Management Education and the Theatre of the Absurd (Ken Starkey, - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Management Education and the Theatre of the Absurd (Ken Starkey, Nottingham University Business School)

What is the purpose of the business school?

• We need new ways of thinking management

education, beyond the business school in its current manifestation

• 1908 - The case for establishing Harvard Business

School supported by the idea of contribution to the public good.

• Hostile takeover of business schools in the 1980s and

1990s by the 'quants', driven by ideological fervour and a fantasy of science, business and markets = indifference to the idea of public good.

• My argument - the theatre of the absurd is a novel

space for reflecting upon the b. school and management education as shaped by the forces of fantasy, emotion, irrationality and conformism

• ‘Psychic life’ is frequently stronger than reason
• Conclusion: we need a sea change in management

education, embracing the humanities, to re-situate the study and practice of management and leadership in its broader historical and philosophical nexus.

Theatre of the absurd as representation of our troubled times

• Confronts the absurdity of a world apparently without meaning, subject to forces we

cannot control, in which irrationality and fantasy dominate.

• Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus as seminal text) talks of ‘the cruel mathematics that

command our condition’ …

• … the deep and damaging gap between what we think we know and what we really do

know.

• The concept of a ‘universal reason’ & the deterministic vision that creates the categories
• f thought and science that supposedly explain the world are, Camus suggests, ‘enough

to make a decent man laugh’

Science/Reason/Fantasy

• The business school and management education have

mainly reinforced absurdity rather than challenged it.

• Beneath a narrative of reason and science lies a whole

farrago of fantasy.

• Economics as dominant discourse (Ferraro et al.)
• Knowledge summed up in Nobel Prize winning speeches

by Miller, Scholes, Merton … extolling the virtues of leverage, Enron, efficient markets etc. …

• The promise of management education – It teaches you

to become a master/mistress of the universe. The alchemical knowledge an MBA gives you enables you to create (i.e. extract) value, the Midas touch.

• This fantasy gave us the financial crisis, Icelandic banking,

RBS, austerity, Alan Greenspan (‘I have found a flaw,' said Greenspan, referring to his economic philosophy, 2008).

• Licence to Be Bad. How Economics Corrupted Us (Aldred)
• Remember: the key proposition of top business schools is

that they educate leaders!

How b. schools encourage absurdity (Feel free to add your own examples!)

Teaching

• Education – Naïve assumption that this is the way

the world works

• Follow these rules & you will become a successful

(rich) leader

• Unbalanced/biased curriculum …
• How many b. school students do we need?
• Masters teaching – what do our 'mega-successful'

(in financial terms) Masters (MSc) courses say about our educational practice? And national security?

• For example, in terms of the university

civic/national agenda, or what it means to offer an international education (to groups that are 90+% Chinese, with varying English ability)?

• Eye-watering fees & margins (contribution to

university)

Research

• Faculty mad about research –

proliferation of journals, 4-star articles, 4x4 wannabees, AJG list …

• Broken journal system (Davis, ASQ). All

this time and effort, 'sound and fury signifying … nothing'.

• Our dirty little secret is that we collude

with the system’s dysfunction (Bennis & O’Toole), serving our own interests and those of university management and journal publishers.

• The bizarre game of REF! Huge waste of

time, effort & money - crazy rules, game playing (eg. staffing policies), short- termism, rejection of books!

Waiting for Godot!

• Waiting for publication thru interminable R&Rs
• “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again.

Fail better.” (Samuel Beckett)

• Boredom guaranteed! ‘By writing like everybody else we

bore ourselves to tears and restrict the range of our inquiries and speculations. … ‘[And] reduce the field to a set of unexamined, turgid, hypothetical thrusts, designed to render organizations systematic and organization theory safe for science’ (Van Maanen)

• B. School complicity in the age
• f the rhinoceros!
• Ionesco – Rhinoceros – 'the man of slogans, no longer thinking for

himself’

• Rhinoceritis - 'a pernicious disease of epidemic proportions …

enslaved by a mass of prejudices that take on the appearance of a terrible lucidity … Suddenly something breaks down, gives way and the monstrous character of men appears' (Ionesco)

• 'MBA students arrive on campus looking and acting more or less like

people; within two weeks, they are easily recognizable as MBA students, using MBA-speak … sharing mannerisms, dress, and understandings' (Augier & March, 2011)

• Management education 'distorts', fashioning its students into

'critters with lopsided brains, icy hearts and shrunken souls'

• Faculty too – Anteby (2013) Manufacturing Morals!
• Herd instinct, animal spirits – eg. financial crisis - 'As long as the

music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance,' (Chuck Prince, Citigroup)

The Lesson

• Education as form of 'vampirism'
• 'For the professor words are just a means of taking

possession of a human being', indoctrinating him/her with 'knowledge'

• 'Inexperienced students are over-trained in analyses and

quantification by professors with limited real world experience … delegitimizing pluralism' (Lambrechts et al.)

• Naive assumption that we are holding a perfect mirror up

to nature, to understand which we need only basic theory, data and maths

Management education & the better angels of our nature

• To paraphrase the Federalist Papers, if men and women were angels, we

wouldn’t (probably) need governments or managers! But many people are not angels and perhaps business schools attract the non-angelic more than the angels!

• Need for new curriculum - more history, humanities (to cultivate the better

angels of our nature, our humanity) & to develop ‘narrative imagination’ (to liberate the mind ‘from the bondage of habit and custom’ - Nussbaum)

• To re-affirm our humanity - 'It would be catastrophic to become a nation of

technically competent people who have lost their ability to think critically, to examine themselves, and to respect the humanity of others' (Nussbaum)

• Who would you rather learn from, Shakespeare or Milton Friedman?

Alternative proposals

• Proposal 2
• Business school de-merger
• Because ‘one has to change the subject to make any progress’ IGeuss)
• 2 separate entities
• Business schools (Finance, Accounting, Economics …)
• Schools of Management & Leadership (Arts & Humanities + necessary

technical understanding …)

The university as mirrored in the b. school?

• The challenge is to (re)conceive of

education and the university as a space for thinking, not as a consumer retail park (Collini, 2017).

• ‘Beginning to think is beginning to be

undermined’ (Camus)

• Camus (1957) emphasizes two key

responsibilities - the service of truth and the service of liberty

• These seem to me to central to our

responsibilities as management educators.

Management education & fantasy fiction

• Business schools teach technical competence (eg. finance) but

not philosophy. Philosophy is learnt from reading fantasy fiction

• Namely Ayn Rand and her heroic individual genius male

entrepreneurs (an architect in The Fountainhead, an engineer in Atlas Shrugged) – most influential figurehead in Silicon Valley. 2nd in US only to Bible!

• Committed to libertarianism, economic freedom, individualism,

egoism, selfishness and rejecting empathy and altruism, totally

• pposed to any form of regulation or worker organization,
• Rand provides the template for the psychic life of Silicon Valley,

the cultural justification for the committed disruptor, entrepreneur, venture capitalists, seeking to shape the future by moving fast and breaking things, making themselves seriously rich, and recreating the world in their own image, Seekers after 'the utopia of greed'.

• Preparing for the end of the world ('Survival of the richest' –

Douglas Rushkoff)

Conclusion: Existence precedes essence

• ‘Management knowledge (theoretical, practical, moral

and aesthetic) is derived from and cannot exist without philosophical frameworks’ (The Philosophical Foundations of Management Thought – Jouillié & Spillane)

• 'fantasy and desire are deeply intertwined with law

and social order … the self is fixed through an ideological framing (familial, religious, nationalistic and so forth) of what the world is really like' (Elliott).

• Goal of management education & research - Bring to

consciousness the ideological and psychic framings of business, management, leadership, individualism, free markets, innovation, entrepreneurship, greed, self- interest…

• To develop the art of management

The Curtain Falls

Our troubled times

• Business leadership - Barbarians at the Gate; Leading the Revolution; Fool’s Gold; The

End of Alchemy; The Gods that Failed. How the Financial Elite Have Gambled Away our Futures; Move Fast and Break Things; Age of Fracture

• Political leadership & Brexit - Trump on the Couch; Fear. Trump in the White House; Fire

and Fury; Insane Clown President … Summer Madness; All Out War; Alice in Brexitland; The Bad Boys of Brexit; Heroic Failure. Brexit and the Politics of Pain …

• Post Truth - 'dark triad traits' (narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy) of leaders
• Down the Rabbit Hole of Leadership: Leadership Pathology in Everyday Life; Licence to

Be Bad. How Economics Corrupted Us

The End

Inquiry, Reflection, Human Rights

• Reflection & inquiry (Senge)
• Dialogue vs. monologue
• Humility, humour, empathy
• Ethical subjects, healthy communities
• To promote understanding essay form is more important than

'scientific' papers!

• Human rights - Guardianos del Atrato
• Public vs private equity
• Rights of business – UK Prof of Accounting!

The dysfunctional b. school & its remedies

Symptom

• Narrow economic thinking rooted in
• ver-rational(ised) perspectives that lack

breadth

• Focus on markets, competition and

individual self-interest

• Focus on business to the exclusion of
• ther stakeholders
• Hegemony of economic and finance

perspectives

• Focus on economic value
• Rejection of books! (REF)
• Promote engagement with other social

sciences and the humanities

• Promote big picture thinking
• Promote reflection on psychology, power,

its exercise and abuses, and its origins in personal and social dynamics

• Educate ourselves and leaders in

democratic processes and democracy to promote understanding of the evolving nature of the link between business and society

• Promote civic engagement and the

pursuit of social capital & public value

• There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen year-old’s

life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.'