(De)humanization in the business school: Critical reflection on doctoral experiences

Abstract

Recently in academia, and particularly in management and organization studies, there is more attention being paid to unpacking our own oppressive systems and practices. In this article, we join the conversation examining the pressures of academia by exploring how reflexivity can be elicited through engaging with theory. We draw on the theories and concepts of Paulo Freire to (re-)interpret how PhD students experience the material practices and symbolic systems of the business school. We use autoethnographic vignettes to engage with our personal experiences and stories as field-based researchers and PhD scholars in UK business schools. Through critical reflection and cooperation-based dialogue, we analyzed these experiences using Freire’s concepts of banking education and (de)humanization. This can be considered conscientização (conscientization), raising critical consciousness of our own experiences. We find that doctoral students suffer from processes of dehumanization in the business school, but they also reinforce these processes through social reproduction. We reflect on the need for solidarity and how an awareness of the role we play within the system can shift our thinking toward constructive social change.

Introduction

In this time of overlapping crises—facing rising inequalities, a pandemic, war, and climate change—it is easy to fall into an existential crisis. This is a human response, and now more than ever it is essential to reflect on our vocation’s purpose. We have often asked ourselves, what am I doing as a doctoral student in the business school? Does the paper that I am writing, does this class that I am teaching, and do the university’s bureaucratic processes achieve anything? Is my vocation meaningful outside the context of the university? As a collective prone to over-thinking, many scholars have already posed these questions. There have been examinations of the purpose of business schools (e.g. Koris et al., 2017; Starkey et al., 2004), as well as recommendations to challenge the systems we perpetuate in trying to justify Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and sustainability with a business case (Barnett, 2016, 2019; Girschik, 2020; Girschik et al., 2022). This article builds on these prior calls to cultivate new ideas and new voices by considering how we can incorporate critical reflection and cooperation-based dialogue by engaging with the work of Paulo Freire.

In the mainstream centering of commerce and corporations in the business school, there is a sense that we sometimes lack a focus on the humans and humanity that collectively build up these organizations. Indeed, it could be argued that business schools have lacked humanity since their inception. Despite narratives that British business leaders initially eschewed management studies, British business schools were formed through elite solidarity (Maclean et al., 2022), with intellectual roots in colonialism (Spicer et al., 2021). As we focus on profit, we can lose sight of the forms of violence, exploitation, and dispossession that can occur in the process. There is an urgent need for business schools to reorient toward addressing fundamental questions of improving human conditions (Rocha et al., 2021). It is important to reinforce a sense of commitment toward a social repurposing of business (Friedland and Jain, 2022), and to develop students to engage critically and challenge existing models that do not benefit humanity (Dal Magro et al., 2020). The struggle against the lack of humanity in the business school, specifically from a UK context, is the motivation for our article, as we attempt to make sense of these issues through personal and shared reflection.

Increasing one’s awareness and understanding of social and political issues through sharing personal experiences and discussions is a feminist knowledge-production technique known as consciousness-raising (Auger et al., 2018; Zulfiqar and Prasad, 2021). McCarthy and Grosser (2023) suggest facilitating consciousness-raising as a method for academic activism, to examine one’s place within the system and to use reflection as motivation and guide for supporting social change from an individual viewpoint, rather than a systemic perspective. In order to employ consciousness-raising as a tool, it is important to consider different frameworks to facilitate its implementation. Some routes for reflection have already been suggested, for example, mindful reflexivity through spiritual practice (Vu and Burton, 2020), queer reflexivity through a “closet” metaphor (McDonald, 2016), or political reflexivity along a “decoloniality continuum” (Abdelnour and Abu Moghli, 2021). We would like to eke out a different potential path of “theory-elicited reflexivity”: using theory to reflect inwards by considering how the concepts of Paulo Freire can be used to frame firsthand experiences of us as researchers, teachers, and students within management and organization studies. These experiences reflect on being academics in a business school and more broadly about management education, which is inextricably linked to the purpose of business schools.

To understand the lack of humanity within the business school through theory, we turn to Freire in particular because his philosophy, particularly his conceptualization of conscientização (conscientization), has deeply informed consciousness-raising (e.g. McCarthy and Grosser, 2023; Zulfiqar and Prasad, 2021). His concepts of humanization and dehumanization also provide valuable insights and possess the potential to be utilized in various settings that extend beyond their initial context. Pedagogy of the Oppressed is one of the most cited books in social sciences (Green, 2016), and has already been applied to many different contexts within management studies: from empirical applications such as how an emancipatory education model could benefit frontline healthcare workers (Cotton, 2021), or using the concept of conscientização to reshape the discourse around entrepreneurship and regional development (Berglund and Johansson, 2007). Freire’s work has also been used to consider how management students can engage with social inequality and sustainability (Dal Magro et al., 2020) and management education’s role in social change (Fotaki and Prasad, 2014), showing the intradisciplinary value of his ideas in the extant literature.

Freire’s theories grew out of his community experiences as an adult educator, promoting educational reforms, in particular for adult literacy, and emphasizing that teaching and learning is a political process (Roberts, 2008, 2015). While in the business school our aspirations vary, we can draw on his concepts of critical pedagogy to critically reflect on what we are socially reproducing. At a time of increasing calls to decolonize the business school and to address grand challenges in management studies, there are many (e.g. Mintzberg, 2005; Parker, 2014, 2018; Spicer et al., 2021) who are questioning the status quo of the business school and whether or not the business school and management education are capable of making the changes needed to address these issues.

PhD students and graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) stand at the crossroads of the business school, straddling positions of learning and apprenticeship, alongside producing and distributing knowledge. Doctoral students are the next generation of academics, and a leading force for bottom-up change in the academy (Gutierrez Huerter et al., 2021). In this article, we investigate how Paulo Freire’s work, in particular the concepts outlined in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, can frame reflexivity in the context of the business school from the perspective of doctoral students. With this in mind, the research question for this article is: How can we use Freire’s theoretical concepts as a framework to (re-)interpret the experiences of PhD students in the business school? In particular, we seek to unravel the material practices and symbolic systems underlying these experiences. By symbolic systems, we mean here the “meaningful symbols” (Schinkel, 2015) which create interconnected meanings, representing the social structures that are embedded within the context of the business school. This can include the different designations of academic journals to indicate quality, the titles that create seniority and hierarchy, or even the name of a school. By material practices, we refer to the visible and invisible processes, regulations, expectations, artifacts, teaching practices, and other material objects (Jarzabkowski et al., 2013) that are socially enacted within the business school. We explore this as a framework for consciousness-raising in order to better understand dehumanization in the business school.

There are many practices that are part of the implicit and explicit training of PhDs within the business school beyond the obvious surface-level activities of reading, writing, and research. In order to participate fully, we should attend conferences, “network,” and join wider conversations in the literature. While these can be stimulating, engaging, and fruitful experiences, they also require levels of social, cultural, and economic capital (see Bourdieu, 1986) that can limit participation, and the practices and symbols can be difficult to parse for newcomers. These tensions are ripe for consciousness-raising. Thus, we analyze our own experiences as PhD scholars in business schools, digging into our problems and our privilege, seeking to better understand the logic that underpins them.

How did Freire view (de)humanization?

A key dilemma for academia is how to champion the emancipation and freedom of the oppressed without perpetuating and reproducing the structures of oppression further (Dias, 2019). Freire (2017) was fundamental in theorizing around this challenge. Central to Freire’s pedagogy is the innate incompleteness of human beings. This stems from the assumption that humans desire to liberate themselves from oppressive states and to become “fully human” (Blackburn, 2000; Kee and Carr-Chellman, 2019). In order to understand the material practices and symbolic systems of the business school from a Freirean perspective, we must first understand his conceptualization of oppression, (de)humanization, solidarity, and fellowship.

Freire described oppression as a state of entrapment in which individuals fail to be “more human” (Freire, 2017: 21). Oppression restricts expression, and the oppressed feel compelled to align with the rules of the oppressor (Dias, 2019), a process of instrumentalization that reinforces the inequalities of an oppressive system. The inability to desire or to evolve into a more humanized form of the self is considered “dehumanization” (Dias, 2019), a denial of humanness at its core (De Ruiter, 2022). Dehumanization encompasses not only those whose humanity has been stolen, but also those who have stolen it (Freire, 2017), and the active restriction of others in their pursuit of humanization (Roberts, 2002), showing how the oppressive systems harm all involved.

Dehumanization materializes in practices and processes of perception, representation, and treatment of individuals in a way where their humanity is not recognized and is undermined (De Ruiter, 2022). The different forms of dehumanization may be implicit, invisible, and subtle or even prominent, explicit, and intense (Govender, 2020). For example, implicit structures can be in the form of social oppression through stigmatizing marginalized groups, and explicit structures can be in the form of legal oppression through discriminatory laws. The manifestation of dehumanization in symbols and material practices via institutional structures, everyday norms and practices, behavior, and attitudes, enable the oppressor to perpetuate dehumanization in a systematic way.

Freire’s theories emerged from his experiences of working as an educator, in particular witnessing the oppressive work lives of workers in Northern Brazil in contrast to the landowners. From these experiences, he developed his theory of humanization, which rests on the hope and desire of the oppressed to start a revolution against the oppressive landowners to transform the world around them and create new institutions (Tan, 2018). Humanization is this “struggle to recover the lost humanity” (Freire, 2017: 18), of the oppressed and transform them into humanized forms. Although dehumanization is a “concrete historical fact” (Freire, 2017: 18), Freire found hope in the fact that dehumanization is not our destiny but the outcome of an “unjust order” of violence, injustice, and exploitation against the oppressed.

Freire conceptualized humanization as an “antithesis to dehumanization” (Govender, 2020; Tan, 2018: 370). Humanization ignites a critical consciousness and sense of agency to understand and stand against dehumanization, particularly focusing on the voices of the oppressed. Humanization in Freire’s (2017) philosophy is an “inescapable concern” that is characterized by the desire and struggle of the oppressed for freedom and justice (pp. 17–18). He outlined that transformation to the desired level of humanness can be achieved through a process of critical, reflexive dialogue, reflection, and praxis (Freire, 2017); elements that are important for consciousness-raising. Freire (2017) argued that humanization lies in the historical task of liberating the oppressed. He emphasized that the power to liberate the oppressed lies not with the oppressor, but in the hope and struggle of the oppressed to liberate themselves. The struggle for humanization is not predetermined, and its pursuit is not a process in isolation, it lies in “fellowship” and in “solidarity” (Freire, 2017).

Solidarity, for Freire, is formed in relationships built through collective labor (Freire and Freire, 1994: 114). He argued for human beings to unite and work toward collective liberation (Darder, 2015). Freire (2017) saw the pursuit for emancipation as requiring a fundamental shift among humans in the way we think and act. He described this shift as a journey toward freeing our minds from the ideologies of domination, oppression, changing the way we think about collectivization, building relationships, and solidarity with others (Darder, 2015). It is about daring to dream about making meaningful choices, to be courageous to speak up, and thereby freeing themselves from the chains of oppression and reinventing the world around them. He adds that to realize our potential to be fully human, the pursuit for humanity must involve the camaraderie of community: fellowship.

How can we become “fully human”?

To Freire, to be fully human is to struggle and act against objectification of human beings. It is a desire to become a “subject who knows and acts” (Tan, 2018: 371) that constitutes the essence of being fully human. Full humanity cannot be pursued in isolation or individualistically (Freire, 2017). As both the oppressed and the oppressor are manifestations of dehumanization, the restoration of humanity is achieved by regaining humanity for both the oppressor and the oppressed; the oppressors must also form part of the struggle for liberation.

Freire (2017) emphasized that the process of liberation and emancipation is complex and collective agenda where “critical and liberating dialogue” (p. 39) is imperative to the struggle for liberation of the oppressed. He stated that “human existence cannot be silent, nor can it be nourished by false words, but only by true words, with which men and women transform the world” (p. 61). He considered true words to be the essence of dialogue and to be constituted by action and reflection, equaling both work and praxis. Dialogue is loving, based on humility and trust, with a recognition of the humanity of others and a faith in the capability of humanity to change the world. It requires horizontal relationships and critical thinking. Through dialogue between teachers and students, Freire stated we can achieve a humanizing pedagogy. Thus, we can see dialogue as a disruptor of processes of oppression and dehumanization.

Freire (2017) called upon the unstoppable spirit in human beings to fight for regaining humanity, and to allow the fearful and subdued to be able to transform themselves and the world they live in. A similar argument was later emphasized by Berthoff (1990: 369), that adapting to oppressive situations is not intrinsic to humans, it is rather a “mission” for human beings to recreate and transform the world using different means, emphasizing the need for creativity.

Becoming human also requires deep engagement with the world through the process of conscientização (Freire, 2017). Conscientização is the transition from Object to Subject through the awareness of the social realities of oppression, including one’s relationships with others (Freire, 2017). He argued that the rise of critical consciousness through conscientização, the reflective participation of the oppressed at all stages of liberation, is essential to make the process of humanization feasible. In Freire’s pedagogy, humanity is a relational and ever-evolving process, which emerges from interpersonal interactions between human beings in the social world.

Freire (2017) also thought that individuals cannot attain full humanity unless they engage in praxis. Revolutionary praxis is grounded on the theory of transforming action (Freire, 2017: 99), directed toward oppressive relationships and structures. The responsibility of transformation falls not only on the oppressors but also on the oppressed. Freire (2017) stated that critical dialogic is the way to dismantle domination and break free from dehumanized forms of human-world structures in society. This dialogic is possible with the spirit of “unshakeable solidarity” (p. 102) between individuals involved equally as Subjects within the praxis and not between humans against others, “as oppressing and oppressed classes” (p. 102). We can draw from this the need for inclusiveness within praxis, that it is necessary for all to participate.

Through the literature, we can see that (de)humanization is shaped by the desire and struggle of the oppressed for freedom and justice, and affects both the oppressor and the oppressed. Humanness can be achieved through a process of critical, reflexive dialogue, reflection, and praxis. These processes draw on ideas of love, trust, action, creativity, inclusiveness, and awareness. These elements are the foundations for Freire’s pedagogy.

What does it mean to be “human” in the business school?

The guiding principles of capitalism and focus on profit maximization to the detriment of social and environmental issues is an ever-increasing dilemma for business schools (Rocha et al., 2021). Business students would also like to look beyond simply replacing the managerial class, to promote humane, ethical, and eco-friendly values (Koris et al., 2017), underlining the need for a shift in thinking in management and organization studies. There is a groundswell of reflection on the oppressive systems we are navigating within our academic community.

These oppressive systems include the patterns of behavior practiced within academia, which are powerfully articulated by Maja Korica (2022) describing attitudes ranging from cold indifference to outright harassment. There are ever-increasing demands for paper-based contributions, both in terms of length and quality of outputs, and the rigid structures for submission (Hensel, 2022). There is also a question of which systems and values we are reproducing (Willmott, 2013a, 2013b), especially the perpetuation of racial logics (Dar et al., 2021). In recognizing the oppressive systems of academia, it is necessary to reflect on the ethical quandaries and power imbalances in what and how we choose to investigate. Abdelnour and Abu Moghli (2021) call for researchers to interrogate the ethical and political ramifications of research in violent contexts, emphasizing how privileged researchers are in relation to their participants, and to consider how reflexivity will affect the research process and potentially mitigate harm. While in management studies, showing strong emotional attachment to what we choose to study is not encouraged, Whiteman (2010) argues for stronger emotional reactions such as heartbreak when dealing with traumatic data, as a way of respecting the personhood of research participants and as an opportunity to connect with the data. Connecting with our work through reflexivity and engaging with our emotions are steps toward counteracting the oppressive systems we face.

With the rise of the “performance paradigm,” there is pressure for academics, particularly PhD students and early career researchers, to comply with different quantifiable forms of controls (Davies and Petersen, 2005). These controls are imposed by institutions to measure different forms of academic performance such as teaching, research, administrative service, and involvement in institutional work (Jones et al., 2020). It is established through the imposition of multiple metrics which unfortunately result in “de-professionalization and fragmentation” of academia (Taberner, 2018: 135). This practice of instrumentalism and performativity (Jones et al., 2020) reduces academic work into quantifiable commodities by assigning scores through multiple systems of assessment such as student surveys, teaching assessments, and by assigning rankings to academic journals, and this in turn creates pressure on early career academics to perform according to these metrics. It creates unnecessary competition among scholars and academics and reinforces issues of anxiety, stress, fear, harassment, bullying, and other similar negative experiences which may have a long-term impact on the health and well-being of the academics (Taberner, 2018; Zawadzki and Jensen, 2020). This emphasis on performance in academia, as structured through disciplinary controls and quantitative metrics, is resulting in individualization (De Vita and Case, 2016) and academic exit (Parker, 2014), but there is little evidence of collective solidarity and resistance against these regimes (Knights and Clarke, 2017).

The extant literature around oppressive systems in academia also reflects on the experiences of doctoral scholars, for example, the pressure for research outputs, and the minimal support and resources. Prasad (2013) narrated his doctoral journey managing pressures in the business school, referring to academia as a “game” (p. 937), and how he and his cohort experienced pressure to follow the pre-established rules of academia to be relevant and to achieve success. Similarly, other scholars (e.g. McCray and Joseph-Richard, 2021; Smith and Ulus, 2020) have discussed the violent effects of pressures created by target-oriented academic work. Prasad (2013) suggested business schools should reflect upon the hierarchical, orthodox, and political nature of journals in mainstream management, and he recommended reimagining the idea of success, to move beyond a singular focus on research output; however, a decade has since passed, and the pressure to “produce” is still sharply felt by early career researchers.

When we join the business school, for better or worse, we learn to navigate these systems and processes. While some see the business school as irretrievable (e.g. Fleming, 2021; Parker, 2018), for others there is still hope for improvement, whether it is by learning from the past or from other disciplines such as arts and the humanities (e.g. Harney and Thomas, 2020; Spicer et al., 2021), or through using disciplined imagination to research desirable futures (Gümüsay and Reinecke, 2022). There are also movements we can consider role models for what this business school could be, for example, Organization Scientists for Future’s (OS4Future) collective framework for personal actions for sustainability (Delmestri et al., 2021).

This article is written at what feels like a period of increasing precarity for academia. Although the so-called “golden age” of academia in the United Kingdom—a period of academic freedom and job stability from the late 1940s to the 1970s—is recognized to be largely a myth due to its exclusionary nature (Tight, 2010), the role of academics in society has changed and there is a collective feeling that things are getting worse. We grapple with the challenges of carrying out research that is “good enough,” in an environment where we have little sense of work–life balance. While there are possibilities for micro-resistance, we long for stronger reform (Zielke et al., 2023). There is decreasing legitimacy and symbolic capital (see Bourdieu, 1986) for academics in a country like the United Kingdom where politicians have claimed there is no more need for “experts” (Mance, 2016) and designated some degrees as “low-value” (Adams and Allegretti, 2023). Higher education is now seen by some as a tick-box exercise for students to get a job, and there is criticism that increasing “managerialization” of universities results in attitudes where “courses are products and students are customers” (Parker, 2014: 289). If this is the case, GTAs and short-term contracts are used as a low-cost way of delivering that product (Lumpkin, 2022), with an increasing sense of precarity to positions and salary. These different threads of devaluing our careers, the prioritization of certain kinds of knowledge over others (i.e. Eurocentric, profit-driven, and patriarchal, see Dar et al., 2021), and the shift in the societal function of academia weave together to form a tapestry of our discontent around the commodification and destabilization of higher education.

Within this context, it is easy to complain. We can lose sight of the quest for knowledge that calls so many of us to academia in the first place. While there are criticisms in the above-cited works, often there are also calls to action, and outlines for improvement. So how can we hold on to the motivation to research and teach, how can we push for a pedagogy that enriches society, while holding its current problems to account? For this, we look to the work of Freire.

Methodology

Motivated by Cunliffe (2003) and Huber (2022), in this article, we use “autoethnographic vignettes” to engage with our own experiences and stories as a field-based researcher and PhD scholar in management schools. The autoethnographic part of the term refers to an autobiographical research process (Humphreys, 2005), based on “self-narrative that places the self within a social context” (Reed-Danahay, 1997: 9). The vignette part of the term refers to the form of the text, which are short, reflective, first-person narratives, encompassing reflexive reporting of incidents, interactions with others, and our embodied experiences, to draw upon our own perspectives in relation with our interactions with other actors and institutions in the context (Humphreys, 2005).

Autoethnographic vignettes form a “substantive and diverse body of qualitative research” (Huber, 2022: 4), and we consider them to be reflexive tools to critically reflect, problematize, and reinterpret (Huber, 2022) our own lived experiences. Using autoethnographic vignettes and reflexive dialogues about these experiences (Hurd and Singh, 2021), we speak to an established method to reflect on learning and knowing as academics in management and organization studies (Hawkins et al., 2017; Knights et al., 2022; Koris et al., 2017).

This article started with a “collegial sharing of our struggles” (Hurd and Singh, 2021: 351). Both authors embarked on our doctoral journeys in 2019, and have shared this experience during a time of extremes, in particular the lockdowns of 2020 and the ongoing pandemic. We met in a Zoom room studying CSR in 2020. While we have come from different backgrounds, one author from the Global South and the other from the Global North, we found many similarities in our positions in the business school: we felt we did not fit the archetype of a “business school student.” We came from academic backgrounds in philosophy and sociology, studied in Asia, and after our first degrees had worked in large corporations and the third sector before starting our PhDs. We shared a concern for society and an interest in how organizations and businesses respond to and in some cases worsen the grand challenges that weigh heavily on our generation. From 2020 onwards, we also participated together in the various initiatives for decolonizing and promoting intersectional feminism in the business school, and read various related texts in a reading group.

From these activities, we realized how existing theory could be repurposed to help us better understand our experiences, and that this had the potential to become a paper as a process of theory-elicited reflexivity. For this article, we formalized our sharing processes over six months through a series of collaborative meetings and individual reflexive writing sessions. As a starting point, we reread Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 2017) for the second time in a reading group alongside other doctoral students. Subsequently, we made notes of key concepts, and considered which themes related best to issues we saw in management studies and the business school, and our positions as PhD students.

Following our reading, we individually wrote stream-of-consciousness and episodic vignettes. We wrote about our own embodied experiences of interacting with others and the impact specific incidents had on us as scholars during our PhD journeys. Through writing these vignettes and sharing reflexive dialogues, we have relived and revisited the events and emotions we experienced over time (Connelly and Clandinin, 1990). We recognize that reflexivity differs from reflection in that it moves beyond searching for patterns and toward “complexifying thinking or experiences by exploring contradictions, doubts, dilemmas, and possibilities” (Cunliffe, 2002: 38; cited in Gray, 2007). These were deeply personal and exposed our relationships, our worries, and our complaints. As we laid down our embodied experiences in formats of autoethnographic vignettes, articulating our experiences, and writing about our own selves in relation to our interactions with others, we critically engaged with our own narratives and social context.

We then shared these vignettes with one another. After reading these privately, we unpacked the experiences, recalling each other’s narratives, and brainstorming which incidents related best to the literature and Freire’s concepts. The process of analyzing these potential vignettes involved revisiting and narrating the events to each other, exploring past struggles in teaching, researching, and “acting the part” of a doctoral student. We probed and reflected upon our embodied experiences (Knights and Clarke, 2017), critically questioned each other as peers, problematizing and framing (Huber, 2022) the issues underlying each memory. Through critically reflecting on each other’s experiences, we encouraged each other to delve deep at an individual level to reflect further on what exactly happened: who was present, and what were their gestures, expressions, body language, and non-verbal responses?

This was followed by further rounds of reflection and discussion. We had long dialogues about what we saw in these experiences. Why were we perturbed by these particular incidents, what elements made certain memories stand out over others? Why are they significant for PhD researchers? Are these representative of our peers, or unique to us? Through this iterative process, we selected the content of the vignettes based on which of our experiences illustrated best the ongoing issues in the business school and management education. We rewrote our vignettes multiple times. We discarded events that were too specific to our personal circumstances, ones that overlapped with their underlying issues, and ones that did not speak to broader systemic issues. We developed our writing as our discussions resurfaced additional elements, and experimented with a variety of different writing styles to engage in different ways with our memories. Because we had been friends during the time of these various episodes, we could support each other and advocate for one another at times when we were uncertain about the validity of our voices. We could remember each other’s hardships and how they pointed to larger systemic issues, such as incidents when a senior academic took advantage and assigned too much marking, and support each other in untangling our privileges from these moments.

During the process of analyzing each other’s vignettes in relation to Freire’s concepts, over much deliberation, we arrived at the consensus of focusing on Freire’s concepts of (de)humanization and banking education to ground and unpack our experiences. These concepts are central to Paulo Freire’s (2017) work in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed. They provided the framework to explore and theorize embodied experiences of our autoethnography study as PhD students in business school in the United Kingdom. We also determined that the best way to present our vignettes was to embed our reflections on the theory inside the vignettes. Engaging with the theory has been a critical part of our exploration of our memories. This was not an inductive, grounded process (see Charmaz, 1995), but rather more akin to abduction, as it started from a hunch and we developed our ideas through a sensemaking process (Sætre and Van de Ven, 2021). The theory shaped how we understood the relationship between our experiences and their underlying significance as reflections on (de)humanization in the business school and management education. Thus, we found it to be more intellectually honest to acknowledge how as scholars, our understanding of the theory shaped our data selection and include this in the vignettes. Finally, we related our experiences to two reflexive questions related to our overarching research question, resulting in two individual vignettes.

These vignettes provide vivid illustrations that are representative of structural issues yet remain uniquely personal. These experiences have impacted us significantly as PhD researchers in business schools. They are specific not only to us as individuals but are bound to a period of time that reflects a social context of global turbulence. As members of the 2019–2020 intake of doctoral students in the United Kingdom, we participated in the social reality of the business at a time of overlapping crises. This included the fallout from Brexit; COVID-19 and lockdowns; the cost-of-living crisis; and the ongoing weather irregularities and existential distress from climate change. At the same time, the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent collective reckoning with racism was felt deeply in the United Kingdom, resulting in many protests and actions such as the toppling of a statue of the 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol on 7 June 2022 as well as continued action from movements such as Rhodes Must Fall. In academia, there was a different vein of protest, as the UK’s University and College Union (UCU) coordinated strikes over deteriorating working conditions and pensions for both academic and professional services staff. While some universities coordinated spaces to discuss these issues, as PhDs, overwhelmingly the onus was on the individual student to negotiate their own political position. These vignettes document how we observe our own actions in light of this social context, and how Freire’s work can create a framework to navigate these experiences. We share these embodied experiences in order to contribute toward extending knowledge and joining the ongoing conversations around reflecting critically on the researching and learning experiences of management scholars and academics in business schools.

In this article, we attempt to understand the experiences of PhD students of material practices and symbolic systems of the business school in a process of consciousness-raising. In line with Freire’s (2017) philosophy, we argue that the “authentic” and critical thinking required for this process is not a purely rational act, carried out in isolation. Rather, it can be an experience of the whole being, involving our conscious self, our feelings, emotions, memory, affects, and our curious mind focused on the object (Roberts, 2002). As this is a deeply reflexive process, it is important that we recognize the privileges of our positions. While neither of us are at the apex of the patriarchy, we carry our own privileges (the socio-economic means to pursue higher education in Russell Group universities with scholarships, fluent in English, etc.). These vignettes describe how PhD students navigate the material practices and symbolic systems within their business schools. We selected examples that “offer concise, contrasting, and representative illustrations” (Hawkins et al., 2017: 297) of the business school, but we recognize that these still center on an environment and a set of experiences that is often closed off to marginalized groups. We also recognize that the craft of research is deeply personal and a “social, embodied and situated performance” (Brown, 2021: 543), and as such this article only speaks for one context within the business school. This is important to recognize when we are engaging with Freire, as his work was focused on people in positions far less privileged than ours. This process can be considered conscientização (Freire, 2017), raising our critical consciousness and recognizing our place within the system of oppression, and taking action by sharing this as an article.

We use Freire’s concepts of banking education and (de)humanization (Freire, 2017) to critically reflect and unpack our own experiences and interactions with others to explore how PhD students experience the material practices and symbolic systems of the business school. In analyzing how dehumanizing attitudes and interactions are constituted through material practices and symbolic systems of the business school, we join the ongoing conversations critically examining management education (Colombo, 2022; Dar et al., 2021; Korica, 2022).

Vignettes

Vignette 1: who is the “oppressed” in the business school?

Within the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, oppression is defined as “subordination to the consciousness of the master,” following Hegel, and true solidarity is fighting at the side of the oppressed (Freire, 2017: 23). I come to this article reflecting on the questions: who then is “the oppressed” in the business school? And am I fighting at their side? I struggle with this as there are myriad of conflicting types of power within the business school, and if we are taking an intersectional view of the demographics of students and teachers, there is not a straightforward answer as to the location of oppression. Freire’s (2017) concept of banking education explains how education takes the form of narration, and notes that it takes the form of a depositor depositing knowledge into a receptacle (p. 45). As a doctoral student and a GTA, I sit on both sides of this process of depositing. However, it does not feel as though there is a “master” for either side of this transaction. The “master” instead is invisible, an external force, a network of expectations for all the actors involved.

Discussing this together with my co-author and other doctoral students, we can see that all figures in the system feel pressure, and that doctoral students are the hub of observing these pressures. The undergraduate students feel pressure to achieve certain grades and attend certain schools, which we see in the classes for which we TA. Early career researchers feel precarious and overwhelmed with the criteria for job progression and increasing demands for service, teaching, and impact, such as the institutional pressures around “learning outcomes” and student feedback in order to protect university ranking positions, which we observe through our peers as they progress into their first research positions. Senior scholars bemoan the changes in academia: the loss of academic freedom, research budgets, and stable pensions, and the increases in bureaucracy and non-research demands, which we observe through our doctoral supervisors and the faculty at our institutions. Through the materials from our university’s branch of UCU, I learnt that in 2022, our gender pay gap was 17 percent, the ethnicity pay gap was 20 percent, and the average pension cut would be 25 percent. These problems were not widely discussed among my PhD cohort, as few joined the union. There is also the disconnection between academic staff, and those outside teaching and research roles: the librarians, facilities teams, and administrators that keep institutions running. There is invisibility, or perhaps a lack of recognition, of these people who are equally a part of the business school and whose labor keeps academia functioning. In addition to the dehumanizing pressures felt in academia, this unspoken delineation creates a system of oppression and exclusion, neglecting certain voices in the discussions of reform in the business school.

As graduate students, we observe all these problems within our institutions and in turn, feel pressure to perform, to network, and to publish, because failure to do so will close off access to “good jobs.” We are told to aim for 4* journals, a concept that I had not even heard of before starting my PhD, and now appears to be the epicenter of success. Freire wrote of social reality and its production by humans, and how in an “inversion of praxis,” this reality turns on us and conditions us (Freire, 2017: 25). Collectively, we are all constructing the social reality of the business school, and socially (re)producing ever-dizzying heights in the standards we set for ourselves.

In 2020, in virtual forums drawing from a variety of universities around the globe, I noticed that most first-year doctoral students found themselves adrift. Many doctoral projects were no longer feasible without travel or face-to-face interactions, so we were forced to abandon fieldwork plans or were delayed until our third or fourth years. Despite these drastic pivots, many students were not given additional time or funding. We were expected to carry on. A senior professor once remarked in a Zoom room seminar how “lucky” we were to have “so much time to read,” which must have been particularly painful for anyone who had extra caring duties or long COVID in addition to their normal workload.

As we entered the second and third years of the pandemic, the world pushed for “normality,” and among new waves of COVID-19, we had to choose between protecting our health or “networking,” a demand that is ambiguously and yet threateningly tied to our academic fate. In the United Kingdom, there was social pressure to teach and socialize unmasked. For example, in 2022, a well-meaning friend stopped me as I entered the PhD offices and said I should stop worrying and that she would rather see my face: while I continued to use my mask in high-traffic areas, I still contracted COVID-19 at one of the first conferences I attended in person. In the same year, a GTA colleague teaching the same module was rebuked by students in our feedback forms for wearing his mask, complaining that it interfered with their understanding. These types of incidents in the business school—peer pressure and institutionalized anonymous complaints—limit our ability to draw on the fundamentals outlined by Freire: love, trust, and creativity. They instead prioritize an instrumental view, in which we are stripped of humanity, prioritizing our prescribed roles as service providers over our human health concerns or protecting our loved ones. However, as doctoral students in management studies, we were shielded from the frontlines of COVID-19 in a way that reflects the privilege of our ivory towers. While key workers were pushed to the frontlines at the beginning of the pandemic, we could seclude ourselves, teaching remotely and carrying out desktop research.

So, I sit with the uncomfortable, reflexive questions: who is the oppressed in the business school? Am I fighting at their side?

The business school facilitates the accumulation of social, cultural, and financial capital (see Bourdieu, 1986) in a way that it is difficult to see any of us as oppressed, and the fact that we find ourselves in the business school in the first place reflects a certain socio-economic position (English-speaking, globally mobile, highly educated; and often male, Global North, and white). A friend pointed out that as GTAs, we are often at the mercy of the selections made by senior faculty. In classes, I have taught about worker suicides, human rights, and environmental issues, but within the various syllabi, we can see that these materials often speak without the people or for the people, instead of with the people (paraphrase of Freire, 2017: 104). The materials continue to strive for a “business case” for ethics and sustainability, shifting our pedagogy to the side of “an instrument of dehumanization” (Freire, 2017: 28). Namely, they protect and reproduce logics that emphasize the economic utility of protecting the environment and the rights of workers, rather than seeing these as inherently valuable outside of business interests—focusing on trying to find the “win-win” scenarios to appear “neutral,” and avoiding making normative claims. But when reflecting with GTA peers, we agreed we do not challenge these logics when teaching, because there is no time when we generally only see a syllabus after it is released, and it is not our place to interfere with a senior colleague’s choices. This can cause a cycle of social reproduction, molding ourselves into business school employees, and learning what is to be taught. This behavior fits with what Freire (2017) called “prescriptions,” where we conform to choices prescribed to us and are oppressed by our adherence to dehumanizing logics. While we are neither solely the oppressor nor the oppressed, we not only contribute to a system that facilitates dehumanization, but we dehumanize ourselves.

During the 2022 strikes, I explained the industrial action to my students, why I was taking part, and connected this to theories of collective action and HR practices that were in the syllabus. Of one hundred students, only three came after class to ask how they could help. A month later, one student dissatisfied with their mark tried to use the strike in their argument for an increase in grades. It is hard to tell if any of this is cutting through, if my efforts to teach in a way that connects theory to social and environmental causes mean anything. But I have to keep trying.

Vignette 2: why do we feel (de)-humanized in the business school?

To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it. Once named, the world in its turn reappears to the namers as a problem and requires of them a new naming. (Freire, 2017: 61)

As the second author and being a business school doctoral scholar, I report here on my experience of living through a historical step toward changing the name of an institution I am studying in with an aspiration to go beyond symbolism and move with a serious intent and commitment toward addressing racial inequalities within the business school. I reflect here upon a couple of incidents that I experienced in school, in relation to this historic event during that time. With the overwhelming response in support of the Black Lives Matter movement around the world, I remember discussions were growing among students in the school. In the beginning, the discussions started within small groups of doctoral scholars, who were sensitized to the movement and took active interest in following and debating what has been going on and how things must move more toward dismantling oppressive power structures and move beyond symbolic initiatives by groups and institutions. Being a scholar from the Global South and having worked with marginalized groups in the region, I was getting myself educated, sensitized, and as Freire would argue, desiring to be more human, by actively engaging in reflective discussions about these matters within small groups, to understand how do my fellow colleagues, academics, and students in the school think about this?

On one such occasion, during an informal lunch with a group of students in the school, this issue came up during our conversation and I experienced a sudden silence and a weird feeling of awkwardness among the group. It felt as if this issue should not have been brought up in the conversation. There was no insensitivity in the responses, but it was a distant, dispassionate, response in separation, echoing as if what does it have to do with us here in the business school? A little surprised by the responses, but we continued the discussion for a while at lunch before we moved to other conversations. I faced similar awkwardness, distant reactions, and a deep sense of discomfort, detachment, and inhibition among other students as well about this movement, or about issues of racial inequalities in business school on multiple occasions thereafter; it seemed, as if, this movement wasn’t for us to have an opinion about or that we have a role in it. I was left anxious, disturbed, and surprised that why did the students feel so distant and why is it not impacting them?

Returning with an anxious mind, I remember discussing this incident with a fellow colleague of mine trying to make sense of this incident. Reflecting on it with my co-author, wherein we revisited the narrative multiple times, discussed with each other about how I felt, why did I feel so, and whether I am overthinking. I kept coming back to reflect on why the student responses seemed so distant, detached, and inhibited. What was stopping them? While acknowledging that my fellow colleagues’ attachment to their identities (Knights, 2006), to their ethnic groups may have restricted their response, Freire’s (2017) arguments on banking education and dehumanization helped unpack this puzzle around the detached, distant, and dispassionate responses among the students.

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire (2017) describes that banking education begins with an understanding of humans as objects. Implicit within this concept is the idea that the students as humans are merely “in the world” (p. 48) as a “spectator,” to receive, and fill themselves up with “deposits of information” (p. 47). Interestingly, while reflecting on my experience in the school, drawing from one of Freire’s concepts explaining banking education and dehumanization helped me to understand and unpack this experience. Freire (2017) uses the concept of “necrophily” (p. 50) to explain the role of humans in the functioning of banking system of education. He describes a necrophilous person as one who identifies and relates with objects. He adds that this system transforms humans into necrophilous people, performing as “depositories” (p. 45) with their thinking and action being controlled, losing their ability to humanize and their power of creativity being inhibited. When I was struggling to understand the detachment, ignorance, and dispassion that I was experiencing among students in my school, I analyzed this dehumanized response, as a representation of the “necrophilous person.” Being the student of “banking education,” the students are entrapped and indoctrinated as this necrophilous person to follow the norms and practices of this system that appears to be determining the success and failure of their academic futures.

Reflecting on another incident thereafter in the school, where the scenario took a bit of a dramatic turn, with a news article about our business school’s name being associated with a major figure in the slave trade was published. At this point, wherein an organized, structured, deliberation process was initiated by the school, as students, one of my colleagues expressed an interest to initiate a formal dialogue among students to share and document students’ voices about this matter. However, when this chain of dialogue was initiated, me and a few of our colleagues were surprised that only a handful of students were able to actively voice their thoughts. Although with that very handful numbers, we wrote to the school’s leadership who were spearheading this historic exercise; we were extremely disheartened with the low student response. Being disheartened and surprised, I continued reflecting further to unpack this puzzle about why students continue to be detached, remain dispassionate, and indifferent to this event about their own institution. On one hand, the school was spearheading the process, creating multiple channels of communication to involve different actors; while on the other hand, it was a struggle to organize the students to seek their voices. It was disappointing, surprising, and I kept wondering why students, who are aspiring to be academic scholars, interested in shaping young minds, desiring to become leaders of tomorrow, and interested in different kinds of research, are not responding actively, not voicing their thoughts toward this historic exercise of not only changing our institution’s name but aspiring to move beyond mere symbolism. I kept questioning what was stopping them.

Unpacking these experiences further to understand whether this detachment of sentiment and the lack of desirability to be organized and voice their choices stemmed only from the position of students being objects of the banking education, invested in their neoliberal career ideals, failing to look beyond what is impacting them directly at this moment. I pondered upon what other possible reasons could be there, for this lack of solidarity, this detachment among the students, and as my co-author calls out, as graduate students in business schools, we, as doctoral students, go through a continuous pressure to perform and to meet certain expectations, since the beginning of the doctoral journey. The pressure to network, to get visible, and to publish in high-ranked journals comes along with the reality that as graduate students, we also deal with a lot of other uncertainties and changes in our lives, especially when we have moved from other countries to the United Kingdom to pursue the doctoral journey. Amid adjusting to these uncertainties and changes, which can be extremely disheveling at the beginning of the PhD journey, and simultaneously trying to adapt and “fit to the world” (Freire, 2017: 49) of the business school, we as PhD students, get conditioned to following these prescriptions, which appears to be determining our futures, with little scope to question it. This is why, as Freire (2017) argues, being the “educated individual,” in the business school, “we receive the world as passive entities” (p. 49) wherein this neoliberal approach in business school education is turning us into the passive, adaptive, necrophilous human, who is entrapped in the functional system. As Freire (2017) says, humanization lies in the process of engagement, the struggle for liberation through solidarity and fellowship among humans, and when the courage to question and the desire for transformation withers away, dehumanization sets in. Drawing from this, I related that the detachment and lack of solidarity for each other, that I deeply felt among the students in the school, was a result of this dehumanized, instrumental form of banking education conditioning the students in a way that they have dehumanized themselves of this historical movement, by not identifying themselves as “Subjects” of this movement (Roberts, 2007).

Eventually, after the name change exercise, the school organized multiple Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) workshops for all students, to initiate a dialogue and provide a foundational orientation about the values that the school stands for and the no-tolerance approach toward issues of racial injustice. Although institutionally a step forward was taken, poor student attendance and low involvement in academics continued to remain as the challenge. Thus, the workshops merely remained restricted to more of a tick-box effort. Having the experience of conducting a few of these workshops myself in the last academic year, it was a disappointing and discouraging experience to realize further that not only it is the students who experience detachment and dehumanization, but it also felt that there is an institutional detachment at a larger level from these issues, which need more carefully crafted, well-intended interventions. Following Banerjee (2022), on one hand, it strongly felt that there is a need for radical transformation, to move toward a more humanized form of institution, toward a change of world view with a radical inspiration to transform the society, dismantling the structural inequalities, institutional racism, and be open to accepting different forms of knowledge. On the other hand, a desired level of humanness in institutions is not possible to achieve in isolation, it is to be gained through fellowship and solidarity (Freire, 2017).

In the process of uncovering these experiences through Freire, I experienced at times a certain hopelessness and disappointment and questioned why the business schools fail to move beyond the tick-off exercises and bring a radical transformation. I continue hoping for a more humanized business school, an institution that is more inclusive and encouraging toward nurturing a will to transform society.

Discussion

As we reflected on our embodied experiences as nascent management scholars in the business school, we unpacked them through the lens of Freire’s concepts in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed. This was a reflexive, dialogic process and it brought us to a juncture where our critical reflections helped us “organize” our thinking, providing a framework for consciousness-raising. Through iterative stages of reflection, we theoretically abstracted our personal experiences to recognize symbolic systems and practices in business schools that reinforce and reproduce processes of dehumanization. In short, we moved from a “purely naive knowledge of reality to a higher one” (Freire, 2017: 104). Following this critical discourse and deliberation, with the belief of “continuing transformation of reality” (Freire, 2017: 65), in this section we look beyond our personal experiences to consider how these observations can be extended into a wider theorization of dehumanization in the business school.

How banking education forms organization and management scholars

Theory-elicited reflexivity in our two vignettes provided a framework and vocabulary for our consciousness-raising. Reflecting on oppression and detachment in the business school, we find that PhDs suffer from the systems of dehumanization in the business school, but also reinforce them through social reproduction. We replicate certain kinds of knowledge, and our targets are often fixed in a way that we fall into the patterns of banking education through reifying prescriptions of our roles. We map these phenomena in our two vignettes, recounting incidences in the business schools that impacted us as scholars and in which we experienced disappointments and discomfort.

From these vignettes we developed our ideas further, drawing upon the concepts of Paulo Freire (2017). First, we consider “banking education.” We found that the concept of banking education in Freire’s work has strong relevance to the management learning and education in business schools. Banking education takes place in the rigidity of syllabi and forms prescriptions of the roles in the classroom, as seen in the first vignette. Freire (2017) argued banking education is an oppressive system that produces exploitative conditions in society. The learning process “anesthetizes” the learner, and attempts to control the creative power of individuals. Their ability to critically engage or imagine alternatives is restricted, as is their ability to transform oppressive conditions, as seen in the second vignette. Reflecting on our embodied experiences and drawing on Freire’s concepts, we argue that management education currently follows a banking model of education, wherein the business schools impose practices and expectations on students that restrict their abilities to critically engage with and conscientize the knowledge that they acquire. We show how the banking model dehumanizes teachers, reducing them to the services they provide, and placing institutional pressure to perfect these services to protect the business school’s standing. Simultaneously, it creates a feeling of detachment within students, rending them necrophilous.

Second, banking education indoctrinates individuals to conform to “prescriptions” of this oppressive system. In the business school, this process is embedded in expectations of management scholars to transform their consciousness, moderate their expectations, and reproduce prescribed behaviors that perpetuate the status quo. As doctoral students, we receive conflicting information from senior scholars: that we should conform to these prescribed behaviors until we secure permanent positions and recognition within the field, that once we are established there will be security to go against the grain, but simultaneously we are told that there is the lack of critical, innovative new scholarship in business schools. The idea to wait for status also ignores the large volume of students who do not make it to permanent positions—in the United Kingdom, only 3.5 percent of students who complete a PhD go on to a permanent research position at a university, and only 0.45 percent reach professor level (The Royal Society, 2010). The prescriptions within academia represent the pressures from the societal context that oppress management scholars. The imposition of prescriptions takes away their ability to critically think or engage in reflective dialogue.

Third, we identified that as PhD scholars in business schools, there is a continuous reinforcement of pressures to perform, publish, replicate certain types of knowledge, conform to certain standards and schools of thoughts, and adapt to the administration and the existing systems of publications. While we recognize these systems of oppression, most of us go along with them rather than challenge them. As Freire (2017) would argue, as PhD scholars we suffer at the hands of the system, and we also reinforce the oppressive system in the business school: playing the role of “sub-oppressors” (p. 19), where the oppressed strive to become oppressors rather than liberate themselves. Forcing ourselves to adhere to these roles deconscientizes us as scholars, and the inability to “conscientize” and engage with knowledge critically reproduces dehumanization in business schools. But to stop there would cut short the potential for liberation within the business school, so as doctoral students wishing to continue in the field, we would like to take a step further into the theory.

Building praxis through conscientização and solidarity

Some see the business school as beyond repair (e.g. Fleming, 2021; Parker, 2018), that it is founded in logics that make it impossible to humanize, for example, the singular drive for profit maximization (Rocha et al., 2021), and its intellectual roots in colonialism (Spicer et al., 2021). But to dismiss it entirely would be yielding to oppressive logics. Freire (2017) wrote that

the oppressed, who have adapted to the structure of domination in which they are immersed, and have become resigned to it, are inhibited from waging the struggle for freedom so long as they feel incapable of running the risks it requires. (p. 21)

To resign oneself to never improving the structure in which we work is to deny the call to fight for liberation. The business school is built of individuals, and we all bring our own sense of humanity and potential for change within society as scholars. For doctoral students, this potential is arguably the strongest as we have entire academic careers ahead of us. McCarthy and Grosser (2023) argued that consciousness-raising as a method for academic activism can co-opt the current culture of individualism without adding to an already burdensome academic workload. This is a pragmatic approach, and we would like to add that it seems especially appropriate for early career scholars who do not have the job security, reputation, or power within the academic hierarchy to aim for broad structural change. The first steps for early career researchers can be critical reflection and cooperation-based dialogues, in order to generate praxis.

We can see through our own critical reflection, as captured in our vignettes, that we could move beyond a “naive” knowledge of reality toward determining reality’s theoretical underpinnings. This was a process of conscientização, shifting us from Object to Subject. By recognizing the elements of (de)humanization and banking education present in our experiences, Freire’s concepts give us the tools to understand the elements of oppression and detachment in the business school. This is also the first step in our humanization: to recognize our social reality. This relates back to recognizing our positionality as scholars (see Abdelnour and Abu Moghli, 2021). In recognizing the social reality, we must also remember the enormous privilege we hold in our research identities. As outlined in the first vignette, we are both at the mercy of the systems of oppression but complicit in perpetuating them. We can unpack the systemic oppression, but at the same time, we should hold this in balance with the power we still possess. We have a responsibility to consider how we select research projects and how we treat the existing literature, as these practices codify what is treated as important knowledge. We also have a responsibility to treat research participants, students, and colleagues with respect. By incorporating these elements into our reflections, we can move past mere commiseration and toward praxis.

In addition to critical reflection, we shared our experiences with each other in dialogue. We found the value of “true words” in relating our experiences to one another, which helped us understand the material practices and symbolic systems in the business school. The essence of Freire’s idea of cooperation in the revolutionary praxis is shared goals, the “unshakeable solidarity” among the group that motivates them to overcome dehumanization and transform the world around. In the second vignette, there is a sense of discouragement in response to our peers’ detachment from engaging with social issues in the business school. However, in light of all of the issues PhDs face, it is not unnatural to default to detachment. In the business school, even within the fields of CSR, sustainability, and critical management studies, there is the need to play the “game” (see Prasad, 2013). We need to be careful: there can be a level of hypocrisy in pointing out the flawed nature of the business school if it is not combined with a sense of solidarity because our professional and financial success is tied to its oppressive nature. Full humanity cannot be pursued in isolation and requires both the oppressed and the oppressor to realize their social realities. In order to further revolutionary praxis, we must reflect on our positions and privileges, to consider where we can take action. This action should be taken collectively, not only with senior and junior scholars, but by including the voice of all those who work in the business school, including cleaners, administrators, librarians, and other facilities staff. This cooperation should be built on dialogue with a strong “commitment to freedom” (Freire, 2017: 141).

Through conscientização and acknowledging the need for solidarity, we can (re-)interpret how PhD students navigate the material practices and symbolic systems of the business school and lift ourselves out of resignment and inhibition to a level of critical consciousness that engages with the root of the material practices and symbolic systems that facilitate dehumanization. We would like to encourage this practice to be developed further but are wary of its co-optation. We are not Freire, calling for the liberation of agrarian workers in Brazil. If anything, the business school is geared toward the future landlord. It is important that concepts such as cooperation-based dialogue are not reduced to a metric that furthers our oppression (see Jones et al., 2020). Also, in revealing personal experiences, members of the business school need to be kept safe, especially for those in marginalized and racialized positions. While the flawed nature of the business school may limit the possibility for true revolutionary praxis, this is a pragmatic entry into the consciousness-raising described by McCarthy and Grosser (2023), where by lifting our awareness of the role we play within the system, our individual reflections can shift our thinking toward constructive social change.

Freire in the business school

If we are to motivate early career researchers who want to see an improved business school to struggle and act against dehumanization, to become a “subject who knows and acts” (Tan, 2018: 371), we should encourage management scholars to engage in a conscientized manner, to share an “unshakeable solidarity” toward humanization, and to harness the power of management education toward bettering the world. To explore this, we would like to consider Freirean concepts further in the context of the business school, and highlight areas that are pertinent for critical reflection.

To encourage conscientized PhD scholars rather than detachment, we can acknowledge the social reproduction of material practices and symbolic systems that facilitate dehumanization in the business school as described in the vignettes and the existing literature. This acknowledgment should not be limited to the ways we treat students and other staff, but also to the way we treat ourselves, and the (impossible) standards which we reproduce. We should discourage the dehumanizing practices of “conquest” (Freire, 2017: 111), where one group desires to “conquer” the other, to impose their own objectives and manipulate and thus reproduce dehumanizing culture in business schools.

Solidarity for humanization can reach beyond personal relations and into our relationship with knowledge. As academics, we have a responsibility for knowledge production and dissemination, which knowledge is considered to be central, and which is periphery and why. It is important to analyze which cases and whose voices we focus on in relation to wider societal and political processes, and to engage in the analysis of power, control, and interests (Reynolds, 1998). In the spirit of Freire’s philosophy, we can also center invisible literatures in our research and teaching. These literatures, often from the Global South, comprise large swaths of management studies but largely lack representation in the reputed, competitive high-ranked journals of management and organization studies, and thus go uncited and untaught. We should ensure that the knowledge we center is with the people, not without the people or for the people (paraphrase of Freire, 2017: 104).

Another area for potential reflection is cooperation and collaboration between doctoral students. Often in the practices of networking, the focus is placed on senior scholars. This could be shifted to peer-to-peer networking, which can lead to more supportive relationships (e.g. horizontal linkages, see Lauriano et al., 2023). Universities could also place more emphasis on bottom-up change by supporting student-led initiatives, providing opportunities to work together and find creative solutions in a democratic manner (see Gutierrez Huerter et al., 2021). This can also inspire our teaching, for example by encouraging experiential learning practices in which student-led groups actively engage stakeholders and co-create solutions for community problems (Kolb, 1984). These fall in line with “problem-posing education,” a form of education that encourages critical engagement, dialogue, and finding answers to problems (Freire, 2017). By posing problems and cooperating to solve them, we can disrupt our prescribed roles as outlined in the vignettes, and move away from the traps of banking education.

Finally, we can consider the energy that already exists within the business school to make the world a better place, to transform it, and to prioritize humanization. This can draw from the underlying elements of Freire’s pedagogy: love, trust, action, creativity, inclusiveness, and awareness. As much as there is room for heartbreak in handling our data (Whiteman, 2010), there is room for these more positive emotions in our interactions, as we integrate our own humanity into our work and positioning. This can take place by using new and creative methods for producing research, for example, disciplined imagination to create a better future (Gümüsay and Reinecke, 2022), using political reflexibility to decolonize knowledge (Abdelnour and Abu Moghli, 2021), embedding reflexivity in teaching and researching in management and organization studies (Cunliffe, 2020), and being pluralistic to construct knowledge about management and organizations in different ways (Willmott, 2008).

Similar to how critical reflection is a pragmatic solution between pushing for change and surviving in the business school, the above suggestions have pragmatic limitations. The ability to reach out in solidarity and to effect changes in standards and research methods while remaining employable varies wildly based on which institution you belong to and in what position. While it is not the radical action that the word “revolutionary” evokes, praxis can only be achieved if one is able to remain in their role. But by encouraging conscientização, centering humanization, and solidarity in our treatment of knowledge, we can feel more legitimacy in our hopes that our vocation can aim to better the world, that we can move beyond strictly focusing upon stories of business and profit and toward a less dehumanizing business school.

Conclusion

In this article, we draw upon Freire’s work and concepts to (re-)interpret how PhD students navigate the material practices and symbolic systems of the business school. We mapped instances of where and how we find dehumanization in our auto-ethnographic vignettes based on theory-elicited reflexivity, which we offer as a framework for consciousness-raising. We would like to emphasize that this article is written from the viewpoint of doctoral students in the Global North at prominent universities. This situates us in a position of privilege; away from the more direct forms of oppression and may inhibit our reflexivity. Still, through using Freire’s concepts as a framework to grapple with our experience, we can make sense of our positions within oppressive systems while acknowledging this privilege and raise our critical consciousness.

Freire (2017) stated that “reality which becomes oppressive results in the contradistinction of men as oppressors and oppressed” (p. 51). Within Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the oppressed/oppressor binary is constructed in a way that humans are seen as working against each other, the Subject and the Object. This dichotomy does not occur in the same way in business schools. Instead, we see patterns of oppression occur in all directions. PhDs are like “sub-oppressors” (Freire, 2017: 19), while we see the patterns of oppression as they fall on us, in pursuing roles in academia we find ourselves replicating the material practices and symbolic systems that oppress us, performing to the systems of professionalization and the pressure to achieve. We play the role of oppressor regardless of whether we desire the power that comes with it, all the while suffering because of our own expectations.

This combination of privilege and disadvantage shapes us. By critically reflecting on these processes of social reproduction of dehumanization in management and organization studies and encouraging cooperation-based dialogue, we can take a pragmatic step toward revolutionary praxis within business schools, toward inclusivity, awareness, and freedom.