Abstract
In what follows, we present a conversation with Professor Noam Chomsky on the topic of whether the business school might be a site for progressive political change. The conversation covers a number of key issues related to pedagogy, corporate social responsibility and working conditions in the contemporary business school. We hope the conversion will contribute to the ongoing discussion about the role of the business school in neoliberal societies.
The crisis of neoliberal capitalism has placed the role of the contemporary business school under renewed scrutiny. While it has traditionally been considered a key institution for transmitting the ideals of free markets, private property, commercialization and managerialism, a number of academics are questioning whether it might also be a site for challenging and rethinking the way business is done. The prominence of Critical Management Studies (CMS) and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), for example, in the business school curriculum attests to a sea change in the way management pedagogy is approached by some, especially in the UK and elsewhere. And as the 2013 theme of the American Academy of Management Conference (i.e. Capitalism in Question) also indicates, these critical concerns are not necessarily those held by fringe groups within the academy. They are currently galvanizing wider debates about the purpose of business school education more generally.
Despite these developments, the widely held perception of the business school as a promoter (rather than challenger) of corporate ideology remains fairly intact among the public, governmental funding agencies, popular media and the student body. As such, this Speaking Out contribution attempts to address two questions that we have found the academic community asking itself of late. Can the business school today be a meaningful site for challenging the orthodoxy of corporate capitalism? And what are the pedagogical implications of such a project, especially during a period of increasing workloads, student fees and administrative micro-management within the university?
For the political and administrative elite currently presiding over many business schools, these questions would no doubt be considered blasphemy. As the growing number of high-profile cases have recently revealed, the once rare indictment of ‘academic misconduct’ is now commonly deployed to quell any kind of dissent or questioning that deviates from the technocratic norm. Raising concerns about the purpose of an academic department can be rebuked by authorities as ‘bringing the university into disrepute’. A dismissible offence. Indeed, the very fact that such questions might be considered ‘speaking out’ is itself indicative of the oppressive climate many of us find ourselves in today.
The questions motivating our discussion are, of course, not new. Recent contributions to the Speaking Out section of Organization have explored the business school in terms of the positioning of education (Pritchard, 2012) and the nature of research outputs (Li and Parker, 2012). These contributions have offered valuable insights into the business school, especially in relation to the changes in academic labor therein (for example, see Butler and Spoelstra, 2012; Harvie et al., 2012; Luke and Kearins, 2012).
Sustained reflection among those working in the business school regarding its socio-political impact is indispensable for enabling us to understand how we might collectively craft a more progressive institutional agenda. To contribute to this ongoing dialogue, we have sought to widen the discussion by considering an outsider perspective on the business school. The outsider in question is Noam Chomsky who, according to the New York Times, is the World’s greatest living public intellectual. Professor Chomsky is an uncompromising and controversial political and social commentator and it is hard to imagine someone who has better credentials when it comes to the business of ‘speaking out’.
Professor Chomsky has written widely on the topic of corporate power and hegemony. However, his views on the business school in particular remain somewhat sketchy. At the present juncture, when the future of the university is now a key struggle for many of us, fought around the desirability of marketization and corporate control, we inquire if the university still holds any emancipatory potential. And what about the business school itself? Given its putative proximity to future managers and administrators, could it not be uniquely placed to engender more democratic subjects of power? Or, and as we suspect Chomsky will polemically contend, is the business school an unadulterated product of capitalism, irrevocably wedded to its agenda and vested interests? As we shall see, Chomsky has some very clear suggestions about the way business school education might be delivered in relation to progressive social change. And many of these suggestions would not be welcome in the upper echelons of the university as we know it today.
We initially framed our conversation around one of Chomsky’s key contributions, Manufacturing Consent (Herman and Chomsky, 1988). This book argues that the media plays a major role in securing our consent to exploitative social conditions. In particular, the mainstream news operates through a series of filters, classifying and repackaging information to suit the interests of the governing elite. Does the same model apply to education and the university? In the past, Chomsky (2003) has stated that the tenor of education today now largely reflects a capitalist imperative:
… the entire school curriculum, from kindergarten through to graduate school, will be tolerated only so long as it continues to perform its institutional role. So take the [US] university, which in many respects are not that different from the media in the way they function … they’re parasitic institutions that need to be supported from outside, and that means they’re dependent on wealthy alumni, on corporations and the government. As long as universities serve those interests, they’ll be funded. If they ever stop serving those interests, I’ll start to get into trouble. (Chomsky, 2003: 57, emphasis added)
The last point is interesting since during our conversation it seemed that Chomsky was keenly aware of his own precarious situation in the US university system. However, this has not stopped him from speaking out and ‘rocking the boat’ for many decades. In light of our positions within the business school, we were especially interested in Chomsky’s views on how it intersects with the broader power relations of capitalism—especially in terms of its pedagogical concerns. Is it possible for the business school curriculum to make a positive social contribution beyond the corporation?
In a 1983 interview, Chomsky strangely argued that the business school was one of the few spaces of ‘truth’ left in the university. This was born from the elite’s need for gritty reality in order to dominate successfully:
… in business schools and in business journals, one often finds a fairly clear perception of what the world is really like. On the other hand, in the more ideological circles, like the academic social sciences, I think you find much more deep-seated illusion and misunderstanding, which is quite natural. In the business school, they have to deal with the real world and they’d better know what the facts are, what the real properties of the world are. They are training real managers, not the ideological managers, so the commitment to propaganda is less intense. (Chomsky, 1983: 233)
This view is fascinating for a number of reasons. For example, following the post-Enron crisis and the conspicuous rise of CSR in the MBA curriculum, can we still hold onto the idea that business school students are ‘non-ideological’? And if the commitment to propaganda is less intense, what function does the truth play here? Into the hands of power or against it?
Having had intermittent correspondence with Professor Chomsky, we managed to arrange a brief face-to-face meeting in his MIT office in Spring 2013. The purpose of the conversation was to explore the role of education and the contemporary business school in relation to the vested interests of neoliberalism, especially during times of crisis. As we enter his office, and are seated, Chomsky is frail but exceedingly gregarious and welcoming. A large photograph of Bertrand Russell presides on the wall over us, creating an air of solemnity as we proceed.
We begin our discussion of the business school by questioning the role of the university more generally. For Chomsky, the university occupies a tendentious space within the broader socio-political system of late capitalism. There is no doubt that it has been partially captured by the neoliberal project and is thus essential for its ideological needs. However, it also retains a degree of autonomy given the large amounts of public funding it receives. For sure, what conservative thought calls the creative vibrancy of free market capitalism, according to Chomsky, is nothing more than the fruits of public works developed within the university and elsewhere. He makes this point at the beginning of our conversation:
If you walked around MIT forty years ago, you would see small electronic start-ups, spin-offs from government funding at the University. IBM was in there. And today, around Kendall Square, we have the big pharmaceutical company, Novartis, because the government is pouring money into biological research to get genetic engineering to pharmaceuticals. Biotechnology is now cutting edge. But it’s not coming from private enterprises; they simply don’t have the resources or the interest in funding something that will be generally available, not just for me, but in the long term. So you go to the source of innovation and creativity and government spending. The university.
We presumed the situation would be less conflicted apropos the business school, since in the US they are generally privately endowed and explicitly espouse the beliefs of the ruling ideology (Khurana, 2010). The MBA programme, for example, has often been criticized for its unquestioning acceptance of neoliberal thought. However, all institutions have agency and in the current era of crisis, it could be posited that business school students and instructors are increasingly open to different ways of doing things, more critical about the so-called virtues of unmitigated capitalism. Chomsky agreed. Indeed, we were surprised by how optimistic he was about this prospect, especially from his own experiences in the business school:
My experience is mainly US-based. At MIT and Harvard there are big business schools. I’m often asked to talk to students. Many business schools, at least to my experience, are much more open and have discussions on things like we are talking about now. Openly, with lively debates, students participating, faculty participating. The same applies to talks I do when I come to London, which I did a couple of weeks ago. In fact the Business School in my experience are some of the most open places in the university. I’ve been struck by it here in the US as well.
According to Chomsky, this is in direct opposition to Economics departments, which he is much more wary of. Indeed, ‘I’m never asked to talk in the Economics department’. We ask him why:
Economics departments are far more orthodox than the Business School. Business Schools understand what is going on, in the Economics department they don’t. There are exceptions of course, but the general conception produced in Economics departments has nothing to do with what the economy is like. They are studying free market models, which has nothing to do with economy. And you can see it. That’s why economists just couldn’t perceive the huge housing problem. They literally didn’t see it. The economy is crashing and they didn’t notice it. Some of the best economists in the world thought: it can’t be happening because there is an efficient market out there. The religion says it isn’t happening, so they don’t see it.
This criticism of Economics departments raises the question regarding ‘what’ exactly the business schools are more realistic about compared to other academic disciplines. Indeed, in another interview, Chomsky (1983) was also very scathing of Political Science departments for promulgating conservative depictions of society, especially in the US. What does the business school ‘know’ that Chomsky is referring to here?
The Business School knows all these things [regarding the crisis], and they are much more related to what’s actually going on in the world today in my experience. For example, instructors and students understand that we have a very limited free enterprise economy, with massive government intervention at every corner. At MIT, you just can’t miss it. For years it was entirely funded by The Pentagon to develop military technology. The taxpayer is fooled, thinking they’re funding a cutting edge free market economy. Well, they know all of this at the Business School, from my experience. They have to be realistic to get this done.
This prompts us to mention CSR and business ethics, an area that has exponentially grown following the corporate legitimacy crisis that Porter and Kramer (2011) claim is perhaps the worse ever. We raise this because CSR complicates Chomsky’s view in a number of ways. On the one hand, CSR could be considered out of touch with reality, since it often trades in the presumption that capitalism might some day co-exist with democracy, sustainability and international labour rights. On the other hand, CSR might also represent an attempt to substantively change (rather than accurately describe) the reality of corporate capitalism. We slowly focus on this problematic by first asking an obvious question:
Do you think business corporations are capable of acting responsibly?
No. It’s a legal responsibility of the corporate managers to maximise profit, which so often isn’t the interests of the rest of us. Corporate managers are permitted to do good works, but only if the television cameras are there, so they can build up an image. In fact, there is even one great court judgement by the Chancery Court of Delaware, in which some issue came up where shareholders objected to the firm was doing something nice, which is illegal. The court urged the corporate world to look more beneficial to the public good. Otherwise, an aroused public will discover what you are doing, and take away your privileges. I think that’s CSR. And it’s not because they are bad people, it’s what the institution requires.
Does this mean that CSR and business ethics runs the risk of obfuscating the underlying truth about capitalism, by perpetuating the idea that a ‘family friendly’ corporation might actually be possible? We pose the question in terms of our own curricular, which actually lists Chomsky as a reading requirement. This sparked an interesting exchange around whether ‘truth’ was enough to make a positive pedagogical difference in the business school setting.
In our business school and business schools generally in the United Kingdom, there is an implicit idea that, following the financial crisis, post-Enron and all of these other social disasters which have transpired over the last ten years, we must now educate ethically, raising critical questions about the corporation among our students, be it in Strategy or Marketing classes.
Just as they did during previous crisis and scandals! I mean, its good to talk about how firms might be ethical. But you should also tell the truth. It’s built into the institutional structures to do the harm they’re doing. For example, if you have oligopoly, you’re going to get collusion. If you see five big banks talking, you can imagine what they are doing. So if you have a market system, even a functioning market system, with money and growth, and the system moves towards an oligopoly, it’s just going to maximise this corruption. This is the ‘truth’ of the system. This needs to be revealed to students.
So, you would say it is more about changing the structures, rather than educating people to potentially act better in the class room?
Not at all, I do not see them as different. Structural change only comes from people who act to make the change or who at least understand what is going on. Business schools do by and large, which is a start. So it seems to me that business education should be able to explain how the institutions work and why. And ask questions like: ‘why do we have advertising?’ As soon as you ask that, a lot of veils begin to lift. For example, markets are supposed to give people more choice. But you can see that markets, even perfectly functioning ones, reduce choices. I want to get home tonight, the market offers me a choice between a Ford and a Toyota—but it doesn’t offer a subway, which would be much better. But that’s not on the market. The market functions to massively restrict choices, helped by its doctrinal structure and the propaganda that goes into that.
So, in an ethical marketing class, for example, the focus ought not to be on green products or sustainability, or whatever, but on the political economy in which marketing functions?
Why do we have advertising, for example? If you had a market system, there wouldn’t be much advertising. If there’s a market system, somebody has something to offer, to sell, and they would say—‘here’s what I have to offer to sell’. You’re going to get collusion and oligopoly. They don’t want to have price wars. Therefore you have to carry out differentiation to make your product look different from somebody else’s, although they are identical. Then you have to advertise, which is misleading because you’re not describing what your product is—involving football players or movie stars, holding up your toothpaste. So the huge phenomena of advertising is just collusion. That’s what they should focus on.
At this point in the conversation, we were still unsure about the emanicpatory power of truth that Chomsky was hinting at here. Merely revealing the basic underlying realities of capitalism in the classroom did not seem enough. How did this translate into different ways of practically approaching business and management, strategy and so-forth?
Is it sufficient to simply reveal the truth like this in the business school seminar? For example, the CEOs of Enron had world-class MBA degrees and learnt the truth about the market mechanism. That helped them ruin the Californian economy as much as anything else.
They’re like those currently destroying the financial system now. For them, it’s the right thing to do if you’re functioning properly and legally within the corporate institution. Trying to maximise short-term profit. If you can do it right, fiddling around with it all and you are big enough so you are not going to be punished for it.
It seemed we had reached an impasse. It appeared to us that Chomsky was less in favour of CSR or business ethics and more supportive of a pedagogical realism about the nature of late capitalism. The unique ‘truth setting’ of the business school allowed for the contradictions of neoliberal ideology to be laid bare. While we thought that an additional political component was needed to orientate this truth, Chomsky implied that we already have enough work on our hands demystifying capitalism in the classroom. So we wondered whether Chomsky was explicitly against ‘political education’ in this respect. Did he hold a similar view to Weber (1946) in ‘Science as a Vocation’, that we ought to remain with the cold facts first and foremost and leave interpretation to others?
Can we ask you about education and politics? A friend of ours, who is a business school professor in the United States, would find his young son silently reading the back of the Kellogg’s cornflake pack every morning. All attempts at conversation with his unresponsive son were futile. So every night he would type up the central political issues occurring around the world and put this on the back of the cornflake pack. The kid would read it every morning while he sat there. When he told people about this, he was criticised for brainwashing his child [CHOMSKY LAUGHS]. He replied, well I think I’ve got my child’s interest more at heart than Kellogg’s have! But it’s interesting, since we’re told that politics is something that we shouldn’t teach and this seems to be fundamentally problematic in education. Why isn’t politics on the curriculum?
It’s pretty dangerous for the authorities to do that. Look back to the English revolution; take a look at the commentary in the 1640s. The gentlemen were appalled by the fact that the rabble were asking so many questions. They were saying things like, ‘we don’t want a king or parliament. We don’t want to be ruled by gentlemen but by countrymen like ourselves’. How can you let the rabble talk about things like? So it makes good sense not to brainwash your kids into finding out what’s going on. I think Emerson had a nice comment just as the mass education system was being developed. It’s because there are millions of people getting the right to vote that education is needed to keep them from our throat.
So education breeds ignorance, as you put it in the 1993 interview (see Chomsky, 1993)?
Well, you’ve got to educate them the right way; you know, put the right stuff on the back of cereal boxes. I think it makes a lot of sense.
This is a fascinating turn in the conversation since it looks as if Chomsky is conceding that some truths are better than others, especially when it comes to educating a child in a manner that doesn’t perpetuate the status quo. Perhaps he is a little closer to Foucault’s understanding of the truth than he first thought (see Chomsky and Foucault, 1974/2006). He continues in relation to the idea of ‘objectivity’:
Right before our meeting today, I had a Skype talk to a journalism school in Sweden. They wanted to talk about truth. How do journalists define the truth? There is something similar going on in journalism schools here. They teach a concept called objectivity. Objectivity means describing accurately what’s happening inside ‘the beltway’, the road that goes around the Capital. That’s objectivity. If you talk about something else it’s bias, subjective. And you see the effects. So for example, inside the beltway, objectivity is the fiscal deficit, because that’s what the rich people care about. You go two miles away, the problem is jobs. A real problem. But the focus is on the deficit. Objectivity means a kind of truth but a very distorted one, with much left out, including a lot of worthy things such as the environmental crisis because the rich and powerful don’t care in any institutional capacity.
The conversation shifts to another important topic, namely the working conditions inside the university, for staff and students. Given the corporatization of the university in the US and the UK, we wanted to explore the implications of transforming higher education into a business. We start by highlighting the problem of student fees and the growing use of metrics, such as the UK Research Excellence Framework. Chomsky is particularly concerned about student debt:
Student debt is a very interesting topic. If you just look around the world, or even through history, it’s extremely hard to believe that there’s an economic reason for it. Take the United States and its huge student debt. It’s a trillion dollars higher than credit card debt. Back in the 1950s, the United States was a much poorer country than it is today, college was mostly free. The GI Bill brought huge numbers of people to college who never would have made it in. When I was a kid in the 1940s, I went to an Ivy League college because you could easily get a scholarship. It was basically free. So how come in a poor country, you can have free high-quality public education, but in a rich country you can’t? As a matter of fact, we see it right in front of us, look across the border to Mexico. It’s free and pretty high quality.
As soon as students pay for education and hand money over, they become consumers rather than students. This changes the nature of education as well as ‘us’ as educators, making it more training and vocationally orientated than it does educational. From your experience, do you think that’s the case?
Yes. It’s the principle thing, I don’t know where it’s going but the purpose is to explicitly turn research into something instrumental for the economy. I even see it when I’m asked to write recommendations for people in England, for fellowships and so on. There’s a certain question—how will their work help the British economy. Interestingly, I just got one from Germany the other day and it asks a similar question. But it said how will this help German science? Even in terms of the economy that is a much better goal to follow if you want the economy to flourish.
The Research Assessment Exercise in the UK enters the discussion—a key issue facing business school academics (see Willmott and Mingers, 2013). The authors explain to Chomsky its mechanics, an evaluation exercise that occurs every five or six years to nationally rank schools, which goes on to determine governmental funding. One of the more controversial aspects of the exercise is the way ‘impact’ is now deemed a crucial performance indicator. Government funding is now evaluated by how much concrete impact your school has had on enhancing economic policy, business success and so-forth.
It’s happening here too. It’s a shocking development. Here, it is happening under the impact of legislators and trustees. It is a constant battle. It is kind of interesting that institutions like MIT are left out of it so they don’t get the same pressure as everyone else, because the funders understand that it is better to leave people alone if you want anything serious to come out. In fact you wouldn’t have computers if it weren’t for that.
But from this narrow business perspective, it is very difficult for, say, a Philosophy Department, because they’re not considered …
… contributing to knowledge … which is terrible.
Finally, we turn to employment practices in the university, especially the deepening precarity of labour and the deskilling of academic work. A university lectureship was once considered the ‘last good job’ (Aronowitz, 2007) before the erosion of security and the rise of increasingly heavy-handed university administration.
In the UK the universities have become highly precarious places of employment. Not only for tenured professors like us who are under a lot of pressure to tick the boxes, but also with adjunct instructors and the burgeoning number of precarious employees. We are trying to figure out what impact this has on the nature of the university as a depository of truth like you’re talking about.
This is an interesting question. We have seen a major increase here too with temporary workers, you know adjuncts, cutting back their benefits and conditions. This model of the university wants what they call efficiency. But efficiency is quite an interesting notion. It means transmitting costs to the weak.
So this is a very one-sided view of efficiency, one that isn’t really designed to meet the broader needs of the university?
Yes. For example, take this case: if you cut back on staff or funding, if you make class sizes temporary bigger, use graduate students instead of professors and so on, it may cost you less money. But from the point of view of the students, it’s quite harmful and, of course, for society too. But those negative outcomes aren’t called inefficient because its about transmitting costs to the weak and we see it everywhere.
Thank you for your time Professor Chomsky.
You are welcome—I hope you make good progress on this project.
Concluding reflections
After our meeting, we were convinced that the business school might certainly be a site for critical and progressive institutional change, especially pertaining to the question of pedagogy. It seems clear from our conversation that Chomsky prefers critical or political ‘realism’ when it comes to educating students about the nature of capitalism and society today. For him, the ‘truth’ about the machinations of the current hegemonic order is still the best weapon for changing it from both within the university and beyond.
We further reflected. Is it possible or even desirable to translate Chomsky’s views into concrete practices inside of the business school? We remain positive but ambivalent. On the one hand, we concur with Chomsky that a good dose of political realism would certainly give organization theory, CSR and marketing, for example, more ‘teeth’ with which to critically appreciate the current neoliberal climate. For example, instead of ‘green marketing’ the focus ought be on the pernicious nature of advertising more generally. Or, rather than look at the stakeholder theory of the firm, emphasis should instead be placed on the activities of multinational enterprises within the global economy, etc. Another good example might be the shadowy world of corporate tax evasion in the US and UK. A good deal of CSR, for example, has almost nothing to say on this topic, which seems rather bizarre.
On the other hand, however, we are unsure about whether the truth is enough, especially in the context of the business school environment. Does revelation automatically lead to indignation and active change for the better? We were trying to suggest to Chomsky that it is not the truth per se that matters, but what is done with it. As university instructors we have both had experiences of deep cynicism among students, whereby the open truths of capitalism perversely become an apologia for business as usual. One might hear this comment in the seminar room: ‘look, the system is screwed and grossly unfair, so lets individually make the most of it, because there is nothing else we can do’. ‘Capitalist realism’ (Fisher, 2010) cast in this manner does not liberate at all, but functions as yet another moment of ideological entrapment.
During the conversation our different perspectives on this issue briefly coincided, especially when Chomsky argued that some truths are better than others. Objectivity has many facets with different outcomes. If time had permitted, we would have liked to have explored this issue in more depth, particularly in relation to the counter-productive effects of what we might call ‘cynical truth telling’ that feels so pervasive in university and business school today.
Overall, we were surprised by Chomsky’s overtly positive impressions of the business school, especially in relation to his strong criticisms of the university and education more generally. He found the business departments he had visited heterodox environments, questioning and refreshingly supportive of critical ideas. Moreover, for Chomsky, it is the necessity for cold facts that makes business schools more in touch with capitalist reality than other departments in the university. The implication is that business schools largely serve the elite, and prospective members of this class need to know what’s really going on in order to dominate society effectively.
But we ask again whether this is simply the case. For those of us who teach in the business school, can it be argued that we have a more accurate and non-ideological conception of reality than our counterparts in other disciplines? Moreover, is there not a danger of assuming that the elite have a privileged understanding of what is really going in society today? According to some commentators, if the 2008 crisis has taught us anything, it is that ruling groups in the West are completely out of touch with reality, living in a fantasy world that has little relevance to ‘99%’ers’, the rest of us. For sure, the business school might also be included in this role-call of the out-of-touch (see Mirowski, 2013).
One thing is certain, however; like many in the business school, Chomsky is deeply concerned about the future of the public university, its academics and student body. For him, the increasing subservience of education to the myopic needs of economic maximization not only stifles knowledge and learning, but harbours counter-productive tendencies that undermine the very vibrancy of the institution. In addition, the way in which universities have wholeheartedly adopted a ‘business analogy’ (Collini, 2012) can lead to rather exploitative employment practices that all of us are undoubtedly worried about. It remains a testament to Chomsky’s political tenacity that after 50 years of active academic service, he still remains militantly optimistic about our ability to take back the university. And we agree with him. Such steadfast optimism will surely be vital for the challenges that lie ahead, especially in the contemporary business school.