Educating for Extinction? Ethical Simulation,Ideological Student Grooming,and the Future of Management Education

Abstract

Business schools increasingly proclaim commitments to ethics, sustainability, and responsible leadership, yet these often operate as ethical simulations—performative displays that secure legitimacy while preserving the managerial and market logics driving inequality and ecological harm. This theory-led essay draws on debates in JME and related literatures to identify four interlocking mechanisms—ethical simulation, epistemic refusal, pedagogical inauthenticity, and planetary harm reproduction—through which responsibility is converted into reputational capital. We introduce ideological grooming to describe how students are trained to recognise and disavow harm simultaneously. We then advance three normative commitments for reimagining business education: epistemic completeness, pedagogical honesty, and planetary responsibility. The article outlines implications for curriculum, pedagogy, governance, and student formation, concluding by urging educators to confront the contradiction of teaching care within systems complicit in planetary destruction.

Introduction: From Responsibility to Betrayal

Business schools present themselves as sites where responsible leaders are cultivated. Mission statements, accreditation frameworks, and module specifications foreground sustainability, care, and responsibility as markers of legitimacy (Costin & Hamilton, 2009; Xu et al., 2024). Yet, as recent UK evidence indicates, these proclamations frequently decouple talk from action, producing ceremonial compliance that flatters rankings and accreditation dashboards while changing little in classrooms or governance (Czarnecka et al., 2025). The contradictions are stark. Business schools intensify discourses of care while remaining structurally complicit in inequality, exploitation, and ecological destruction. What appears as ethical embrace is better described as ethical simulation: staged performances that secure legitimacy and reputational capital while leaving intact the logics of accumulation and managerial dominance driving global crises. This paradox, of performing care while producing harm, sits at the heart of our inquiry and motivates the conceptual and empirical synthesis developed below.

Recent JME debates illustrate how simulation operates in practice. Comer and Schwartz (2015) show how virtue ethics collapses into behavioural checklists; Cunliffe (2016) demonstrates reflexivity’s fragility once tethered to assessment regimes; Shapiro Beigh (2025) reveals how assurance-of-learning cycles, impact evidencing, and audit-ready rubrics pre-format what counts as ‘critical’. Correspondingly, Pastier and Serhal (2025) note that climate content is typically appended rather than integrated into core content.

Two interrelated concepts guide the essay. Ethical simulation names the institutional process by which claims to sustainability and care are staged to reproduce legitimacy while diverting attention from systemic harm. It operates through symbolic compliance, proceduralisation, and reputational logics that render responsibility visible while structurally displacing its consequences. Ideological grooming captures how students are affectively and cognitively shaped to identify with managerial logics, even when those logics contradict ecological survival or social justice, as it will affect them, and their progeny, for the rest of their lives. By ideological grooming, we refer to the gradual affective ontological and epistemic formation of students into managerial norms that render existing organisational arrangements not merely intelligible, but acceptable and desirable. Unlike ethical simulation, which operates at the level of institutional performance, or pedagogical inauthenticity, which names a condition of constrained ethical engagement within teaching practices, ideological grooming captures a subject-forming process through which students learn what kinds of critique, concern, and responsibility feel realistic over time. This occurs through repeated exposure to euphemistic language, selective curricular omission, affective reward for compliance and optimism, and assessment regimes that normalise harm as managerial necessity. The term ‘grooming’ is used deliberately and with awareness of its sensitivity: it denotes slow normalisation and habituation, through which ethical orientations are shaped by repetition, affective alignment, and institutional reward rather than explicit instruction. Business education thereby cultivates misrecognition and complicity rather than responsibility.

Our approach is a critical essay that responds to calls in JME and adjacent literatures to interrogate not only classroom practices but also the institutional fields that shape them (Antonacopoulou, 2008; Cunliffe, 2002; Fenwick, 2005; Hibbert & Wright, 2023; Maloni, et al., 2021). The analysis draws together critical management education, ecological, and process-relational philosophy and critical political economy as complementary traditions for analysing how responsibility is taught, constrained, and legitimised within business education. We theorise how responsibility is converted into legitimacy, how planetary harm is normalised in business education, and how pedagogy might be reoriented towards care in substantive rather than simulated terms. This analysis sits alongside work showing how business schools absorb sustainability critique without altering complicity (Wright & Nyberg, 2015) and how managerialism functions as ideology organising both practice and pedagogy (Parker, 2002, 2018).

Our contribution is twofold. First, we theorise ethical simulation and ideological grooming as systemic logics that explain why innovations in ethics, reflexivity, and sustainability are easily neutralised. Second, we point to directions that move beyond simulation: violence literacy that equips students to trace direct and structural violence in supply chains, finance, and operations; experimentation with cooperative and plural organisational forms (Kuznetsova et al., 2025; Restakis, 2010; Stewart et al., 2025; Whyte & Whyte, 1991), and recovery of neglected relational traditions that treat management as moral and co-creative practice rather than technique (Barnard, 1948; Follett, 1924; Katz, 1955; Mintzberg, 1973). These are starting points for reorienting educational practice.

Our critique proceeds from a relational and ecological ontology in which organisations are constitutively embedded in social and planetary systems (Browning, 1990; Whitehead, 1929/1978). From this standpoint, managerialism functions as an ideology whose adequacy must be judged by its alignment with lived experience, explanatory coherence, and its consequences for collective flourishing (Edwards, 2010; Finocchiaro, 2021). Ideology is understood here not simply as explicit doctrine but as the socially embedded system of meanings, practices, and assumptions through which particular interests are normalised and rendered commonsensical (Deem & Brehony, 2005; Doran, 2016; Larrain, 1979). Acknowledging this ontology also avoids the ontological neglect that limits some organisational critiques (Griffin, 1998; Lawson, 2003). Managerialist ideology fails these criteria by obscuring interdependence and normalising forms of harm, rendering its claims to responsibility axiologically insufficient.

Critiques of orthodox economics reinforce this concern. Lawson (1997, 2003) argues that neoclassical economics rests on unrealistic assumptions of closed systems, atomistic agents, and equilibrium conditions that obscure the open, relational, and historically contingent character of social reality. From a critical realist standpoint, such assumptions limit explanatory adequacy and marginalise processual and relational understandings of economic life. Complementing this critique, Beinhocker (2006) advances complexity economics, emphasising evolving systems, network effects, and emergent dynamics that challenge linear, equilibrium-based models. Both perspectives align with process-relational ontologies and highlight how traditional economic assumptions underpin managerialist logics that business education often reproduces uncritically.

On this ontological and axiological basis, the essay develops this argument by tracing four interlocking mechanisms across the educational process. We begin by theorising ethical simulation as the institutional staging of responsibility within business schools. We then show how epistemic refusal sustains this simulation through the deliberate incompleteness of curricula. Educators enact this incompleteness pedagogically through inauthentic teaching practices that normalise performative responsibility, culminating in the intergenerational reproduction of planetary harm. The next section elaborates the concept of ethical simulation that prefigures such a scenario.

Ethical Simulation in Management Education

Responsibility discourse has become ubiquitous in business schools. Learning outcomes stress ethical reasoning, accreditation standards embed sustainability and modules on leadership and corporate responsibility proliferate, while B-Corp emerges as a new credential (Breuer, 2025). At face value, this suggests a genuine normative shift. Yet such ubiquity signals responsibility’s role as strategic performance rather than transformation (Banerjee, 2008; Blowfield & Murray, 2019; Fleming & Jones, 2013; Hibbert & Wright, 2023; Keller, 2023). Responsibility here functions less as substantive reorientation than as legitimacy work, aligning with reputational frameworks and resource access (Bowen, 2019; Deephouse & Carter, 2005; Li et al., 2016; Suddaby & Greenwood, 2005). Ethical simulation captures the paradox wherein business schools present responsibility yet stage it, allowing appearance to substitute for enactment. Building on these empirical studies, we extend such insights conceptually to theorise ethical simulation as a systemic dynamic rather than a local or incidental teaching failure.

Accreditation logics intensify the dynamic. Frameworks such as AACSB, EQUIS, and PRME reward evidence of responsibility, yet metrics reduce responsibility to lists of modules, cases, or rubrics (Baird & Elliott, 2018; Costin & Hamilton, 2009). Ethical simulation thrives here: responsibility is optimised for audit, displayed as virtue signalling rather than structural transformation. A recent UK study shows empirically how institutions proclaim sustainability yet exhibit talk–action decoupling consistent with organisational hypocrisy (Czarnecka et al., 2025). Students thus encounter responsibility as pedagogical spectacle that signals legitimacy while leaving managerialist content intact.

This shapes student learning. When character education becomes compliance, as Comer and Schwartz (2015) warn, students internalise responsibility as performance. When reflexivity is truncated by assessment, as Cunliffe (2016) notes, they learn its acceptability only within managerialist limits. When sustainability is subsumed into accreditation rituals, as Pastier and Serhal (2025) and Shapiro Beigh (2025) show, students see existential crises managed through symbolic gestures. Ethical simulation thus organises both institutional legitimacy and student subjectivity.

Marketisation of HE further reinforces this. Business schools compete for enrolments and rankings, using responsibility as a marketing device (Ball, 2012; Naidoo, 2003). Parker (2018) argues that schools often reproduce managerial elites aligned with global market interests. Ethical simulation enables institutions to claim progressive credentials while supplying expertise to corporate and financial elites. Responsibility becomes another commodity, packaged for students and accreditors. By offering appearances of care, simulation inoculates institutions against critique, allowing them to claim responsibility while perpetuating ecological destruction and inequality. In foreclosing radical pedagogy, simulation obstructs responsibility itself. While important pockets of critical, sustainability-oriented, and ethically committed teaching do exist, they typically operate at the margins of business schools whose dominant structures, incentives, and legitimacy regimes continue to privilege reputational performance over transformation.

Framing responsibility as ethical simulation clarifies JME-noted contradictions, explaining why virtues become ritualistic (Comer & Schwartz, 2015), reflexivity constrained (Cunliffe, 2016) and sustainability superficial (Pastier & Serhal, 2025; Shapiro Beigh, 2025). These are systemic effects of an educational apparatus designed to prioritise legitimacy over transformation. Ethical simulation is therefore a structural outcome of how business schools are positioned within managerialist and market logics, operating through a form of institutional Orwellian ‘doublespeak’ in which responsibility is invoked to conceal, rather than confront, harm. The analysis now turns from this political–economic positioning to how these logics become institutionalised within governance structures and pedagogical practice.

Structural Embedding of Ethical Simulation

This section examines how ethical simulation is institutionally embedded within the ideological and governance structures of business schools, drawing on a half-century of managerialism critique that has shifted from diagnosing bureaucratic domination to analysing its reproduction through business education. Parker (2002), extending earlier relational critiques of bureaucratic rationality (Ramos, 1981), exposed management education as an apparatus for legitimating managers as a distinct social class, arguing that business schools function as engines of authority formation. Stewart (2009) then illuminated how consultancy and pedagogical practices disseminate the myths of management, reproducing the very hierarchies they purport to rationalise. Locke and Spender (2011) traced how managerialism aligned business education with corporate and state power. Klikauer (2013) subsequently codified its central values of efficiency, hierarchy, and control, making visible the moral architecture beneath managerial rationality. Parker’s (2018) later analysis extended the critique to show how business schools became structurally committed to reproducing elites rather than cultivating responsibility. Across this evolving trajectory, managerialism emerges as a constitutive ideology that allows only forms of moral display that preserve, rather than unsettle, its authority. Despite rhetorical commitments to empowerment, business schools continue to normalise command-and-control as the natural grammar of management, translating responsibility into compliance, and ethics into performance. In this sense, hierarchy functions as the institutional expression of managerialist ideology: it sustains legitimacy by choreographing obedience while rendering substantive moral agency systemically impossible. Within this architecture, ethics must be operationalised through managerial devices like learning outcomes, competency frameworks, and accreditation metrics that translate moral inquiry into procedural compliance. Institutional actors thereby absorb the ethical vocabulary of care, responsibility, reflexivity, and sustainability into the same instrumental rationality that sustains hierarchy.

In this sense, business schools do not simply teach managerialism, they embody it, converting moral aspiration into an administrative function (Ghosal, 2005; Khurana, 2007; Mintzberg, 1973). It is important here to frame simulation as structural. Managerialism naturalises hierarchy and schools translate these into curricula that simulate responsibility. Insights from JME, such as Shapiro Beigh (2025) or Pastier and Serhal (2025) gain clarity in this light: superficial sustainability pedagogy is symptomatic of structures tying responsibility to legitimacy, not transformation.

Understanding ethical simulation structurally reframes the reform challenge. If responsibility is simulated because business schools are bound to managerialist and market ideologies, then isolated pedagogical innovations risk neutralisation. As Parker (2018) suggests, the problem is the structural role of business schools in neoliberal economies. Moving beyond simulation requires engagement not only with pedagogy but also with the institutional and ideological conditions that sustain it. The following section turns to one such mechanism: the deliberate incompleteness of curricula and the epistemic refusals through which business education shields students from systemic critique.

Epistemic Refusal and the Incompleteness of the Curriculum

These structural conditions have epistemic consequences: responsibility can only appear in forms that do not threaten managerial authority, producing curricula that are systematically and deliberately incomplete. Institutions simulate responsibility through audits and accreditation and simultaneously limit what students are allowed to know. A more insidious process of epistemic refusal sustains simulation: critical perspectives, relational theories, and plural alternatives are systematically excluded. By withholding knowledge that might destabilise managerialist authority or market orthodoxy, business schools reproduce responsibility as performance rather than practice. This erasure has deep roots and can be seen as the systematic sidelining of relational and moral traditions that directly challenge managerialist authority. Early thinkers such as Follett (1924, 1949) emphasised relational organising in which power was integrative rather than dominating. Barnard (1938, 1945) conceived leadership as cooperative and moral, embedding educative responsibility at its core. Later, Ramos (1981) proposed a pluralist ‘new science of organisations’. These traditions highlighted relational competence and ethical responsibility, yet business schools have largely marginalised them. Instead, students encounter narrow models of efficiency, control, and competitive individualism. This narrowing is systemic, designed to align management education with neoliberal managerialism to exclusion or marginalisation of pluriversal epistemology.

Critics long recognised this incompleteness. Leavitt (1989) lamented MBA neglect of pressing practical issues, and Bennis and O’Toole (2005) warned that schools pursued abstract legitimacy rather than responsibility. Mintzberg (1973, 2005) went further, claiming MBAs often made graduates less prepared for leadership by privileging detachment over wisdom. Over the decades, these critiques point to epistemic boundaries that resist change. Their repetition suggests incompleteness is not a temporary flaw but an institutional feature, sustained through mechanisms of epistemic refusal. Stewart (2009) showed how management education reproduces myths of expertise, cultivating faith in techniques that obscure reality, while Spillane and Joullie (2023) revealed philosophical assumptions that preclude alternative ontologies, rendering managerial concepts inevitable, and silencing dissent. Business schools thus do not simply fail to include alternatives; institutional processes actively disqualify them.

The consequences are profound. Students are not just underexposed to critique; they are habituated to view managerialist and market orthodoxies as exhaustive. Comer and Schwartz (2015) observed how under such conditions virtue ethics collapses into routine; Cunliffe (2016) documented how reflexivity was truncated by institutional limits; Shapiro Beigh (2025) showed how sustainability curricula were shaped by accreditation rituals; and Pastier and Serhal (2025) found climate pedagogy often symbolic rather than substantive. Together, these cases show how responsibility is internalised as symbolic practice while systemic drivers of harm remain unexamined.

This refusal is linked to capitalism’s structural logics. Including Follett’s (1924, 1949) relational ethics or Barnard’s (1948) moral leadership would destabilise authority structures upheld by managerialism. Grappling with Sandel’s (2013) critique of markets or Whitehouse’s (2017) account of corporate capture would expose systemic contradictions. Taking seriously Hagglund’s (2019) secular freedom, Kelly’s (2023) analysis of wealth supremacy, or Christophers’ (2024) claim that capitalism cannot address climate change would reveal that elite accumulation undermines shared flourishing. Epistemic refusal thus operates as institutional necessity: curricula are kept incomplete because completeness would delegitimise the school’s role within managerialist and market logics.

Understanding incompleteness as deliberate highlights the grooming function of business education. Business schools deny students access to critical perspectives while encouraging affective investment in partial truths. As they rehearse virtue ethics, sustainability frameworks, or reflexivity within managerialist limits, they are trained to equate responsibility with legitimacy. This process, which I call ideological grooming, systematically habituates students to mistake performance for ethics. By ideological grooming I mean the institutional process through which business schools condition students to accept partial knowledge as complete, equating staged responsibility with legitimacy while foreclosing alternatives. The classroom thus becomes the site where epistemic refusal and ethical simulation converge: knowledge is withheld, responsibility staged, and students habituated to confuse the latter for the former.

Epistemic refusal is thus structural. To imagine incremental reform is to underestimate how education is integrated into systems of accumulation and ideology. What emerges is the necessity of confronting the political economy of knowledge in management education. If ethical simulation is sustained by epistemic refusal, cultivating responsibility requires rethinking what business schools are for and whose interests they serve. These omissions are not only curricular but pedagogical. In current curricula, educators often exclude critical traditions while disavowing their implications. In this translation from knowledge to practice, business schools enact what I later describe as pedagogies of existential irresponsibility: training students to perform responsibility while remaining complicit in harm. To see how these political–economic and epistemic conditions translate into lived educational experience, the discussion now turns explicitly to pedagogy.

Pedagogical Inauthenticity and Ethical Disavowal

Having outlined the political–economic drivers of ethical simulation and the epistemic exclusions they produce, the focus now shifts to their pedagogical expression in classroom practice. In this context, students encounter not only gaps in knowledge but staged exercises that mask systemic harm. This is pedagogical inauthenticity: the performative enactment of responsibility in ways that preserve ideological boundaries created by curricular omission. Importantly, practices such as case teaching, reflexivity exercises, and ethics assignments are not inherently inauthentic; they become so when subordinated to assessment regimes, audit logics, and reputational imperatives that constrain what can be questioned, acknowledged, or acted upon. Inauthentic pedagogy is therefore the practical face of incompleteness, cultivating the habits of simulation through which responsibility becomes performance rather than practice. Case studies, reflexivity tasks, and sustainability frameworks habituate students to treat ethics as symbolic alignment with legitimacy rather than moral engagement. Educators train students to appear responsible while simultaneously teaching them to disavow the consequences of performativity.

Earlier educational traditions reveal that management pedagogy could have developed along explicitly relational and ethical lines that resist instrumentalisation, rather than merely offering historical antecedents to contemporary practice. Follett (1924, 1949) and Barnard (1938, 1948) advanced relational and dialogical approaches in which responsibility was taught as moral co-creation rather than as managerial technique. Dewey’s (1916) commitment to experiential learning and Freire’s (1973) seminal conception of conscientisation similarly located learning in collective inquiry and ethical reciprocity. More recent work (Matusov, 2009; Wegeriff, 2025) extends these ideas by framing classrooms as spaces of collaborative meaning-making. Their shared marginalisation exposes the systemic nature of pedagogical inauthenticity: traditions that foreground participation and care are excluded precisely because they would destabilise the technocratic and hierarchical premises of managerial education, and because they sit uneasily with time-pressured curricula, standardised assessment, accreditation metrics, and risk-averse governance.

Contemporary analyses confirm the depth of this exclusion. Comer and Schwartz (2015) observed that virtue-ethics modules often reduce to character drills, signalling moral engagement while concealing its absence. From a Kantian perspective, Bowie (1999) argues that business ethics requires treating stakeholders as ends in themselves rather than instruments of profit. Yet empirical corporate practice rarely approximates this standard, suggesting that ethics education often invokes normative frameworks whose organisational realisation remains largely aspirational rather than operational. Cunliffe (2016) showed how dialogical reflexivity cultivates relational ethics but is truncated by institutional limits. Shapiro Beigh (2025) found that sustainability teaching frequently satisfies accreditation metrics rather than addresses crisis, while Pastier and Serhal (2025) documented how climate pedagogy becomes symbolic and tokenistic. Joullié (2015) traced this pattern to the philosophical foundations of management, which narrow pedagogy to instrumental rationality, and Spillane and Joullié (2023) demonstrated how managerial rhetoric sustains these boundaries by presenting assumptions as common sense. Stewart (2009) located the classroom itself as a site where students venerate techniques that conceal systemic harm under the guise of expertise, and Parker (2002, 2018) situated these pedagogies within institutional structures that reproduce managerial elites. Collectively, these critiques show that pedagogical inauthenticity is not local error but structural reproduction: an epistemic formation that transforms ethics into procedure and responsibility into performance.

For students, the consequences are profound. Business schools present responsibility discursively while teaching practices that sustain harm. This strain is not merely affective but also cognitive: requiring students to repeatedly perform moral reflection under institutional constraint resonates with self-regulation research showing that sustained demands for controlled, normative self-presentation generate context-dependent fatigue rather than moral growth (Forestier et al., 2022). Students learn the vocabulary of ethics but also its disconnection from practice, acquiring fluency in moral language without corresponding capacity for moral action. Responsibility becomes a rhetorical exercise; something to demonstrate in assignments or interviews rather than to ground transformation in practice. Inauthentic pedagogy simultaneously erases those most harmed by business: communities dispossessed by extraction, poisoned by waste, displaced by supply chains or endangered by global heating. Banerjee (2008; 2014) showed how corporate responsibility discourse effaces colonised and environmentally damaged voices, while Farmer (2004) and Roberts (2008, 2010) framed such exclusion as structural violence. Spivak’s (1988) provocation makes this silence intelligible: the subaltern speaks, but pedagogy organised around managerial responsibility will not recognise that speech as legitimate knowledge. Within such frameworks, the voices of those harmed are rendered inaudible, not because they are silent, but because the system refuses to listen or acknowledge. The epistemic unhearability that Spivak theorised manifests concretely in management education: Fotaki and Prasad (2015) and Kumar et al. (2025) show how inequality, dispossession, and environmental violence are systematically excluded from curricula. Recent analysis of business case study materials similarly shows how Indigenous perspectives are marginalised through implicit ontological assumptions embedded in pedagogical artefacts (Hrenyk & Salmon, 2024). Their findings confirm that pedagogical silencing operates not only at the discursive level but through institutional design, enabling students to feel responsible while remaining unseeing to those who suffer.

Silencing is therefore affective as well as epistemic. By producing pride in symbolic engagement through case studies, accreditation projects, and virtue exercises, pedagogy converts complicity into moral satisfaction. Students internalise responsibility as an affect rather than a practice. This is ideological grooming: educators teach students not only what to think but how to feel about responsibility. Through such affective conditioning, business schools prepare students for institutional projects of existential irresponsibility in which responsibility is emotionally enacted but ethically empty and consequentially perverse.

Reform within these constraints remains elusive. As Ghoshal (2005) noted, destructive management theories persist not because of educator failure but because curricula privilege opportunism and shareholder primacy. Genuine change, as Leavitt (1989), Bennis and O’Toole (2005), and Mintzberg (2005) argue, demands reconfiguring the institutional incentives that reproduce inauthenticity. Yet the neglected pedagogical traditions of Follett and Barnard remind us that management education could be relational and ethical rather than instrumental. Framing pedagogical inauthenticity as ethical disavowal therefore clarifies that the challenge is not to add more responsible content, but to confront the structures that render responsibility performative. The next section examines how this structural inauthenticity sustains legitimacy at the institutional level.

Pedagogies of Existential Irresponsibility

Pedagogies of existential irresponsibility emerge when symbolic practices of responsibility are institutionalised and scaled, teaching that legitimacy and compliance matter more than transformation. What begins in classrooms as discursive and affective training reappears institutionally through accreditation, governance, and reputation systems. Business schools thereby model that symbolic gestures can substitute for ethical engagement and that responsibility can be performed without consequence. Far from peripheral, these dynamics link pedagogy, curriculum, and governance to the imperatives of managerialism and capitalist accumulation.

At the institutional level, institutional leaders most visibly stage responsibility through sustainability rhetoric and accreditation regimes. Institutions reproduce the same case studies, reflexivity exercises, and sustainability projects that structure classrooms at scale as evidence of compliance, optimised for legitimacy rather than ethical change. As Shapiro Beigh (2025) and Pastier and Serhal (2025) demonstrate, sustainability and climate pedagogy often become audit rituals in which responsibility is equated with measurable standards and documentation. Czarnecka et al. (2025) extend this by showing how sustainability pledges are routinely decoupled from resourcing and assessment. Such institutional hypocrisy functions pedagogically: it trains students and faculty alike to equate rhetorical alignment with moral substance and to read performance as virtue.

This institutionalisation is not accidental but structural. The critiques excluded from curricula, concerning extraction, inequality, or ecological collapse, for example, re-emerge as organisational logics that schools themselves reproduce. Growth imperatives, reputational competition, and corporate capture leave little space for collective responsibility or epistemic dissent. Students thus learn resignation: that irresponsibility is inevitable, and that responsibility must coexist with accumulation. Bakan’s (2005) characterisation of the corporation as structurally irresponsible applies equally to business schools, which reproduce these pathologies through governance, accreditation, and curriculum design. The pedagogy of existential irresponsibility is therefore not a deviation from institutional purpose but its expression.

Through this architecture, narrowed knowledge, and inauthentic pedagogy consolidate into systemic functions of elite reproduction and managerialist orthodoxy. Students are instructed not only through syllabi but through institutional acts—rankings, accreditations, and sustainability reports—that together operate as tacit curricula. As Klikauer (2013) and Locke and Spender (2011) note, business schools remain embedded within neoliberal economies, translating ethical aspiration into instruments of legitimacy. This dynamic reflects what Pache and Santos (2010) describe as the reconciliation of conflicting institutional demands, where values of care and sustainability are subordinated to the pursuit of legitimacy. The result is epistemic narrowing: alternatives such as Ramos’s (1981) pluralistic organising, Laloux’s (2014) distributed authority, or the dialogic pedagogies of Dos Santos et al. (2024) are symbolically cited yet structurally excluded. De Sousa Santos (2014) reminds us that such exclusions constitute forms of epistemicide, erasing the knowledges and pedagogical traditions of the Global South that could ground more relational and justice-oriented education. The implicit lesson is that legitimacy depends on alignment with neoliberal order, and that responsibility is valid only when compatible with market logic. Ethical simulation thus operates as an institutional pedagogy, through which pedagogical and assessment practices teach students that responsibility is reputational performance.

Institutions thereby reframe responsibility as the reproduction of legitimacy amid crisis. Students internalise that ethics can coexist with harm so long as it enhances institutional standing. The longstanding critiques of Ghoshal (2005), Bennis and O’Toole (2005), and Mintzberg (2005) converge on this point: management education destroys its ethical intent by teaching responsibility as an instrument of power. The result is not moral apathy but learned complicity, a conviction that systemic harm is a condition of professionalism and competence.

The consequences are intergenerational. Each cohort inherits this architecture of simulation and transmits it forward through managerial practice, policy, and pedagogy. Business schools thus operate not only as sites of learning but as temporal mechanisms for reproducing ideological commitment across generations. Through these pedagogical and institutional practices, existential irresponsibility becomes a normalised feature of organisational life, sustaining the very conditions that make genuine sustainability impossible.

Adding ethics or sustainability content cannot disrupt reproduction when such content is absorbed into the mechanisms of legitimacy it seeks to challenge. As long as business schools remain bound to the logics of managerialism and accumulation, responsibility will continue to be staged rather than enacted. The task, therefore, is not only institutional but epistemic: to confront how business education itself teaches irresponsibility and to imagine pedagogical forms capable of resisting its reproduction at existential scale.

Implications for Curriculum, Pedagogy, Governance, and Student Futures

Reform within existing structures may prove inadequate, but outlining implications surfaces alternatives and clarifies what is at stake. Business schools must not avoid responsibility for the knowledge, practices, and subjectivities they reproduce. The following discussion considers implications for curriculum, pedagogy, governance, student futures, and leadership, because resisting ethical simulation and ideological grooming requires developing counter-managerialist competencies that business schools currently suppress. These commitments are not presented as idealised solutions, but as orienting practices that can inform everyday pedagogical judgement: how curricula are framed, which silences are named, how cases are contextualised, and how ethical tensions are discussed rather than resolved.

Central among these is conscientisation (Freire, 1973); the capacity to perceive and act upon structural and epistemic contradictions. Conscientisation is complemented by assumptional analysis (Meinong, 1983), deep inquiry leading to warranted assertibility (Dewey, 1938), and rhetorical and argumentation competencies that enable students to discern and challenge the ideological premises of managerialism (Corbett, 1990; Toulmin, 1958/2003). Such capacities cannot be cultivated through lecture-and-case pedagogies oriented to analytic performance, but require dialogical, relational, and participatory forms of organising and learning. These relational-critical capacities are foundational to any pedagogy seeking to move beyond simulation.

Curriculum: Confronting Incompleteness

The absence of systemic harm in core subjects like strategy, finance, and operations produces epistemic harm by translating violence into the language of ‘externalities’, a rhetorical device through which business execution and education redefines destruction as something incidental, unfortunate, and beyond its moral consequence and remit. What is endemic to accumulation is thus taught as exceptional, preserving the fiction of responsible management. Epistemic completeness does not require curricular expansion, but reframing: broadening epistemic range can be achieved by contextualising existing cases and theories within their social, ecological, and political consequences, juxtaposing dominant models with excluded alternatives, and naming what remains absent rather than attempting comprehensive coverage. This can often be achieved without adding new modules: brief contextual lectures alongside core theories, comparative readings that juxtapose dominant and marginalised perspectives, or assessment prompts that ask students to identify excluded stakeholders or consequences can broaden epistemic range while preserving curricular coherence. Direct violence (Galtung, 1969) and structural violence (Farmer, 2004; Roberts, 2008) manifest through consequences of corporate endeavour in the form of impoverishment, dispossession, and ecological destruction, yet these forms rarely figure within managerial analysis. Expanding curricula to include violence literacy would enable students to name, trace, and contest such harms rather than absorb euphemistic framings. Likewise, reintroducing neglected traditions of relational competence and cooperatives would resist the foreclosure enacted by managerialist orthodoxy. In this sense, curricular reform is less about content addition than about epistemic correction: revealing what has been systemically excluded and re-embedding responsibility as systemic awareness rather than elective add-on. In this respect, decolonising approaches concerned with recovering excluded knowledges and exposing the epistemic violence of neoliberal managerialism and its historical antecedents are well-suited to such transformation.

Pedagogy: From Performance to Authenticity and Care

Pedagogy too often stages responsibility as performance, training students to simulate ethicality rather than practice it. Moving beyond this requires pedagogies of authenticity that confront and explain rather than euphemise harm. Such pedagogy must engage directly with systemic violence through critical cases, situational testimonies from affected communities, and exercises in violence literacy that render visible what managerial discourse obscures. These interventions need not be extensive. They can include requiring students to trace social and ecological externalities alongside financial analysis in standard case discussions, integrating short counter-case materials from affected communities into existing sessions, or incorporating reflective assignments that explicitly analyse tensions between profitability and harm. They may also involve naming the harms occluded by managerial language, inviting students to examine how organisational decisions redistribute risk and suffering across people and ecologies, and resisting assessment framings that treat ethical damage as a neutral ‘externality’ or abstract dilemma.

Pedagogical honesty further entails openly discussing institutional constraints with students, acknowledging tensions between ethical aspiration and organisational realities, and modelling reflexive uncertainty rather than managerial certainty. Violence literacy can likewise be incorporated through exercises tracing supply-chain labour conditions, environmental externalities, or financial risk transfer within conventional business analytics teaching.

An ethic of care grounded in process-relational ontology underpins this shift. Organisations and subjects are constituted through relations across time and ecology, making responsibility relational rather than procedural. The ethic of care constitutes a distinct moral framework that foregrounds relationality, interdependence, vulnerability, and responsibility over abstract rules or outcomes. Emerging from feminist ethics, care theorists emphasise moral attention to concrete relations, situated judgement, and the maintenance of life-sustaining practices (Held, 2006; Mayeroff, 1971; Noddings, 2005). Ethics, in this tradition, is not a codified principle but an ongoing practice of attentiveness and response to others within asymmetric and often fragile relations. Within education and management contexts, an ethic of care has been linked to pedagogical responsibility, moral attentiveness, and resistance to instrumental rationality (Boice, 1996; Buttner, 2004; Burton & Dunn, 2005). Yet an ethics of care remains marginal within business ethics and management education, often acknowledged only tokenistically. Care ethics resists abstraction, auditability, and managerial control, making it difficult to translate into accreditation metrics or behavioural checklists. Its exclusion therefore aligns with ethical simulation, where responsibility is performed discursively while relational, embodied, and political obligations are systematically disavowed.

Authentic pedagogy therefore entails cultivating the capacity to dwell with what Rittel and Webber (1973) termed ‘wicked problems’: complex, interdependent, and morally fraught challenges that resist technical or procedural resolution. Contemporary management scholars extend this framing to sustainability and education: Ferraro et al. (2015) show how organisational paradoxes mirror wicked problems; Waddock (2013) argues that engaging them demands moral imagination and systems awareness; and Laasch et al. (2023) propose transformative learning approaches that acknowledge their irresolvable nature. Yet these problems are not merely complex; they are, in Morton’s (2013) sense, hyperobjects. These are phenomena in the production of which business plays a central role, such as climate collapse, ecological degradation, and existential crises that are so vast, distributed, and temporally entangled that they exceed human comprehension. In classroom terms, such realities surface when sustainability cases are treated as discrete managerial problems while their cumulative, irreversible, and intergenerational consequences remain analytically absent. Pedagogical authenticity thus requires attunement to both scales of responsibility: the lived immediacy of wicked problems and the planetary entanglement of hyperobjects. Responsibility, in this view, is not compliance with rules but sustained ethical engagement with uncertainty, consequence and interdependence; an ongoing practice oriented towards planetary care.

Governance: Incentives and Capture

Without structural reform, responsibility will remain simulated. Alternative models exist: Ramos (1981) imagined pluralist organisations, Laloux (2014) documents self-management, and recent work (Ammirato, 2024; Lavie, 2023) shows cooperatives confronting grand challenges. Yet elite capture (Whitehouse, 2017) undermines reform, ensuring governance remains aligned with managerialist reproduction. To avoid co-optation, governance must move beyond ceremonial adoption. This could include independent auditing of teaching claims, transparent metrics of curricular completeness, and sanctions for talk–action gaps—forms of accountability that resist organisational hypocrisy (Czarnecka et al., 2025).

Student Futures: Intergenerational Responsibility

Students are the primary conduits through which business schools reproduce logics across generations. Pedagogical inauthenticity and curricular omission ensure graduates inherit truncated vocabularies of responsibility, equipped to perform ethics but unable to imagine alternatives. This is not benign ignorance: it constitutes intergenerational harm reproduction. Planetary responsibility cannot be reduced to individual educator virtue or resolve: it is necessarily pursued under institutional constraint, where acts of disclosure, refusal, and re-framing remain partial and fragile, yet ethically significant precisely because they resist full incorporation into legitimacy performances. Hagglund’s (2019) notion of secular faith in shared flourishing offers a counter-ethos. Students can be equipped to challenge managerialism and capitalist extraction by engaging cooperative traditions (Restakis, 2010; Whyte & Whyte, 1991), relational competence, and violence literacy. Reimagining student futures demands epistemic completeness, pedagogical honesty, and planetary responsibility, otherwise, education becomes a mechanism for perpetuating harm. Students must learn not only how organisations succeed, but also how they destroy, and how alternative futures might be collectively imagined. They should understand the breadth of the project in which they are engaged, and business schools should be honest and authentic in explaining this dynamic.

Leadership: Conscientisation Across Levels

Finally, reform requires conscientisation of leadership. Faculty, deans, accreditation bodies, and disciplinary associations all play a role in sustaining or disrupting epistemic grooming. Freire’s (1973) concept of conscientisation underscores the necessity of cultivating critical awareness not just among students but within leadership strata. Institutional leaders must recognise their complicity in reproducing planetary harm and confront the capture of governance by rankings and donors, even if only to agentically fold such consciousness into performative responsibility actions. Disciplinary leaders can widen epistemic horizons to acknowledge critical, decolonial, and ecological perspectives. Even corporate partners engaged in curriculum design must be challenged to acknowledge the systemic violence of business. Conscientised leadership would shift responsibility from being staged as symbolic capital towards being exercised as institutional transformation. Without such shifts, reforms in curriculum, pedagogy, or student formation risk absorption into the very logics they contest. Such initiatives inevitably remain partial because educators operate within accreditation pressures, resource constraints, and institutional legitimacy regimes that limit transformative change.

Conclusion

This essay has advanced three normative commitments intended to reorient management education away from ethical simulation and towards substantive responsibility. Epistemic completeness calls for confronting curricular omissions by situating dominant managerial knowledge within its social, ecological, and political consequences, while recovering plural and relational alternatives marginalised by managerialist orthodoxy. Pedagogical honesty demands the cultivation of violence literacy: the capacity to name organisational harm, trace its distribution, and acknowledge the contradictions between ethical rhetoric and lived damage. Planetary responsibility extends this orientation to the intergenerational horizon, recognising that students are not merely learners but carriers of institutional vocabularies of responsibility into futures already shaped by ecological crisis.

These commitments systematise longstanding insights within critical management education scholarship regarding ethical simulation, ideological grooming, and the limits of reflexivity, ethics, and sustainability teaching under institutional constraint. They reaffirm that the challenge facing business schools is not a lack of ethical awareness or pedagogical goodwill, but the structural alignment of curricula and teaching practices with legitimacy, accumulation, and managerial control. The contribution of this essay lies in consolidating these insights into an integrated framework that clarifies how epistemic, pedagogical, and institutional dynamics jointly shape what responsibility can be known, taught, and enacted.

The implications are therefore not primarily technical, but institutional and epistemic. Orienting business education towards planetary responsibility cannot be achieved through additive reform alone, nor through the refinement of existing ethics and sustainability offerings. It requires sustained confrontation with the architectures that organise knowledge, shape pedagogy, and delimit what can be questioned within business schools. Whether such institutions can bear this confrontation remains uncertain. Yet recognising responsibility as a matter of truth-telling rather than performance marks a necessary beginning, one that repositions management education as a domain accountable for the futures it helps to reproduce.