Regulation and freedom in global business education

Abstract

PurposeThis paper seeks to confront the orthodoxy of global business education with some insights from postcolonial theory in order to develop a new critical pedagogy adequate for a global sociology of management and accounting.Design/methodology/approachReviewing the state of play in postcolonial theory and noting the new politicisation in that field, the paper asks what relevance this politicisation might have for an alternative to orthodox global business education.FindingsThe paper finds that the texts available to postcolonial theory present a wealth beyond the regulation of colonial and neo‐colonial regimes and in contrast critical management studies do not have texts that express such wealth or reveal global business as the regulator of such a wealth. Instead critique and indeed the anti‐globalization movements risk, appearing as regulators of wealth and business, threaten to emerge as the true carnival of wealth and path to freedom.Research limitations/implicationsTo dissociate critique from regulation and business from wealth, business and management education must seek out these texts in the fantasies among students and in the differences that obtain, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued, at the heart of capital.Originality/valueThis article embraces the fantasies of the fetish of the commodity as part of an immanent politics, claiming both an excess of wealth and an access to wealth, based on a new fetish adequate for the globalized limits that students and teachers encounter.