the end of business school education

Where executivezen states/foretells the end (the lexical ambiguity is deliberate) of business school education: what the form of endeavour, called education, within business schools (in particular) produces and how this system is no longer tenable. How so? Executivezen blames the rise of managerialism. By managerialism executivezen is echoing Lyotard’s analysis of “maximising the performativity of the economic system”, where the pressures (from both a normative and critical perspective) of globalization are being applied across business education. “A new educational pragmatism, impelled by globalization, seems to be draining [educational] practice of normative interest and validity,” says Blake, Smeyers, Smith & Standish in their introduction to the Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Education (2003). The universities are under constant assault from managerialist reformers who seem to be deploying (to use a managerialist term) a common sense solution (-here’s another) to a taken-for-granted worldview of economic crisis. And so the red card has been shown to the current managerialist paradigm of business education in two ways: firstly, managerialism is a desired end product of business education: b-schools produce managers and a school’s performance can be rated in the number and quality of this managerially competent workforce. Secondly – and here’s the killer – it is the same managerialism that spells the end, the finality, of business school education. The world in which b-schools operate, the backstory of capitalism and globalization that form not only the b-school’s raw input but also its (raw) output, the context of its education, its servicing, of business, itself conceives of this educated output reductively as merely workforce, due to the same globalizing pressures that exact competitive supremacy in vocational achievements from entire populations.

Now, the theories informing this new managerialism are, according to Blake et al, unsurprisingly fiercely unphilosophical. Whether denoted as common sense or positivist, the managerialist theoretical emphases are on statistics, observation and testing and on the sovereignty of utility or “what works” (Blake et al, p8). As we know, the watchwords of this managerialism are skills, competencies, performance measurement, critical success factors, learning outcomes and increased profit. Understandably, objections to these self-evident measures are severely dismissed as nonsensical, irrelevant, counter-productive and self-defeating.

What executivezen, and this blog, stand for is a re-theorization of business education: or as I prefer to call it, a la Rorty, business edification. Education seems to blank and presumptuous a term: it is, crucially, an insufficiently self-reflective term when applied to practices that are blind to the effects on the conditions of its own possibility. And by theory executivezen means not as a legitimation for principles and actions but, rather, as a “deeper reflection on the nature and implications of the very educational [edificational] enterprise. Conceived like this, the role of theory begins to look like interpretation rather than explanation” (Blake et al, p9). This leaning toward hermeneutics comes as a response, in part, to the loss of faith in foundations of the poststructuralist and deconstructive philosophies, which themselves no longer hold out as foundations. Yes; this verbose blogs’ intentions are unashamedly philosophical – in the continental tradition of the philosophy of education – and act as a windbrake to shelter a vestige of critical reflection on the runaway-train of capitalist, globalist, vocationalist inspired business education. My edification soapbox is not intended as perjorative but as part of the strategy to redefine (ha! I knew it!) a more appropriate style of edifying endeavour – mutually appropriate to business and to humankind.