Management Education and the Theatre of the Absurd (Ken Starkey, Nottingham University 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. What is the • Hostile takeover of business schools in the 1980s and purpose of the 1990s by the 'quants', driven by ideological fervour and a fantasy of science, business and markets = indifference to the idea of public good. business • My argument - the theatre of the absurd is a novel space for reflecting upon the b. school and school? 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 of thought and science that supposedly explain the world are, Camus suggests, ‘enough to make a decent man laugh’
• 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. … Science/Reason/Fantasy • 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 Research • Faculty mad about research – • Education – Naïve assumption that this is the way the world works proliferation of journals, 4-star articles, 4x4 wannabees, AJG list … • Follow these rules & you will become a successful (rich) leader • Broken journal system (Davis, ASQ). All • Unbalanced/biased curriculum … this time and effort, 'sound and fury signifying … nothing'. • How many b. school students do we need? • Our dirty little secret is that we collude • Masters teaching – what do our 'mega-successful' with the system’s dysfunction (Bennis & (in financial terms) Masters (MSc) courses say about our educational practice? And national O’Toole), serving our own interests and security? those of university management and journal publishers. • For example, in terms of the university civic/national agenda, or what it means to offer • The bizarre game of REF! Huge waste of an international education (to groups that are time, effort & money - crazy rules, game 90+% Chinese, with varying English ability)? playing (eg. staffing policies), short- • Eye-watering fees & margins (contribution to termism, rejection of books! university)
• 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 Waiting safe for science’ (Van Maanen) for Godot!
B. School complicity in the age of 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 • To paraphrase the Federalist Papers, if men and women were angels, we angels of our wouldn’t (probably) need governments or managers! But many people are not angels and perhaps business schools attract the non-angelic more than the nature angels! • Need for new curriculum - more history, humanities (to cultivate the better angels of our nature, our humanity) & t o 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 challenge is to (re)conceive of education and the university as a space for thinking, not as a consumer retail park (Collini, 2017). The university • ‘Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined’ (Camus) as mirrored in • Camus (1957) emphasizes two key the b. school? 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. 2 nd in US only to Bible! • Committed to libertarianism, economic freedom, individualism, egoism, selfishness and rejecting empathy and altruism, totally opposed 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
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