If Only Business Schools Wouldn't Teach Business
Dan Clore
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
http://tinyurl.com/6mcudk
Mangement
If only business schools wouldn't teach business
by Martin Parker
guardian.co.uk, Sunday November 30 2008 00.01 GMT
The Observer, Sunday November 30 2008
Business schools are the cash cows of the contemporary university. Their
expansion in the UK over the past few decades has provided jobs for
ex-sociologists (like me), and a great deal of income through selling
degrees in local and global markets. Their profitability has also made
them useful in justifying the gradual reduction of state funding to
universities and the move towards a more marketised university system.
But what do business and management schools actually teach? The answer
is both obvious and slightly alarming. They teach capitalism.
Universities have often rather fawned on the rich and powerful. From the
kings and bishops who endowed the mediaeval universities to the
industrialists who built the Victorian ones, the institution has focused
on those with money and status. The business school is no exception.
With its glass atrium and brochure that implies a ticket to the plush
business lounge, it aims itself at the global managerial class. It does
not, by and large, sell its wares to voluntary organisations,
co-operatives or trade unions, and its relationship with the public
sector is uneasy.
But this focus results in a narrow conception of what business schools
should teach. If history departments teach about the past, and medical
schools teach about the human body, then business schools should teach
about organisations. That is their general subject-matter - exploring
the ways in which human beings come together for collective benefit, or
not. It doesn't take a genius to notice that different people in
different times and places have organised themselves very differently.
There are few universals, and a staggering range of ways in which humans
have made and exchanged things, and justified power and authority. To
take a few at random, they would include communes and the Mafia, the
Amish and the Zapatista. They are not reducible to the recent invention
of 'management'.
In an obvious sense, management is a particular form of organising; not
the only one, nor the end of history, but pretty much the only thing
taught at b-school. This has at least one evident consequence:
alternative forms of organising are not taken to be options at all;
globalising, speculative capitalism is seen as inevitable. While I don't
think you can blame the current financial crisis on the business school,
you can certainly say that the sort of knowledge sold by the business
school has become the common sense of the managerial classes.
Let's think about it in a different way. Can you imagine studying in a
biology department which only teaches animals with four legs and omits
the rest? Or getting a degree in history based on studying a part of
17th-century Staffordshire? This is what business schools are doing.
They are creating a managerialist encyclopaedia that has had entire
categories of organising airbrushed out of it. Reading many textbooks,
you might assume that contemporary capitalism worked for everyone on the
planet, and that it had come into existence through a consensual form of
evolution. Listening to what many professors say, you might imagine that
marketing really did help customers find the best products, and that
developing countries have chosen to sell their cash crops at knockdown
prices.
But, most importantly, you would have no idea about the history and
practice of communes and co-ops; or the slow food movement and localism,
or forms of micro-credit and mutualism, or anarchist, environmentalist,
feminist and communist views on hierarchy and decision-making. I am not
suggesting that this censorship is deliberate; I think it is usually
based on carelessness or ignorance. But either way, students are being
taught that there are no animals that do not have four legs, and hence
that the present state of affairs is the best we can collectively
imagine. Consciences thus soothed, the graduate can collect his or her
pass to the executive lounge secure in the knowledge that this is the
best of all possible worlds.
Hence my proposal: rename management and business schools 'schools for
organising', and ensure they help to teach organisers (of all shapes and
sizes) the history and politics of organisation. This might mean handing
back some corporate sponsorship, and perhaps renaming a shiny lecture
theatre. It would also mean retraining some enthusiastic young lecturers
with high salaries and a fondness for suits and the language of the new
capitalism. Then students can expect courses on local exchange trading
schemes, as well as speculative futures and share swaps. If we are to
learn anything from the present situation, it must be that business as
usual is not an option. Who knows, when business schools start teaching
more than market managerialism, another world might become possible.
• Martin Parker is professor of organisation and culture at the
University of Leicester's school of management
• Simon Caulkin is away
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
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Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
in charge on this island?
Professor: Why, no one.
Skipper: No one?
Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
-- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"
