Warwick Business School EFMD The Future of the Business School - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Marianna Fotaki, MD, PhD, MSc (Econ) Warwick Business School EFMD The Future of the Business School Seminar Series

Criticality, Responsibility and Citizenship in Management Education

University of Bath 7th November 2019

• The content, the philosophy, and the teaching

methods of our pedagogies must be brought closer to societal concerns

• Propose relevant pedagogical strategies

concerned with answerability and relationality

• Business and management education as a

force for societal transformation

• Freedom of choice and user autonomy occupy

prominent positions on the agendas of policy makers in many countries, increasingly more so than equity of access or equality of opportunity.

• The belief that social policy could be used as a tool for

social transformation in post-war welfare state constructs has been increasingly challenged.

• This shift was initiated almost three decades ago by the

market proponents but can now be observed for all mainstream parties across the political spectrum.

• The customer as sovereign and free is supported by the

fantasmatic notion of freedom of choice (Fotaki, 2006, 2010)

• This ideological discourse has shifted to the areas of public

policy which were until recently defined by the notion of care, solidarity and responsibility for the other

• Such discourses defend organizational members against the

loss of past institutional values that grew more within communities and collectivities (Long, 1999)

• The burgeoning economic inequality between the

richest and the poorest is a cause of concern for social, political, and ethical reasons

• The widespread evidence of wrongdoing in

business and politics jeopardizes the very nature and trustworthiness of democratic institutions

• The environmental degradation and global

political threats

The financialized self (Max Haiven, 2017) ‘It is not only popular, franchised series like Dragons’ Den or The Apprentice that celebrate ruthless, single-minded, fangs-bared avarice, nor the bemusing drug-addled, sex-crazed anti-heroes of the Wolf of Wall Street and his pack; it is also the canny antique- hunter, the shrewd house-flipper, the driven restaurateur, or the single-minded start-up genius of “reality” TV. All are different vantage points on a financialized Vitruvian Man willing to risk and leverage everything, and mobilize every ounce of ingenuity, daring, “social capital” and talent, towards realizing their privatized ambitions’.

‘The association of collectivism with totalitarianism fits hand in glove with a powerful elite that needs to keep the people in an illusion that they are all individuals, that is, individualised consumers for whom collective action and the creation of new imaginary significations are out of imaginary range’. Imagining the End by Ingerid S. Straume "The Imaginary Reader", Bergen, Norway 2015

What kind of economic system is most conducive to human wellbeing?

There is no magic bullet that can reverse the damage done by decades of neoliberalism. (Photo: Getty Images)

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• “There is no society”:

“And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first” (Margaret Thatcher, 1987)

• The social purpose of management has been replaced by the

notion of managers as merely the agents of shareholders; beholden only to the cause of promoting shareholders’ profits (Khurana, 2010).

• The use of theoretical frameworks that have effectively turned

business schools into cheerleaders of big business (Munir, 2011).

• What it is to be leading a moral life in

business and society?

• What it is to be leading a meaningful

life?

• We gain a sense of value and significance by

helping other group members = Living through the

• thers
• This is not only giving meaning to our life but is an

effective means of dealing with the existential fear

• f death and our own mortality (Irvin Yalom)
• What people often value the most in their work is to

do with the voluntary ‘gift’ of giving

Brain Pickings

“Love's Work: A Reckoning with Life”, a philosopher

• The world of modernity is a time in which

we are "infinitely sentimental about ourselves, but methodically ruthless towards others.“

• Mary Evans , literary and gender theorist argues:

‘Our misuse of the word ‘love’, now so banded about as

to have become as meaningless as the kisses on the emails between strangers’ has led to ‘sentimentalisation’ of love.

• ‘The future is the time in which we might not be,

and yet, we must imagine we will have been’

I offer an ethics of relationality, that acknowledges and brings back love, compassion and identification

• Relationality captures the ethical
• bligation of care toward the

irreducible other:

‘If I seek to preserve your life, it is not only because I seek to preserve my own, but because who ‘I’ am is nothing without your life, and life itself has to be rethought as this complex, passionate, antagonistic, and necessary set of relations to others’. (Butler 2009, p. 43, Frames of War)

• Relationality is the foundation of human

subjectivity in both the social world and in individual exchanges

• Judith Butler argues that since we all

depend on the other within conditions that are inevitably precarious, our fears about survivability link us to others we do not know (Butler, 2004).

• What is the impact of our actions on

(‘distant’) others and communities?

• Answerability: provides an account for the
• utcomes of one’s actions through involvement in

particular activities and consideration of how these contribute to achieving societal goals that enable individuals to flourish

• “Answerability is Bakhtin’s term that implies responsibility and

accountability of the individual toward Self and the Other. It is a whole philosophy of life and of the act that ‘can only be a moral philosophy.’” (Boje and Al Arkoubi (2009: 113)

• It translates into business accountability toward communities

in which businesses operate and toward the distant “others” whose lives may be affected by their activities.

• The use of multidisciplinary and transnational concepts for

analyzing the potential impact of business activities

• Bringing topics close to students’ own experiences and

allowing them to develop a new appreciation of ‘the other’

• Instilling consciousness raising into the classroom by adopting

reflexivity when interacting with students

• This also implies being reflexive about how our own identities

inform:

• what we choose to teach
• equally as significant, is what we choose to omit
• how we go about teaching

• Rethinking the idea of businesses as global citizens rather

than as selfish corporate psychopaths

• Prompting students to question how they might be

implicated in producing these consequences and to consider their answerability in the future

• Introduce pedagogies that promote relationality and

answerability:

• Broadening of topics and integrating multiple transnational perspectives in

the curricula,

• Increasing students’ experience/field exposure
• Working with teacher’s reflexivity in the classroom

Questioning Neoliberal Capitalism and Economic Inequality in Business Schools Marianna Fotaki and Ajnesh Prasad⇑ ACADEMY OF MANAGEMENT LEARNING & EDUCATION September 17, 2015 amle.2014.0182