The crisis of scholarship in business schools: From fragmentation to ethos

Business schools are increasingly subject to critique for advancing instrumental, profit-oriented logics, reproducing social and ecological harms and prioritising metric-driven research over teaching and public engagement. While such critiques are often attributed to governance failures or misaligned incentives, this paper argues that they point to a deeper legitimacy problem within contemporary business education. Specifically, it conceptualises the current moment as a crisis of scholarship-as-ethos: the weakening of a shared moral and epistemic orientation that historically linked inquiry, pedagogy and engagement. Adopting a genealogical approach, the paper traces how neoliberal, Eurocentric and anthropocentric assumptions about scholarship emerged through political, colonial and economic projects and were subsequently normalised through audit cultures and managerial governance. This analysis helps explain why decolonial and relational posthuman perspectives function not as external critiques but as responses to enduring epistemic exclusions shaping dominant models of management learning. Building on, and moving beyond Boyer’s typology, the paper reframes scholarship as ethos—situated, relational, materially mediated and ecologically embedded—and develops this framing through selective engagement with Indigenous and non-Western traditions (e.g. Ubuntu and Buen Vivir), Confucian accounts of moral cultivation and relational posthuman thought, treated as plural and historically contingent. The paper concludes by outlining implications for management learning including reforms to evaluation practices and curricular designs that reconnect scholarly work, pedagogy and ecological responsibility.