The good business school

Abstract

As Organization celebrates its 30th Anniversary, this paper asks: what might it mean to be a good business school? The paper reviews research published in this journal to assess the current state of business schools, revealing a somewhat dismal picture of institutions beholden to instrumental managerialism, top-down hierarchical control, obsession with metrics, and narrow and elitist research agendas. This state of affairs is re-assessed though Raewyn Connell’s idea of The Good University. Through this analysis, we are able to identify the good business school as one serves society by educating citizens and creating knowledge that leads to shared prosperity, social equality and human flourishing.

Introduction

The growth of business schools around the world since the 1980s is a neoliberal phenomenon. As alternatives to capitalism were muted and deregulated corporate business activity expanded on a global scale, business became an increasingly preferred choice for university students. Today there are more than 10,000 business schools in the world (Adolphus, 2023). The Master of Business Administration, the archetypal business school course, was undertaken by more than 250,000 students globally in the 2020-21 academic year (Byrne, 2022). What are considered the “best” business schools are also formulated along neoliberal lines. These are the schools that promise graduates well-paying corporate jobs and a readymade network of global connections. Often extortionate tuition fees are charged on a return-on-investment basis as graduates see education as a road to individual financial gain in a competitive professional labor market.

The neoliberal business school has come under sustained critique in the journal Organization. The central tenets of this criticism is that these schools are destroying the traditional idea of the university, are directed by ruthless managerialists, are representatives of Western masculine imperialism, and have reduced intellectual work to ranking based competition. This essay reviews this research, refracting it through Raewyn Connell’s idea of The Good University (2014). We respond to the criticism of business school education by considering what might be the feature of “the good business school.” The good business school, as we conceive of it, is one that is both public and democratic in its purpose, and that serves society by educating citizens and creating knowledge that leads to shared prosperity, social equality and human flourishing.

In presenting this argument we acknowledge that the opportunity to contribute to this 30th Anniversary issue of Organization is a great privilege as we have each developed our thinking and critical research in relation to the legacies left behind by many of the founders of Critical Management Studies. We also acknowledge that we have each built our career and made our livings in business schools for some time. Moreover, while we enter into an insider critique of these institutions, we also acknowledge our debt to them as our workplaces and sources of our livelihoods.

We work at two very different schools. At the time of this anniversary, Carl Rhodes is Dean of UTS Business School at the University of Technology Sydney, located on the land of the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation. This is a school that has explicitly embraced a social commitment to developing and sharing knowledge for an innovative, sustainable and prosperous economy in a fairer world. This is a school where research of social and political value is welcomed and encouraged. Alison Pullen is a feminist researcher, professor and outgoing editor of the journal Gender, Work and Organization. Alison works at the business school at Macquarie University which rests on the land of the Wallumattagal clan of the Dharug Nation. Whilst the school does not embrace research or curricula that is critical or gendered, she ensures it is part of her academic practice. Alison finds purpose exploring structural, cultural and affective alternatives to the normalization of patriarchy, toxic masculinity, racism and heteronormativity which threatens human lives, social justice and democracy.

What’s wrong with the neoliberal business school

Organization is home to many research papers and essays that have, collectively, mounted a sustained and deep critique of the nature of business schools. These contributions highlight many of the complexities and conflicts in place within business schools, including between management and staff, academic scholarship and marketization, mainstream and critical pedagogy and research, corporate and social impact, managerially relevant and socially purpose, outward facing leadership and socially just management of people, individualism and collective growth, and enforced compliance and grassroots resistance, to name but a few.

As with is the case in the broader field of Critical Management Studies, employee resistance to authority (or the lack thereof) has been a feature in the research into business schools presented in Organization. Parker (2014), for example, documents the change process undertaken in a European business school as it led to the disenfranchisement of the school’s staff while leaving them unable or unwilling to resist the changes. Parker describes the process as managerialist, top-down, hierarchical, and corporate. The approach, as described by the School’s Dean, involved “an earth-shattering change program essential for the sustained pre-eminence of our Business School” (p. 282). The conditions for success were defined in terms of financially profitable products (courses), escalating positioning on university “league table” rankings and the quantum of articles published in prestige journals. Parker points to a more general phenomenon where business schools have lost their way as the forces of neoliberalism have robbed them of the distinctiveness granted by the legacy of the University. In place, the new corporate business school is all about market competition, where the most highly ranked academics deliver profitable products to customers, responding positively and passively to financial incentives to do so.

The neoliberal business school, it has been argued, has diminished the breadth and wealth of scholarly work, reducing it to that which can be measured by a narrow set of metrics. As van Houtum and van Uden (2022) surmise: “the modern university has normalized and internalized a neoliberal metrical governmentality, in which quality, freedom, and societal benefit risk being exchanged for quantity, managerial control, and status benefit” (p. 197). Even with business schools and universities increasingly embracing “impact” as a measure of their success, this has depoliticized academic activism, reducing it to support for the corporate economy (Rhodes et al., 2018). Journal quality lists have been identified as especially pernicious. Publishing in so called “top-tier journals” has become a mark of scholarly excellence as if the quality of research can all be boiled down to a singular and simple metric. Willmott (2011) has argued that the “fetish” that business schools have developed with journal ranking and measurement has resulted in the weakening of intellectual diversity and scholarly innovation. By Hussain’s (2015) assessment this threatens the “long term growth and enrichment of the academic environment for a generation” (p. 135) by undermining the true quality and variety of business school research (see also Cluley, 2014).

Focusing on competitive metrics as a measure of success is part of a broader trend of the “marketization” of university research and education, with individual academics coerced and cajoled into “playing the game” that results in good “numbers” while diminishing the intellectual value and originality of their work (Butler and Spoelstra, 2012). Moreover, this is a man’s game where the assumedly neutral criteria for academic excellence reproduce structures of discrimination based on gender, class and race (van Den Brink and Benschop, 2012). Business schools have been criticized for their almost unanimous support of global capitalism, eagerly having taken on the role of “globalizing the curriculum as a means of educating ‘global’ professionals, managers and leaders” (Boussebaa, 2020: 487) with little concern for the neo-colonial inequalities that it has resulted in (Jammulamadaka et al., 2021). This neo-colonialism is exacerbated by the fact that what counts as business and management knowledge, as far as leading academic journals are concerned, is largely written by Anglo-American scholars (Murphy and Zhu, 2012), the majority of whom are men. Scandalously, there has even been a report of a senior and established male business school professor cyberbullying by asserting that female academics’ peer-reviewed work in feminist organization studies is “bad research” (Mandalaki and Pérezts, 2023). It is the individual acts of this professor that exemplify the masculinity of the neoliberal business school where, as described by Lund and Tienari (2019), “displaying oneself as competently detached from the local while advancing one’s career is connected to performing a form of masculinity that is openly individualistic and aggressively competitive” (p. 107). These are the environments that Smith and Ulus (2020) characterize as “masculine structures and encroaching neoliberal discourses that create hostile atmospheres unsupportive of vulnerability and uncertainty” (p. 840).

The Good University

Amidst the justified despair resonating through the pages of Organization we turn for inspiration to Raewyn Connell’s book The Good University (2014). Connell starts from a position very much aligned with authors in Organization. By her assessment, “universities have been swept up in the triumph of the market agenda” (p. 9). Ruled by a “market regime” universities that were once integral parts of an overall system of public education, are now quasi-corporations competing against each other for diverse sources of income. In these universities career managers pursue a corporate mission of producing human capital at a profit. Connell writes:

The market turn has transformed universities from being a cooperating set of public sector agencies, to being a hybrid and fragmented industry of contractors to the state [. . .] it delivers export earnings from overseas student fees [. . .] and supplies expensive vocational courses to many economies. The market turn has achieved these results at some costs. Inequality amongst universities has risen, and their role in generating social inequality has been reinforced. The idea that universities exist to serve the public good survives, but is now overshadowed—in policy and publicity—by the logic of private benefit. (p. 137)

What is to be done? Connell rejects nostalgia as if we might return to a mythical golden age, choosing instead to elucidate the possibility of a “university of hope” characterized by inclusiveness, imagination, creativity and joy. This runs counter to the current trajectory where universities, and business schools at the forefront, would become privatized corporations with shareholders demanding a return on capital investment. In contrast, Connell conceives of the good university as a collective activity of research and teaching that is built on five criteria:

Democratic

The good university is democratic in its internal governance and its social purpose. It is organized so that responsibility and decision-making are shared. The university is dedicated to social justice, seeking to broaden access to higher education and to undertake research that contributes to social equality.

Engaged

The good university is fully engaged with the society that supports it, pursuing research agendas that respond to social needs and curricula that do not just teach techniques but explore their foundations and question their underpinnings. Teachers are fully engaged with students in a joint enterprise of learning.

Truthful

The good university is dedicated to the truth, pursued through “completeness of evidence, powerful analysis, consistency of argument, and systematic critique” (p. 173). Research dares to question what is taken for granted and criticize what is privileged. Teaching is research based and opens avenues where students learn to think for themselves.

Creative

The good university is creative in that it builds on the dynamic ability to both question and create knowledge. Academic freedom is prized and enacted through adventurous and imaginative work in both teaching and research.

Sustainable

The good university takes a long-term perspective on how it is organized and funded. Members of the university have good working conditions and employment security. The university is modest in its expenditure, using public resources judiciously to pursue its goals.

So, how well do business schools perform against Connell’s criteria? If we take the research published in the Organization as a guide, we can safely conclude that business schools are, in general, failing miserably. Democratic? Business schools have been moving in precisely the opposite direction, toward forms of governance characterized by top-down hierarchy and centralized control, where traditional values of collegiality and shared decision-making are seen as quaint and old fashioned (Parker, 2014). Rather than being primarily engaged with problems of the world in which they are located, business schools are obsessed with managing by a narrow set of numerical performance indicators. If there is engagement it is with leagues tables measuring competitive success, with other business schools, or journal ranking systems (van Houtum and van Uden, 2022). Even when “social impact” is brought out as a new way of measuring success, it is massively depoliticized and reduced to management control friendly measurement systems (Rhodes et al., 2018). These schools are less interested in the truth as they are in creating a competitive market position through bogus proxies for academic excellence (Butler and Spoelstra, 2012). In place of scholarly creativity business schools promote individualized careerism along narrow disciplinary lines (Lund and Tienari, 2019) creating environments hostile to openness and critical questioning (Smith and Ulus, 2020). To be critical is effectively to be disaffiliated from the core of the business school agenda (Rowlinson and Hassard, 2011). Sustainability is replaced with labor casualization and profiteering in an era where business schools are considered global businesses (Siltaoja et al., 2019) and network components of modern capitalism (Jensen and Zawadzki, 2023).

Hope is not dead

If we accept the conclusion that business schools have failed miserably to meet the criteria to be positive, progressive and engaged academic institutions focussed on contributing the public good, what then might be done about it? Connell (2019) reminds us that the good university is not a figment of her imagination but is present in real practices that are active and present in universities. Through the actual practices of teaching and research undertaken today, democracy is still “lurking in the basic work of universities” (p. 186), and we add also in business schools. Despite corporatization, the belief that universities serve the purpose of the public good is still present. Battered, but not entirely broken, universities and their business schools retain the promise of inclusiveness, progress and common value. The key to change is to work to keep that promise through whatever means at our disposal—through our teaching practice, our research activity, our public engagement and our management. These are avenues open to all academics—from the early career researcher to the seasoned professor to the academic manager—individually, collectively, and in solidarity. Beyond the cold comfort of despairing about the business school lies the warm possibilities of doing things differently, each starting with ourselves and what is within our power.

As Spicer et al. (2021) aver, the starting point to imagining the possibilities of a different kind of business school is to recognize that the business school itself is not monolithic or singular in its purpose, structure or practice. Moreover, just as there have been different forms of business schools in the past, there can also be different ones in the future—models that are not seduced by corporate managerialism and market competition and the dominant instrumental model of the business school that follows (Kitchener et al., 2022). Following Kitchener and Delbridge (2020) the opportunity is for business schools to redirect their work toward an explicit mission of delivering on the “public good” out of a “moral commitment to human betterment” (p. 320). Such a mission would take as its goal the production of “cooperative humans, substantive business schools, fairer societies, and thriving ecosystems” (Colombo, 2023). Against the juggernaut of the corporate business school, the real possibility of business education and research that re-engages with the public and democratic function of the university has emerged (cf. Dewey, 1916). This function is one where business education would develop students’ abilities to understand the broader position of business in society, and to make informed and responsible choices.

By and large business schools are responsible for educating the “professional managerial class”—that social group, as Liu (2021) explains, has been taught to identify with the values of the prevailing neoliberal order while at the same time positing themselves as liberal and progressive. We have failed if business education ends up supporting “virtue hoarding” that engages in feel-good political positions that do little to shift the status quo. A belief in public and democratic business schools means educating citizens to be the leaders and professionals who can not only perform the functions of business, but also that have a broader social and political understanding of the role of business and management in creating a better and more equal society on a global level. It also means engaging in meaningful research that contributes to addressing the world’s “grand challenges” of climate change, energy, health and the delivery of social care (Currie, 2023), inequality and marginalization (Dodd et al., 2022). Connell proposes that “basic to any future beyond the dog-eat-dog market is the principle that universities meet collective needs” (p. 189). There is a social need for good business education and research that fulfils a public and democratic purpose. For all business schools and for all business school academics, the challenge and opportunity are there for the taking.

Concluding: The Critical Journal Organization

As reviewed above, Organization has long housed debates surrounding the emergence of business and management schools. In this paper we suggest that the research published in Organization is especially important because it allows us to think through the transformative potential of the good business school. This is a school that learns from its past and engages with theory and critique to shape new knowledge which informs activism, practice and social change. If we look back to the first issue of Organization published in 1994, the founding editors Burrell et al. (1994), attested to a journal committed to “becoming neo-disciplinary” (p. 9) and promoting an ethos which is theory-driven, international, open reflective, imaginative and critical (p. 12). Some 30 years later we take heed that if the good business school is to be embraced then this same ethos needs to be embedded in all aspects of what universities do and how they are governed. Doing so would rail against the violent myopia that results in dysfunctional business schools antithetical to the academic values that the founding editors of this journal attested to. To pursue a vision of the good business school we will need to get “out of the ruins” (Hanke and Hearn, 2012) that the Western university has too frequently become (Calás and Smircich, 2001, 2023). Doing so demands that we get “back to the values of community, caring, and concern for others which had not been forgotten but rather suppressed under the weight of ‘the competitive individual’ of Western liberalism cultivated under ‘advanced global capitalism’ premises, and promoted by our institutional practices” (Calás et al., 2023: 180).

The authors in Organization have warned us not to be complicit, heralding how resistance and responsibility for a different future will be needed. Organization remains a journal that welcomes multidisciplinary contributions and diverse theoretical traditions. As we have discussed here, it is also a space unafraid of challenging taken-for-granted assumptions of our own institutions. Whilst the university is a behemoth that is hard to challenge alone, when people work collectively, we remember that resistance is not futile, and that change is possible. In this spirit, we proffer that bringing the values that Connell attests to into the heart of what we do as business schools will enable future generations to be able to be proud of what has been achieved by good business schools.