sociology

This is the second installment of a series on business schools.  The first was Are Business Schools to Blame (4/7)?

Does the business school need saving?  Its “soul”?  Is there a crisis brewing where there is no faith in business knowledge or are the current economic times the result of periodic blips or a few rogue players who aren’t following the “rules”?  It depends on who you talk to.  I believe the business school is here to stay, but the challenges for competing business schools will be ones of legitimacy in the eyes of the public and relevance in an increasingly global higher education market.  

In January, Tom Ehrlich offered a commentary on business education entitled The Business of Business Education is More than Business.  Ehrlich makes this keen observation::

“The application of critical analysis and good judgment to economic issues is important for all students, but surely it is essential for students majoring in business. Business leaders need to understand the historical, cultural, scientific, organizational, and political contexts of their domain, and these are best gained through liberal education. This need raises for us a question: to what extent are undergraduates majoring in business on campuses across the country gaining these and the other attributes of a strong liberal education?”

I’m all for liberal education infused in the business curriculum, but my vision is less about checkboxes of general education requirements and more about integrating or bridging the liberal arts into the curriculum.  

“One point to consider is that, for the most part, business curricula have not ’embedded’ liberal arts into the student’s program of study, but rather have isolated it, by separating it from the business education process.”

–Chew & McInnis-Bowers (2004), “Blending liberal arts & business education”

I think one of the ways that higher education provides value is helping students connect concepts and synthesize knowledge, but my experience is that it takes quite a bit of work to truly incorporate the liberal arts and social sciences into syllabi, let alone curriculae.  I’m talking about the epistemology of business.  Countering the received-view is no mean feat.  Given my own liberal education {along with 3 business degrees}, I can draw upon Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  Some may argue that the received views of business and business education are fine.  There is no crisis at hand, in Kuhnian terms, leading to “revolutionary science”.*  Why fix what ain’t broke?  Well, that’s one way to go.

The fact of the matter is that the problems/issues of the financial sector have been in the news for a decade in mainstream sources like PBS Frontline.

• Betting on the Market (1997) {see clips here}
• Dot Con (2002)
• Bigger than Enron (2002)
• The Wall Street Fix (2003)
• The Secret History of the Credit Card (2004)

These stories can help all students to think critically about the business of business.  {I tell mine to even have a healthy skepticism of the Frontline videos.}  These videos are excellent points of departure for the interdisciplinary integration of liberal learning and business.  One common thread of most of these Frontline stories is an emphasis on the social relations of markets.  Enter Stanford Sociologist, Mark Granovetter, who published a very influential sociology paper on “embeddedness” in 1985.  Embeddedness denotes a situation where economic relations between individuals and/or firms are couched in actual social networks, as opposed to an idealized market of rational behaviors.  Granovetter cites a study of the business practice of auditing that illuminated unpredicted results::

“Audits of parts by the central office were supposed to be conducted on a surprise basis, but warning was typically surreptitiously given. The high level of cooperation shown in these internal audits is suggested by the following account: ‘Notice that a count of parts was to begin provoked a flurry among the executives to hide certain parts and equipment . . . materials not to be counted were moved to: 1) little-known and inaccessible spots; 2) basements and pits that were dirty and therefore unlikely to be examined; 3) departments that had already been inspected and that could be approached circuitously while the counters were en route between official storage areas and 4) places where materials and supplies might be used as a camouflage for parts. . . . As the practice developed, cooperation among the [department] chiefs to use each other’s storage areas and available pits became well organized and smoothly functioning’ (Dalton 1959, pp. 48-49).

Dalton’s work shows brilliantly that cost accounting of all kinds is a highly arbitrary and therefore easily politicized process rather than a technical procedure decided on grounds of efficiency.”  

–Mark Granovetter (1985), “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness”

A-ha!  While auditing may serve a rational economic function to increase efficiencies or ensure compliance, the reality is that managers were circumventing this using their social networks.  The same holds true for malfeasance on a larger scale, evident in many of the Frontline videos.

The interfaces of science, the fine arts, architecture, communications, the humanities, and the social sciences with business can provide a “two-way learning street” to use Ehrlich’s term.  Giving students liberal education knowledge truly integrated with applied professional knowledge should encourage more systems thinking.  Students will be familiar with complexity and have a wide array of concepts to draw from to analyze problems.

Moving towards the integration of liberal knowledge with professional education may not change the world, but in my opinion, as business educators, it’s doing our job.

Norman Birnbaum has an enjoyable piece in The Nation about the publication of The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings of C. Wright Mills a collection of Mills vast writings, edited by John Summers.  I was struck by one particular passage in Birnbaum’s account of Mill’s view of the role of the intellectual in promoting societal transformation.

the new bearers of a project of social transformation were the intellectual vanguard. Allowed by society to think, but told not to think too much, they resented being denied autonomy–or ascribed the role of court jesters. In the American ’50s, Mills and others across the political spectrum were described not as social thinkers but as social critics. The implication was that the major structures of society would remain intact, no matter what was said.

While Mills might have been too sanguine about the prospects of a revolution by intellectuals (see Paris 1968), these words struck me, particularly combined with the discussion we’ve been having here about Jon Stewart’s interview with Jim Cramer on the Daily Show.   it seems that we have an obligation to do more, but we hide behind a cloak of scientific objectivity.  Others have written more eloquently than me about the rationalization of the academy, and I’m just as squeamish as the next guy about activist academics, but it seems to me there is a third way.  We should be producting knowledge that is relevant, critical, and empirical at the same time.  But more importantly, we should be more intentional about promoting that knowledge rather than allowing others to do so.

I recomment people read Harold Wilensky’s article in Contexts (I don’t just blog for the company, I”m also a client!) about the impediments to making one’s research policy relevant and the role that institutional structure plays in that process.  Props to ASA for trying to move in that direction.  In my discipline I think there exists a nagging belief that policy relevance means sacrificing empirical purity. I think I can have my empirical cake and eat policy relevance too (I’ve never understood what that expression means).