Professor Martin Parker: Business schools are actually quite dangerous institutions

... many of the kind of aspirations, the ideas that are encouraged at business schools, are essentially about obedience rather than creativity and insolence.

The quote above by Martin Parker as well as the headline of this post are from the BBC show presented below.

The core of Parker's critique against business schools is identical with what I say about the whole Academic cult.

Or to be precise. The effects of the Hidden worldview of Platonism, promoted by the Academics, that I demonstrate in Section One are identical with Parker's distinct perspective regarding the business schools.

It is simply so that any systematic and truly independent study of any Academic topic will result in the same kind of critique.

Parker's page, University of Bristol

Parker’s Twitter


Contents

Parker in BBC's Business Matters
The Long Read in The Guardian
Parker's Book
My Comments
Closely Related Posts



Parker in BBC's Business Matters

Here follows a condensed part of the BBC show Business Matters 18 May 2018 where Parker is interviewed by the host Fergus Nicoll (Wikipedia/Twitter).

Parker:

I don’t think business schools are helping at all; largely because they are not addressing the huge challenges that face the human race on this planet.

Business schools are largely complicit in reproducing the kind of economic system that we have a present and that means they're not really attending to questions of, for example, carbon emission, climate change and so on let alone ideas about social justice and equality and so on.

This effectively means I think that Business schools are actually quite dangerous institutions that preventing us from making the kind of social economic changes that we needs to in order to survive as a species on this planet.

Nicoll:

Dangerous that's a pretty strong word. We will come back to that in a second Martin. What to undergraduates, what to post graduates say when they come to the faculty? What are the reasons they give for signing up for business? Signing up maybe for an MBA?

Parker:

… It's fairly clear that they've would rather have done physics or the history of art or something like that. They're really picking business and management because they think it's a safe choice and nothing more.

Nicoll:

Can you teach entrepreneurship, for example, I'm willing to bet a lot of the world's most successful start-ups; their protagonist did not go to business school?

Parker:

… Indeed I think you can argue that schools of business and management are really much better at teaching people to be corporate drones than they ought to be entrepreneurs.

Because many of the kind of aspirations, the ideas that are encouraged at business schools, are essentially about obedience rather than creativity and insolence.

So I don't think that, say you know, the idea of an entrepreneur sits very easily with the rather regimented attitude within the business school.

Nicoll:

Conversely, Martin, would it be fair to bet that most of the boardrooms in the banks and companies that precipitated the global financial crisis was stuffed with business qualifications?

Parker:

Yeah, I think that is really true. There is certainly a great deal of evidence that many MBA qualified individuals go out and do enormous harm.

That's not to say that everybody with an MBA is necessarily immoral, corrupt or stupid or anything.

But certainly doing business qualifications doesn't seem to prevent people from doing that doing daft things.

And we know about corporate scandals and so on. Enron, for example, is a classic example of somewhere that was being celebrated as a fantastic organization run by highly qualified managers and then proved to be nothing more than a tissue of lies and corruption; this is not an unusual story.

Listen to the full interview and the following short discussion with

Therese Tucker, CEO and founder of Blackline,

Andrew Peaple, Deputy Asia Finance Editor for the Wall Street Journal

Online or download pod: Business Matters 18 may 2018, Suzanne Scott Becomes Fox News CEO

The section regarding Parker's critique begins

26:39 in the online version that includes the news

25:25 in the podversion



The Long Read in The Guardian

Why we should bulldoze the business school, There are 13,000 business schools on Earth. That’s 13,000 too many. And I should know – I’ve taught in them for 20 years. Martin Parker, The long read, The Guardian, 27 April 2018.

This is one of Parker's best formulations in The long read.

… the assumption that human behaviour – of employees, customers, managers and so on – is best understood as if we are all rational egoists. This provides a set of background assumptions that allow for the development of models of how human beings might be managed in the interests of the business organisation. Motivating employees, correcting market failures, designing lean management systems or persuading consumers to spend money are all instances of the same sort of problem. ...

Parker’s Book

Martin Parker’s book, Shut Down the Business School!: An insider’s account of what’s wrong with management education, was published earlier in 2018.

On the publishers site you can read the beginning of the first chapter.

Here is the contents.

Introduction
1. What Goes on In Business Schools?
2. Teaching Capitalism
3. What's Wrong with Management?
4. What's Wrong with the Business School?
5. The Business School and the University
6. What is 'Management' Anyway?
7. The School for Organising
8. The Politics of Organising
9. What Do Students Want?
10. The Business School of Tomorrow

This review that is written from the perspective of cooperative organisation.

Book review: Shut down the business school – What’s wrong with management education, Anca Voinea, Co-operative News, 27 March 2018.


My Comments

From my perspective it is possible to transfer the core of Parker's Excellent critique to the Dimension of Platonism or to a critique against the whole Academic cult.

Business schools are of course a branch of the Academic cult and Platonism.

Accordingly it is the whole Academic field that is dangerous not just the business schools. Or it is not just the business schools that produce “corporate drones”; the main objective of the Academic cult is to produce citizen drones.

So to scrap or remake only the business schools will not have any effect whatsoever.

What is needed is to dissolve Platonism and the Academic cult.

However, to reach to the point where many realise what Platonism is all about there is a need of the kind of specific critique that Parker delivers.

Or like this. In the spring of 2018 have the major promoters of Platonism the BBC and The Guardian been forced to at least accept that there is a need to talk about that a large part of the Academic terror is not acceptable.

This means hopefully that the unconditional surrender of the Academic cult is not so far away.


Closely Related Posts

Reflect on Steve Jobs' Speech and the Other side of the Static Wall – In Memory of the Deceased Future Part 2, 30 March 2018

A Groundbreaking Speech by the British Minister for Universities and Science – Will Perhaps – Open Up To Real Education, Real Science and Real Democracy, 27 December 2017

The Guardian Demands Officially that the People Must be Ruled by Mysticism, 1 November 2017

BBC and the Academic Cult Demand You to Replace Understanding with Faith, 29 September 2017

What's Wrong with Science? – Propaganda Galore – Learn How they Hide the Static Religious Dogmas to Fool you to Trust the Academic Cult, 6 May 2017