Martin Parker asks whether business schools might be able to help address carbon capitalism, rather than simply teaching it.
On Wednesday 3 June 1970, the Board of Social Studies at Warwick University in England discussed a memorandum written by a then recently-arrived Professor of Sociology, John Rex, cautioning against the expansion of business studies at the University. Rex argued that Business Studies should not be taught as an undergraduate discipline, and expressed severe reservations about its projected rapid growth.
He was not alone. Also in 1970, the Warwick historian, Edward Thompson, and colleagues had lambasted the way in which universities were increasingly being shaped by “a particular kind of subordinate relationship with industrial capitalism”. In a blistering account of the university’s early years, Warwick University Ltd, they condemn the early establishment of “the brave new discipline of Business Studies” and its intention to produce graduates “who were well adjusted to enter industry”.
But half a century later, the business school now dominates Warwick University, being its cash machine and its operating language. The same is seen almost everywhere else in the UK. Rex’s projected numbers of 549 students by 1979 now look naive. Warwick’s usiness School currently has around 7,500 students and around 300 staff, which means that about one in four of Warwick University students study there.
Rex’s memo has been swept away by winds of change that have grave implications for addressing the crisis of real climate change.
The expansion of UK business schools from 1970 has been relentless. And they have told, and sold, a version of capitalism in which carbon capitalism is largely unquestioned.
When did the winds first blow? In the late 1960s business schools were just getting going in the UK, following the 1963 Franks Report on British Business Schools. Its author, Oliver Franks, had been chairman of Lloyds Bank, and on the steering committee of the now notorious Bilderberg group from 1954 to 1956. And when asked by various management bodies to report on management education, he said that there was not enough of it and recommended that new schools open. Given who he was, and who had asked him, it would have been rather surprising if he had said anything else.
So the expansion of UK business schools from 1970 has been relentless. And they have told and sold a version of capitalism in which carbon capitalism is largely unquestioned.
Business is now the most significant knowledge product being sold by the global university system, providing fee income of at least $400 bn in more than 13,000 schools globally. In 2020, UNESCO statistics indicated that the global national average percentage of students studying business, administration or law was between a quarter and a third.
According to Eurostat, in the same year, a quarter of Europeans graduated in those disciplines. In the UK, one in six students is currently studying business or administrative studies. Can those institutions be part of the solution, or are they simply reproducing the problem?
business does not go away if it is no longer studied or taught within the university. Hiding your head in a book is not a sensible strategy when the world begins to burn.
It is easy to have sympathy with Rex and Thompson, but their argument that the barbarians are at the gates belonged to an outlook that had had its day. It was a defence that looked to dreaming spires and universities sequestered from the world in the name of intellectual purity. But business does not go away if it is no longer studied or taught within the university. Hiding your head in a book is not a sensible strategy when the world begins to burn.
And the most anachronistic part of Rex’s memo is that it was written by a professor. Any idea of academic governance is now long gone. UK universities are hierarchically managed, with residual courts or assemblies that masquerade as parliaments but have no decision-making powers. Consultations are held with staff and students, and the institutions are referred to as “ours”, but managers are appointed by other managers, not elected by staff.
The memo captures a particular moment when disciplinary diversity was assumed as a necessary good that could be defended through the power of academic governance. Arguably, both of these conceptions are now history, as the arts and humanities dwindle, the business schools continue to expand, and university governance becomes ever more centralised and hierarchical. So the problem and the answer are to be found within the business school.
Consultations are held with staff and students, and the institutions are referred to as “ours”, but managers are appointed by other managers, not elected by staff.
The knowledge and practice that business schools reproduce is the major cause of a planetary and ecological crisis, as well as massive inequalities of income and wealth within and between nations. It is now far too late to imagine that universities might have nothing to do with business, but the present moment is an opportunity instead to use the fact that they have so much skin in the game to radicalise what business studies means. If we shut down the business school, then we must replace it with the school for organising – a place for studying how we rescue ourselves from carbon capitalism.
The problem is not just researching and teaching business itself, but the particular way of thinking about capitalism and its organisation that is behind it. If we were to teach about zero carbon alternatives, about degrowth and localism, it might become part of the solution. Business currently gets taught as if hierarchy were functionally necessary, finance only comes from venture capitalists or shareholders, and growth is a universal law.
Universities cannot ignore business, but business schools can become places that teach and research about the whole variety of organising practices that might help us produce a low-carbon, high-inclusion, high-democracy economy. This means teaching about employee-ownership trusts, mutualism and doughnut economics. And at Warwick University, they could teach about the Triumph Meriden Workers’ Co-operative, a few miles from campus, which, in 1975, demonstrated that a motorcycle factory could be run by its workers.
These arguments about ownership and control apply to universities as well, which must be democratised and made to serve their communities, people and planet, and not to compete with each other in the name of growth. Then perhaps we can, one day, imagine a world in which business school students and staff are discussing what sorts of knowledge might help produce a fair economy and a liveable planet.
This is a condensed version of Business Schools Rex: Warwick University Ltd, Historical Studies in Industrial Relations 43: 91–102.
