AMBITION | BE IN BRILLIANT COMPANY O ver the past decades, Business Schools have been heavily criticised for neglecting their societal role – both from within the institution and by outside stakeholders. Often-heard critiques have targeted Business Schools as pursuing a too narrow and rigid scientific model of management, teaching capitalism as the only form of organisation to their students, and
integrate these topics into management education have ranged from offering electives and mandatory standalone modules to making these topics part and parcel of foundational strategy, marketing, and management courses. The next crisis: conveying the wrong message Now, Business Schools do not seem to be critics' target of choice when looking for the causes of, and culprit behind, the Covid-19 pandemic – perhaps because the pandemic has manifested itself primarily as a health crisis and, by implication, it has been governments' handling of the spreading virus that has been the news of the day since March 2020. While, at first, it may appear that all this has little to do with educating managers and business leaders, in reality it does – albeit not so much in terms of rapidly switching to online modes of delivering management education. This becomes clear when reviewing Business School faculty's discipline-oriented interpretations of the business consequences of Covid-19, or the way they are overhauling curricula by emphasising the importance of risk management and changing their business models to demonstrate their relevance. In fact, the Covid-19 pandemic has catapulted Business Schools into an existential crisis yet again, and the silence about it is deafening, both by critics and Business Schools themselves. Moreover, sustainability is not part of the solution for this crisis – it is part of the problem. The problem with management education's provision of sustainability is that it has tended to convey the wrong message to students. For one, management students have been taught that corporate responsibility for sustainability is supra- legal, implying that what is not against the law, is neither unsustainable nor unethical behaviour. In addition, students are being taught that being profitable is a social responsibility in itself, if not the primary responsibility of business. Pandemic parasitism It may hence come as no surprise that online reservation platform, Booking.com, which has boasted billions in profits over the past few years and has brought back some $4.5 billion USD in stock in 2019, requested
surrendering to rankings and the market. Others have accused Business Schools of being complicit in the wave of corporate fraud scandals that took place around the tum of the century and have pointed at their role in the 2007-2011 financial crisis. One 2009 research paper from Temple University’s Robert Giacalone [now at John Carroll University] and Donald Wargo even posited that Business Schools were at the roots of the global financial crisis because they promulgated theories, such as profit maximisation and materialism, that made it easy for business managers to eschew ethical behaviour in favour of short-term profits. Dubbed 'academies of the apocalypse', Business Schools suffered an existential crisis and were urged to reflect on their societal role. An important outcome of the resulting soul-searching efforts was that Business Schools across the board increased their attention to business ethics, CSR, and sustainable business. Their efforts to
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‘The Covid-19 pandemic has catapulted Business Schools into an existential crisis yet again, and the silence about it is deafening’
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