Disrupting Privilege as Power and Control: Re-Imagining Business and the Appreciation of Indigenous Stewardship in Management Education Curricula

Abstract

We explore privilege and its systemic intertwining with management education curricula. We take the view that privilege as power and control is intimately bound up with shareholder primacy as a foundation of mainstream management education (Lund Dean & Forray, 2021). In an attempt to tackle this, we provide a single case study of how we appreciate a broad concept of Indigenous stewardship in a brand-new foundation unit called “Responsible Business Mindset,” as part of a Master of Commerce program at a large Australian university. By proactively engaging with Indigenous stewardship to tackle privilege we contribute to the literature on engaging with privilege in management education curricula. We highlight how a concept of Indigenous stewardship may help us to reimagine business, where business no longer ignores the interconnections and interdependencies it has with the communities and natural environments within which it operates. Such a concept may also be a means to bolster alternative narratives to shareholder primacy that currently exclude a meaningful debate about privilege. At the same time, the entire exercise of introducing a new concept into the curricula has brought about a deep and critical self-reflection of our own privilege and how we as educators can respectfully and meaningfully introduce such concepts with a sense of appreciation rather than appropriation.