Há no mundo 13.000 escolas de negócios. São 13.000 escolas a mais. Martin Parker sabe do que fala pois foi aí professor durante 20 anos. No 'Guardian', Parker explicou porque devem estas escolas ser passadas a bulldozer. Pouco depois, saiu o seu 'manual' sobre o assunto: “Shut Down the Business School: What’s Wrong with Management Education”, verdadeira versão moderna e aplicada ao tema do clássico "Delenda Carthago"
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.
Visit the average university
campus and it is likely that the newest and most ostentatious building will be
occupied by the business school. The business school has the best building
because it makes the biggest profits (or, euphemistically, “contribution” or
“surplus”) – as you might expect, from a form of knowledge that teaches people
how to make profits.
Business schools have huge influence, yet they are also widely regarded to
be intellectually fraudulent places, fostering a culture of short-termism and greed.
(There is a whole genre of jokes about what MBA – Master of Business
Administration – really stands for: “Mediocre But Arrogant”, “Management by
Accident”, “More Bad Advice”, “Master Bullshit Artist” and so on.)
Critics of business schools come in many shapes and sizes: employers
complain that graduates lack practical skills, conservative voices scorn the
arriviste MBA, Europeans moan about Americanisation, radicals wail about the
concentration of power in the hands of the running dogs of capital. Since 2008,
many commentators have also suggested that business schools were complicit in
producing the crash.
Having taught in business schools for 20 years, I have come to believe that
the best solution to these problems is to shut down business schools
altogether. This is not a typical view among my colleagues. Even so, it is
remarkable just how much criticism of business schools over the past decade has
come from inside the schools themselves. Many business school professors,
particularly in north America, have argued that their institutions have gone
horribly astray. B-schools have been corrupted, they say, by deans following
the money, teachers giving the punters what they want, researchers pumping out
paint-by-numbers papers for journals that no one reads and students expecting a
qualification in return for their cash (or, more likely, their parents’ cash). At
the end of it all, most business-school graduates won’t become high-level
managers anyway, just precarious cubicle drones in anonymous office blocks.
These are not complaints from professors of sociology, state policymakers
or even outraged anti-capitalist activists. These are views in books written by
insiders, by employees of business schools who themselves feel some sense of
disquiet or even disgust at what they are getting up to. Of course, these
dissenting views are still those of a minority. Most work within business
schools is blithely unconcerned with any expression of doubt, participants
being too busy oiling the wheels to worry about where the engine is going.
Still, this internal criticism is loud and significant.
The problem is that these insiders’ dissent has become so thoroughly
institutionalised within the well-carpeted corridors that it now passes
unremarked, just an everyday counterpoint to business as usual. Careers are
made by wailing loudly in books and papers about the problems with business
schools. The business school has been described by two insiders as “a cancerous
machine spewing out sick and irrelevant detritus”. Even titles such as Against
Management, Fucking Management and The Greedy Bastard’s Guide to Business appear
not to cause any particular difficulties for their authors. I know this,
because I wrote the first two. Frankly, the idea that I was permitted to get
away with this speaks volumes about the extent to which this sort of criticism
means anything very much at all. In fact, it is rewarded, because the fact that
I publish is more important than what I publish.
Most solutions to the problem of the B-school shy away from radical
restructuring, and instead tend to suggest a return to supposedly more
traditional business practices, or a form of moral rearmament decorated with
terms such as “responsibility” and “ethics”. All of these suggestions leave the
basic problem untouched, that the business school only teaches one form of
organising – market managerialism.
That’s why I think that we should call in the bulldozers and demand an
entirely new way of thinking about management, business and markets. If we want
those in power to become more responsible, then we must stop teaching students
that heroic transformational leaders are the answer to every problem, or that
the purpose of learning about taxation laws is to evade taxation, or that
creating new desires is the purpose of marketing. In every case, the business
school acts as an apologist, selling ideology as if it were science.
Universities have been around
for a millenium, but the vast majority of business schools only came into
existence in the last century. Despite loud and continual claims that they were
a US invention, the first was probably the École Supérieure de Commerce de
Paris, founded in 1819 as a privately funded attempt to produce a grande
école for business. A century later, hundreds of business schools had
popped up across Europe and the US, and from the 1950s onwards, they began to
grow rapidly in other parts of the world.
In 2011, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business
estimated that there were then nearly 13,000 business schools in the world.
India alone is estimated to have 3,000 private schools of business. Pause for a
moment, and consider that figure. Think about the huge numbers of people
employed by those institutions, about the armies of graduates marching out with
business degrees, about the gigantic sums of money circulating in the name of
business education. (In 2013, the top 20 US MBA programmes already charged at
least $100,000 (£72,000). At the time of writing, London Business School is
advertising a tuition fee of £84,500 for its MBA.) No wonder that the bandwagon
keeps rolling.
For the most part, business schools all assume a similar form. The
architecture is generic modern – glass, panel, brick. Outside, there’s some
expensive signage offering an inoffensive logo, probably in blue, probably with
a square on it. The door opens, automatically. Inside, there’s a female
receptionist dressed office-smart. Some abstract art hangs on the walls, and
perhaps a banner or two with some hopeful assertions: “We mean business.”
“Teaching and Research for Impact.” A big screen will hang somewhere over the
lobby, running a Bloomberg news ticker and advertising visiting speakers and talks
about preparing your CV. Shiny marketing leaflets sit in dispensing racks, with
images of a diverse tableau of open-faced students on the cover. On the
leaflets, you can find an alphabet of mastery: MBA, MSc Management, MSc
Accounting, MSc Management and Accounting, MSc Marketing, MSc International
Business, MSc Operations Management.
There will be plush lecture theatres with thick carpet, perhaps named after
companies or personal donors. The lectern bears the logo of the business
school. In fact, pretty much everything bears the weight of the logo, like
someone who worries their possessions might get stolen and so marks them with
their name. Unlike some of the shabby buildings in other parts of the
university, the business school tries hard to project efficiency and
confidence. The business school knows what it is doing and has its
well-scrubbed face aimed firmly at the busy future. It cares about what people
think of it.
Even if the reality isn’t always as shiny – if the roof leaks a little and
the toilet is blocked – that is what the business-school dean would like to
think that their school was like, or what they would want their school to be. A
clean machine for turning income from students into profits.
What do business schools
actually teach? This is a more complicated question than it first appears. Much
writing on education has explored the ways in which a “hidden curriculum”
supplies lessons to students without doing so explicitly. From the 1970s onwards,
researchers explored how social class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and so on
were being implicitly taught in the classroom. This might involve segregating
students into separate classes – the girls doing domestic science and the boys
doing metalwork, say – which, in turn, implies what is natural or appropriate
for different groups of people. The hidden curriculum can be taught in other
ways too, by the ways in which teaching and assessment are practised, or
through what is or isn’t included in the curriculum. The hidden curriculum
tells us what matters and who matters, which places are most important and what
topics can be ignored.
In many countries, a lot of work has been done on
trying to deal with these issues. Materials on black history, women in
science or pop songs as poetry are now fairly routine. That doesn’t mean that
the hidden curriculum is no longer a problem, but at least in many of the more
enlightened educational systems, it is not now routinely assumed that there is
one history, one set of actors, one way of telling the story.
But in the business school, both the explicit and
hidden curriculums sing the same song. The things taught and the way that they
are taught generally mean that the virtues of capitalist market managerialism
are told and sold as if there were no other ways of seeing the world.
If we educate our graduates in the inevitability of tooth-and-claw
capitalism, it is hardly surprising that we end up with justifications for massive
salary payments to people who take huge risks with other people’s money. If we
teach that there is nothing else below the bottom line, then ideas about
sustainability, diversity, responsibility and so on become mere decoration. The
message that management research and teaching often provides is that capitalism
is inevitable, and that the financial and legal techniques for running
capitalism are a form of science. This combination of ideology and technocracy
is what has made the business school into such an effective, and dangerous,
institution.
We can see how this works if we look a bit more closely at the
business-school curriculum and how it is taught. Take finance, for instance.
This is a field concerned with understanding how people with money invest it.
It assumes that there are people with money or capital that can be used as
security for money, and hence it also assumes substantial inequalities of
income and wealth. The greater the inequalities within any given society, the
greater the interest in finance, as well as the market in luxury yachts.
Finance academics almost always assume that earning rent on capital (however it
was acquired) is a legitimate and perhaps even praiseworthy activity, with
skilful investors being lionised for their technical skills and success. The
purpose of this form of knowledge is to maximise the rent from wealth, often by
developing mathematical or legal mechanisms that can multiply it.
Successful financial strategies are those that produce the maximum return
in the shortest period, and hence that further exacerbate the social
inequalities that made them possible in the first place.
Or consider human resource management. This field applies theories of
rational egoism – roughly the idea that people act according to rational
calculations about what will maximise their own interest – to the management of
human beings in organisations. The name of the field is telling, since it
implies that human beings are akin to technological or financial resources
insofar as they are an element to be used by management in order to produce a
successful organisation. Despite its use of the word, human resource management
is not particularly interested in what it is like to be a human being. Its
object of interest are categories – women, ethnic minorities, the
underperforming employee – and their relationship to the functioning of the
organisation. It is also the part of the business school most likely to be
dealing with the problem of organised resistance to management strategies,
usually in the form of trade unions. And in case it needs saying, human
resource management is not on the side of the trade union. That would be
partisan. It is a function which, in its most ambitious manifestation, seeks to
become “strategic”, to assist senior management in the formulation of their
plans to open a factory here, or close a branch office there.
A similar kind of lens could be applied to other modules found in most
business schools – accounting, marketing, international business, innovation,
logistics – but I’ll conclude with business ethics and corporate social
responsibility – pretty much the only areas within the business school that
have developed a sustained critique of the consequences of management education
and practice. These are domains that pride themselves on being gadflies to the
business school, insisting that its dominant forms of education, teaching and
research require reform. The complaints that propel writing and teaching in
these areas are predictable but important – sustainability, inequality, the
production of graduates who are taught that greed is good.
The problem is that business ethics and corporate social responsibility are
subjects used as window dressing in the marketing of the business school, and
as a fig leaf to cover the conscience of B-school deans – as if talking about
ethics and responsibility were the same as doing something about it. They
almost never systematically address the simple idea that since current social
and economic relations produce the problems that ethics and corporate social
responsibility courses treat as subjects to be studied, it is those social and
economic relations that need to be changed.
You might well think that each
of these areas of research and teaching are innocuous enough in themselves, and
collectively they just appear to cover all the different dimensions of business
activity – money, people, technology, transport, selling and so on. But it is
worth spelling out the shared assumptions of every subject studied at business
school.
The first thing that all these areas share is a powerful sense that market
managerial forms of social order are desirable. The acceleration of global
trade, the use of market mechanisms and managerial techniques, the extension of
technologies such as accounting, finance and operations are not routinely
questioned. This is a progressive account of the modern world, one that relies
on the promise of technology, choice, plenty and wealth. 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.
The second is the assumption that human behaviour – of employees,
customers, managers and so on – is best understood as if we are all rational
egoists. This provides a set of background assumptions that allow for the development
of models of how human beings might be managed in the interests of the business
organisation. Motivating employees, correcting market failures, designing lean
management systems or persuading consumers to spend money are all instances of
the same sort of problem. The foregrounded interest here is that of the person
who wants control, and the people who are the objects of that interest can then
be treated as people who can be manipulated.
The final similarity I want to point to concerns the nature of the
knowledge being produced and disseminated by the business school itself.
Because it borrows the gown and mortarboard of the university, and cloaks its
knowledge in the apparatus of science – journals, professors, big words – it is
relatively easy to imagine that the knowledge the business school sells and the
way that it sells it somehow less vulgar and stupid than it really is.
The easiest summary of all of
the above, and one that would inform most people’s understandings of what goes
on in the B-school, is that they are places that teach people how to get money
out of the pockets of ordinary people and keep it for themselves. In some
senses, that’s a description of capitalism, but there is also a sense here that
business schools actually teach that “greed is good”. As Joel M Podolny, the
former dean of Yale School of Management, once opined: “The way business
schools today compete leads students to ask, ‘What can I do to make the most
money?’ and the manner in which faculty members teach allows students to regard
the moral consequences of their actions as mere afterthoughts.”
This picture is, to some extent, backed up by research, although some of
this is of dubious quality. There are various surveys of business-school
students that suggest that they have an instrumental approach to education;
that is to say, they want what marketing and branding tells them that they
want. In terms of the classroom, they expect the teaching of uncomplicated and
practical concepts and tools that they deem will be helpful to them in their
future careers. Philosophy is for the birds.
As someone who has taught in business schools for decades, this sort of
finding doesn’t surprise me, though others suggest rather more incendiary
findings. One US survey compared MBA students to people who were imprisoned in
low-security prisons and found that the latter were more ethical. Another
suggested that the likelihood of committing some form of corporate crime
increased if the individual concerned had experience of graduate business
education, or military service. (Both careers presumably involve absolving
responsibility to an organisation.) Other surveys suggest that students come in
believing in employee wellbeing and customer satisfaction and leave thinking
that shareholder value is the most important issue, and that business-school
students are more likely to cheat than students in other subjects.
Whether the causes and effects (or indeed the findings) are as neat as
surveys like this might suggest is something that I doubt, but it would be
equally daft to suggest that the business school has no effect on its
graduates. Having an MBA might not make a student greedy, impatient or
unethical, but both the B-school’s explicit and hidden curriculums do teach
lessons. Not that these lessons are acknowledged when something goes wrong,
because then the business school usually denies all responsibility. That’s a
tricky position, though, because, as a 2009 Economist editorial put it, “You
cannot claim that your mission is to ‘educate the leaders who make a difference
to the world’ and then wash your hands of your alumni when the difference they
make is malign”.
After the 2007 crash, there was a game of pass-the-blame-parcel going on,
so it’s not surprising that most business-school deans were also trying to
blame consumers for borrowing too much, the bankers for behaving so riskily,
rotten apples for being so bad and the system for being, well, the system. Who,
after all, would want to claim that they merely taught greed?
The sorts of doors to knowledge
we find in universities are based on exclusions. A subject is made up by
teaching this and not that, about space (geography) and not time (history),
about collectives of people (sociology) and not about individuals (psychology),
and so on. Of course, there are leakages and these are often where the most
interesting thinking happens, but this partitioning of the world is
constitutive of any university discipline. We cannot study everything, all the
time, which is why there are names of departments over the doors to buildings
and corridors.
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.
Most business schools exist as parts of universities, and universities are
generally understood as institutions with responsibilities to the societies
they serve. Why then do we assume that degree courses in business should only
teach one form of organisation – capitalism – as if that were the only way in
which human life could be arranged?
The sort of world that is being produced by the market managerialism that
the business school sells is not a pleasant one. It’s a sort of utopia for the
wealthy and powerful, a group that the students are encouraged to imagine
themselves joining, but such privilege is bought at a very high cost, resulting
in environmental catastrophe, resource wars and forced migration, inequality
within and between countries, the encouragement of hyper-consumption as well as
persistently anti-democratic practices at work.
Selling the business school works by ignoring these problems, or by
mentioning them as challenges and then ignoring them in the practices of
teaching and research. If we want to be able to respond to the challenges that
face human life on this planet, then we need to research and teach about as
many different forms of organising as we are able to collectively imagine. For
us to assume that global capitalism can continue as it is means to assume a
path to destruction. So if we are going to move away from business as usual,
then we also need to radically reimagine the business school as usual. And this
means more than pious murmurings about corporate social responsibility. It
means doing away with what we have, and starting again.
“Shut Down the
Business School: What’s Wrong with Management Education” was published by Pluto Press in May 2018
