Abstract

Business schools are institutions which, a decade after the financial crash, continue to act as loudspeakers for neoliberal capitalism with all its injustices and planetary consequences. In this lively and incendiary call to action, Martin Parker offers a simple message: shut down the business school.

Parker argues that business schools are 'cash cows' for the contemporary university that have produced a generation of unreflective managers, primarily interested in their own personal rewards. If we see universities as institutions with responsibilities to the societies they inhabit, then we must challenge the common notion that 'the market' should be the primary determinant of the education they provide.

Shut Down the Business School makes a compelling case for a radical alternative, in the form of a 'School for Organising'. This institution would develop and teach on different forms of organising, instead of reproducing the dominant corporate model, enabling individuals to discover alternative responses to the pressing issues of inequality and sustainability faced by all of us today.
'This is a tour de force of contemporary critical management thinking. All too often, the textbooks and the MBAs get in the way of what should be the future for business - participative, value-creating and sustainable. Read, learn... and shut down the business school'
Ed Mayo, Secretary General, Co-operatives UK
'A thoughtful and serious piece of work'
Financial Times
'Business schools are at the centre of the malaise of financialized capitalism... Parker prescribes the nuclear option - termination'
Hugh Wilmott, Professor of Management, Cass Business School, City University London