The big ‘business-school collusion’

Chris MabeyProfessor of Leadership

Middlesex University Business School

Technik unsprung

The university stands for things that are forgotten in the heat of battle, the values that get pushed aside, the facts we don’t like to face….the questions we lack the courage to ask (Gardner)

A modernist mental health institution?

learning becomes madness through the very excess of false learning (Foucault)

..a gaping moral hole at the centre of business education and perhaps management itself (Khurana)

a collusive cycle?

business schools

instrumental students

career-minded and boxed-in

academics

conservative research

elitistaccreditation

managerialistuniversities

functionalist employers

….instrumentally minded students meet career-minded academics who are driven by elitist accreditation

and managerialist universities to produce conservative research and assembly line teaching

which are consumed by functionalist organizations…..

A CALL FOR ETHICAL LEADERSHIP, BUT

• Why do business people find academics asking the wrong questions and coming up with complicated answers?

• Why do academics find business people obsessed with quick-fix solutions?

• Why do those pursuing philosophical or spiritual approaches get misunderstood & find both groups missing the point?

“Justin Welby spoke of his plan at an IMF meeting for Britain’s ambitious young bankers to give up work for a year and join the “quasi-monastic community” of St Anselm at Lambeth in order to learn about ethics ahead of entering the City….

If we are to see a real and substantial shift in the way morality is integrated into business and banking, the change will need to come from the inside. With those at the top embracing the values present in Catholic Social Teaching and a vision of the common good.”

http://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/publications/2014/10/09/

WE ALL INHABIT BUBBLES

a way of seeing the world…reinforced by the language we use..

…..what we read and interact with daily…which shape the way we think

These bubbles are fragile…..can shift over time and change

…largely invisible but are

…highly influential

One way to break collusion: explore the spiritual/philosophical roots of Ethical Leadership

• Level 1: Practices: ethical approaches :eg. CSR, mindfulness, diversity initiatives, regulatory regimes (Francis Report, Davies Report, GRI…)

at worst…a passing fad or temporary fix

• Level 2: Discourses….assumptions and theories that lay beneath these practices: eg SLT, business economics, neo-liberalism, CMS, Foucauldian philosophy,

at worst….myopic and non-collaborative

• Level 3: Beliefs and values which give rise to these assumptions: eg Cartesian dualism, Buddhist philosophy, humanist psychology, Christian theology, others?

at worst…fundamentalist and non-inclusive

An example…Sustainability Reporting

“From the initial search through the largest 250 companies deemed to be able to claim a credible reporting framework to GRI standards, only 94 emerged….many organisations claim to report on particular performance indicators, but do not provide the data and thus do not report.

… In addition there are cases of reporting on certain indicators where the information provided suggests that the organisation does not comply with the indicator

…All in all, this [research] suggests that motivation to disclose, overall, could be better explained by the benefits to be achieved from being seen to be doing the right thing.”

Roper et al (2011)

we need to enter contested terrain together

Ethical Practices

Discourses: assumptions and theories

World-views: beliefs and values

resources• Developing Leadership…SAGE book

• Questions Business Schools Don’t Ask, Academy of Management Learning and Education special Issue, Dec 2015

• ESRC Seminar Series: Ethical leadership: Spiritual and Philosophical approaches

www.ethicalleadership.org.uk