Shut Down the Business School by Parker Martin;

Author:Parker, Martin;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pluto Press

6

What is ‘management’ anyway?

In the first half of this book I was trying to convince you that we have a problem. I wanted you to understand that the business school is a place that has a malign influence, and that this is because it acts as the loudspeaker for one particular form of life: market managerial capitalism. It is clear that this is an economic model which is complicit with all sorts of social, economic and environmental problems and that the business school is one of the places that will need to change if we are to collectively deal with the world we have made. More of that in the next chapter, but first I need to pin down the idea of ‘management’, because this is the practice that is taught within the b-school. (It is also the name for lots of business schools, a name that inserts a certain honesty into its branding as a school that teaches the bosses, not the workers.1) This is important because otherwise the slippery word will slide back in, claiming that it is a mutable term that can easily cope with the extensions and modifications that I will be proposing later on.

In this chapter, I will show that it can’t, or rather, that we shouldn’t let it, slip back in, because the word ‘management’ already comes with some quite specific baggage. It is a word that arrives with particular meanings, like most words do, and those meanings need to be clearly understood in order that ‘management’ can be distinguished from all the other social arrangements, patterns and institutions that we find in the ramified and dizzying world of human beings. Bear in mind that this book is arguing that the business school doesn’t take the problem of organization seriously enough, and that is what needs to be addressed. In a blindingly obvious sense then, the key to the problem that the business school presents is in the name. Words like ‘business’, or ‘management’, or ‘commerce’ almost always refer us to some very particular forms of organization. Mostly large, mostly private sector, often corporations and almost always supposedly populated by people with no more politics or ethics than Pavlov’s dogs. (I pay you, you bark. I praise you, you roll over and show me your belly.)

The business school teaches capitalism and the inevitability of the corporate form. These quite specific organizational models and their paper cut-out rational egoists are then assumed to provide general lessons for all sorts of other organizations, which is a bit like assuming that studying ivy can tell us about all other plants, or that the documented behaviour of elephants must be the same as that of fleas because they are both animals. The fact is that the world of human beings is populated by all sorts of organizations, and they all present different problems of governance, financing and co-ordination. If management is to become a subject worthy of the name, then it must study and teach more than just management.

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