Hi, Terry,
If you read Martin Parker’s article, he offers a careful and closely reasoned argument for closing business schools. This is a far deeper argument than the early comment on poor teaching and tawdry research. His main argument involves the relationship of business schools to a larger society infatuated with business — and most especially, the role that business schools play in educating people for market managerialism.
Parker states his central argument against business schools in terms of the massive bad effect these schools exercise on businesses and key social institutions. Parker’s central argument is short enough to quote him in full:
“If we educate our graduates in the inevitability of tooth-and-claw capitalism, it is hardly surprising that we end up with justifications for massive salary payments to people who take huge risks with other people’s money. If we teach that there is nothing else below the bottom line, then ideas about sustainability, diversity, responsibility and so on become mere decoration. The message that management research and teaching often provides is that capitalism is inevitable, and that the financial and legal techniques for running capitalism are a form of science. This combination of ideology and technocracy is what has made the business school into such an effective, and dangerous, institution.
“We can see how this works if we look a bit more closely at the business-school curriculum and how it is taught. Take finance, for instance. This is a field concerned with understanding how people with money invest it. It assumes that there are people with money or capital that can be used as security for money, and hence it also assumes substantial inequalities of income and wealth. The greater the inequalities within any given society, the greater the interest in finance, as well as the market in luxury yachts. Finance academics almost always assume that earning rent on capital (however it was acquired) is a legitimate and perhaps even praiseworthy activity, with skilful investors being lionised for their technical skills and success. The purpose of this form of knowledge is to maximise the rent from wealth, often by developing mathematical or legal mechanisms that can multiply it. Successful financial strategies are those that produce the maximum return in the shortest period, and hence that further exacerbate the social inequalities that made them possible in the first place.
“Or consider human resource management. This field applies theories of rational egoism – roughly the idea that people act according to rational calculations about what will maximise their own interest – to the management of human beings in organisations. The name of the field is telling, since it implies that human beings are akin to technological or financial resources insofar as they are an element to be used by management in order to produce a successful organisation. Despite its use of the word, human resource management is not particularly interested in what it is like to be a human being. Its object of interest are categories – women, ethnic minorities, the underperforming employee – and their relationship to the functioning of the organisation. It is also the part of the business school most likely to be dealing with the problem of organised resistance to management strategies, usually in the form of trade unions. And in case it needs saying, human resource management is not on the side of the trade union. That would be partisan. It is a function which, in its most ambitious manifestation, seeks to become ‘strategic', to assist senior management in the formulation of their plans to open a factory here, or close a branch office there.
“A similar kind of lens could be applied to other modules found in most business schools – accounting, marketing, international business, innovation, logistics – but I’ll conclude with business ethics and corporate social responsibility – pretty much the only areas within the business school that have developed a sustained critique of the consequences of management education and practice. These are domains that pride themselves on being gadflies to the business school, insisting that its dominant forms of education, teaching and research require reform. The complaints that propel writing and teaching in these areas are predictable but important – sustainability, inequality, the production of graduates who are taught that greed is good.
“The problem is that business ethics and corporate social responsibility are subjects used as window dressing in the marketing of the business school, and as a fig leaf to cover the conscience of B-school deans – as if talking about ethics and responsibility were the same as doing something about it. They almost never systematically address the simple idea that since current social and economic relations produce the problems that ethics and corporate social responsibility courses treat as subjects to be studied, it is those social and economic relations that need to be changed."
Martin Parker offers several reasons for closing business schools that do not at all apply to design schools.
There is plenty wrong with design schools, but there is no case to make for closing them. We can improve design schools. Parker’s case for closing business schools rests on a series of crucial flaws built into the nature of the business school itself.
It’s a bit like someone explaining what’s wrong with fast food restaurants that sell mass-produced fatty foods and large sugared drinks. In response, one would not expect someone to say, “Wouldn't much the same arguments also support bulldozing and shutting down all French restaurants?”
In my view at least the same arguments do not apply.
Of course, you may have an argument for bulldozing and closing all design schools — but these would not be the same arguments that Martin Parker applies to business schools. If you’ve got an argument to make, it might be interesting to read it. Having once been a professor at a business school, I appreciate Parker’s views. It is quite possible that business schools do more harm to the world than good, specifically for the closely reasoned arguments he makes. These reasons do not apply to any other form of university-level education.
Design schools do not damage the world to any greater degree than any other kind of school. What’s wrong with most design schools could be alleviated with greater support and — in some cases — improvement. That would seem to be the way forward.
Unless, of course, you’d like to bulldoze and close all universities in their entirety.
Yours,
Ken
Ken Friedman, Ph.D., D.Sc. (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| Email [log in to unmask] | Academia http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn
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