Abstract
This chapter argues that business schools yield 3 problems: the problem of research, the normative problem, and the problem of the use of knowledge. The authors cite the heart of the issue as the “separation fallacy”, most powerfully seen as the exclusion of ethics from business judgments, but generalizable as a duality between the worlds of management and the humanities. Freeman and Newkirk lay out five main modes of research and make recommendations for how each can escape the “separation fallacy.” Lastly, the chapter suggests how to redefine and rediscover the disciplines of business by thinking about more thick moral conceptions.
Originally published in: Business Schools Under Fire: Humanistic Management Education as the Way Forward, 273–290 © Palgrave Macmillan, 2011
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Notes
- 1.
This paper is the result of a joint effort with our colleagues Jared Harris, and Sankaran Venkataraman. A further version of the paper will undoubtedly list some of them as co-authors.
- 2.
Jeffrey Pfeffer and Christina T. Fong (2002), ‘The End of Business Schools? Less Success Than Meets the Eye’, Academy of Management Learning and Education 1(1, September, 92).
- 3.
Henry Mintzberg (2004), Managers Not MBAs (San Francisco: Berrett Koehler).
- 4.
And, more recently commenting on the US’s first MBA president, now responsible for a great deal of political misery as well. ‘Leadership Beyond the Bush MBA’, unpublished, is available on Mintzbert’s website: http://www.henrymintz-berg.com/pdf/leadershipbush.pdf
- 5.
Sumantra Ghosal (2005), ‘Bad Management Theories are Destroying Good Management Practices’, Academy of Management Learning and Education 4(1).
- 6.
While this effect, of theory creating behaviour, may be most pernicious in the case of agency theory, we may also see it in finance. As our colleague Paul Harper has pointed out, the Black Scholes model predicts options prices possibly in part because most players in the market are taught to price options using the Black Scholes model. And in Nassim Taleb’s analysis in The Black Swan, recent market upheavals have occurred when the assumptions underlying the model have proven false.
- 7.
Ghosal, 75.
- 8.
This section draws heavily on Jared Harris and R. Edward Freeman (2008), ‘The Impossibility of the Separation Thesis’, Business Ethics Quarterly, 18(4), 541–8.
- 9.
And if they cannot be disentangled, what are the implications for ideas such as corporate social responsibility and triple bottom line?
- 10.
- 11.
And, in many cases, they have shaped our institutions. For example, the current structure of the mobile telephone market in the US is a result of behaviours induced by a spectrum auction process designed to yield maximum prices for the licenses, regardless of the stability of the resulting businesses.
- 12.
For an analysis of brands as social texts, see Hatch, Mary Jo and Rubin, James (2006), ‘The Hermeneutics of Branding’, The Journal of Brand Management 14(1–2), September, 40–59(20).
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Freeman, R.E., Newkirk, D. (2023). Business School Research: Some Preliminary Suggestions. In: Dmytriyev, S.D., Freeman, R.E. (eds) R. Edward Freeman’s Selected Works on Stakeholder Theory and Business Ethics. Issues in Business Ethics(), vol 53. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04564-6_31
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