge of teaching engineering and management students the complex interplay of economic, social, and institutional pressures that govern sustainability in global supply chains. It introduces a novel, theory-driven gamified behavioural experiment designed to provide an immersive, experiential learning environment for this purpose. The game’s design is grounded in Game Theory and Institutional Theory, which provide a robust framework for simulating the realistic decision-making dilemmas faced by apparel industry suppliers. The experiment was implemented in two pilot studies with postgraduate students, yielding preliminary data on student decision-making under varied systemic conditions. The key pedagogical finding is that student behaviour shifts predictably in response to changes in the simulated institutional environment, demonstrating the game’s efficacy in making abstract theoretical concepts tangible. This paper details the pedagogical design, theoretical foundation, and preliminary application of the game, positioning it as an effective tool for developing systems thinking and ethical reasoning competencies related to sustainability in engineering education.