The Guardian Long Read is well worth your attention today. It is entitled:
Why we should bulldoze the business school
There are 13,000 business schools on Earth. That's 13,000 too many. And I should know — I've taught in them for 20 years. By Martin Parker
The sorts of doors to knowledge we find in universities are based on exclusions. However, the B-school is an even more extreme case. It is constituted through separating commercial life from the rest of life, but then undergoes a further specialisation. The business school assumes capitalism, corporations and managers as the default form of organisation, and everything else as history, anomaly, exception, alternative. In terms of curriculum and research, everything else is peripheral.
Within the business school, capitalism is assumed to be the end of history, an economic model that has trumped all the others, and is now taught as science, rather than ideology.
In other words, even if (and it's a big if) economics was transformed there is a bigger problem and that is the existence of 13,000 university departments teaching that greed is good based on lowest common denominator economic thinking for very high fees that those paying them think entitles them to reward by exploitation because that is what they have been taught is the essence of modern management.
Of course this is a caricature. There will be exceptions. But I fear Parker is too often right. And that is deeply worrying. What he is, in effect, saying is that embedded in most universities is a profoundly anti-intellectual department dedicated to maintaining the exploitative status quo in society. I admire his courage for saying so.
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In so doing, he seems to echo the words of Chomsky when he refers to a form of totalitarian thinking and teaching of economic models in the West, but more generally throughout the capitalist world.
In such a system, there is little room for thinking differently, experimenting with new economic models, little room for the “human factor”.
Squeeze and crush, accumulate and pocket. For the few, not the many.
A tiny beacon of light in the world of Satanic darkness described by Martin Parker – https://www.schumachercollege.org.uk/courses/postgraduate-courses/economics-for-transition. Hopefully similar places of progressive learning exist elsewhere.
But Schumacher is not a business school!
I know – I was just looking for a slither of light in the gloom. Business schools, as they exist today, are primarily the result of the ‘successful’ neo-liberal take-over of the US higher education system which was expanded globally. It was a very smart move by them which, as stated, has had catastrophic implications for life on the planet. And there is currently no known antidote. However, any skeptical student could enroll for a post-graduate course at Schumacher, which might broaden their horizons.
There is little wonder when we see the effects of the Mont Pelerin Society and the spread of neoliberalism. Most Western governments are now addicted to the dogma. The aims and objectives of the MPS as set out in its 1947 inaugural meeting, with regard to infiltration of the academic estblishment worldwide, have been successful to the extent that alternatives to neoclassical, monetarist thought as espoused by Friedman are rare.
There are, however, exceptions, as you mention. My own alma mater, the University of Leeds is just such an example among many in the UK, where either the business school (in the case of Leeds) or the economics or social sciences faculty, e.g. at UCL, Southampton, Manchester, are teaching modern macroeconomics and the practice of teaching alternatives appears to be making a comeback in the USA and elsewhere.
I feel, and will be happy to see proven, the Guardian report may be better suited to the educational obituary column than its current affairs section.
Just occasionally I view Richard D Wolff, the former professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts and Marxist. Quite an engaging speaker. His comment was that formal economics courses were, as far as business employers were concerned, pretty useless. Therefore, they set up business schools to teach the skills and knowledge they needed. This implies that the products of these schools knew little of political economy, economic history and different theories underlying their practice. What we do has a context and we need to be aware of it.
To the extent that business schools are just used to parrot and disseminate neoclassical economics to MBA students I agree completely with Martin Parker.
However, there is another side to some business schools, particularly as regards research: some of them do what economists should be doing if they had the right set of theoretical tools (rather than the neoclassical paradigm) – trying to combine sociology and political science (and some psychology) with economics to analyse the modern economy. CRESC at Manchester University, which was partially a Business School initiative, was a great example of this, and there are some others around the UK. I call it “political economy” in the best sense of the term. And this kind of cross-disciplinary endeavour is easier to get up and running in business schools because they often have more disciplinary flexibility and a more pragmatic research agenda than economics departments.
best
Howard
Howard
It’s hard though to think of CRESC as a business school in this sense
But I take your point
Richard
Thank you for your observations on this. How interesting – explains a lot. Time for more potential MBA / Economics students to be made aware of this and the alternatives……….
It is not just business schools – the idea that universities exists to provide training for business has become pervasive in the UK. Of course, the academics, at the front line, fight this, but their power has been diminished to level of employee reliant on the next pay packet. The recent strike has raised awareness of the extent to which the ethos of a university has been eroded. But I am optimistic, the momentum for change is building.
That they are called business ‘schools’ is probably significant.
Mark Twain observed that he had never allowed schooling to interfere with his education.
The pragmatist wanting to get into the corporate world is perhaps well served by business schools, because without learning the prevailing groupthink and all the attendant current buzz words and jargon you’ve got no chance of gaining even an entry level job. I’m not confident I would know how to operate a water cooler let alone understand the job interview questions.
At bottom it’s another example of corporate capture. ‘Business’ expects that government will train its workforce. Then conveniently forgets that this is part of the social infrastructure which it relies on and which needs to be paid for.
‘Twas ever thus.
One of the best and most excoriating critiques of the MBA and the baleful influence of Harvard Business School is Henry Mintzberg’s “Managers not MBA”. It should be required reading of anyone doing an MBA, which no-one should be allowed to do in their 20s. In a nutshell, the business of turning overconfident young people with little real life experience into spreadsheet sociopaths who inflict immense damage on businesses and communities, and are judged a success if they extract a profit for shareholders, regardless of the cost, is a disaster for us all.