Wheels on the Wagon

The wagon of neoliberal ideology rolls on, despite the rotting of its chassis. As Paul Mason says, writing in the New Statesman,  ‘an ideology does three things: it justifies the economic dominance of a ruling group; it is transmitted through that  group’s control of the media and education; and it describes the experience of millions of people accurately enough for them to accept it as truth’[i]. While Alan Greenspan’s post-Lehman Brothers congressional testimony may have marked the collapse of the neoliberal ideology, that ideology persists, as Mason states, as a dominant philosophy that underpins the educational practices of business schools (at least). Tariq Ali goes a step further and claims that the pillars of the Washington Consensus world order have been viewed as almost divine institutions whose authority derived from the mere fact of their existence [ii]. When the popular press muckrake over the recent falls from grace of the god-like banking masters of the universe, can we expect a similar casting out of the divine institution of neoliberalism from the curricula, methodologies and philosophies of business-schools – those elite clearing houses of the language of market fundamentalism, anti-statism, and deregulation? What cataclysms, above and beyond the bankruptcy of the neoliberal ideology itself, are left to fall on those educational institutions tasked with professionalizing the executant class of that ideology? None.

Then what counts as progressivism in the education of executants of the post-neoliberal world order is surely any pedagogic platform from which the failings of that old world order are addressed, in the manner talked about in this blog. And what better place to seed a new (Obama-esque?) post-neoliberal lexicon than from business schools themselves – the venerable coaching houses of most management and organisational bandwagons. The register of such a revolutionary lexicon is defiance towards an old guard that persists in championing Friedman-ite shareholder profit over human emancipation. The logic of this new lexicon is polarizing, deciding whether you’re either part of the problem or part of the solution. As Philip Kovacs says, ‘I think there is a moment here where we can and should separate business leaders who genuinely want to contribute to the world we share (we’ll call them progressive) from those business leaders who follow a consume/produce/dominate model. The former need to be recognized, rewarded, and encouraged, and the latter critiqued, punished, and avoided’ [iii]. Via the register of defiance and the logic of polarisation, the new grammar of a post-neoliberal pedagogy for executives could do a lot worse than embrace the emancipatory potential of the political philosophy of  Jacques Ranciere and Alain Badiou. In the fashion of this blog – that of offering new angles of approach to the process of overturning the stagnant educational philosophies underpinning the practices of business schools – I’m hoping my next post will begin to show the utility inherent in the work of Badiou and Ranciere (the ‘change’ and ‘new hope’ heirs to the fading poststructuralist tradition) that might rescue business schools from complete irrelevance in the face of a new demand in executive competence.

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[i] Paul Mason, ‘A Last Chance’, p.22. New Statesman, 10 November 2008. [ii] Tariq Ali, (2008) ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope’, London, Verso. [iii] email to the author.