[Peace-discuss] Shut Down the Business School

[Brussel, Morton K]

Of equivalent concern is what is taught in Economics departments, another favorite Major of undergraduates in the USA, and in graduate school.

On May 25, 2019, at 10:28 AM, David Green via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net<mailto:peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>> wrote:

https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/shut-down-the-business-school/

In your latest book you call for the Business School to be replaced by what you call the School for Organising. Before getting on to the latter, could you say what the basic problem with the Business School is, as you see it? Why do you focus in on this particular organisation within society? What is so important about the Business School?

The rise of the Business School is something that is not really commented on that much. But it is an astonishing change in higher education globally, particularly in the U.K. What we have seen in the last twenty or thirty years is the globalisation of a particular form of higher education which teaches and mostly reproduces a set of assumptions about global capitalism and the way that business should operate. In the book I claim that there are now something like thirteen thousand Business Schools globally and their turnover, in terms of fees, is something in the region of four hundred billion dollars. So we are talking about a very big sector, a set of institutions that has enormous purchase in terms of the number of people it teaches about the way that their society should be structured.

The key problem for me is the way that the Business School essentially encourages us not to question the existing order. The quick summary, I suppose, is to say that these are schools for capitalism. They teach capitalism and very often teach capitalism in the most crude and unreconstructed way, particularly in the areas of finance where many of the instruments of financialised capitalism that caused the last financial crisis, are being taught as if they were acceptable within the Business School. Now, I’m not saying the Business School is the only reason that we have the particular problems with capitalism that we have at present but it is clearly one of the amplifiers, one of the megaphones, one of the producers of the ideology that supports a particular economic and social structure and I think, and an increasing number of people think, that that economic and social structure is causing us huge problems in terms of the generation of inequality, the production of environmental externalities, the assumptions about leaders and led which are resulting in the kind of populism and nativism that we are seeing right the way across the global north. It is clear to me that the structure that we have is broken and yet we have a set of instructions that seem to be blithely carrying on as if there were no problems or if they do acknowledge those problems they largely reduce it to corporate responsibility and tinkering around the edges. What I think is we need major revision. Well not just revision, I think we need revolution in terms of the way we educate our young people about their economic life and possibilities.
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