Infusing courageous love for universal dignity and environmental response- ability through management education and learning: Inspired By Freire’s dream

Abstract

Freire’s pedagogy is commonly applied to the education of those relegated to known dangerous socio-economic exploitation locally and globally. In contrast, we apply his concerns to ourselves as among the seemingly privileged humans on this Earth. Through this essay, we challenge uncritical assumptions embedded in the forms of The Global Market normalized (and only occasionally challenged) in much business school education. We personalize ‘The Global Market’ as a particular representation of ‘Moloch’, an ancient deity demanding human sacrifice. We depict ‘Democracy’ as Moloch’s Handmaiden. Informed by Freire’s emancipatory values, we offer a contribution to management education that is responsive to, responsible for and response-able in the realization of global justice exemplified in (but not unique to) the aspirations of the United Nations. We offer an interpretation of the radical ethics of Emanuel Levinas whose attention lies with those countless people he claims each of us to have responsibilities for. Applied to the field of management education, we reflect on whether the United Nations-led Principles for Responsible Management Education offer opportunities to progress Freire’s Pedagogy of Hope to enhance forms of management learning infused with courageous love for universal emancipation from Moloch’s harms, an emancipation we express as universal justice.

Introduction

Inequalities, injustices and exploitations within and across nations brought to light by global and local responses to COVID-19 are depicted by Barros et al. (2022: 1) as illuminating a pre-existing climate emergency and

widening socio-economic inequalities, polarization, systemic racism, misogyny, gender inequality and violence, erosion of democratic values and institutions, commodification and marketization of education and social life.

In this essay, we make explicit our position that the disturbing outcomes of contemporary globalization as depicted by Barros et al. (2022) are exacerbating personal fears, generating a rise in dangerous neo-nationalism, and intensifying contested regionalization. Authoritarian leaders are finding increasing populist favour in many places. The entanglement of state and corporate interests is intensifying. For all our concerns about capitalist/democratic integration, we are not suggesting a move to dictatorial political organization. Rather, we invite a creative rethink of a future yet unthought – or what Freire calls ‘an untested feasibility’ (Freire, 1994: 7–9) by an empowered, invigorated and visionary citizenry in which the education of managers and Management Learning has a part to play.

In the realms of management education, increasing attention is being given to aspects of social and environmental dynamics that once received only limited recognition, largely from those in the critical subgroups of the Academy of Management. To illustrate this increasing mainstreaming of concerns, we take as our example the uptake of the United Nations (UN) Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME), a response to the perhaps still embryonic and thus fragile UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that have their roots in the UN Global Compact (UNGC). Our focus on the dangerous dimensions of the status quo brings our focus on Freire’s work to the heart of our profession. In contrast to more common applications of Freire’s pedagogy to those relegated to the periphery of any regime, we apply his concerns to ourselves as among the seemingly privileged of the world. Through this essay we challenge uncritical assumptions embedded in the forms of The Global Market normalized (and only occasionally challenged) in much business school education. Our focus in this essay is to provide an application of Freire’s work to strengthen the emancipatory potential of the UN and of Management Learning as avenues for a pedagogy that opens the way to the realization of a just form of human organization and restorative relationship between people and planet.

Situating ourselves

Consistent with an understanding of the state of the world as presented by Barros et al. (2022), and with an eye to the SDGs as among the UN’s instruments for global transformation, we take our position with Secretary General António Guterres in his address to the 2021 SDG Moment Event. Guterres (2021) states,

Our world is challenged as never before. Putting the SDGs further out of reach. It would be easy to lose hope. But we are not hopeless, or helpless – we have a path to recovery . . .

We ask, however, if advocacy for a path of ‘recovery’ indicates a call on a romantic notion of a past world where western ideas of justice were made unproblematically paramount. A Freirean mode of decolonizing education in this regard may include a critical review of the interest-protecting political boundaries imposed particularly post-World War Two (WW2) benefitting disproportionately various populations. Such a review could also explore the leadership of the UN as a vanguard in promulgation of Keynesian governance for the restoration of war-torn nations and the upskilling of impoverished populations, followed by its part in the imposition of neoliberal economics globally from the late 1970s when the conditions of the state of the world depicted by Barros et al. (2022) were sown. Undertaking such reviews may provide a more credible idea of ourselves as justice-serving people (Humphries-Kil, 2019; Verbos and Humphries, 2014). We posit that management education, if at all focused on justice, generally promulgates the idea that justice is to be technically served through market mechanisms and the graduates of management education will apply these mechanisms regardless of their outcomes. Reflecting on our interpretation of western liberalism, and notwithstanding Barros et al.’s recognition of the oppressions to be addressed, Freire’s potential to awaken us to our part in the unjust and dangerous outcomes of contemporary human organization and its management is the focus of this essay.

We suggest that there are deep contradictions in much that is taken for granted in management education. A Freirean contribution to management learning and education, we propose, enables the exposure (Freire’s notion of ‘unveiling’) and transformation (Freire’s notion of ‘praxis’) of these contradictions. Tolerance of such contradictions continues to limit the necessary responses to transform ‘the state of the world’ as described by Barros et al. (2022) to one of universal justice, or what Paulo Freire might call a ‘dream’. We name our dream the infusion of management education with courageous love for universal human dignity and environmental response-ability as justice. We use the concept of ‘response-ability’ as it is a crucial distinction pertinent to ‘capacity building’ – an ability/capacity to be responsible. According to Higgins (2021: 53), ‘even well-intentioned forms of responsibility are often and inadvertently overcoded by the (neo-)colonial logics that it sets out to refuse and resist: responsibility and the ability to respond are often not one and the same’.

As authors, we have over 30 years of engagement with the work of Freire in the context of both formal management education and community activism. We posit that our collective efforts as members of the Management Learning community have contributed only a limited (and perhaps limiting) impact on the current generation of managers as leaders and citizens in the face of dangerous and unjust inequities. Our dream is to contribute to a management education that generates persons able to manifest ‘a more just society’ within and across nations or globally. We call on Freire’s ideas of a critical hope to encourage faith that a better future is possible, a future worth struggling for (Freire, 1994: 7–11). We thus present our essay in four parts to explore the potential of Freire’s insights for a management education responsive to, responsible for and response-able in transforming a world impacted by COVID-19 and long-embedded inequalities, injustices and exploitations this pandemic brought to light.

The layout of our essay

In Part 1 of this essay, we contrast a nightmare and a dream. We align ourselves with ‘the state of the world’ as depicted by Barros et al. (2022) and with what Goodman (2022: 8) provocatively calls ‘The Cosmic Lie’. We do this to set in place our understanding of the hegemonic influence of that Lie. We call this lie a nightmare and contrast it with Freire’s notion of a ‘dream’, an ‘untested feasibility’ that Freire posits as a future worth struggling for (Freire, 1994: 7–9). To collate our alignments, we have adapted a depiction of Moloch the Tyrant in mythology and theology. Moloch demands fealty to the point of human sacrifice. Moloch is thus ¹ characterized as the tyrannical control of ‘The Global Market’ on human consciousness and conscience. This ‘Market’ itself is a reification, or what Freire might call a concretization, obfuscating the interests of a few and to ensure a generalized tolerance of, or a deflection from, the suffering of many. We suggest that Moloch’s monstrous demands are cloaked with the notion of a seemingly emancipatory governance (Democracy), but a governance however that has not stemmed the flow of suffering to meet Moloch’s demands.

In Part 2, we attend to what Freire (1994) calls ‘obstacles’ to the achievement of a ‘dream’. Here we set in place a discussion of Freire’s notions of consciousness and the potential of responsive, responsible and what we articulate as response-able voices in management learning to undergird calls for reflexivity and praxis in our diverse realms of influence. To this end, in Part 3, we introduce our reflections on the realization of our dream encouraged by Freire’s notion of a critical hope and his faith in Love. As most pertinent to the Management Learning community, we explore the UN’ promulgation of the PRME with their roots in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the UNGC, and the SDGs. Louw (2015) suggests that from a critical management educational perspective the PRME (and we suggest the UNGC and SDGs), as currently conceived and enacted, have a very limited capacity to challenge the dominance of corporate interests and values within management education discourse. We do not intend for this essay to be a detailed analysis of the current actions undertaken under the auspices of the PRME. Rather, we provide an analysis by which teachers and students of management might respond in a form of intellectual activism in the way Contu (2020) suggests; a critical performativity to help scholars makes a difference in the world.

Our essay concludes in Part 4, summarizing our contribution to the call to decolonize our minds and our institutions, and for an activist pedagogy as praxis generating enlarged consciousness and the courage to love justice in the realms of Management Learning and beyond (Jamil et al., 2022).

Part 1: a nightmare and a dream

To set the scene for our call for a more courageous management education, we align the creation of ‘the state of the world’ depicted by Barros et al. (2022) with what Goodman (2022: 8) provocatively calls ‘The Cosmic Lie’, and with our own understanding of the hegemonic influence of that lie. We call this lie a nightmare; a nightmare we frame as a socialized subjugation of the functionaries who serve Moloch – a personification of a monstrous system fuelled by human sacrifice. We contrast this nightmare with Freire’s notion of a ‘dream’, a ‘utopia’ of human freedom and universal justice, a ‘dream’, an ‘untested feasibility’ that Freire posits as a future worth struggling for (Freire, 1994: 7–9).

The ‘nightmare’: a snapshot in time of the cosmic lie

‘The [Global] Market’ is the integrated capitalist/democratic regime we personify as Moloch. This regime is unveiled by Goodman (2022) as a cloak of vested interests at play in the context of societies that promote (even impose on others) capitalist/democratic values enticingly depicted as a meritocracy. This meritocracy is presented as a doctrine of ‘equal opportunity’ (EO) that vindicates unequal outcomes. This regime normalizes an alluring, yet demonstrably bogus idea woven into the neoliberal version of capitalism, that cutting taxes and deregulating markets will ‘trickle the benefits down to the lucky masses’, something that has according to Goodman, ‘in reality, happened zero times’ (2022: 8). As well as the many marginalized Freire was concerned with, many of Moloch’s once most ‘secure(d)’ functionaries are now also made vulnerable. Numerous individual lives are impoverished, or even extinguished through growing inaccessibility to the necessities of life.

Ahmed et al. (2022: 6) estimate that 263 million people will have been pushed into extreme levels of poverty through endemic global inequality intensified by COVID-19, including a maldistribution of medical-related goods and services, and rising food prices exacerbated by the war in Ukraine and by climate change exacerbating drought and flood-related deprivations. In this time, the ‘wealth of the world’s ten wealthiest men has doubled, while 99 percent of humanity’s incomes have decreased as a result of Covid-19’ (Ahmed et al., 2022: 6). They report that there were 573 more billionaires in the world by March 2022 than when this pandemic began. Forty of those billionaires profited from the monopolies of their companies over vaccines, treatments, test instruments and personal protective equipment. Chancel et al. (2022: 3) report that ‘the richest 10% of the world population now controls 76% of wealth, while the poorest half owns less than 1%’. Goodman’s focus on the long history of inequality in the United States affirms this pattern of opportunity and harm is not only attributable to COVID-19. In the past 40 years, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans ‘gained a collective $21 trillion in wealth . . . [while] the bottom half have seen their fortunes diminish by $900billion’ (Goodman 2022: 12). Goodman writes that ‘The Cosmic Lie’ promulgated by ‘Davos Man’ (the personification of those elites and their handmaidens) is a nightmare for those who are exploited, marginalized and harmed by their attempts to engage with it, or who are systemically excluded from its purported opportunities, in part by [purportedly] warping the workings of democracy (Goodman, 2022: 8). Tolerance of this state of the world is our nightmare. Nevertheless, even where our intolerance of this tolerance is shared, its potential transformation is not seen in the same way by all commentators.

For some social and political thinkers, such as Stiglitz (2012, 2015) and Piketty (2014), growing inequality suggests a systemic failure that may harbour diverse moral concerns and may generate fears for political and social destabilization. From another point of view such inequality is not an indicator of system failure so long as the obstacles to opportunities and explicit corruption are not demonstrably at play. Rather, from this latter point of view especially, the egalitarian positions (Cohen, 1989; Dworkin, 1981), any inequality generated from a system deemed fair is an indication that the entwined concepts of justice (as Equal Opportunity) and meritocracy (as just rewards or exclusions based on effort) are working well together as intended. For those most convinced of this latter view economic inequalities (and their outcomes) merely represent the out-workings of markets enabled by states. These outcomes will correct themselves eventually if they are left to do so. Our position in this essay is that this latter view is not credible. More radically expressed, in this essay we concur with Goodman’s dramatization of this view as a cosmic lie. We draw together ‘The Cosmic Lie’ Goodman sets out to unveil and Freire’s notions of dreams and nightmares. The neoliberal regime is posited by us as a nightmare incarnated through layers of subjugation, subservience, and selective privileging that enables corporate capitalists favouring globalization to harness democracy to its service. It is Freire’s notion of The Dream that inspires us as we explore the potential of the UN’s influence of the future, specifically channelled through the PRME.

The UN is an institution that influenced two significant and contrasting waves of global policy directives post-WW2 in its commitment to both democracy and capitalism. Humphries-Kil (2019) describes the first wave of influence as a post-war remediation of destroyed infrastructure and livelihoods with state support of citizens through attention to the conditions of employment and the provision of many social services. The second wave, gathering force from the late 1970s, is the neoliberal wave described more fully by Stiglitz (2015). The influence of this wave, despite growing critique (Monbiot, 2022; Stiglitz, 2012, 2019), is still serving exponentially a small group of now global elites. Their privilege has rested on a domesticated, hegemonically controlled citizenship and on servant classes kept passive with real, imagined or hoped-for rewards for their fealty. We posit that the second wave encompasses an intensified fealty to be pledged to Moloch, hidden in a seemingly emancipatory and justice rhetoric.

We present the regime of Moloch as our nightmare, a nightmare cloaked in deceptions. We do so to emphasize the genealogy of humanly invented values made seemingly concrete, nigh naturalized as a necessary order. This order of ideas is materialized in part through the incarnation of casts of characters that instantiate the order. Most humans are not the emancipated agents of so-called western meritocracies, so often contrasted with the oppressed populations of dictatorships that Freire’s work is perhaps most known for. It is a view opened for consideration through Freire’s Pedagogy of Hope.

Pedagogy of hope: democracy as (delusional) dream

Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving the Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 1994) is the sequel to Freire’s early work with those people he understood as ‘the Oppressed’ in the context of Brazil in the 1970s. On its publication, a friend challenged Freire: ‘But Paul . . . a Pedagogy of Hope in the shameless hellhole of corruption like the one strangling us in Brazil today?’ (Freire, 1994: 8). To this Freire (1994) replies,

. . . the ‘democratization’ of the shameless and the corruption that is gaining the upper hand in our country, contempt for the common good, and crimes that go unpunished have only broadened and deepened as the nation has begun to rise up in protest . . .. (p. 8)

Freire’s response to the challenge made by his friend reverberates in our reflection as we respond to ‘the state of the world’ being realized today. We focus on the complexity of the seemingly shameless maldistribution of necessities for life and the deflection of collective duty to care for the common good, a deflection that serves to normalize a doctrine of radically individualized human rights to compete for the necessities of life in Moloch’s realm. This shameless normalization is made actual through the shallow doctrine of meritocracy that is woven into Moloch’s imaginary cloak of universal justice through the [supposed] EO to compete for limited resources. This is the pivot we make to move from Freire’s original community of concern to our application of his thinking to a wider global population in service to Moloch, a willing, unconscious or enforced service enabled by an unfulfilled potential of Democracy as His ‘Handmaiden’. But even Handmaidens need layers of servants to fulfil their functions. The specific layers of servants in our focus include those who promulgate uncritically the dominant form of Management Education that contributes to the shaping of the governors, managers, consultants, researchers, teachers, consumers and students who will serve Moloch. Service to this tyrant is a significant contradiction to the emancipatory ideals of the UN. The UN as an institution, can only have the meaning and value humans vest in it. The same applies to the institutions we call Democracy, The State, or Capitalism. Through their particular construction (or what Freire migh call their specific ‘concretization’) these institutions can be made accountable for the outcomes we demand of them.

Contradictions in the state of the world

Deetz (1992: 21) notes the contradictions ‘that arise when strong authoritarian powers like the multinationals are allowed to exist in democratic states obliging governments to be more responsive to corporate interest than to those people who elected them’. More than two decades ago, Morgan (1986, cited in Deetz, 1992) wrote,

Many organizations are larger and more powerful than nation states; but, unlike nation states, they are not accountable to anyone but themselves . . . their foreign subsidiaries being tightly controlled through policies, rules, and regulations set by headquarters . . . The resources of the multinationals are usually managed in a way that creates dependency rather than local autonomy. (Deetz, 1992: 18–19)

Deetz posits that throughout the 20th century, the modern corporation has come to dominate practically every aspect of contemporary society, including the state, the educational system, the media and the family. Our daily lives have become increasingly colonized by a managerial ethos that is fundamentally at odds with concurrently espoused core democratic principles. While modern corporations offer opportunity and financial reward for some (perhaps many), their unmediated, distorted growth has had considerable ecological and human costs. He concludes that any conception of politics that restricts political analysis to governance by the state misses the operant politics of modern global society. The trend towards an invisible regulatory mechanism and corporate-run public decision-making seems clear (Deetz, 1992: 7–36).

In a similar perspective to that offered by Deetz, Korten (2015a) stresses that power has shifted away from governments responsible for the public towards a handful of corporations and financial institutions that are driven by a single imperative – the pursuit of short-term financial gain. Korten calls the imposition of the system-endorsing regulatory mechanisms ‘the ultimate tyranny’ (2015a: 20). In contrast to overt dictatorships, however, such corporate systems of control are more subtle and mostly invisible: ‘Those it enslaves, though they may live in desperation, may be unaware of the true nature and cause of their condition and even believe themselves to be free’ (Korten, 2015a: 22). Moloch’s rule as hegemonic control, we posit, is the result of a convergence of ideological, political, and technological forces behind a specific process of economic globalization.

We comply because the public culture cultivated by the corporate media, educational institutions, and even some religious institutions condition us to equate money with wealth and the making of money with wealth creation. Thus, we accept the fiction that a growing gross domestic product (GDP) means that corporate rule is making us richer as a society, ignoring its destruction of the real wealth on which our health and well-being ultimately depend. (Korten, 2015a: 21)

Where companies are allowed to be more powerful than countries, where investors may be reassured of the primacy of their personal economic interests taken into the hands of such company executives, citizens should be wary. It is, however, a wary-ness difficult to grapple with when one’s very survival is woven into the supposed efficacy of this regime and one’s personal circumstances are assessed according to one’s assumed commitment to it.

Moloch has been adept at harnessing the fealty of His Household to satiate His appetite. He demands members of His Household, mandated through their various layers of duty, to feed him human sacrifices. Some members of His Household may well be aware that they themselves could become an item on Moloch’s menu at any time. The Corporation, Moloch’s avatar, now purports to provide the opportunity not only for the provision of the material necessities of compliant Household members, but also for the enhancement of the body, mind and soul of His subjects through its supposed emancipatory potential. Where there is undeniable suffering, He offers philanthropic assistance to projects He deems worthy – further embedding the imaginary of a Benevolent Emperor not often seen for His naked greed.

This depiction of the world as Moloch’s Empire is posited as our nightmare. We next contrast this nightmare with a reflection on our dream, a dream that brings our attention back to the influence of Freire on our efforts as authors, researchers and teachers in the disciplines of management education.

The ‘dream’: Freire’s critical conscience and consciousness raising

Freire depicts a world worth struggling for as a ‘utopia’ that ‘will come once those who make their own history wish it so’ (1994: 205). For the possibility of engaging such a will, Freire proposes that ‘human beings, as beings endowed with consciousness, have at least some awareness of their conditioning and [thus specific constraints on their] freedom’ (1994: 205). Such individuals may meet with obstacles to their actual freedom through what Freire calls ‘limit situations’. These situations ‘prohibit the majority from realizing the humanization and concretization of ser-mais, of being-in-a-larger way, being more so’ (1994: 207). In contrast, he posits, persons who nurture a critical consciousness can take distance from that which unsettles them. They can turn an uncovered actuality into a problem-topic that, through the fierce struggle of dialogical actions (Freire, 1994: 8–9), can be confronted and overcome. Thus ‘the dream can become reality’ (1994: 206).

Freire’s notion of critical consciousness is intended to break the ‘culture of silence’ he posits to be infused into the demeaner of oppressed people. This aspect of his work avoids a depiction of oppressed people as ‘dupes’. They know of their oppression. Thus, Freire offers a way of ‘unveiling’ that which is already known/real to the inquirer but that may not be easily seen in its detail, let alone spoken about. In that context, an ‘educational practice of a progressive option will never be anything but an adventure in unveiling’ (1994: 7).

In a similar way, we draw Freire’s work closer to attention on ourselves: those of us who would be people of justice, but who seem systemically constrained to make effective changes in the world that would relieve the suffering of people and planet and liberate us from those compliances which implicate us in the suffering of others and in the diminishing of our emancipatory ideals for others and ourselves. For this orientation to Freire, we progress with the guiding wisdom of Lila Watson (2004),

if you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is tied up with mine, then let us work together.

In the following sections of this essay, we follow Freire to assert that the purpose of the unveiling of harm, exploitation and oppression is to change such situations. The authenticity of consciousness raising (bringing to greater awareness) ‘is at hand only when the practice of the revelation of reality constitutes a dynamic and dialectical unity with the practice of transformation of reality’ (Freire, 1994: 102–103). To engage with this orientation in Management Learning we infuse in our work the term ‘ako’ (New Zealand Ministry of Education, 2014), a term borrowed from indigenous pedagogy in Aotearoa inviting teachers and students to be equally engaged in inquiry – an orientation to Management Learning we invoke in this essay.

Part 2: unveiling obstacles to the realization of the dream

Freire’s notions of consciousness and the potential of responsive, responsible and response-able voices in management learning undergird our call in this essay. We focus on what Freire calls ‘limit situations’, situations that ‘imply the existence of men and women . . . whose affairs are “denied” and “curbed”, [i.e.] the oppressed’ (Freire, 1994: 206). Such limit situations may be perceived by the oppressed as obstacles

1. that cannot be removed;

2. they do not wish to remove;

3. they know exist and need to be broken through [and such persons] devote themselves to overcoming them (Ana Maria Freire cited in Notes to Freire, 1994: 205).

Freire’s emancipatory aspirations carry reverberations of a mentality that deflects persons from articulating the oppression they may be aware of or not in their own social, political or economic circumstances. In this essay, we focus on persons who are devoted to overcoming limit situations, those who feel themselves challenged to solve the problems of the society in which they live. We include ourselves as activist teachers with a Freirean orientation to our work. We thus progress the essay using ‘we’ as positioning ourselves as part of the community of readers we consider our peers. We, as individuals or a community in the Academy of Management, may or may not perceive our own precarious tenure in Moloch’s Household. Within the auspices of the capitalist/democratic regime, we may or may not conceive of ourselves as perhaps both oppressor and oppressed, as both powerless and powerful, or as necessarily accountable for deeply engrained injustices that harm ourselves and others.

Freire draws our attention to the need for a critical consideration of a personal consciousness that may ignore, hide, deflect attention from, or diminish the severity of diverse oppressions so we may absolve ourselves from responsibility for systemic transformation. Avoidance of such self-reflection inhibits a consciousness that has the potential to redress both the oppressions experienced by others and ourselves, and our part in their perpetuation. Following this line of thinking capitalism, particularly in its neoliberal form, purports to be the champion of freedom. Such freedom is to be achieved through opportunities provided by state sanctioned mechanisms for the coordination of material production and consumption. In democratically orientated jurisdictions such mechanisms must be available to all equally. However, following Deetz (1992) and Korten (2015b), the drive of capitalist corporations for monopoly control of economic and political power makes the current form of economic production and distribution a contradiction to this ideal.

The collective deflections from attending to structurally embedded inequality of power may be the ‘obstacle’ to universal justice that some do not want to address. Wilson (2021) states, we ‘know’ but we do not act. Almost a decade ago, Klein (2014) argued, for example, that even many of those people then conscious of the effect of climate change, their sense of personal liability in this catastrophic reality could be pacified by the emerging rhetoric of sustainable or ethically portrayed market consumerism. This is a seductive rhetoric set adrift to permeate common consciousness and inhibit a more radical analysis of western neoliberal ideology and the self-serving control of powerful corporate elites. Switching from fossil fuels to modern biofuels, for example, has been promoted as one of the solutions to climate change. These fuels are made from plant oils, crop waste or wood. According to Monbiot (2022), this shifting of focus has little to do with saving the planet and everything to do with political expediency including land grabbing and profiting from exploitable cropping.

The corporate achievement of an illusion of caring about the wellbeing of people and planet in a shift of focus controlled by powerful elites while people and planet continue to suffer may be reconsidered as a tolerance of, or deflection from, what Zygmunt Bauman calls ‘collateral damage’ (2011: 4). Social and environmental indicators continue to deteriorate. The known damage has been considered. Still, we agree to serve the regime that maims and kills. Typical responses might include denial, diminishing or deflection of our personal complicity in the tolerance of such harm caused to people and planet. It suggests our willingness to deliver Moloch with the human sacrifices. He demands not only the frail, the powerless and those we have marginalized as unworthy of care, but He also requires our peers and our loved ones. We tolerate the conditions of His reign and shape our identities in His service accordingly.

Identity: oppressed and oppressor – at times, one and the same

Giroux (2007) depicts universities as factories of a particular form of knowledge that imprisons graduates in a narrow sense of self and society. Such a graduate may have a delusional sense of personal or class privilege with assumed entitlements all too easily manipulated to ensure conformity to unjust or dangerous commands. With our eye on our Management Learning community, we follow Parker (2018: 97) who argues that business schools continue to serve as ‘loudspeakers for neoliberal capitalism’ by developing a generation of business leaders whose orientation results 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 in work organizations’ (2018: 158). Research by Bapuji et al. (2020) posits that what is not always made explicit is that local and global decision-makers, often educated at liberal universities, contribute to normalizing and reinforcing societal inequalities, and these decision-makers often come from privileged backgrounds. Even less explicit is the situation of the limited future opportunities for business graduates, some as vulnerable as the marginalized, more typically associated with the disenfranchised that is the focus of Freire’s work. These observations ought to serve as a clarion cry to both staff and students who may still believe their certifications will (eventually) reward them with security in Moloch’s Household.

Most recently, Shah et al. (2022) argue despite multiple calls for an overhaul of business schools and management education, the rhetoric of responsible business is still dominated by the ubiquitous but false narratives of student employability and profit maximization at the end of the ‘supply chain’ of global management education. We posit that in their disciplined service of Moloch, management educators and students are implicated in the achievement and maintenance of that normality where our graduates knowingly or unwittingly objectify others to fuel the reach and grip of Moloch. We deflect attention from management learning as limited to the domestication and training of subjugated functionaries conditioned to be the servants of Moloch. There is little consideration in their education that they themselves or their loved ones may well form a future item on His menu. Education for service to and (insecure) reward in this purportedly politically neutral and pragmatically functional system of human organization appears to disconnect learners from the prioritization of relational principles such as compassion, mutuality and a courageous love for justice in favour of market consumerism and career-orientated learning (Pherali, 2016). But it need not be that way!

One of the tasks of progressive educators in a pedagogy inspired by Freire is to unveil opportunities for hope, no matter what the obstacles may be. Freire (1994) stresses the potential value of an authentic dialectical moment when persons meet and learn from each other the reality of the social situation. Freire draws on Marx’s conceptualization of the dialectical process: the idea of unity of practice and theory through which societies work together in the creation of new norms, rules, procedures and policies (Au, 2017; Dale and Hyslop-Margison, 2010). This learning method (‘conscientizacao’ – consciousness raising) might be promoted in management education so that teachers and students could take action to alter or change their socio-economic perspective to one that is more consistent with the emancipatory ideals of a democracy, a democracy that controls the economic sphere rather than the reverse. To focus on a constructive engagement with such a dialectical moment, we envision the possibility of generating teachers and students with new identities, managers who are able to work towards a justice-loving future.

We next reflect on ‘The Dream’ driven by Freire’s notion of a ‘Critical Hope’ and his faith in ‘Love’ by exploring the potential of possibilities generated through the emancipatory aspirations of the UN. Most pertinent to our focus in this essay are the PRME with their roots in the UDHR, the UNGC and the SDGs.

Part 3: the dream! Freire’s critical hope and courageous love for justice – a necessary, existential, concrete imperative

Encouraged by Freire’s notion of a critical hope and his faith in love we reflect here on the possibilities generated by the UN to realize our dream of a more universally just and sustainable future. We ask ourselves how committed we as a community of educators are to manifesting such a future, particularly if this requires a deep challenge to the very legitimacy of Moloch’s existence. Given the seemingly stubborn intensification of the damage arising from Moloch’s regime, questions about the complicity of management education remain pertinent. This situation ought to generate among us a certain type of enragement – an enragement to fuel a hope necessary for transformational action.

According to Freire (1994: 10),

Pedagogy of Hope is written ‘in rage and love’, without which there is no hope. It is meant as a defence of tolerance – and it will reject conservative neoliberal postmodernity.

In his opening words in Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire (1994: 7–8) writes,

We are surrounded by a pragmatic discourse that would have us adapt to the facts of reality. Dream and utopia are called not only useless but positively impeding . . . I do not understand human existence, and the struggle needed to improve it, apart from hope and dream. Hope is an ontological need.

To merely hope for the emancipation of humanity is ‘to hope in vain’ (1994: 9). Without ‘a minimum of hope, we cannot so much as start the struggle. And, without the struggle, hope as an ontological need dissipates, loses it bearings, and turns to hopelessness. And hopelessness can become tragic despair’ (Freire, 1994: 9).

To encourage the dream, Freire provides the notion of ‘untested feasibility’ – a belief in the ‘possible dream’ – ‘. . . in the utopia that will come once [those] who make their own story wish it so’ (Freire, 1994: 205) – a belief that will materialize when the obstacles to universal emancipation are overcome. We are of the view that such emancipation cannot be generated from the form of neoliberalism that has prevailed in the world these past three decades or more. The state of the world depicted by Barros et al. (2022) will not change its trajectory in this form of being human on this planet.

Vallelly (2021) explores how neoliberalism transformed the relationship between utility maximization and the common good. In an age where a growing sense of futility has been so prominent as to be allocated its own name [Futilitarianism], a discussion of hope as a moral charge provides an inspirational pedagogical turn. Hope, as a conscious form of work, is described in Kaba’s interview with Intercept (2021) as

. . . a discipline . . . It’s less about ‘how you feel’ and more about the practice of making a decision every day that you’re still gonna put one foot in front of the other, that you’re still going to get up in the morning. And you’re still going to struggle . . . It’s work to be hopeful.

Giroux (interview, de Oliveira Figueiredo and de Siqueira, 2020) says without hope

there is no sense of critical agency, and without an empowered sense of agency, there is no sense of hope . . . You can’t have hope without courage. You can’t have hope without a degree of struggle.

Over three decades ago, Freire proposed that there is a need for a kind of ‘education in hope’ (1994: 9). With over a decade of neoliberal ideology infusing the lifeworld, by extending the application of social responsibility and sustainability to the realms of business, the PRME represents a platform for rethinking management education. It was promoted as an opportunity ‘not only to rethink what is being taught in business schools, but also to question the pillars upon which management education was built’ (Rasche and Escudero, 2010: 246).

Five years later, Fotaki and Prasad (2015: 559) argue ‘business schools need to question the relationship between neoliberal capitalism and economic inequalities’, despite the earnest expansion of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and business ethics courses exemplified in the SDGs and the PRME. They claim that the doctrine that privileges anonymous shareholders’ interests without adequately accounting for the long-term effects on the communities in which businesses operate erodes social values such as responsibility towards others or even basic compassion, which society expects businesses to uphold. Recently, Kociatkiewicz et al. (2022) posit that business schools are hunted and haunted by capitalist ideology and that the fundamental character of capitalism precludes business schools from providing a curriculum that serves a purpose other than the accumulation of financial capital. They suggest that this mentality needs to be exorcized. These contemporary commentators present us not with a nostalgic interest in the work of Freire, but as a vindication of Freire’s observation in 1994 that ‘the facts, the debates, the discussions, the projects, the experiments, the dialogues . . . shared in the 1970s . . . seem to be as current (in) the 1980s’ (1994: 11), and we would posit as they are today.

At the time of writing, over 800 business schools are signatories to the PRME (PRME, 2023). By bringing a deliberately calibrated moral compass compatible with the values and identities of the neoliberal lifeworld into management education, Moloch can be assured of a sincere and domesticated cadre of servants whose energies will attend to those matters that cannot be ignored.

In the global context of increasing inequalities, environmental catastrophes and social unrest, higher education has become even more critical to what Freire articulates as a rejection of the [then] already dominating conservative, neoliberal postmodernity. Freire articulates this rejection as ‘our right and our duty to preserve mutual love by ensuring that it will rise above our political options and ideological positions’ (1994: 13). To educate for a prioritization of mutual love for justice in the schools that currently prepare functionaries for service to Moloch may seem like a delusional dream. Yet without such a dream and a critical awareness of the current state of higher education as a limit situation, the state of the world as depicted by Barros et al. (2022) would suggest that the trajectory of humanity has not been significantly redirected despite the infusion of Social/Corporate Responsibilities into business schools. We posit that the limited and limiting parameters of those infusions curtail the creative and critical thinking skills that will empower people to disrupt oppressive economic systems cloaked in a limited and limiting moral framework. Such limitations are presented in this essay as a key ‘limit situation’ to be overcome in part by a Pedagogy of [critical] Hope as a location of struggle for a future characterized by mutual love. How deep do we need to dig to find the source of these limitations and the seed for the dream of a love-inspired future? Such a deep dive would explore the likelihood of ourselves as human beings colonized by a dangerous ideology paraded as an emancipatory regime in which we are complexly positioned as both exploiter and exploited. That would take courage.

Decolonizing our minds through an emancipatory management pedagogy

The inclusion of corporate/state sanctioned system-preserving social responsibility courses into Management Education provides a challenge to those who wish to transform a status quo that exploits, degrades and puts all humanity at risk. Such a tansformation would need to challenge the ‘will to power’ that has colonized what Habermas (1984) calls the lifeworld. Deetz (1992: 13–43) writes of such colonization as a ‘process where corporations benefit from processes in which major national and international corporations have frequently, wittingly or unwittingly replaced religious, familial, and community institutions in the production of meaning, personal identity, values, knowledge, and reasoning through fixed mechanical integration’. With such dominant integration in place, every other institution subsidizes or pays its dues to the corporate structure, and by so doing diminishes their own institutional role. The state, ostensibly developed for the realization of public good, interprets this as corporately permitted considerations of social and environmental responsibilities integral to that form of order that supports their priorities. The educational institutions proclaiming to foster autonomy and critical thought instead train for occupational success within those parameters.

Despite such colonizing infusion of Moloch’s regime into daily life and into higher education as our specific focus, Freire’s (1994: 51) astute words resonate: ‘objective social reality exists not by chance, but as the product of human action, so it is not transformed by chance’. In the face of the state of the world as depicted by Barros et al. (2022), ought it not be the job of higher education (any education) to create the space for new possibilities generated by ‘hope’ for something new created from courage to dream the untested feasibility of a world generated by and for love? Such a word stands in contrast to a world created for the economic benefit of some – but even fewer people than Goodman’s exposure of the Cosmic Lie implies.

Based on Freire’s ideas, hooks (2010: 87) claims that learning requires openness and willingness to engage with new possibilities, ‘so that we might discover those places of radical transparency where knowledge can empower’. The emphasis on politics, ethics and public responsibility of education and educators makes Freire’s work particularly relevant in the context of global crises today. In this essay, we draw our focus to the injustices perpetuated in the promotion, tolerance or limited challenges to the foundational capitalist principles that continue to trump all other values in the global coordination of management and leadership identities and activities, and the human relationship with Earth. How can Freire’s scholarship apply to a category of humans who find their way into business schools that might, by the overtly oppressed and exploited, be considered a privileged class? Might a claim to vulnerability by such a privileged class seem offensive to those more obviously subjugated? What possibilities for a radical reconsideration of the values generating capitalist globalization might arise with a focus on the normalization of ‘managers’ as servants of Moloch? We posit that this service, even in its relative privilege, also undermines those deemed privileged. The exploitation of those mistakenly considered secure in Moloch’s Household is achieved through the possibility that we too and our loved ones are vulnerable to the

• exacerbation of local and global insecurities in basic human needs – food, fuel, water, services,

• rise of social and political instability and violence – and the cost of control/policing/incarcerations arising there from,

• intensification of pollution of the planet and climate change exacerbating chronic illness, deprivation and death.

Based on our experience, many students appear to be aware of the state of the world as precarious. Not all accept without question the thinking that the growth of the economy fulfils their aspirations for a safer world. However, even these thoughtful students appear to accept that training to serve in Moloch’s Household will provide a level of education to secure their future wellbeing and perhaps that of their dependents. The explorers among them may well be drawn to the UN’s SDGs. They may even have been led there by teachers alert to the learning opportunities provided by the PRME. To that extent, the SDGs and the PRME are perhaps the most seemingly hopeful indicators that the crises facing humanity are being attended to with the education for leadership of business, perhaps according to the values set out in the UNGC. Such an orientation may well serve as a vindication of their choice of careers and the shaping of their identities as an aspect of knowing or developing themselves as a person of justice (Verbos and Humphries, 2014). Among those drawn to these opportunities to contribute to a just future are those who know that the SDGs are not [yet] effective enough (Biermann et al., 2022; El-Zein et al., 2018). Some may even see the SDGs as an aspect of the colonization of the lifeworld (Langan, 2018), a form of colonization we have sketched into Part 1 of this essay. Such people may wish to change the trajectory of humanity but see no other place to act constructively. The associated risk of such paralysing despair is the focus of Freire’s call on hope as a necessary commitment. The rejection of- hopelessness which Freire encourages is where we now direct our thoughts. It is this very recogninition and rejection of despair that holds an emancipatory opportunity.

Knowing about, but not knowing where or how to act for, a desired future can create despair. It is here, in this moment of potential despair, we see the opportunity for a step in emancipatory education. In contrast to the often-functionalist ethics most prominent in management education, we now follow the example of Wray-Bliss (2009) to a call on the relational ethics offered by Emmanuel Levinas to generate a more critically conscious education for management learning. Our use of Levinas in this essay is intended to move from the consciousness raising ideas applied in this essay to invite a greater awareness of the neoliberal encroachment on the populations perhaps most represented by our management students. We seek to trigger our conscience about the impact of this encroachment not only on ourselves and those we love, but on all those dangerously affected by this encroachment.

Wray-Bliss (2009) draws on the work of Emanuel Levinas to examine dominant ideas of CSR through the lens of critical management studies (CMS). He suggests that the importance of Levinas’ ethics arises from his rethinking of the relationship between self and the Other – specifically the insistence on the ‘primacy of the Other over self’ (Byers and Rhodes, 2007: 239). Wray-Bliss asks us to bring together ‘the violence of critique . . . with the ethical responsibility to represent and respect the singular humanity of this manager [teacher] and these organizational subjects who may be implicated in or affected by morally questionable practice’ (Wray Bliss, 2003: 282). Freire provides a guide for those who feel a call to act ‘and to uncover some “untested feasibility” . . . those who feel it incumbent upon them to burst through the barriers in question. How? By solving, dissolving, through action accompanied by reflection, these obstacles to the liberty of the oppressed’ (Freire, 1994: 206). Following Wray-Bliss, we in business schools are invited to work on the project that is our self, our career, our narrow realm of practice and responsibility for which we are formally accountable. When our infinite responsibility for proximate others is displaced by our concern to shore up our own vulnerable, individualized, accountable self in ways that are tolerable to ourselves and our peers, the opportunity for a more radical response is lost.

We advocate for the generation of capacities in critical inquiry to create a way for a future enabled by the democratic ideals the UN promotes. The call for submissions to this special edition of Management Learning invites us to consider (neo)-colonization in our work. It is an opportunity and maybe a duty to self-reflect and for our reflections to have bearing on actions. This is what we understand by the invitation for greater reflexivity in this call. With Wood Jr. and Pansarella (2019) we encourage management educators to embrace transdisciplinary programmes of as a teaching technique to educate students in forms of reflexivity to prepare them to take personal responsibility for their actions. To engage authentically, such knowledge must be ‘felt and embodied to allow the creation of new, ethical attitudes, which is what students will take away for life after the course, is finished’ (2019: 3). We posit reflexivity to be necessary for the decolonization of minds and to action towards a just society and acknowledge the work of Freire to bringing us to this understanding.

Reflexivity

Archer (2012: 22) notes that reflexivity is linked to change by a perceived need by social actors in modern societies to question their social circumstances and to act in ways that lead to social transformation. Archer defines social actors as deliberately engaged, reflexive persons who continually consider how to behave in accordance with their aims, values and commitments, or ‘ultimate concerns’. Responding to an invitation to consider the state of the world as described by Barros et al. (2022), and to further consider our individual and collective contribution to these circumstances in our professional contexts, invites a concentrated focus on two of the significant socio-political and economic organizing systems of our times: capitalism and democracy.

Hibbert and Cunliffe (2015: 180) call on the value of ‘critical reflexivity’ to underpin the expectation that management educators will challenge the pillars of management education, resulting in a new way of understanding the curriculum’s purpose and content. With rising inequality across the world, Fotaki and Prasad (2015) implore business schools to question neoliberal capitalism and economic inequality. They contend that using participatory and auto-reflexive pedagogical approaches in business schools is crucial to pose a substantive challenge to the taken-for-granted assumptions of neoliberal capitalism and economic inequality as the governing economic paradigms for society.

Reflexivity is understanding that we live in a social and natural world; we are all entangled in shaping it in intended and unintended ways. One of the greatest challenges in making reflexivity relevant to students is convincing them of the need to think critically about their role and place in society. This is because questioning prevailing managerial ideologies, structures of control and systems of power is frequently perceived as threatening and unnecessary (Cunliffe, 2020). ‘We need to accept responsibility for what we do and say’ (Cunliffe, 2016: 743). Cunliffe (2020) proposes that one way to help our students become reflexive is to turn our call to an ‘ethical gaze’, a gaze we have attributed to the work of Bauman and Donskis (2013). We attribute this gaze as a necessary step to a Freirean call to become more reflexive in our work as educators, researchers, students, managers and leaders, impressions or projections of our ‘selves’ reconceived as both oppressor and oppressed.

Taking UK as a context, Millar and Price (2018) investigated the views of management educators on PRME as an ‘imaginary’ to provide a particular vision of how management education should change. Their study found that PRME rather than promoting critical reflexivity serves as an ‘imaginary’ to inhibit critical reflexivity and impose a specific agenda, limiting fundamental change. They argue that while PRME has introduced a moral focus in the classroom, PRME has not encouraged critical reflexivity around the ‘individualist and self-interested nature of business’ (Millar and Price, 2018: 360).

As part explanation for the inhibited reflexivity Miller and Price observe we point to Rhodes (2022) who claims that the primary obstacle to achieving social impact in business schools is the prevailing research culture, which places excessive emphasis on publication and ranking systems that serve to promote the self-interest of deans and provide them with opportunities to boast. He describes his experience at a conference where academics and researchers delivered presentations pertaining to the perpetuation or potential mitigation of economic and social inequality. Nonetheless, he observes a conspicuous theme that remained unaddressed, which pertains to the means by which scholars can acquire knowledge to effectively combat the pervasive issue of inequality. The primary emphasis of the attendees at this conference was on strategies for publication. Rhodes perceived that the objective of investigating inequality did not appear to be aligned with the goal of mitigating inequality (praxis is missing!). In the academic setting, there exists a significant expectation for faculty members to produce high-quality publications pertaining to the topic of inequality indicates that in order for business schools to genuinely commit to advancing social value and promoting the welfare of others, a fundamental shift in research culture and methodology is imperative. Conferences such as the one Rhodes comments on may advance one’s academic career and turn a professor into a marketable labour commodity for the ‘best’ business schools. Rhodes’ observation is an example of the type of self-reflection Freire would advocate for – in our applications to those business school researchers, teachers and students who advocate uncritically for the emancipatory idea(l)s of the UNGC and the SDGs as they might be exemplified in the advocacy of the PRME.

Embracing more pluralistic forms of knowledge and reflexivity in the realms of student engagement assists in developing rich, complex and potentially transformative explanations of organizations and organizational life (Cunliffe, 2020) and in acting on them ignites praxis. Such reflexivity as praxis is a necessary precursor to the decolonization of the lifeworld, as we advocate in this essay with our particular focus on the often taken for granted or even veiled knowledge assumed in management education.

Amid calls for the decolonization of management knowledge Zulfiqar and Prasad (2021) posit, ‘reflexivity becomes even more important for academics, and business schools’ who they invite ‘to revisit their social purpose towards the broader communities in which they operate’ (Zulfiqar and Prasad, 2021: 158). They believe that reflexive pedagogical approaches can make conventionally invisible practices visible and become to location of action. Their findings demonstrate that their project provided significant possibilities for social change by enabling students to criticall think about their own class privilege and act courageously to disrupt extreme social inequalities. They believe that it is ‘possible for critical pedagogical approaches to dislocate culturally codified social systems considered too entrenched to change’ (2021: 176).

Educating for reflexivity implies sensitizing and provoking students to arouse their own ethical and moral responsibilities. We add that it may serve as an incentive to do so, to reflect on the possibility that not only those who may attract their compassion, but they themselves and their loved ones are also ‘at risk’ in this system. This risky situation is well summarized by Guterres (2022) in his opening of the UN General Assembly in September 2022,

Our world is blighted by war, battered by climate chaos, scarred by hate, and shamed by poverty, hunger, and inequality.

Conflicts and unrest continue to rage.

The war in Ukraine is devastating a country – and dragging down the global economy.

Global hunger began to rise before the pandemic and has never recovered.

The solidarity envisioned in the United Nations Charter is being devoured by the acids of nationalism and self-interest.

This year’s General Debate must be about providing hope and overcoming the divisions that are dramatically impacting the world.

In the last section of this essay, we critically consider the hopefulness for the HOPE vested by Guterres, (2021; 2022) in the SDGs and solidarity of the UN. If such hope brings transformational change, what of the PRME?

Part 4: strengthening the courage to love justice

We conclude this essay with a call to scholarly action, a call to decolonize our minds, our institutions and management learning. This call requires a consideration of our ideas about responsiveness and responsibility to others and our duty to enhance our response-ability in all spheres of our lives – applied in this essay to our privilege and influence as teachers in business schools. We advocate for an activist pedagogy as praxis generating enlarged consciousness through a call to the en‘courage’ment of the human conscience (Jamil et al., 2022). We posit that business school teaching and learning insufficiently prepare business and management teachers and students at all levels of the academy to address the suffering and exploitation of people and planet even as many of us may believe we are doing so – and that in not doing so we are collectively feeding Moloch.

We invite a reflection on the connection between Democracy and Capitalism as we have attended to these institutions in this essay. Joyner (1999: 335) writes:

The end of the Cold War brought about a new, revised recognition of democracy. Not only as a system of political rights and liberties, but also as a process through which economic and social development can be promoted toward the goal of securing peace and security. It is this view that undergirds the UN’s strategy toward democratization.

Corporate- and state-sponsored capitalism trumps the value of democracy is a case we make using Goodman to provide the types of narratives we find convincing. Reetika Kheera states (cited in Amico, 2020), ‘While neither capitalism nor democracy exist in their ideal form, especially today, what democracy promises is more appealing to me than what capitalism promises. For instance, unlike democracy, capitalism does not even strive to achieve equality’. There are strands in Management Studies that have woven in some of the most assertive responses to undeniable narratives of exclusions, responses which in other publications we have conflated as the Equal Employment Opportunity mythology and its practical applications as ‘diversity management’ . We invite consideration of these as a hegemonic ploy or as an unfulfilled promise (Humphries-Kil, 2019). Our position is that these are not one thing or another. They are intensions to be manifest.

We acknowledge the efforts of our peers who for several decades have braved the career challenges that derive from their dedication to a more critical management studies. The persistence of a world as characterized by Barros et al. (2022) and by Guterres, (2021, 2022) however, gives us cause to pause in any uncritical celebration of the plethora of qualifications, programmes and courses espousing responsible management education – not only, but perhaps most explicitly articulated in the work of the UN’s leadership in the UNGC, the SDGs and the associated implications for Management Learning under development, as it is in the PRME.

Freire raises the spectre of colonization fundamental to his notion of human emancipation – a life of dignity for all. We have applied his notion to the exclusions from the means of a life of dignity for many with regard to income, social and political security, and as an outcome of the catastrophic state the environment on which all must rely. These exclusions have deep roots in historical and contemporary colonization. Their remedy must be invigorated in the seeds of hope for Democracy promulgated by the UN, explicitly advocated for, for example, in the opening address to the 2021 and 2022 UN Assembly by Guterres. Despite their advocacy for an invigorated democracy, for freedom and lives of dignity for all, the reality of these measures, even in advanced democracies, is very fragile. We have brought to the fore Freire’s emancipatory aspirations for all humanity, an ideal expressed also in the realm ethics proposed by Levinas. Among the obstacles to such emancipation pertinent to our management education are any type of reasoning that take our attention away from the overt or cloaked complicity in the generation of ‘the state of the world’ that continues, despite claims to the contrary – to provide Moloch with human sacrifice. In the third decade of the 21st century, how far do people trust business to provide leadership for a secure and just world? It is not that we propose that business does not have a crucial part to play. The questions we could ask are: To what extent can business be required to prioritize the common good over the enrichment of a few? How are we educating students of management to insist on such a priority and to expect this of and for themselves and of and for others? The indicators appear to be going in the wrong direction.

We are alerted by a move in public consciousness, as evidenced in two reports by the Edelman Trust Barometer. In the Trust’s 2020 Global Report, 56 percent of the public respondents aged 18 to 64 years from 28 countries reported the belief that capitalism was doing more harm than good in the world. Findings of the annual trust and credibility survey conducted by the Edelman Trust Barometer reported in 2022, 36,000 respondents from 28 countries indicated that they believe business to be the most trusted institution due to the perceived failure of governments to lead during the pandemic. It could be argued that strategically positioned corporates (and their investors) have reaped the greatest benefits of the COVID-19 pandemic by harnessing the desperate needs of governments to manage the situation in a manufacturing and distribution model whose inequities are still under investigation. The ideals of democracy must be invigorated so that the ideas of universality are normalized, and global respect for the wellbeing of Earth is a priority. The diminishing of these values must receive the critical response and remedial action necessary for a better future. Education is one key aspect of this dream for the future.

In this essay we have limited our focus for a truly emancipatory pedagogy to the sub-disciplines of Management Learning. Our own areas of expertise are characterized by our [critical] hope for the PRME. In this sub-realm of our professional peers, we acknowledge the growing and hard-won commitment to critical discussions about the dangerous seduction of green- or blue-washed markets. In these examples and many like them however, capitalism remains the preferred (or accepted) organizing principle. The personification of ‘The Market’ as ‘Moloch’ can be linked to the children’s fable The Emperor’s New Clothes. In this fable, a mythical Emperor parades in what he is told are the most attractive clothes made for him by his sycophantic tailors. But there are no clothes. The Emperor is naked. In the fable, the children in their naïve honesty call out ‘The Emperor has no clothes’! The Moloch in our fable also parades in garments that are not real, garments woven, for example, from the lies presented as the ‘truths’ that Goodman uncovers, embelished with shiny threads of the doctrine of EO, a flawed theory of just desserts. However, the Emperor’s subjugated populations – from the pattern makers to the cheering crowds – are not children, though many children may be among his future victims. And so it is with Moloch’s rule. Many children and adults will be fed to Him. In our story, the sycophantic minions do not dupe Moloch. He knows his cloak is a lie, but He impresses collusion, tolerance and fear on his subjects. He remains shameless in his naked aggression, his crafty adaptations and assimilations or the eradication of His critics. For the adults in our story, the imaginary cloak of a purported meritocracy that results in unequal but assumed fair outcomes and the environmentally destructive fabrication for the maintenance of this lie is [still to be fully] called out at one’s peril – even as the maintenance of Moloch’s Empire and the lives of its all its inhabitants are faced with catastrophic consequences.

Freire’s ‘dream’ applied to management learning is to invite us to consider a different more just world, a utopia that he articulates as an ‘untested feasibility’. Can Freire’s legacy be expanded to suggest that all Moloch’s pattern makers, weavers, tailors, machinists, and wardrobe masters can learn that they too cannot be ensured exemption from the harm Moloch is wreaking? What would accelerate the dawning of such consciousness? Might such a reflection invite a reflexivity among our ako not seen to this point?

We conclude this essay with a ‘call to scholarly action’. It is a call to amplify and expand the work with ako (our peers and our students) to decolonize our minds and our institutions more radically by encouraging management learning as a praxis generating raised consciousness and strengthening the encouragement of the human conscience to serve Love for Justice rather than fealty to Moloch. It is a call to unveil the lie that Moloch, when fed His required sacrifices, will reward the fealty of his minions. We propose an extension of Freire’s Pedagogy of [a critical] Hope to address the whole of humanity as ‘the Oppressed Subjects of Moloch’. We take as our mandate the call from Chomsky: It is the responsibility of intellectuals ‘. . . to uncover lies’ (Chomsky, 1967).

For a privileged minority, western democracy provides the leisure, facilities and training to seek the truth hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest through which the events of current history are presented to us. We posit that in the context of management learning, we as teachers and as students are both contributors to diverse system preserving subjugations and the targets of such subjugation. Such exploration demands a sense courageous humility and a new kind of response-ability. Higgins (2021) states that response-ability is not simply taking on the responsibility that has always been and always is in front of us, but also the ‘iterative (re)opening of responsiveness towards the potentiality of perceiving and differently enacting possibilities and problematics within the distributive relations that we inherit’ (2021: 274).

We could ask ourselves: ‘What can we teach to “help our students to learn?’” as the Call for Papers asks us to do. Better still, we could ask: ‘How can we help our students and ourselves to learn about a love for justice, if not through the demonstration of a willingness to decolonize our own minds and incentivize the courage to do so?’. A commitment to bring the fruits of this labour to our classes without a clear curriculum to do so is to engage our peers and students with Freire’s notion of co-enquiry: ‘We make the way by walking’.

The Call for Papers to this Special Issue invites us not to eulogize, but to explore the potential of Freire’s work in the context of Management Learning. This very call is a testimony to the persistence of the once marginalized cohort of colleagues in the Academy who have been willing for some decades to call for a radical reconsideration of the impact of colonization(s), exploitation and oppression. Barros et al. (2022) have invigorated for us our continuing exploration of Freire’s notions of the necessity of [a critical] hope and courageous love based on a ‘dream’ that human organization(s) can be universally inclusive and life-enhancing. The courageous persistence of a dedicated cohort of peers and the enthusiastic response of the students for whom this work resonates remain an inspiration to us.

We have posited that the decolonization of assumed knowledge in our professional realms of expertise can happen through the decolonization of the minds of management educators and, through their example, the intellectual orientation and future practices of our students. Freire’s main contribution was to educate the marginalized to be aware of systemic dynamics, (in contrast to assumed personal failings) to be the cause of their deprivation and exploitation. Freire (1994: 101) said, ‘The future of which we dream is not inexorable. We have to make it, produce it; else it will not come in the form that we would more or less wish it . . . a dream for which we struggle’. We have explored in this essay our critical perspectives on management education by inquiring into the potential strengths and limitations of explicit aspirations to contribute to a just society as expressed in the UNGC and the associated SDGs, the PRME and the opportunities and limitations of Freire’s emancipatory aspirations.