BGA | BUSINESS IMPACT
went on to describe the government policy as ‘cruel and abusive’. These are examples of a reactive approach to political issues. Managers are forced to address political questions related to their businesses because of employee pressures. Others react to investor pressure. Others still are finding that, in what has been described as a ‘politicised brandscape’, their customers are choosing brands based on the political meaning – is it ‘green’, does the supply chain use forced labour, is the company contributing to social wellbeing? Some companies and brands have had political thinking embedded within them for some time, maybe it has even been the basis on which they were founded. Patagonia, for example, was founded on the basis of a love of the outdoors and the consequent environmental activism of its founder, Yvon Chouinard. Environmental politics is built into the company’s DNA. Patagonia runs regular events in its stores, focused on environmental issues, and supports the production of activist films. It focuses obsessively on reducing its environmental footprint from how it manages its supply chains to a focus on the durability of its clothing to reduce over-purchasing and consequent waste and resource use – a stance that is, or at least was, nigh-on heretical in the fashion business. It has launched a programme called Worn Wear, encouraging its customers to buy used clothing rather than new and offering to fix worn clothing for nothing to discourage people from buying new. It ran an initiative that connected its customers to environmental groups. Patagonia has even refused to sell its clothing to corporations that do not prioritise the planet. In 2017, when former President Trump decide to shrink the size of his predecessor President Barack Obama's national monuments, Patagonia’s website was changed to feature an explicitly political statement upfront which declared ‘The President Stole Your Land’. During the 2020 US election campaign, Patagonia doubled down on its political assault on climate deniers by adding labels to a line of shorts stating, ‘Vote the Assholes Out’. The tagline was not new, but it had particular relevance during the 2020 election. Pictures of the hidden label went viral on social media
and the politically labelled shorts sold out in no time. These are only a few examples. From the geopolitics of operating in China, to the politics of climate change, to diversity, human rights, and many other issues, politics is becoming all pervasive. How some Business Schools are adapting In the era of the new political capitalism, Business Schools can no longer afford to ignore the intimate interrelationship between business and politics. Their duty is to prepare students for the reality of the world they will be operating in once they leave the sheltered world of academia. And some are stepping up. Stockholm Business School and Copenhagen Business School offer courses on business and politics. HEC Paris has recently announced a collaboration with Sciences Po to bring expertise on geopolitics to its business teaching. Others are also moving in this direction. To address the relationship between politics and business, Business Schools need to go beyond layering ESG perspectives onto standard business thinking. What is required is a wholesale re-think of how the very concepts of ‘business’ and ‘markets’ are looked at. Markets, local or global, are political constructs, not economic or commercial constructs. This is because markets as we know them cannot operate without a set of rules that are politically determined and that chime with prevalent social mores. The fiction of the ‘free market’ must be banished from business teaching. Similarly, the fundamentals of what a business is and what business is for also need to change. The shareholder value model is past its sell-by date. The role of business is, like all other institutions, to participate in the process of creating a better society. What that looks like is politically determined. Politics, therefore, is not an optional add-on to standard business teaching much like, for some companies, going green is just a thin veneer layered onto business-as-usual. Politics needs to permeate every aspect of Business School curricula and give students a true picture of what the 21st century business environment looks like. Hint – it’s deeply political.
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Joe Zammit-Lucia is the author of The New Political Capitalism (Bloomsbury, February 2022). Following an executive career in multinational business, he founded a management advisory firm with offices in Cambridge (UK), New York and Tokyo. On divestment, he co-founded the RADIX network of public policy think tanks.
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