The Alienation of Scholarship in Modern Business Schools: From Marxist Material Relations to the Lacanian Subject

In this essay, we theorize the fragmented nature of the alienation experienced by management scholars working in neoliberal universities. We argue that management scholars not only suffer from the detachment of labor from product (e.g., research and teaching) as material economic relations determine, but by adding a psychoanalytic perspective, we claim that they also must enjoy this process as a necessity of a neoliberal logic that reinforces anxiety. Hence, we argue that alienation should be approached as a potential to fulfill when considering troubling production relations in business schools. In terms of the implications addressing primarily our colleagues, we suggest hystericizing our alienation from our labor with simple acts of critique in management education and research. In other words, by hystericizing, we mean not only asking questions to produce more knowledge for the market, but also always staying in a questioning mode and being dissatisfied with the answers.