Although business schools have existed for a very long time, in the last few decades they have become a standard feature in most British universities; not surprisingly, in that time they have come to play a prominent role in the higher education landscape, generally bringing in much more income than other departments, and helping steer the broader culture of the university in an increasingly business-centred direction. They have huge power within and beyond the university, shaping and influencing the way both students and wider society think about business and the economy. It is also unsurprising that they overwhelmingly use this influence to defend business-as-usual. But despite their neoliberal culture, they nonetheless remain ‘academic’ spaces, where lecturers have a perhaps surprising level of freedom to teach students what they see fit, including ideas about a world beyond capitalism. Around the UK, a handful of critical scholars are doing just that, showing students – and their colleagues – that another world is possible. But we wanted to think about ways to make an impact beyond our practical capacity; inspired by ideas from cultural studies, we are interested in thinking about how ideas come to be resisted, ignored, or accepted. Business schools are hugely influential in generating and reproducing ideas about our economy, so it’s time to start turning that influence in a new direction.
Human society is a remarkable thing, not just for all those things it produces – for better or for worse – but for how it produces and reproduces itself. Every human is born into at least one culture which shapes everything we say, think, and do. Language is the most obvious feature of any culture, but culture finds its way into every aspect of our lives – the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the knowledge we have, and, of course, our values. What is so remarkable about this process is that it happens in large part without any conscious or deliberate intervention; cultures reproduce themselves, but they use us as their vehicle to do so. Capitalist culture has been especially successful in reproducing itself, inculcating everyone born within its reach with its norms and values, and its assumptions about how the world works. Most of this happens naturally, as we learn from our parents, our siblings, our friends and school teachers, and, of course, from the media. Simply by living our lives, we are endlessly exposed to ‘information’ in ways which we don’t think of as education; for example, we hear certain words – innovation, growth, the free-market, bosses, entrepreneurs – again and again and again. We hear them so often that they become naturalised, and, because they come to appear normal, and because we hear them from people we trust, we associate them with not only how the world is, but how it should be. Over time, we absorb all these pieces of information and add them to our broad understanding of the world.
But this ‘natural’ process of cultural reproduction also has a lot of help. The education system has long been critiqued by progressives for reproducing capitalist ideology in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, but in the last few decades, universities have outdone themselves in the social reproduction of capitalist-friendly graduates, with business schools simply the most explicit examples of corporate-focused education. Well understood as the cash cows of a financially unstable university system, business schools are soaking up students who increasingly understand education as an economic transaction; if you’re going to pay so much for your degree, the logic goes, you need to get a degree that will guarantee you a high-earning job when you leave. It often doesn’t work out like that, of course, but for many students, it just seems too risky, or frivolous, to spend tens of thousands of pounds to get a degree that might be more intellectually, but less financially, rewarding.
What students learn when they get to a business school varies a great deal, depending on the institution and the course; you can learn marketing, HR, finance, leadership, and, of course, you’ll be taught a little bit about the need to think about sustainability and corporate responsibility. You might get told the odd thing about social enterprises and B Corps, but unless you take one of a handful of specific courses across the country, you won’t get much more than a passing reference to these ‘alternative’ business models, let alone anything more meaningfully radical such as worker co-operatives. And you’re exceedingly unlikely to learn anything about capitalism as an economic system, or systemic alternatives to it. In other words, all the social conditioning students encounter simply by living in a capitalist society is reproduced some more in a business school – you leave being an even better capitalist, without even knowing what capitalism really is.
Of course, there are some inspiring spaces which try to offer alternative models of education, teaching people about co-operatives, how to work democratically, and how to think more critically about things like marketing and accounting. Some of these exist within, or on the peripheries of, the university system, whilst others, like Stir to Action, are independent of it entirely. As vital as these spaces are, there are too few of them to counter the size and scope of the business school sector, and they require huge levels of time, energy, and money, all of which are in short supply for those of us trying to do things differently. Just as importantly, they tend to attract people who have already made a conscious decision to explore alternative ways of organising, which means that the great majority of people go through their education, and through life, learning nothing about alternatives to capitalism and capitalist organisations, whilst learning a great deal, explicitly and through that endless cultural reproduction, about how to be a perfect capitalist, whether as a consumer, worker, manager, boss, or entrepreneur.
Students not only know little or nothing about how we could organise the economy and society differently, they are also subtly taught to fear any alternatives they may encounter. Whilst readers of this magazine may see co-operatives, for example, as inspiring examples of democratically-run businesses, many students will draw implicit connections between co-operatives and state communism. If that sounds far-fetched, feel free to come along to one of my lectures, and hear students defending capitalism by referring to the threat of the authoritarian dictatorship with which they automatically associate any alternative to the ‘free market’. Even those students who don’t make such explicit connections struggle to grasp the complex diversity of ways in which an economy, and a society, can be organised. For them – as for most people – ‘the market’ is synonymous with capitalism, and profit-making corporations, workers, and bosses are synonymous with the market.
To understand why this is such a challenge, and to understand what we are trying to do about it with the Re-organise project, we need to return to the issue of culture. Humans are remarkably intelligent, capable of incredibly complex thought; but we are also mammals, and mammals living in a staggeringly complex social world. In order to navigate that world, we need to ‘learn’ a great deal about it without really processing that learning in a conscious or reflexive way. Again, learning a language is a great example; most of us can speak and write perfectly well having been taught very little, if anything, about grammar or syntax. Once we have learned a language, it becomes ‘second-nature’ – and becomes a huge part of who we are, shaping our thought and behaviour in ways we never even realise. Our relationship to our broader culture is very similar; we ‘instinctively’ understand what it is to be a consumer, we ‘know’ that businesses need bosses, that the market is efficient, that capitalism promotes innovation, that innovation is always good, that economic growth is vital… Because we know all of this so deeply, through the process of endless cultural reproduction, it is remarkably difficult to challenge on a rational basis. Paradoxically, we embrace the ways of thinking which we imbibe through our culture without realising it, but when people try to introduce us to new ideas which we can consciously and reflexively engage with, we tend to do one of two things; either we feel like they are trying to indoctrinate us into some radical and dangerous way of thinking, or we completely disconnect, because we have no pre-established association with the ideas presented to us. In other words, the more subtly information is presented to us, the greater the chances we will allow that information to sink in.
Re-organise is trying to reproduce this process of subtly disseminating knowledge, but with alternative ideas. So rather than focusing our energy on big projects aimed at teaching a small number of students a great deal about things like co-operative organising, Re-organise is taking a much wider but more ‘superficial’ approach. Very simply, we’re trying to get academics, and people working in academic services – careers advisors, etc. – to simply mention co-operatives; just a passing reference here or there.
Getting lecturers to slowly drop in the odd reference to co-operative forms of organising, in a lecture here, a seminar there, at countless times through a student’s university experience, helps slowly mimic the unconscious learning that we automatically get from wider culture. These casual references are less likely to create that defensiveness mentioned earlier, and more likely to be soaked up as a result. Over the course of a degree, a student may encounter a handful of these moments, making them more receptive if and when they stumble across a copy of STIR magazine, or see a course focusing on alternative organising, and so on.
So far, Re-organise has been enthusiastically received, and whilst we’re currently focusing on business schools, we will soon be extending the project to other departments. Importantly, we want as many people working within the university system as possible to get involved. We’re looking for people to contact other staff members to ask them to engage in whatever way they can, and we’re also building up a library of resources so that people without much knowledge on alternative economies can easily prepare a slide or two for their lectures. The positive implication of our cultural approach is that it requires fewer resources and less knowledge than specifically-tailored courses, and can easily be introduced into the existing educational framework.
We’ll never match the ubiquity of capitalist culture, and we still desperately need those in-depth spaces for people to really learn about working democratically, but we think Re-organise can be an important part of a broader strategy to shift our culture in a more progressive direction. And the more of you who get involved, the more successful it will be. Take a look at our website – re-organise.org – for information about being part of re-organising education for a democratic future.
Dr. Matthew Wilson is a researcher and lecturer at Swansea University. He has been involved in community and co-operative organising for over twenty years, and is currently exploring ways to challenge the cultural perceptions of alternative economic and organisational forms.
