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The Business School’s Right to Operate: Responsibilization and Resistance

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Abstract

The current crisis has come at a cost not only for big business but also for business schools. Business schools have been deemed largely responsible for developing and teaching socially dysfunctional curricula that, if anything, has served to promote and accelerate the kind of ruthless behavior and lack of self-restraint and social irresponsibility among top executives that have been seen as causing the crisis. As a result, many calls have been made for business schools to accept their responsibilities as social institutions and to work toward becoming more socially embedded and better attuned to public interests. In this paper, however, we point to some of the barriers there may be in the way of business schools developing into responsible organizational citizens proper. We argue that there are lines of resistance against responsibilization operating at epistemological, institutional, and organization levels and that we need to take account of barriers on all these levels in order to properly capture the challenges that are involved in making the modern business school amenable to demands for more social responsibility. In terms of working toward overcoming such barriers, we discuss how business education can become more socially embedded via the inclusion of ethical reflection and critical thinking.

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Notes

  1. Although it can be argued that all theories of management are somewhat ideologically contaminated, we reserve this term for theories that build on strong negative assumptions about human behavior and what motivates it, i.e., in particular agency theory, transaction cost theory, and game theory. That being said, we do acknowledge the plurality of theories being used in contemporary management studies, beyond the stark reading of the state of affairs presented by Ghoshal in his seminal 2005 paper. This calls for discussions of how significant less instrumental and top-down approaches to management and leadership [like the one presented by Mintzberg et al. (2002)], with their potential to provide more responsible and morally acceptable models of behavior, appear to be in the offerings of modern business schools. How many of us recall that Michael Porter himself, in his extremely influential work on the five forces, Competitive strategy (1980), acknowledged the significance of the personal values of managers and societal expectations in setting up a competitive strategy? How many strategy professors actually discuss the implications of incorporating values and social expectations in the formulation of corporate strategy?

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Acknowledgments

A previous version of this article was presented at the 2012 Joint Conference of KABE & JABES (respectively, the Korean and Japanese Academy of Business Ethics) held in Seoul, with the title: “The Role of Business Ethics in Business Schools: A European Perspective.” The authors want to thank the editors and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions that have been very helpful in improving the paper.

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  1. ESADE Business School – Ramon Llull University, Av. Pedralbes, 62, 08034, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

    David Murillo

  2. Copenhagen Business School, Porcelænshaven 18A, 2000, Frederiksberg, Denmark

    Steen Vallentin

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  1. David Murillo
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Correspondence to David Murillo.

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Murillo, D., Vallentin, S. The Business School’s Right to Operate: Responsibilization and Resistance. J Bus Ethics 136, 743–757 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-015-2872-1

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