Abstract
Before I begin this review, I believe I need to make two disclosures. The first is that I have known Martin Parker since 1991 when we were relatively young junior faculty at a point where Martin was ‘still’ a sociologist and I was business school faculty. Now, we are both older, hopefully wiser, Martin is a professor in a management school, and I have returned to my roots and I am located in a department of anthropology and sociology (where I have a wonderful large corner office in a 100+ year old building, with real walls and two large external windows, a 14-ft ceiling, a real oak floor, and a solid door that I can close and no one can see through). The second point is that I have been one of those ‘ticks on an elephant’, a business faculty writing critically about business and management education, but now play the part of a critic from the outside. The reader of this review must then be conscious that this review is not written ‘at arms-length’ and might be seen as an exercise in what is now labelled ‘critical friendship’.
In Shut Down the Business School, Martin Parker adds to the drumbeat of critical analyses of business schools and their practices. One should not be misled by Parker’s comment in the preface that ‘… I will be proceeding without much care, preferring polemic to detailed analysis’ (p. xiii), the book is not 180 pages of tirade and ranting, although it does have its polemical moments. The volume walks a fine line between advancing a political/ideological position and discussing the relevant literature, without reading like an academic text. In the opening chapter, Parker takes us on a tour of an ‘imaginary’ business school. Of course, for those of us in this field of endeavour, the school is easily recognizable; it is any of the dozens of schools we may have encountered on either side of the Atlantic – steel, glass and sterile. With glass walls inside and out, they are hubs of activity for all to observe. This is the point that Parker wants to make. The sameness and uniformity of these institutions, including the form of the buildings they occupy, make them clearly recognizable on campus as places apart from the other physical spaces on campus (often being placed at distance from the central area of the university). The remainder of the Chapter 1 gives us a brief history of the development of schools of commerce, management and business from the mid-19th century to today.
The next three chapters of the book are a broad review of the critique of the business schools and their curriculum. I use the term review as much of this material has been discussed, presented and published in the past by Parker and others, including myself.
Parker opens the Chapter 2 on a topic that is near and dear to my own heart (Ehrensal, 2001), the hidden curriculum of the business school. The chapter examines what is not and what is taught in the business school. Noting that the curriculum is a combination of ideology and technocracy, the chapter, not surprisingly comes to the conclusion that the purpose of the business school curriculum is to conceal capitalism as common sense – teaching the inevitability of managerial capitalism. The Chapter 3 goes on to interrogate the modern notion of management. After a brief historical review of the term, Parker, in terms that we have seen previously in his Against Management (2002a), lays out his objections to top-down, autocratic notions of management as used in modern organizations. Chapter 4 mounts a broader critique of what Parker sees as the shortcomings of the business school, with a particular focus on how various calls for the reform of the business school and its curriculum have rarely if ever lead to any real changes in how these schools operate.
In Chapter 5, Parker moves to what he sees as the real problem with the business school – its influence on how the university is governed and funded. Here, he discusses the infusion of market ideology into decision-making and the corporatization of the organizational structure, including the imposition of corporate style managerialism. He pessimistically suggests that this might even be a case where the parasite (the business school) leads to the death of the host (the university).
In Chapter 6, Parker begins his transition to discuss what he believes the alternative(s) to the business school might be. We again revisit the question ‛what is management?’ In this brief chapter, Parker ends with a question ‘How can anyone organize anything without managers?’ The rest of the book attempts to answer that question.
In Chapter 7, he introduces us to his alternative, the School for Organizing. Parker begins this chapter by reiterating that the B-school excludes consideration of all types of organizations and organizing that do not fit the model of management capitalism. He then reveals his ‘cunning’ plan (or, at least, ‘argument’), a school that would draw broadly from multiple disciplines that explores the various forms of organizing that exist or have existed. He advocates for a broad tent of both methods and subjects. This argument draws extensively from Parker’s previous work on alternative organizations (Parker et al., 2007). In Chapter 8, he continues his argument for this approach to the study of organizing, examining the political nature of organizing, drawing heavily on his previous work on utopia and management (Parker, 2002b).
The title to Chapter 9 asks the question, ‘What do students want?’ To this reviewer, this is the most intriguing chapter in this volume. Parker discusses whether higher education is a public or private good, clearly noting that the B-school credential is seen as the latter not the former. He also discusses all the parties for whom the current arrangements are beneficial – the corporate sector, professional associations, the universities, and some business faculty, among others. He concludes with some original utopian thinking that students, that once hearing of an alternative future, would be attracted to the School for Organizing and away from the B-school. His argument gambles on the young being optimistic idealists and enthusiastic.
The book concludes with Parker’s utopian vision of the future. A future where society is de-schooled and all the realms of possible ways of organizing are explored. A world where the university has a School for Organizing that challenges the current status quo. So where does all of this leave us? As I read this volume, the question that kept returning to mind was ‛who is the audience for this book?’ It is relatively short and a relatively fast read, written more like a ‘pop management’ book than a scholarly tome. For critical management scholars, there is not much new on offer, other than the possibility of joining an ‘amen choir’. There is certainly nothing in the book that would change the minds of those who benefit from the current B-school status quo. Certainly, students being introduced to CMS would benefit from a read; the volume does review quite a bit of material that both Parker and others have published. The book has seemed to catch at least the short term interest of the media, giving Professor Parker the opportunity to make his case to a wider audience, but the question remains, will this be a Warholian 15 minutes of fame or can something bigger be built? And, what about the general public? The question is whether a radical publisher got this book onto the popular business management table or shelf at the local Waterstones or Barnes & Noble? If they could, then there might be a chance that it would introduce some semblance of doubt into the system. The optimist in me hopes that this book gets a wider read, both by the general public and by ‘reform’ minded faculty in B-schools. Then, there might be a call for changes that are more than just tinkering at the edges of the B-school curriculum.