Introduction: A Post‐crisis Critical Reflection on Business Schools

Every cloud has a silver lining. There could be no more opportune a time to reflect critically on business schools and the education they (we) profess to provide. It is not clear that Lord Turner, Chairman of the UK Financial Services Authority, was directly blaming business schools when he argued that prior to the crisis there had been ‘a fundamental intellectual failure’, but he was convinced that the business model that finance capital had created was suspect and there is no question of an influential role for finance economics (BBC 1, 2009). This took the form of principal–agency theorists advocating cash bonuses and stock options to motivate managers to fulfil their obligations to concentrate on improving shareholder value. In the context of the neoliberal economic consensus that swept both developed and developing economies in the late 1990s and early 2000s, this business model was a recipe for disaster, as has proven to be the case. Moreover, we are still awaiting the ‘new economic philosophy’ that Gordon Brown was sure would replace the ‘unbridled free market dogma, which had been discredited by the financial crisis’ (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1103662/Well-rise-challenges-year-says-Gordon-Brown.html, consulted 25 March 2009). When The Economist (2009), hardly an organ of Marxist critique, turns on business schools –‘this has been a year of sackcloth and ashes for the world's business schools’– and lambasts them for their myopia, their lack of science and their lack of ‘scepticism and cynicism’, something is clearly not right. This special issue was conceived before the economic crisis broke but we feel it is even more timely now than before. Its title –Making the Business School More ‘Critical’– deliberately uses ‘critical’ in a broad sense, rather than the narrower sense characterized by ‘critical management studies’ (CMS). Given that the business school is complicit in the current financial crisis, we feel a degree of discomfort with the anti-performative emphasis of some CMS literature (Fournier and Grey, 2000). Instead, whilst remaining critical and reflexive about our practice, we feel obliged to offer some way forward. With this in mind, we selected papers that are oriented towards how we might improve matters, rather than those that merely offer a critique of business school activity. We hope we can thus help business schools, deans and faculty, and the users of business schools (students, clients), become more reflexive in considering how to respond to economic events that may prove a tipping point in what the world expects of business schools and, indeed, business. One of the many interesting aspects of our current financial crisis is the mirror it holds up to business school practice. While we wait to see how the economic crisis unfolds, it is beholden on us to reflect more deeply and critically on the purpose and content of business school education. Many business schools, including Harvard, are looking critically at what they teach in the light of the crisis with calls, for example, for MBAs to sign the equivalent of the medical profession's Hippocratic Oath. It is an inconvenient truth that many of those implicated in the disasters that have beset Wall Street and the world's other financial centres are MBA graduates. The job destination of choice for MBAs from the world's leading school has been the higher echelons of finance and careers in banking, hedge funds and private equity firms. It is the financial economics that they have learnt at the core of their MBA programmes that supposedly equipped them for these careers. It is these financial models and practices that led to economic meltdown, either through cupidity or ignorance in the application of economic theory to, in particular, the shadow banking sector. These ‘financial hydrogen bombs were built on personal computers by twenty-six-year-olds with MBAs’ (Tett, 2009, p. 36). Antonacopoulou's paper is therefore timely in offering an example of a more reflexive, critical perspective on MBA teaching. The starting point is a contestation, supported by the the impact economic practices had in the financial crisis, of the belief that MBA programmes provide the best recipe for success in management. Clearly, the achievement of the cachet of the MBA degree from a leading business school provides a huge positive contribution to a management career, but what MBAs teach can no longer be assumed to be consistent with management practices that improve business performance. The business school ‘best practice’ model is fundamentally flawed because we do not have the research knowledge to determine what is best practice. Divided along functional lines, MBA curricula fail to provide much opportunity for an integrative perspective. Indeed, the primacy of the economic commands the majority of attention and demeans other perspectives. Antonacopoulou proposes a reflexive, critical approach to management education, both conceptually and practically, analysing an innovative MBA programme based upon reflexive critique that challenges conventional wisdoms (theoretical and practical) and situates management theory and practice as a form of socially and politically driven ideology. Interestingly the emphasis upon reflexivity fits well with the views of legendary trader George Soros who argues that the only way to truly understand market dynamics is in terms of their reflexive character rather than in terms of predetermined analytical models. One of the things our current crisis illustrates is the limits and flaws of models of economic behaviours. Antonacopoulou argues that innovation in management education must involve a questioning of existing models and, also, a new engagement with the practice of management in forms of research that generate a co-production of knowledge with and for management. This provides an interesting angle on the ongoing debates in management research about rigour and relevance which come together in ‘engaged and relational scholarship’. The basis for this argument is founded in the Aristotelian concept of phronesis in a timely reference to the importance of grounding practice on a philosophical base. Of course, a central concern for Aristotle and other Greek philosophers was the theorization of the ‘good life’. What our current situation demonstrates is that we ignore the relationship between management, business and the good life, broadly defined, at our peril. Antonacopoulou's paper builds on a variety of contributions to critical pedagogy in the business school (e.g. Grey, 2004) which look increasingly relevant to debates about management practice, its shortcomings and its possibilities. Mingers' (2000) paper provides a useful summary of the thrust of these approaches as focusing upon the critique of rhetoric, of tradition, of authority and of objectivity. Crucial to the various critical approaches is the attempt to demystify and contextualize the situation of management and business and the relationships between their various stakeholders, to move beyond a narrowly functionalist and self-satisfied approach, the hubris of which has driven economic meltdown. Antonacopoulou's paper ends with a critical reflection upon the limits of critical approach and thoughts on how to develop it further in the future. Vince's paper in the special issue is also concerned with business school education, albeit empirically focused upon the case of undergraduates, who constitute a significant body of students in most business schools but who, typically, remain absent from academic analysis of the role of the business school. Vince deals with the thorny issues of politics and emotions in the educational process and provides a grounded illustration of the enactment of more critical pedagogy that others may seek to adopt. His paper focuses particularly on a distinction that he makes between learning in action and learning inaction. Learning in action relates to the discourse of action learning according to which it is believed that people learn best and most productively when engaged in practice rather than in abstraction. For example, we know that action learning can provide a generative learning model for improvements in practice. Membership of an action learning group can assist individuals in the development of strategic actions which then can be tested and potentially transformed in practice. Learning inaction, by contrast, is where we learn, whether through knowledge, fantasy or imitation, just when it is appropriate both emotionally and politically to remain inactive. Vince provides an example of learning inaction from a professional learning case of pharmacists who displace their leadership responsibility for managing human relations onto the human resource specialists and therefore remain inactive when it comes to any learning associated with such issues. Most of the paper, however, is devoted to reporting on the author's own experimental and experiential pedagogical strategies with undergraduates. One example is a form of thought experiment which involves asking his students at the beginning of the lecture to produce something beautiful out of a page of foolscap paper. This apparently ‘simple’ exercise is conducted so as to generate learning in action since the anxiety and ambivalence surrounding the task can be used self-reflexively to think about working in organizations where the anxiety of not knowing or not being clear about what is expected is a very common experience. Further experimental experiential exercises are reported on and each of them is intended to create uncertainty and anxiety so that the lecturer can encourage self-reflection on how this is managed usually to generate rules, routines – in short, to organize their way out of the disorder, uncertainty and insecurity. While threatening to both students and teachers, it is the author's belief that such an approach to teaching and learning can lead to highly effective, critical management education pedagogy. Our third paper in the special issue by Tourish, Craig and Amernic focuses on leadership. In response to concerns about their role, business schools have turned to the notion of leadership as a way to redefine their identity and mission. However, a focus upon leadership may reinforce the challenge faced by business schools to sustain their legitimacy. Leadership remains without a widely accepted theoretical framework or cumulative empirical understanding so that a usable body of knowledge is absent (Khurana, 2007). A paper focused on leadership education thus seems particularly relevant in any debate about making the business school more critical. The paper by Tourish, Craig and Amernic, like Vince's, considers the political and emotional realities of management practice, through focusing on enactment of transformational leadership (oriented towards collective interest) in settings characterized by contradictory performance management systems (oriented towards self-interest). The paper builds upon an emerging critique of transformational leadership that argues that there are considerable limits to the extent to which so-called leaders can transform organizations and suggests leadership in organizations might be better described as ‘target-based leadership’ (Currie and Lockett, 2007). Tourish, Craig and Amernic moves ‘downstream’ from this broader argument to consider the implications of the collective self-interest dilemma for those likely to practise leadership following business school education and how this might drive an ‘alternative’ pedagogy of leadership education, which is more critical, relational and reflective. They suggest some general directions for an alternative leadership prospectus, based on followership, the promotion of critical upward communication within organizations, and the recognition of leadership as a contested, discursive and co-constructed phenomenon. The penultimate paper in this special issue, by Ferlie, McGivern and De Moraes, broadens the debate beyond education to consider the underpinning model for the business school. Its starting point converges with that of our introduction in reflecting the view that business schools, after decades of astonishing growth, are facing the danger of educational, intellectual and moral collapse (Khurana, 2007). The paper makes a strong case for a new ‘public interest’ model for the business school of the future, contrasting this with the three alternative models of practice-led, critical and agora. (Interestingly, like the paper by Antonacopoulou, there are echoes of Greek philosophy in this paper too, with the agora reference and the reference to phronesis.) The public interest model draws on critical reflection on the strengths and weaknesses of business schools and the best of alternative models and the paper specifies the nature of the model and the conditions to which it is responsive, as well as its implications for future management research. Indeed, one of the implications of the model is that business schools might be renamed as schools of management to eschew too close an alignment with business and corporate interests. The emphasis in the public interest model is clearly upon school as opposed to business. Ferlie, McGivern and De Moraes draw support for their argument from consideration of the medical school which, they argue, provides a challenging model for business schools to compare themselves with. In terms of relevance, one can imagine the public outcry if medical schools graduated students whose medical practice led to a systematic destruction of public health! This provocation situates the authors with those who call for the development of the business school as a form of professional school and provides the basis for a consideration of what this might mean for the education of a management profession in terms of professional identity, socialization, self-regulation and codes/ethics of practice. Crucially, it would involve management researchers developing a more effective knowledge base for management practice. Such public interest schools would need a stronger social science base. As well as comparing business schools with medical schools, there might be other interesting models, such as Harvard's Kennedy School of Government rather than Harvard Business School. As the business world responds to the challenges of economic constraint, public sector management offers an interesting perspective on managing diverse and conflicting interests, building legitimacy and co-production of knowledge and viable practice with a range of stakeholders (Moore, 1995). Ferlie, McGivern and De Moraes endorse a strategy of corporate engagement without corporate capture. Our final paper by Ford, Harding and Learmonth is particularly reflexive, and is designed to provoke and unsettle readers, should they feel overly comfortable with the analysis thus far. It seems a fitting place to end. In this paper, the authors pursue an admirable goal of turning critical theory in on itself, arguing that it is bizarre for these theoretical tools to be applied only to managers or other more mainstream academics. Drawing on three vignettes from their previous research, they raise a number of uncomfortable questions about their own role as critical management scholars. A major concern is the extent to which their attachment to a critical management perspective can be simply an identity that is unreflectively elevated above the Other, e.g. mainstream or practitioner views, and imposed on their students as a ‘regime of truth’. A key concern here is the counter to this which is that the actual effects of their pedagogy on students cannot be anticipated, controlled or predicted. This is because the content of a critical discourse is readily eclipsed as it becomes muddled up with a diverse range of experiences and practices once students leave the university environment. In the first vignette the authors are troubled by the fact that students can so internalize the ideas of their academic teachers as to behave continually under a judgemental cloud that prevents them from doing precisely what critical theorists might intend – thinking for themselves. The second vignette demonstrates that the academic accounts or models of organizational life – critical or mainstream – are too simple to encompass the lived complexities of everyday management practice. The third vignette is based on research relating to academics and their idealized aspirations to be respected intellectuals making a difference, carrying out ground-breaking research and distancing themselves from mundane administration. The sense that academics are just as preoccupied with the self – material and symbolic success – as the practitioners or mainstream theorists that they often seek to criticize made them, and presumably by implication all of us, feel decidedly uncomfortable. The insights drawn from these vignettes raise a number of questions about what it means to make the business school more critical. In their words, there are a number of ‘unsettling questions, not only about CMS, but also about CMS's relationship with the wider business school – and our place(s) within both’. Our aim in the special issue is to raise such unsettling questions in a hopefully constructive way.