On Nov 30, 8:03=A0am, Dan Clore <cl...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
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>
> http://tinyurl.com/6mcudk
> Mangement
> If only business schools wouldn't teach business
> by Martin Parker
> guardian.co.uk, Sunday November 30 2008 00.01 GMT
> The Observer, Sunday November 30 2008
>
> Business schools are the cash cows of the contem****ary university. Their
> expansion in the UK over the past few decades has provided jobs for
> ex-sociologists (like me), and a great deal of income through selling
> degrees in local and global markets. Their profitability has also made
> them useful in justifying the gradual reduction of state funding to
> universities and the move towards a more marketised university system.
> But what do business and management schools actually teach? The answer
> is both obvious and slightly alarming. They teach capitalism.
>
> Universities have often rather fawned on the rich and powerful. From the
> kings and bishops who endowed the mediaeval universities to the
> industrialists who built the Victorian ones, the institution has focused
> on those with money and status. The business school is no exception.
> With its glass atrium and brochure that implies a ticket to the plush
> business lounge, it aims itself at the global managerial class. It does
> not, by and large, sell its wares to voluntary organisations,
> co-operatives or trade unions, and its relation****p with the public
> sector is uneasy.
>
> But this focus results in a narrow conception of what business schools
> should teach. If history departments teach about the past, and medical
> schools teach about the human body, then business schools should teach
> about organisations.
History departments don't teach about "the past", and
medical schools don't teach about "the human body".
Their focus is much more narrow than that. Likewise,
business schools do not teach about all forms of
organization, or even all forms of productive organization,
or even all forms of capitalist organization. Universities
are large, expensive organizations established and
maintained by a ruling class and studies of savages
or hippies are going to be very peripheral to the
concerns of their owners and operators. The kind of
business which appeals to them is the kind
where brisk men is good suits occupy the plush
lounges and flip billions of dollars back and forth.
Judging by the recent misadventures of capitalism,
they don't do a very good job of studying even
within their narrow focus, but I guess that's another
issue.
May I suggest that this may be for the best? You
can't run a commune or cooperative successfully
with ruling-class values and ideas. By expanding
their purview, all business schools and universities
are likely to do is inflict their contagion on a larger
number of people.
> That is their general subject-matter
-=
exploring
> the ways in which human beings come together for collective benefit, or
> not. It doesn't take a genius to notice that different people in
> different times and places have organised themselves very differently.
> There are few universals, and a staggering range of ways in which humans
> have made and exchanged things, and justified power and authority. To
> take a few at random, they would include communes and the Mafia, the
> Amish and the Zapatista. They are not reducible to the recent invention
> of 'management'.
>
> In an obvious sense, management is a particular form of organising; not
> the only one, nor the end of history, but pretty much the only thing
> taught at b-school. This has at least one evident consequence:
> alternative forms of organising are not taken to be options at all;
> globalising, speculative capitalism is seen as inevitable. While I don't
> think you can blame the current financial crisis on the business school,
> you can certainly say that the sort of knowledge sold by the business
> school has become the common sense of the managerial cl*****.
>
> Let's think about it in a different way. Can you imagine studying in a
> biology department which only teaches animals with four legs and omits
> the rest? Or getting a degree in history based on studying a part of
> 17th-century Stafford****re? This is what business schools are doing.
> They are creating a managerialist encyclopaedia that has had entire
> categories of organising airbrushed out of it. Reading many textbooks,
> you might assume that contem****ary capitalism worked for everyone on the
> planet, and that it had come into existence through a consensual form of
> evolution. Listening to what many professors say, you might imagine that
> marketing really did help customers find the best products, and that
> developing countries have chosen to sell their cash crops at knockdown
> prices.
>
> But, most im****tantly, you would have no idea about the history and
> practice of communes and co-ops; or the slow food movement and localism,
> or forms of micro-credit and mutualism, or anarchist, environmentalist,
> feminist and communist views on hierarchy and decision-making. I am not
> suggesting that this censor****p is deliberate; I think it is usually
> based on carelessness or ignorance. But either way, students are being
> taught that there are no animals that do not have four legs, and hence
> that the present state of affairs is the best we can collectively
> imagine. Consciences thus soothed, the graduate can collect his or her
> pass to the executive lounge secure in the knowledge that this is the
> best of all possible worlds.
>
> Hence my proposal: rename management and business schools 'schools for
> organising', and ensure they help to teach organisers (of all shapes and
> sizes) the history and politics of organisation. This might mean handing
> back some cor****ate sponsor****p, and perhaps renaming a ****ny lecture
> theatre. It would also mean retraining some enthusiastic young lecturers
> with high salaries and a fondness for suits and the language of the new
> capitalism. Then students can expect courses on local exchange trading
> schemes, as well as speculative futures and share swaps. If we are to
> learn anything from the present situation, it must be that business as
> usual is not an option. Who knows, when business schools start teaching
> more than market managerialism, another world might become possible.
>
> =95 Martin Parker is professor of organisation and culture at the
> University of Leicester's school of management
>
> =95 Simon Caulkin is away
>
> --
> Dan Clore
>
> My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and
Others_http://tinyurl.com/2gco=
qt
> Lord We=FFrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
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>
> Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
> in charge on this island?
> Professor: Why, no one.
> Skipper: No one?
> Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
> -- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"
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