The University of Finance

Business and management theorists have so far responded to the financial crisis by centring on the notion of finance as an object of study. The inference here has been that the responsibility for the crisis lies with the flaws of individual managers, and, consequentially, that a sprinkling of Business Ethics (Wayne, 2009) and/or Critique (Currie et al, 2010) to the MBA curriculum is a suitable panacea for the recent excesses. From this we get the characterisation of the crisis as a product of individual misbehaviours in the financial sector: a regression onto the already decisively discredited “bad apple” thesis (e.g. Bakan, 2005). A different but related set of responses has sought to de-emphasize this traditional role of the business school as handmaiden to capitalism and thereby widen the curriculum to include politics, philosophy and cultural studies (e.g. HBR, 2009; Schmidt, 2008). 

The questions raised in this special issue attempt to push the debate within the university in general, and the business school in particular, on from this concern with finance as an object of study and on towards a concern with finance as a condition of study. This focus upon the notion of finance as condition of study considers the various ways in which students and teachers alike have long been induced to view study through a purely financial logic: as surplus value without underlying production, as “knowledge transfer” without work. Within this special issue, our contributors therefore consider not so much how the curriculum might be changed in light of the crisis. Instead, they consider how the very study of finance as a condition of study might itself form the basis for a collective resistance to the ongoing financial conditioning of study. 

www.ephemeraweb.org
volume 9, number 4


editorial
  
 
Armin Beverungen, Stephen Dunne and Casper Hoedemaekers
 The university of finance
 
 
 
articles 
  
Morgan Adamson 
 The human capital strategy

 
Dick Forslund and Thomas Bay­
 The eve of critical finance studies

 
Ishani Chandrasekara­
 Why is finance critical? A dialogue with a women's community in Sri Lanka

 
  
talk
  
Stefano Harney
 Extreme neo-liberalism: an introduction

 
  
roundtable
  
Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty
 Sydney Forum on the financial crisis: an introduction

 
John Roberts
 Faith in the numbers

 
Randy Martin
 Whose crisis is that? Thinking finance otherwise

 
Martijn Konings
 The ups and downs of a liberal conciousness, or, why Paul Krugman should learn to tarry with the negative

 
Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty
 Homemade financial crisis

 
Melinbda Cooper and Angela Mitropoulos
 The household frontier

 
Fiona Allon
 The futility of extrapolation: reflections on crisis, continuity and culture in the 'Great Recession'

 
  
reviews 
  
Elizabeth Johnson and Eli Meyerhoff
 Toward a global autonomous university
 
Francesca Bria
 A crisis of finance