Imagineering the Business School and the Corporation in Global Kinetics

As suggested by Engler, neoliberalism (which is essentially grounded on pessimistic assumptions about individuals and institutions) is the basis of corporate globalization. We know already that while corporate globalization has produced a few winners, it has unfortunately produced more losers in the global economic system.

But what makes this ideology present a rather gloomy vision about man and society in general? Various theories (agency theory, transaction cost economics, game theory, social network analysis, theories of social dilemmas, etc.) of the Chicago boys tend to be rooted on the following: Morals are matters for individuals, behavioural assumption of self-interest, and focus on human imperfections. According to Sumantra Ghoshal, a former professor of London Business School, if you combine ideology-based gloomy vision with the process of self-fulfilling prophecy (double hermeneutic), theories will induce management behaviours just as what we have seen in the high profile corporate scandals in the recent years. Isaiah Berlin calls it the dehumanization of management practice and this has certainly caused a kind of global kinetics which shocked not only shareholders of affected corporations but also the general public as a whole.

In view of the problem posed above, Ghoshal calls for reversing of the trend. The ultimate goal according to him must be to go from the pretense of knowledge (the deliberate effort in social science research to adopt the scientific model) to the substance of knowledge. According to him, management researchers should strike a balance with regard to the different and contradictory facets of human nature and organization behaviour. This means they should also focus on the positive problem which entails tempering the pretense of knowledge and re-engage in the areas of scholarship that have been overlooked (integration, application, and pedagogy). This requires a paradigm shift altogether especially in evolving a totally different culture in the academe – a massive change not only in the structure and context of how business faculty operate but also in the kind of leadership in business schools. For companies and individuals, this would mean they have to put significant pressure to realign the perspectives and priorities of the institutions they support. Academies of Management on the other hand will have to create a new intellectual agenda by accommodating and thereby relegitimizing scholarship pluralism.

With the self-fulfilling prophecy inherent in theories in the social domain, relegitimizing scholarship would hopefully re-legitimize the positive role of corporations and of management as a practice. Likewise, if we substitute the pretense of knowledge with substance of knowledge produced through a more pluralistic scholarship milieu, and complement it with a more optimistic vision about individuals and the world, perhaps this will result to a different kind of corporation on one hand, and to a more positive view of corporate globalization on the other. In such a Utopian-like scenario, global governance may not necessarily be about what or how much an entity or nation can get but more on what or how much it can possibly share!

Reference:

Ghoshal, S. Bad Management Theories Are Destroying Good Management Practices.
Academy of Management Learning & Education, 2005, 4 (1): 75-91