Social justice interrupted? Values,pedagogy,and purpose of business school academics

This commentary introduces Madeline Toubiana’s article, “Business pedagogy for social justice?”.The article evolved from a 2-day Critical Management Studies workshop stream at the Academy of Management that we organized in the summer of 2010 at which her article was originally presented. Extending from the insights emerging from Toubiana’s article, we briefly discuss the importance of reflecting on the values of social justice that we hold as business school academics, and we further begin to imagine the possibilities of the classroom as an arena in which we can inspire social change.

The stream, “Whose business? Business, ethics, and society in critical management studies” aimed to bring together a variety of scholars who were actively grappling with questions and challenges of contemporary management education, specifically with its role in bringing about social change. We were especially interested in those scholars who were addressing these questions and challenges from a critical vantage point in the context of business ethics and business in society courses. At the broadest conceptual level, we were hoping to use the forum to ask whether management education—and, by some extension, management scholarship—is sufficiently engaged with issues of significance for the lives of people who create, sustain, partake in, or are otherwise effected by, business activities. In holistically approaching this question, we sought to use the research workshop as a venue from which to catalyze discourse on certain subjects that continue to be relegated to the periphery of—and, at times, rendered wholly invisible in—our field.

We were pleasantly surprised by the response that we received. Indeed, in the end, our workshop stream consisted of scholars from universities in Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, South Korea, France, and the Dominican Republic. The articles covered topics as varied, and as intellectually stimulating, as how Richard Rorty’s postfoundational philosophy can offer constructive insights into teaching business ethics to how business ethics and business in society courses can benefit from the utilization of natural critical learning environments to the gendered and sexualized disposition of today’s business schools. Needless to say, we were both very satisfied and impressed by the ideas that were generated from the participants in the workshop stream.

One particularly interesting contribution to the workshop stream was Madeline Toubiana’s article. A doctoral candidate in organization studies at York University’s Schulich School of Business in Toronto, she endeavored to empirically investigate the possibilities for a paradigmatic transformation to occur within business schools that would begin to substantively take into account pressing issues of social justice. In responding to this question, she draws on data that she collected through an inductive-based qualitative study that predominately included interviews with professors from Israel and Canada. After performing a cross-cultural analysis, she finds that there exists an ontological disjuncture between how professors define social justice at the personal level—which emphasizes notions of fairness, equality, and equity—with how social justice is actualized within the institutional settings of business schools. She astutely attributes this disconnection to the hegemonic dynamics espoused by most contemporary business schools, which include profit-driven ideologies, the underlying character of MBA programs, and a guiding orientation for quantitative research.

Toubiana’s illuminating and thoughtful glance into the perspectives of business school academics raises a number of important issues regarding the nature of the business school. Of these issues, two merit particular attention, which we will briefly discuss in the remainder of this commentary. The first issue concerns the question of values of business school professors and the second issue relates to the classroom as a pivotal arena to inspire the requisite social change.

On the first point, there is a perceived assumption that subjects, and more aptly here, academics are well able to neatly distinguish between their personal and their professional selves. This assumption derives from the philosophical underpinnings of Cartesian duality where human subject is a dispassionate actor who is able to metaphysically demarcate between experiential and transcendental reasoning. Yet, as critical researchers, we know with some certainty that the idea of a completely detached subject is a myth and that the separation between the personal and the professional self is artificially constructed. We find credence in this claim from a study conducted by one of the authors of this commentary that demonstrated how deeply held masculine and often sexist values of academia continue to influence how we perceive ourselves and others, and the biases that this introduces in knowledge creation (Fotaki, 2010). However, there is little consideration of how academics can mediate the rift between the values that they hold and the type and the scope of the teaching and scholarship that they pursue within business schools. It is perhaps understanding this gap that can explain the ontological disjuncture identified by the professors interviewed by Toubiana regarding how they understood social justice and how they sought to enact it within the given institutional constraints of their profession.

Following on the message conveyed by the article, we call on scholars to not only dismiss the idea that we as researchers and teachers are bereft of values but also encourage them to more explicitly and more provocatively integrate their values of social justice into management education. This requires us, as scholars, to thoroughly engage with reflexivity that is socially embedded and relevant to societal concerns. Reflexivity is one of the pillars of content management system (CMS), and it contends that we as scholars must be aware of the philosophical assumptions that we make and the methodology that we employ in any given study (Fournier and Grey, 2000; Prasad and Mills, 2010). Expanding the scope of this concept, we argue that academics ought to be reflexive about the values of social justice that they espouse, and that they ought to vigorously and substantively integrate these values into management education, such as through their infusion into curricula. A few critical scholars have begun to explore, either directly or tangentially, how values-based reflexivity can be incorporated into management education. For instance, Cunliffe (2009) explains how such a perspective can challenge the traditional meanings that students—including those pursuing executive MBA programs—hold as to what it means to be a leader (also see Fenwick, 2005; Ford et al., 2010).

On the second point, we as academics increasingly succumb to the old adage that, those who can do, and those who cannot teach. Moving against the grain of this idiom, we imagine the possibilities of the classroom as a dynamic space full of potential energy by which we can engender social change. Returning to Paulo Friere’s (1970) idea of “conscientization,” we argue that business school academics should use the classroom as a discursive forum in which to develop what Friere calls “critical understanding.” For Friere (1970), it remains essential for individuals to be able to critically understand—through, what he labels, “objectification”—both themselves and the social world. As he writes: “Without this objectification ... man [and woman] would be limited to be in the world, lacking both self-knowledge and knowledge of the world” (Freire, 1970: 40; italics in original). Citing Friere, Sleeter et al. (2004) note that it is essential to illuminate myths that serve the interests of those in power, by discursively consolidating their own hegemonic authority:

[T]he myth that the oppressive order is a “free society”; the myth that all men [and women] are free to work at whatever they wish ... the myth that this order respects human rights ... the myth that anyone who is industrious can become an entrepreneur ... the myth of the industriousness of the oppressor, and the laziness and dishonesty of the oppressed ... the myth of the universal right to education. (Freire, cited in Sleeter et al., 2004: 82)

Working from Freire’s framework, conscientious academics are charged with the responsibility of using the classroom to vividly highlight to their students the problems arising from a system where one group is privileged at the direct marginalization of another; as is manifested in the unfolding global financial crisis and the increasing retraction and privatization of the public space. It will be through such engagements with critical understanding that business schools become part of a movement for progressive social change instead of being accused of failing to educate future business executives about the social significance of financial systems and financial practices.

In sum, these two points present discursive sources of agency to move toward redressing the systems of institutional constraints, which are currently thwarting business school academics engagement with social justice as identified in Toubiana’s article. Indeed, by integrating our values for social justice into management education and by imagining the classroom as a space for social change, we move toward better capturing the potential for business schools to be at the vanguard of progressive and conscientious thinking and not simply as cheerleaders for big business (Munir, 2011). Admittedly, this not so modest agenda is a worthy goal to be pursued by management scholars who see themselves as progressive social scientists.