MAY 2018

Business education is not leading to good corporate governance and we teach alternative
models, putting co-operation and corporate responsibility on the curriculum
EDUCATION
BY MARTIN PARKER,
Professor of Organisation
Studies at the University of
Bristol and author of Shut
Down the Business School
(Pluto Press, 2018)
Virtually every university in the UK has a business
school, and they collectively teach around one in
seven university students. It’s a gigantic and very
profitable industry, and one that has grown as state
funding of universities has declined. But these are
not neutral purveyors of teaching and research
about how to organise, because the b-school sells a
very particular form of knowledge. It teaches about
capitalism, and largely ignores any alternatives.
The business school is a creature of the market.
In order to stand a better chance of selling ideas, it
is a good idea to teach things that flatter those who
want to become wealthy and powerful. And this is
exactly what the b-school does, by suggesting that
decision making by management and the unequal
distribution of rewards are inevitable. Students are
taught that these are the result of a combination of
economic laws and human nature. Leaders must
be amply compensated to compensate them for
the burdens that they shoulder while well behaved
employees admire them from a distance.
The problem that the business school should
be addressing is governance. As Plato says in The
Republic, we need to be careful how we educate
those who might lead us. If we educate our graduates
in the inevitability of market managerialism, it is
hardly surprising that we end up with justifications
for massive salaries and hierarchical decision
making. That is the message that the business
curriculum provides. The abstraction called ‘the
market’ is assumed to be the hidden hand that noone
can buck, and it is ‘the market’ that determines
that some get paid more than others.
The key to the problem of business education is in
the name. Words like ‘business’, or ‘management’,
or ‘commerce’ refer us to some particular forms
of organisation. Mostly large, mostly private
sector, usually the limited company. These quite
specific organisational forms are then assumed
to provide general models for all sorts of other
organisations, which is a bit like assuming that
studying whales can tell us about herring. Because
the fact is that our world is populated by all sorts
of organisations, and they all present different
solutions to the problem of governance. That’s
why we need a School for Organising, not
for management.
If we start looking, there are lots of forms
of organisation that an alternative school might
look at in order to learn lessons. This means the
curriculum would not ignore organisations on a
different scale, or in different cultures, or from
different times. Organisation – as a verb – simply
refers to the patterns that humans produce in
order to get things done. It could include families,
42 | MAY 2018