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Abstract

What does it take for business schools to reconnect with new cohorts of students and their societal expectations? One of the myriad barriers that universities face when addressing such a conundrum is widely given by a hidden – in plain sight – part of the educational curriculum: the principle of secularism adopted decades ago as a precondition of Western modernisation. We do not argue in favour of the adoption of religious forms of education or the design of religious-oriented curricula. Our argument is that within religious philosophies lies a rich inventory of knowledge that connects with millions of religious and non-religious people who are members of a diverse range of societies, organisations and businesses. We propose that a better integrated approach to business students’ development could draw from more human-centred methods of pedagogical design to which the concept of eudaemonia – what motivates people’s hearts and minds – is closely connected. This is particularly salient if we consider the enormous influence that business programmes have globally. This article contributes to the extant literature on business education and management learning by establishing clearer links and theoretical reflections between myriad scholarships concerned with addressing business schools’ connections with new cohorts of students in increasingly diverse societies.

Keywords

Business education decolonisation eudaemonic well-being hidden curriculum religion and spirituality

Every year, thousands of business students around the world enrol in programmes to enhance their understanding of subjects such as ethics, social responsibility, diversity and sustainability (Friedland and Jain, 2022). The addition of such subjects to formal business curricula reflects a growing preoccupation with providing businesses with an informed and more socially conscious managerial and technical workforce (Tormo-Carbó et al., 2018; Wang and Calvano, 2015). Interestingly, evidence suggests that often, such programmes fail to connect with students’ and societal aspirations (Saunders et al., 2022; Tormo-Carbó et al., 2019).

Rapid societal changes have forced countries in the West, their institutions and organisations to reimagine the core foundations upon which they operate in the face of more intricate identities, societal expectations, technologies and environmental concerns (Kirmayer, 2019; Murdock, 2016). To many, these are intrinsic components of a postmodern era; yet business programmes and schools have been relatively slower in reinventing themselves in light of this new reality (Bratianu et al., 2020; Crane et al., 2016; Miotto et al., 2019).

What does it take for business schools to reconnect with new cohorts of students and their societal expectations? In this article, we argue that one of the myriad barriers that universities face when addressing such a conundrum is widely given by a hidden – in plain sight – part of the educational curriculum: the principle of secularism adopted decades ago as a precondition of a Western modernisation project. We do not argue in favour of the adoption of religious forms of education or the design of religious-oriented curricula. As we will argue in this article, within religious philosophies, a term which we use in its broadest sense, lies a rich inventory of knowledge that connects with millions of religious and non-religious people who are members of a diverse range of societies, organisations and businesses.

It is interesting to see how business leaders often feel inspired to talk about the many spiritual syncretisms achieved throughout their careers. From the amalgamation of clear Judeo–Christian values to the more intricate embedding of these and Buddhist, Hindu and Indigenous spiritual philosophies, business leaders seem to be eager to share how they have crafted unique spiritual compasses to conduct their business responsibly in numerous conferences, autobiographies and news pieces. Yet, similar discussions about how such inventories could help important societal issues are constantly excluded from formal business programmes.

Probably more interesting is the fact that while our business schools are becoming increasingly diverse, we still haven’t been able to design and deliver programmes that connect with core components of people’s identities. Across the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – just to mention some – thousands of students and academics wearing hijabs, turbans and yarmulkes attend business programmes, laboratories and retreats every day. A solid body of evidence has shown that life in an imagined secular space is far from easy for many of them. Furthermore, if we accept the long-held premise that Western secularism is not truly devoid but a new, more nuanced, articulation of Christianity, one can raise the question of whether other voices should be heard when addressing important societal issues in our classrooms.

In this context, we propose that a better integrated approach to business students’ development could draw from more human-centred methods of pedagogical design to which the concept of eudaemonia – what motivates people’s hearts and minds – is closely connected. This is particularly salient if we consider the enormous influence that business programmes have globally. This article contributes to the extant literature on business education and management learning by establishing clearer links and theoretical reflections between myriad scholarships concerned with addressing business schools’ connections with new cohorts of students in increasingly diverse societies. As observed by Parker (2018), most business schools exist as parts of universities; therefore, a broader principle of societal good should be widely ingrained in their programmes. Parker (2018) provocatively asks: Why, then, do we assume that business degrees should only teach one form of organisation – capitalism – as if that were the only way in which human life can be arranged? (p. viii).

We take this provocation and use it as a starting point to reflect on how a religiously neutral educational space was created, what are its cultural connotations, its semiotic elasticity, its hidden curricula, its colonial connotations and, more importantly, how all these bear consequences to the integration of alternative views of common good rooted in religious knowledge and philosophies. This is particularly salient considering that in philosophical Aristotelian–Thomistic tradition, the common good is defined as a set of conditions that favour both the pursuit of a community good and the personal fulfilment of each member of the community (Frémeaux, 2020). From there, we briefly discuss how nuanced forms of exclusion are shaped in this neutral space and what hidden transcripts are used by students and academics at the centre of such exclusion to help them navigate a business education. Finally, we explore the concepts of eudaemonia and eudaemonic well-being as an alternative to shape a more inclusive type of educational experience that benefits not only students with clear religious identities but the overall academic community.

The architecture of the neutral space: a secular business education

An almost commonsensical premise behind modernisation theories is that religion has been a historical burden to the ‘civilised’ world, some sort of unwashed legacy upon which multiple forms of exclusion have and are still justified as a means of control of the poor and uneducated (Bruce, 2002; Marx, 1978). From this perspective, religions are perceived as the creed of the savage, one that is tainted by ancient forms of superstition and irrationality, encompassed in disguised forms of the sacred and the divine. Such forms encompass not just philosophical assemblages of spiritual knowledge but the embodiment of faith in people’s expressions of everyday life. This broader construal of religion is what we refer to in this article.

One key element of modernisation theories is the widely held notion that with economic development and education, people would move away from religion as they reap the benefits of progress embedded in truthful, scientific and, therefore, universal knowledge. Such theories are based on a set of assumptions about religion, and, as observed by Deo (2020), over time, they have all turned out to be false.

In the 20th century, the term ‘secular’ was adopted in a polysemic fashion. It had numerous facets for many different people, yet it was cohesive enough to provide a ‘universal’ view of an expected sense of neutrality in how the state was to conduct its affairs. As observed by Balboni and Clements (2022), modernisation involved articulating an ostensible architecture of neutrality ingrained in a set of ‘alleged’ universal meanings of a postcolonial nature, of which secularism was a core one. In this context, neutral spaces – free of tradition, subjectivity and irrationality – were to become indispensable to modernisation. This need for neutrality led to the privatisation of religion – its confinement to private spaces –in a relatively stable and non-plural religious West during the 20th century, followed by a decline in religiosity (Asad, 2003). This linear process was historically contingent, but because of European colonialism and its concomitant production of social scientific knowledge, it became the ‘normal’ progression that all societies were expected to follow (Deo, 2020).

Western universities, in general, and business and economic programmes, in particular, played a pivotal role in such a modernisation project. Theirs was a quest to integrate the knowledge and the values of modernity and put them to use to tear down the walls of ignorance and impoverishment around the world. As Sommerville (2006) argues, universities ‘had a civilising mission’, one that required a novel assortment of values, beliefs and expected behaviours. This perfect bundle of attributes required the articulation of a neutral educational arena, a place where people – regardless of who they were before – could join a community of knowledge free of religion and its inconveniencies. In other words, a neutral space.

It is within such space that myriad educational curricula have been developed over the past decades. An educational curriculum is defined as an explicit, conscious, formally planned course with specific objectives (Kentli, 2009). Next to this lies an informal or hidden curriculum, a series of unspoken or implicit values, behaviours, procedures and norms overwhelmingly present in all educational settings. Such a rich inventory of attributes is, in itself, a complex system of signification that incentivises and enforces certain behavioural patterns, professional standards and social beliefs while navigating a learning environment (Miller and Seller, 1990). Building up on this, Giroux (2001) describes the hidden curriculum as norms and principles experienced by students throughout their education life. Furthermore, as argued by Margolis (2001), a hidden curriculum is the reproduction of schooling that enables us to understand schools’ hegemonic function that maintains the power of the state. Here, it is worth noting that if Western notions of modernisation were to be developed as the official vehicle of progress, secular education was to be one of the wheels of this official carriage.

Understanding educational settings as a complex system of signification, its curricula as its official transcript and its hidden curriculum and transcripts as the unofficial – sometimes unperceived – set of incentives to navigate the system in a particular way creates fertile ground to understand life in the neutral space. Furthermore, it positions the space within a broader circle of shared intelligibility with enough plasticity and elasticity to visualise symbolic interaction and its expected limits. This is concomitant with contemporary accounts in the fields of cultural, political and organisational anthropology.

Is the neutral space really neutral?

While modernisation and secularisation theories found echoes across academic disciplines in a stable way during a big part of the 20th century, their popularity started to erode in the face of alternative scholarships of more critical reflection such as feminism, colonialism and identity politics. Numerous authors in these realms have argued that secularism was never the neutral ground it claimed to be, but a Western construal of Christendom articulating a global binary normative of cosmological views leading to a new form of colonialism (Asad, 2003; Josephson-Storm, 2018; Mahmood, 2005).

In his influential work ‘The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism’, Max Weber (2013) argued in favour of exploring a sociology of religion to gain further insights into the development of a market philosophy guided by concepts such as competition, individualism and business productivity. From this perspective, Weber brought to light a series of religious underpinnings hidden in plain sight within the societal norms and behaviours upon which capitalism developed. These usually are referred to as the Protestant ethic, and their residual effects continue to be hidden across business curricula. For instance, it has long been argued that the evolving path of Judeo–Christian faiths historically shaped core concepts of business and economics, resulting in our contemporary notions of business development, wages, corporate social responsibility, trade and working conditions (Atherton, 2010; Wilson, 1997).

Interestingly, when Western secularism is understood as a modern coded version of Christianity in general and Protestantism in particular, the hidden curriculum of business education moves from being a neutral space looking for equal outcomes of modernisation and turns into an even more uneven field to the pedagogical articulations of discourses and identities. Two elements are worth noting here. First, if business curricula indeed contain diluted articulations of Christianity, is it possible to do the same for values found in other religions? In other words, if the alleged neutrality of the space was able to build an architecture of morality, common good and ethics based on Christian religious beliefs but devoid of its dogmatic components, it would probably be just fair to look for alternatives to expand such views in a more inclusive way by bringing new religious philosophies into the mix.

Second, secularism, as a component of a hidden curriculum, materialises in a silent postcolonial script that students use to navigate their learning pathways. Such a script contains dozens of micro affirmations of Christian tradition that may not look much to the eye of the non-religious reader but are, in fact, hidden support structures for those looking to exercise their Christian religious beliefs. For instance, the neutral space is allegedly secular all year, except for important religious dates, such as Sundays, Easter and Christmas, in which Christian and non-Christian students and staff enjoy a ‘well-deserved break’ based on a religious calendar. How are these micro affirmations experienced in the face of more religiously diverse classrooms? Do they have the potential to create new forms of exclusion?

Religious life in the neutral space

Just like the official script of education contains discourses and spaces for micro affirmations of faith within religions, it also incorporates an invisible set of sanctions upon which exclusion is vividly experienced by thousands of academics and students pertaining to non-dominant religious groups. Such sanctions work fundamentally as micro and macro inequities and have increasingly been documented by academics over the past three decades. Data contained in this body of evidence are a rich testament to life in the neutral space. Just the names of some of these pieces provide the reader with a compelling case about meaningful symbolic interaction and power asymmetries between secular expectations and religious identities: ‘Unwanted sisters’ (Asmar et al., 2004), ‘Everyday discrimination’ (Hyers and Hyers, 2008), ‘Holding my breath’ (2011), ‘The forgotten minority’ (Bowman and Smedley, 2013), ‘Because I had a turban’ (Joshi, 2007), ‘A satisfied settling?’ (Islam et al., 2018) and ‘Pushed to the edge’ (Abbas et al., 2021) are just a subset of selected examples in a rich inventory of empirical evidence of religious exclusion in universities.

Overwhelmingly, this body of evidence unveils out-group stress, encounters with discrimination, reduced sentiments of belonging, assimilatory strategies to be accepted within the wider academic community, feelings of isolation and living under constant stereotype threat. Moreover, results seem to be significantly stable across regions in the Western world, with significant variations across specific religious groups. Somewhat unsurprisingly, narratives involving students and staff wearing visible religious signifiers (e.g. hijabs, kirpans and turbans) exceed those regarding other – easier to conceal – religious identities.

Interestingly, many of the accounts collected through this literature unveil subtle – yet constant – rather than rampant acts of exclusion against students and staff in university settings. A nuanced set of annotations to the official educational script shapes a hidden curriculum of expected secularity with an unbalanced set of rewards and penalties. Within this, a common assumption that religious identity can easily be put aside whenever entering the neutral space seems to be a common entry point of these narratives. This is a fundamental component of Christian tradition within the neutral space: the assumption that – like in the case of Western secularism – people from different religions should be equally able to compartmentalise their faith in public or private spheres of interaction. The recent debate over the use of hijab in some European countries is a good example of this assumption. Reflecting on this expected compartmentalisation, Nasir and Al-Amin (2006) mention:

Religion or spiritual faith and its enactment, is a central aspect of identity for many students – after all, religion not only defines us in terms of our participation in practices and membership in certain communities within the context of our societies, but it also defines us in relation to God and the universe. Sensitivity to this important aspect of the identities of people from all faith traditions will make college campuses less alienating places for them. (p. 23)

Human beings do not exist in a world of closed conceptual systems, doomed never to communicate. Postmodern reality is as much about self-awareness as it is about the co-creation of collective goodness in more power-balanced settings. Alienating people’s identities in classrooms is simply not an answer to the modernisation process any longer. Obvious exclusions based on religious signifiers are just the tip of the iceberg of a more complex – yet nuanced – process of alienation in the neutral space.

This recognition has resulted in the birth of a new post-secular perspective upon which education can reframe its secular expectations. To be post-secular is not to blindly embrace the dogmatic aspects of one or more religions but to disavow the normative project of alleged neutrality and to make policy with a consciousness of the historical legacy of that project (Deo, 2020). As eloquently stated by Smith and Whistler (2010):

The secular in the hands of Western powers becomes an imperialist weapon, for the secular is always already interpreted as a particularly Western and post-Christian secular, rather than anything approaching a generic secular that can be located equally in all religious traditions. (p. 16)

The displacement of worlds and identities within the postmodern world has made this weapon an inner instrument through which dominant groups create numerous forms of societal and educational alterity. Alterity can be corrected using a new educational view on that matter.

In writing about the need to build a more integral religious view in university education, Ward (2004) observes:

Of course, we have our own beliefs about whether there are ultimate goals and values, and if so, what they are. But those beliefs can change, and they are likely to be more informed the more we know about the beliefs of others on similar subjects. (p. 32)

Eudaemonic well-being: an alternative for a decolonised curriculum

A central implication of the post-secular discourse is its core rejection of colonialism and a consequent call to deconstruct and reconstruct myriad social spaces, including but not limited to academia and businesses. Balboni and Clements (2022) observe that a consequence of the alleged neutrality of Western concepts is how universal translations of a concept result in illusions of hetero-temporal horizons. From this perspective, neutrality is a sanitised solution in which diverse individuals – for example, students and staff or business owners and customers – mutate into a false universal – a postcolonial construal – that reproduces Eurocentric discourses and creates myriad forms of alterity.

Exploring such alterity from the lens of religious identities pushes researchers to understand the colonial legacy of secularism and the need to pave avenues to build a decolonised, more inclusive curriculum for current and future cohorts of students. Furthermore, it challenges pedagogical designers to reflect on how, in many cases, Western notions of privatisation and compartmentalisation of people’s faiths run the risk of reproducing colonial legacies rather than promoting new forms of cultural critique and intellectual emancipation (Mignolo, 2012).

Experiences of academic exclusion based on faith have numerous ramifications; clearly, these go beyond requests for tangible support structures to help people thrive in their careers (e.g. inclusive dress codes, peer-support groups, the existence of prayer rooms), and move to the core of what people feel in terms of their connection with the programmes they study and teach. For decades, universities and their business schools have been the target of criticism based not just on their ethos (Bennis and O’Toole, 2005; Fleming, 2021; Harley and Fleming, 2021; Khurana, 2010; Spicer et al., 2021) but also on the colonial nature of their curricula (Alvares and Faruqi, 2012; Mbembe, 2016; Mugobo, 2021; Shahjahan et al., 2022).

The term ‘decolonising the curriculum’ has gained global momentum over the past decade. It is commonly defined as ‘creating spaces and resources for a dialogue among all members of the university’ (Akhtar, 2022) and is seen as a way of moving beyond Eurocentric views of learning into a more reflective, inclusive and representative construal of diverse identities, geographies and realities. Decolonising the university curriculum, in general, and the business curriculum, in particular, involves a multi-epistemic literacy, pluralising and legitimising alternative knowledge, representations and life worlds (Mendes and Lau, 2022).

As observed by Shahjahan et al. (2022), when universal secularism is explored through the lens of decolonisation, the process means realigning and connecting their intellectual, physical, ethical and relational practices with one another. Here, the Western academy is seen as a site separating epistemology and ontology from religion, relationality, nature, wellness and local communities, thus countering cultural practices within the region (Alatas, 2012). Weaving inclusive and holistic connections across these factors should be central to decolonisation.

A recent turn to human-centred design to shape academic programmes provides a fertile ground for this quest. These new methods focus the lens on people’s feelings and motivations, making them the centre of a new type of pedagogy. Designing for an increasingly diverse future involves a deep understanding of who our staff and students are, what expectations they have in life and how their unique realities – including alterity experiences – shape their identities and expectations. Furthermore, questions of happiness and self-fulfilment provide pedagogic designers with a unique opportunity to imagine collective, decolonised and more inclusive spaces of discussion in which myriad views of religious- and not religious-oriented students and staff can coexist.

Motivation and happiness in the neutral space have been traditionally assessed through complex evaluative mechanisms to ‘objectively’ measure people’s well-being (Das et al., 2020). As currently understood, this approach has been influential in redesigning the periphery but not the core of the neutral space. It is through this approach that campus life is now ‘more inclusive’ of cultural and religious minorities through the creation of mentorship programmes, the awareness of dietary restrictions and the creation of praying spaces.

However, not everything in life can be expressed as hard facts, nor can happiness be totally targeted through the provision of ‘reasonable’ accommodations and awareness programmes. It is in this context that scholarly discussions of well-being are increasingly moving from a point where tangible aspects of health and physical well-being are premium to a place where alternative aspects of human complexity are acknowledged and valued (Atherton, 2010; Steedman, 2020; Uchida et al., 2015).

This human-centred approach to the study of well-being has been named subjective well-being, and it broadly encompasses how individuals feel, or think about, the desirability of their own lives based on the various positions and trajectories they transit across diverse socio-historical contexts (Diener, 2009; Merelo, 2019). From this vantage point, subjective well-being is associated with intangible components such as pursuing happiness, contributing to the common good, achieving life satisfaction and living according to one’s own values. All of these offer opportunities to create solid connections between the self, the spiritual, the religious and the collective in the broadest possible sense.

Fostering linkages between this new perspective on well-being and current business pedagogies would be a novel but promising alternative to reengineering the neutral space. Eudaemonic notions of well-being orient people’s aspirations of agency and provide individuals with a dynamic framework to guide and interpret one’s actions and those of others. Agency, in this context, denotes the freedom to act on behalf of what people value and has reason to value (Fischer, 2014).

The long-existing relationships between religion and well-being were notably recognised in 2011 when a group of theology scholars published the edited volume ‘The practice of happiness: political economy, religion and wellbeing’. In its introductory essay, Atherton (2010) observes how a renewed interest in both religion and well-being studies creates a promising environment to reconnect religion with contemporary disciplines equally concerned with the pursuit of happiness. To do so, religion needs to be addressed as an underpinning force diachronically and synchronically informing human relationships in sometimes hidden ways. Interestingly, many pieces in the aforementioned volume make salient arguments about how diverse religious beliefs go beyond traditional dogmatic perspectives and are still influential in the way in which both religious and non-religious people conceive the collective construction of the societal common good as a source of individual and collective well-being.

Such arguments are not entirely new. A few gleanings from practitioners of some of the non-Western religions are briefly alluded to as an aperitif of how deeply we as human beings emanate from faith, spirituality and religion. For example, in Zoroastrianism, well-being is harnessed through the totality of a person’s thoughts, words and deeds and when death calls one must pass over the ford of the accountant to register this totality (D Mistry, 2021, personal communication). Well-being in Hinduism (S Ramasami, 2021, personal communication) is defined from two standpoints – external and internal. External well-being involves the existence of a harmonious environment in the world outside, brought about by mutual efforts of individuals towards society. By each individual working selflessly for the benefit of others can bring about a state of societal harmony. However, external well-being isn’t adequate for an individual; an inner state of well-being is also needed. This is defined as the experience of an unsurpassed inner peace and joy arising in a mind which has been rendered quiet, free from passions and agitations upon recognition of the Truth. Seva (voluntary service), meditation and yoga practices can help to achieve holistic well-being of an individual and collectively as a community. From a Bahai standpoint, well-being is union of all peoples of the world with an emphasis on the spiritual side of human beings (S Mahon, 2021, personal communication).

Religion hence can not only permeate but shaped salient ontological attributes of societal life and provided these with a raison d’être in the broadest possible sense. For centuries, humans understood social relations not merely as a means of self-sustenance but as a central formulation through which individuals fulfilled moral understandings of the self, the community and the divine. Indeed, most sacred texts contain not just stories, proverbs and adages, but core components of modern social thought directly touching on community life.

Designing for the diverse future

Problems with connecting the eudaemonic needs of new cohorts of business students go well beyond superficial architectural challenges. As Dyck and Caza (2022) observe, contemporary business education tends to reinforce and support a long-held managerial ideology that puts profit generation as ‘the’ top priority of the discipline. Furthermore, introducing alternative approaches has proven difficult, especially when such alternatives attempt to challenge core ideological assumptions institutionally ingrained in business curricula and business education literature (Dyck and Caza, 2022; Ferraro et al., 2005; McLaren and Mills, 2010; Prichard, 2009).

From such a lens, business education may be perceived as a discipline designed exclusively for gaining theoretical knowledge and practical skills necessary to ‘succeed’ in business. The issue with such historic construal lies primarily in how ‘success’ is interpreted by the minds and hearts of generations still experiencing the residual effects of doctrines portraying profits as the utmost success indicator. Hidden assumptions of this sort do not make things easy when it comes to meeting the eudaemonic needs of contemporary students, increasingly aware and proud of their many identities, cosmologies and sense of commitment to their communities.

It is in this context that integrating spirituality and religion through eudaemonic well-being into the business curricula requires an integral and multifaceted approach to content planning, development and delivery. To do so, we draw from a series of synergetic propositions rooted in the work of scholars in critical management studies, social and ecological thought and positive organisation scholarship (e.g. Calma and Davies, 2021; Dyck and Caza, 2022; Meyer, 2018; Samra-Fredericks, 2003; Setó-Pamies and Papaoikonomou, 2016).

What this scholarship has in common are two fundamental propositions: (1) traditional business education needs to broaden its scope to accommodate alternative views and understandings of contemporary societal phenomena to equip future generations of students better, and (2) generative paradoxes informed by a variety of perspectives can result in alternative pedagogies better suited to assist students in grasping the complexity of societal issues and their effects on businesses.

Elaborating on this, a new, more eudaemonic type of pedagogy has the potential of harnessing business content in a more integral way by locating human existence at the centre of an informed debate regarding multiple and sometimes opposing perspectives of what needs to be done and why. This, in turn, facilitates not just shaping a broader perspective but also negotiating boundaries across concepts, thus enriching the overall learning experience (Banerjee, 2022). Moreover, scholars have argued in favour of enhancing students’ reflexivity through the creation of generative paradoxes where the conflict between tensions is harmonised to create an emergent power that stimulates innovative, mutually advantageous outcomes (Allen et al., 2019; Andriopoulos and Lewis, 2009).

A curricula design that puts eudaemonic well-being at the centre should be mindful of how all content connects with the minds and hearts of students. This can include interventions to build relational bridges between diverse religious and non-religious positions in the classroom, the development of a more open and religious-sensitive academic workforce, the support services offered to religious and non-religious students and, more importantly, the value that religious philosophies can bring to complex discussions of self-fulfilment, common good, ethics, inclusion, climate crisis and social responsibility. We see all these as areas of opportunity to collectively address an impending issue that still requires further research from a pedagogical perspective.

This does not come without risks or challenges. As recently argued by Banerjee, a decolonial perspective of business theory and learning should not aim to locate multiple contexts into a fictitious ‘holistic and valid’ black box.

Rather than attempt to subject all other worlds to the rules of a universalized Western world, a decolonial perspective asks us to imagine a ‘pluriverse’ – a world in which many worlds coexist and where everything is connected to everything else. (p. 1084)

Eudaemonic well-being has the potential to support the articulation of such a pluriversal universe.

Conclusion

Throughout this article, we have argued that our approach to educating students to live and act ethically needs to be addressed and assessed from a decolonised perspective based on the inclusion of more diverse and socially conscious societies. An increasingly rich scholarship suggests that new mechanisms to connect with students’ hearts and minds are needed to foster an ethical sense of business purpose, one that is consistent not just with people’s identities but with those of the people one interacts with in life, with the community one lives in and with the numerous positions and trajectories humans occupy in the complex process of living. Weaving eudaemonic well-being across the business education architecture is only one way to do so, but it is indeed a promising one. Furthermore, this approach is one that could help minimise the effects of a hidden script long ingrained in business curricula by reconnecting religion with complex subjects of analysis.

From this perspective, using eudaemonic well-being as a tool to decolonise the business curriculum should not be seen as a master plan. As stated by Jammulamadaka et al. (2021), there is no master key for such a task. Instead, decolonising should be seen as a diverse horizon of liberation of colonial subjects constructed by the colonial subjects themselves (Mignolo, 2018).

Our argument is concomitant with that of numerous scholars exploring how to reimagine and reinvent business schools and programmes by expanding their horizons beyond instrumental rationality (Kitchener and Delbridge, 2020), re-examining their contribution to businesses and societies (Pio et al., 2021; Pio and Merelo, 2022; Starkey and Thomas, 2019), reconnecting them with what motivates new generations of students (Felber, 2019) and reframing its responsibilities under the light of new identities and notions of social justice (Dar et al., 2021; Rumens, 2016; Vijay and Nair, 2022).

We acknowledge that there are clear and valid concerns about the reconnection between issues of religion with and within academic programmes, but our article is a call to address hidden transcripts openly and responsibly rather than perpetuating the existence of what is increasingly becoming an artificial ‘neutral space’. A space that seems unable to inspire and propel to action but also alarmingly creates more exclusive and, in many cases, unwholesome conceptions of what is good for students, businesses and societies. Indeed, neutral hearts do not make the world go around!

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Edwina Pio

Guillermo Merelo

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Do neutral hearts make the world go around? A eudaemonic turn in business curricula

Abstract

Keywords

The architecture of the neutral space: a secular business education

Is the neutral space really neutral?

Religious life in the neutral space

Eudaemonic well-being: an alternative for a decolonised curriculum

Designing for the diverse future

Conclusion

Footnotes

Funding

ORCID iDs

References