Introduction : a post-crisis critical reflection on business schools

Every cloud has a silver lining. There could be nomore opportune a time to reflect critically onbusiness schools and the education they (we)profess to provide. It is not clear that LordTurner, Chairman of the UK Financial ServicesAuthority, was directly blaming business schoolswhen he argued that prior to the crisis there hadbeen ‘a fundamental intellectual failure’, but hewas convinced that the business model thatfinance capital had created was suspect and thereis no question of an influential role for financeeconomics (BBC 1, 2009). This took the form ofprincipal–agency theorists advocating cash bo-nuses and stock options to motivate managers tofulfil their obligations to concentrate on improv-ing shareholder value. In the context of theneoliberal economic consensus that swept bothdeveloped and developing economies in the late1990s and early 2000s, this business model was arecipe for disaster, as has proven to be the case.Moreover, we are still awaiting the ‘new economicphilosophy’ that Gordon Brown was sure wouldreplace the ‘unbridled free market dogma, whichhad been discredited by the financial crisis’ (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1103662/Well-rise-challenges-year-says-Gordon-Brown.html,consulted 25 March 2009). When The Economist(2009), hardly an organ of Marxist critique, turnson business schools – ‘[t]his has been a year ofsackcloth and ashes for the world’s businessschools’ – and lambasts them for their myopia,their lack of science and their lack of ‘scepticismand cynicism’, something is clearly not right.This special issue was conceived before theeconomic crisis broke but we feel it is even moretimely now than before. Its title – Making theBusiness School More ‘Critical’ – deliberately uses‘critical’ in a broad sense, rather than thenarrower sense characterized by ‘critical manage-ment studies’ (CMS). Given that the businessschool is complicit in the current financial crisis,we feel a degree of discomfort with the anti-performative emphasis of some CMS literature(Fournier and Grey, 2000). Instead, whilstremaining critical and reflexive about our prac-tice, we feel obliged to offer some way forward.With this in mind, we selected papers that areoriented towards how we might improve matters,rather than those that merely offer a critique ofbusiness school activity. We hope we can thushelp business schools, deans and faculty, and theusers of business schools (students, clients),become more reflexive in considering how torespond to economic events that may prove atipping point in what the world expects ofbusiness schools and, indeed, business.One of the many interesting aspects of ourcurrent financial crisis is the mirror it holds up tobusiness school practice. While we wait to seehow the economic crisis unfolds, it is beholden onus to reflect more deeply and critically on thepurpose and content of business school educa-tion. Many business schools, including Harvard,are looking critically at what they teach in thelight of the crisis with calls, for example, forMBAs to sign the equivalent of the medicalprofession’s Hippocratic Oath. It is an incon-venient truth that many of those implicated inthe disasters that have beset Wall Street andthe world’s other financial centres are MBABritish Journal of Management, Vol. 21, S1–S5 (2010)DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2009.00677.x