{"id":179162,"date":"2018-04-28T19:06:00","date_gmt":"2018-04-29T00:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/04\/28\/you-had-me-at-bulldoze-the-business-school\/"},"modified":"2018-04-28T19:06:00","modified_gmt":"2018-04-29T00:06:00","slug":"you-had-me-at-bulldoze-the-business-school","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/04\/28\/you-had-me-at-bulldoze-the-business-school\/","title":{"rendered":"You Had Me at, “Bulldoze the Business School”"},"content":{"rendered":"
Martin Parker, a former professor at a business school, is suggesting that business schools should be shut down<\/a>:<\/div>\n

Visit the average university campus and it is likely that the newest and most ostentatious building will be occupied by the business school. The business school has the best building because it makes the biggest profits (or, euphemistically, \u201ccontribution\u201d or \u201csurplus\u201d) \u2013 as you might expect, from a form of knowledge that teaches people how to make profits. <\/p>\n

Business schools have huge influence, yet they are also widely regarded to be intellectually fraudulent places, fostering a culture of short-termism and greed. (There is a whole genre of jokes about what MBA \u2013 Master of Business Administration \u2013 really stands for: \u201cMediocre But Arrogant\u201d, \u201cManagement by Accident\u201d, \u201cMore Bad Advice\u201d, \u201cMaster Bullsh%$ Artist\u201d and so on.) Critics of business schools come in many shapes and sizes: employers complain that graduates lack practical skills, conservative voices scorn the arriviste MBA, Europeans moan about Americanisation, radicals wail about the concentration of power in the hands of the running dogs of capital. Since 2008, many commentators have also suggested that business schools were complicit in producing the crash. <\/p>\n

Having taught in business schools for 20 years, I have come to believe that the best solution to these problems is to shut down business schools altogether. This is not a typical view among my colleagues. Even so, it is remarkable just how much criticism of business schools over the past decade has come from inside the schools themselves. Many business school professors, particularly in north America, have argued that their institutions have gone horribly astray. B-schools have been corrupted, they say, by deans following the money, teachers giving the punters what they want, researchers pumping out paint-by-numbers papers for journals that no one reads and students expecting a qualification in return for their cash (or, more likely, their parents\u2019 cash). At the end of it all, most business-school graduates won\u2019t become high-level managers anyway, just precarious cubicle drones in anonymous office blocks. <\/p>\n

These are not complaints from professors of sociology, state policymakers or even outraged anti-capitalist activists. These are views in books written by insiders, by employees of business schools who themselves feel some sense of disquiet or even disgust at what they are getting up to. Of course, these dissenting views are still those of a minority. Most work within business schools is blithely unconcerned with any expression of doubt, participants being too busy oiling the wheels to worry about where the engine is going. Still, this internal criticism is loud and significant.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I would highly suggest that you click through and read the rest of the article.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Martin Parker, a former professor at a business school, is suggesting that business schools should be shut down: Visit the average university campus and it is likely that the newest and most ostentatious building will be occupied by the business school. The business school has the best building because it makes the biggest profits (or, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[365,368,397,364],"class_list":["post-179162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-business","tag-corruption","tag-education","tag-evil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179162"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179162\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}