Teaching (Cooperative) Business: The “Bluefield Experiment” and the Future of Black Business Schools

Abstract

Academy of Management Learning & EducationVol. 20, No. 3 Research & ReviewsFree AccessTeaching (Cooperative) Business: The “Bluefield Experiment” and the Future of Black Business Schoolsis companion ofReviving the “Forgotten History” of a Black Business SchoolLeon Prieto, Simone Phipps, Neil Stott and Lilia GiugniLeon PrietoClayton State University University of Cambridge, Judge Business School, Simone PhippsMiddle Georgia State University University of Cambridge, Judge Business School, Neil StottMiddlesex University and Lilia GiugniUniversity of Cambridge, Judge Business SchoolPublished Online:6 Oct 2021https://doi.org/10.5465/amle.2020.0127AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsDownload CitationsAdd to favoritesTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail In recent years, business schools’ research, teaching, and management practices have faced a wealth of criticism. Khurana and Spender (2012), for example, suggested that modern business schools are saddled with a research model that encourages excessive narrowness of scope, producing little in the way of insights about the dilemmas facing real-life practitioners. Martin Parker’s (2018) provocatively titled Shut Down the Business School also challenged academics to reevaluate the way they teach business and to help students question the leading assumptions that link management theory to the maintenance of the capitalistic system. Others reconstructed how business schools progressively lost the civil role they were once charged with and came to focus on shareholder primacy and a view of managers as the agents of shareholders (see Khurana, 2007; Spender, 2016). Specifically, it has been put forward that current educational strategies do not encourage economically vulnerable individuals to develop leadership skills and improve the communities in which they were raised; rather, they instill in them an aspiration to move into the upper class while leaving their communities behind (Greenleaf, 2002; see also Alvesson & Sandberg, 2012; Augier & March, 2011).In light of this growing body of critical scholarship, it is striking that histories of business schools have neglected the impact of race and racism. In particular, while recent scholarship has sought to reappraise the Black contribution to management history (Prieto & Phipps, 2016, 2019; Walker, 2009), both the historical trajectories of Black business schools and the legacies of the African American academics and teachers who shaped them remain largely unexplored. Yet, Black business schools are unique and historically complex organizations (Favors, 2019). Between the Civil War and the end of the segregation period, over a hundred “holding institutions” for African American students—who were prohibited from matriculating from other higher education institutions (Evans, Evans, & Evans, 2002)—were founded in the southern United States. Many of these historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) had business and economics departments that went through significant changes over the last decades. Today, Black business schools cater to the educational needs of increasingly heterogeneous student bodies. They are still faced with the crucial tasks of keeping African American historical and cultural tradition alive and producing and disseminating knowledge and good practices to develop marginalized Black communities (Kedia, Clampit, & Gaffney, 2014). In fact, as effectively argued elsewhere (Gordon Nembhard, 2008), economic equality remains to this day the unfinished business of the civil rights struggle, which makes Black business schools’ missions all the more vital (Allen, Epps, & Haniff, 1991). HBCUs and their business departments also face the pressures of globalized education. Heavily affected by the standardization of management teaching that has characterized North American universities since the 1960s (Hommel & Thomas, 2014), Black business schools have seen the originality of their missions and institutional practices undermined. Today, this is evident by the scarcity of degrees and courses offered in alternative economic development and critical political economy, which were once popular across HBCUs and explicitly connected to the struggle for African American emancipation (see Haynes & Gordon Nembhard, 1999).In this paper, we address these significant knowledge gaps by providing a critical history (Durepos, Shaffner, & Taylor, 2019) of experiential cooperative business teaching during the 1920s and 1930s in the Department of Business Administration at Bluefield Institute (now known as Bluefield State College) in West Virginia. We chose Bluefield because it was the first HBCU that established a student cooperative to serve as a form of business laboratory, the untimely closure of which helped us to explore the structural challenges faced by Black innovators. Building on insights from critical management history, critical pedagogy, and critical race theory (CRT) research paradigms, we reconstruct how management education at Bluefield was profoundly influenced by Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois’s pioneering ideas on Black economic cooperation and by Prof. W. C. Matney’s equally groundbreaking experiments with cooperative business models. After having provided an account of the Bluefield cooperative’s development, end, and legacy, we then proceed to consider the relevance of cooperative business education and experiential teaching to modern Black business schools and other educational institutions. In so doing, we contribute to scholarly debates on how monocultural and simplistic histories of management learning constrain present and future developments (Cummings & Bridgman, 2016) and on how the politics of business schools and management teaching can contribute to perpetuating historical injustice (Bridgman, Cummings, & McLaughlin, 2016; Dye, Mills, & Weatherbee, 2005; Hassard, 2012; Peltonen, 2015). Importantly, and in line with the action-oriented ethos of critical organizational history, critical pedagogy, and CRT, we also include a set of considerations for what educators and change agents (especially, but not exclusively) within HBCUs and African American communities can learn from alternative history, economic, and teaching frameworks.CRAFTING RACIALLY AWARE CRITICAL HISTORIESCritical Organizational History, Methodological Challenges, and Racial AwarenessThe study of management and organizations has long been criticized for being a-historical, or for integrating historical insights in a universalistic, uncritical manner (Zald, 1993). With this in mind, an increasing number of critical organizational historians have attempted to craft reflexively written historical narratives, aiming to capture a plurality of voices from both within and outside mainstream organizations. Well aware that organizational theories, forms, and practices may all underpin dominance, over the last three decades, many of these scholars have turned their attention to the ways in which existing accounts obscure, neglect, or perpetuate inequities, injustices, and marginalization on the basis of color, gender, sexuality, class, and ability (Rowlinson, Jacques, & Booth, 2009). Their writings expose exploitative practices, highlight resistance, carefully explore positionality issues, and consider alternative ways of organizing to achieve equity and empowerment (Durepos et al., 2019). Where racial matters are concerned, in particular, critical race theorists Delgado and Stefancic (2017) have claimed that “revisionist histories”—well-researched, alternative historical narratives that highlight racial concerns—should be regarded as a hallmark of antiracist efforts.Among the greatest challenges still faced by critical organizational historians is the difficulty in retrieving sources that do justice to multiple and diverse voices. Traditional archival research tends to offer insights into the histories of those whose testimonies, artifacts, and writings were purposefully selected for posterity to the exclusion of disadvantaged groups (Mills, Suddaby, Foster, & Durepos, 2016). Researching the historical trajectories of U.S. organizations from a race lens can be especially daunting, as before the civil rights movement, not many were interested in what African Americans did and thought (Painter, 2006). But the historical processes through which race has been constructed, enacted, and sometimes reimagined are central to the present life chances of millions of Black Americans. Organizational historian Bill Cooke (2003) has argued that American slavery, a pivotal event in the construction of African Americans as a racialized group, has long been wrongfully expunged from management history. He has called for more post-colonial management inquiries and for historical analyses that explore the persistence of racism in management (Cooke, 2003, see also Nkomo, 1992). In recent years, others have suggested that race-sensitive scholarship and antiracist practices should be explicitly integrated into business schools (Dar, Liu, Martinez Dy, & Brewis, 2020; Nkomo, 2011).Building on this, we aim to offer a racially aware, critical history of the intellectual influences that shaped Black business schools in the 1920s–1930s and of their pioneering experiments with cooperative economics and experiential business teaching, which their proponents saw as the means of achieving agency through collaboration amid the obstacles of a racialized society. We regard Bluefield as a paradigmatic exemplar of the collective effort of Black activists and educationalists to develop both an alternative economic paradigm and an innovative and racially aware practicum based on the ethos of cooperation that was strongly rooted in African intellectual history.Unfortunately, few traces of the student cooperative set up at Bluefield remain, and, like many critical researchers before us, we were forced to seek sources unattainable through conventional organizational archival research. We were able to reconstruct the case’s history through analyzing disparate but numerous sources such as letters drafted by Dr. Du Bois, Prof. Matney, and other key historical characters, as well as newspaper articles, memoirs, and materials pertaining to the socioeconomic context of West Virginia in the 1920s and 1930s. Following Durepos et al.’s (2019: 459) observation that “there is emancipatory potential at the very moment in which we make choices as researchers,” we analyzed data while recognizing that such a story could have been written in multiple ways. Specifically, we chose to develop our narrative set against the background of insights offered by CRT and critical pedagogy—two bodies of work to which Du Bois, Matney, and other protagonists of the Bluefield case contributed in crucial ways. We also sought to think reflexively and take matters of positionality seriously. As a Black man of Caribbean heritage who graduated from an HBCU, a Black woman of Caribbean heritage who graduated from an HBCU, a White European woman, and a White European man with vastly different descents and experiences within educational and research settings, we made a point to pay careful attention to the way our own “racialized and cultural systems of coming to know, knowing, and inhabiting the world” (Milner, 2007: 388) impacted this study. Above all, we were aware when we started this project that our varied positions and identities were inextricably embedded in the research process in which we engaged, and we worked together to leverage this toward the production of emancipatory knowledge and practices (Chapman, 2007).Insights from Critical Race Theory and Critical PedagogyA theoretically sophisticated research paradigm, CRT is comprised of a number of epistemological and methodological assumptions, among which, first and foremost, is the principle that race matters, that it is a central structure in society, and that racial inequality permeates every aspect of social life (e.g., the legal system, schooling, housing, economics, family, culture, and, crucially, our very research practices) (Zamudio, Russell, Rios, & Bridgeman, 2011). Above all, CRT proponents have suggested that racial thought is engrained in societal belief systems, with subtle (and often subconscious) biases about racial superiority elevating some groups while disparaging the contributions of others and ultimately institutionalizing their oppression (see Brown & Jackson, 2013). Started in the 1990s as an intellectual project rooted in American jurisprudence scholarship (Dixson & Rousseau Anderson, 2017), CRT soon evolved into a transdisciplinary philosophical movement with a strong activist stance. In other words, CRT scholars did not limit themselves to drawing from multiple fields to understand and create awareness around the permanence and pervasiveness of racism. They also actively worked to change oppressive dynamics (Dixson & Rousseau Anderson, 2017) and to redefine traditional civil rights claims in a broader perspective, which encompassed economics, the social construction of inequalities, and, importantly, education (Crenshaw, 1990; Delgado & Stefancic, 2017).In fact, CRT ideas have exerted a strong influence on the education field and informed a plethora of critical approaches to pedagogy and analyses of race-based disparities in academic opportunities (see hooks, 2014). In the United States, a rich body of work tried to rediscover and promote pedagogical approaches generated within African American communities as a distinctive cultural group. Authors writing within this perspective argued that Eurocentric curricula are generally valued as superior to the ideas and practices developed by oppressed groups, while the latter, which might be inspirational for a broad range of people, are often missing from mainstream narratives (Zamudio et al., 2011). A second stream of research has used CRT to depict African Americans not as an ethnic and cultural category but as a racialized group, exploring the impact of shifting social constructions of race on Black lives (see Libassi, 2018). These works posited that Black students comparatively underperform in academic settings due to the fact that their communities have grown accustomed to fewer and lower-quality educational offerings (Epps, 1995; Garcia, 2020; Jones, Schmitt, & Wilson, 2018). According to this argument, African American youths have long been harmed by teachers and educational managers who, influenced by their own racial biases, serve as gatekeepers and inhibit their academic success (St. Mary, Calhoun, Tejada, & Jenson, 2018). Dixson and Rousseau Anderson (2017), in particular, argued from a CRT perspective that even seemingly race-neutral policies can reinforce educational inequity, since supposedly color-blind but structurally White curricula have the effect of maintaining and deepening racial beliefs and stereotypes (see also Gold, 2016). Furthermore, education is a key determinant of career and lifetime opportunities and equity ownership and is ultimately linked to wealth (Heo, Grable, & O’Neill, 2017; Tamborini, Kim, & Sakamoto, 2015). Not only have fewer and lower-quality business educational opportunities been afforded to the African American community, but offering education without corresponding chances to succeed is also problematic (Taylor & Cantwell, 2019). We know that at the individual and firm level, African Americans still endure differences in earnings and (un)employment (Gould, 2020; Hipple & Hammond, 2016; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2020; Wilson, 2019; Wilson & Rodgers, 2016), while at the macro level, national growth rates have historically benefitted Whites, with unemployment and inflation disproportionately hurting Blacks, and the race wealth gap growing even wider after the recession of 2007–2009 (Koba, 2013).It is particularly striking that these rich and diverse insights have so far been largely neglected within management research, including within the subset of literature that contests mainstream or inequitable approaches to management education (see Amis, Munir, Lawrence, Hirsch, & McGahan, 2018). This is—we believe—a missed opportunity, as CRT has the potential to illuminate how conventional, neoliberal, and standardized business school curricula have contributed to the exclusion and marginalization of Blacks, which may eventually inhibit even the most educated among them from suitable employment and economic and social standing.With this in mind, and through the lens of CRT, we have turned our attention to Black business schools as central hubs for the education and professional and business training of Black communities, as well as for African American economic emancipation. In particular, by reconstructing the historical trajectory of business teaching at Bluefield Institute in the 1920s–1930s, we aim to make three key contributions. First, we intend to help recover a “forgotten history” and give voice to unjustly overlooked characters, highlighting what we are missing by erasing groundbreaking theoretical, teaching, and business models that emerged within Black communities. Second, and in line with our CRT and critical pedagogy framework, we seek to illuminate the connection between the racialization of business school education and the search for solutions to the racial wealth gap (Hanks, Solomon, & Weller, 2018). Bluefield educators and activists, indeed, came to experiment with cooperative thought and practices as they acknowledged that capitalism had historically wounded Black communities, and thus they sought alternative economic and pedagogical frameworks that might fit heterogenous, vulnerable, and racialized socioeconomic contexts (Marable, 2015). The premature end of the Bluefield experiment, as we shall see, is also a testimony to the fact that racism may be embedded in economic policy views and seemingly race-neutral state interventions that further undermine economic opportunities for Blacks. Third, and coherently with the action-oriented dimension of CRT, we endeavor to stay true to the principle that knowledge and awareness of the racial divide are insufficient and that contributing to encouraging agency and diffused empowerment is essential. Therefore, we use our historical analysis to inform a discussion on how a new approach to business schools as a laboratory, rooted in racial awareness, prosocial economics, and critical pedagogy (as inspired by the Bluefield experiment), may help contemporary educational institutions to better serve Black communities and tackle societal challenges that are meaningful to them in ways that fit their purposes (see Stott & Tracey, 2018: 1). Critically, we explicitly suggest that alternative perspectives, such as economic cooperation and experiential teaching, might hold a great potential not only for HBCUs but for business schools at large (see Morrell & Learmonth, 2015).THE IDEAS BEHIND THE BLUEFIELD EXPERIMENT: ECONOMIC COOPERATION AND DU BOIS’S FORGOTTEN LEGACYThe idea that Black business schools could and should do more to have a greater social impact, instead of simply “teaching capitalism” to a demographic that traditionally lacked access to capital, existed well before the rise of CRT. In particular, a key influence behind the innovative economic and teaching practices that emerged at Bluefield was the work of pioneering African American thinker and civil rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963). A prolific writer and orator, and an inspirator of critical scholarship on both race and economics, Du Bois occupies today a central place in postcolonial and African American studies syllabi. Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., a leading scholar of African American Studies at Harvard, referred to Du Bois as the nation’s most influential Black scholar (Gates Jr., 2011). However, his seminal thinking on economic cooperation and the actions he took to put his ideas into practice have received comparatively little attention, even among students of the transnational cooperative movement (Gordon Nembhard, 2014b). By rediscovering this forgotten legacy and reconstructing the influence it had on a prominent HBCU, we help recover a rich and intricate history and showcase the uniqueness of Black business schools as sites of intellectual, political, and economic activism.W. E. B. Du Bois and Economic CooperationA prominent sociologist, historian, and social progressive, Du Bois set for himself the twofold task of observing and analyzing the effects of race and racism and of reforming economics thinking and teaching to tackle racial inequality. As expressed in some of his least read and yet trailblazing writings (Du Bois, 2007), he strongly believed in the power of economic cooperation and proposed that Blacks should form cooperative businesses as a solution to the high rates of poverty, unemployment, and social exclusion that still hindered the integration of African Americans following the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Drawing on the practices of local Black enterprises that had emerged in response to exclusion from White businesses, he overtly argued for democratic and popular control of Black firms (Higbee, 1993) and for a “Black cooperative commonwealth” of producers and consumers that may gain and consolidate Black power (Du Bois, 2007: 108). In White America, Du Bois observed a competitive individualism that reflected a social Darwinism different from the norms of communal Africa—the “motherland” of African Americans (Haynes, 2018: 131). For Du Bois, what distinguished Black America were African traditions and philosophies such as Ubuntu and African cooperativism (see Mangaliso, 2001), which survived through slavery and were reinforced during a segregation that also isolated Blacks from the intense individualist creed of broader American society (Haynes, 2018: 131). Du Bois felt that humans were social beings who thrived in communities (Mangaliso & Mangaliso, 2007) and that reviving and enacting the communitarian norms linked to a communal African heritage was crucial to developing positive social responses to Black Americans’ segregation and poverty (Haynes, 2018: 131).Importantly, Du Bois was part of both a larger movement of African American activists who campaigned for equal rights for Blacks (see Morris, 2015) and of a transnational network of intellectuals and social progressives who had been reflecting on the philosophy and practice of cooperation in Europe and the Americas (see Rodgers, 1998). At the time, the “social question,” which had preoccupied reformers across continents, mostly pertained to how to maintain social order as industrialization transformed socioeconomic relationships and concentrated wealth into ever fewer hands (Dawley, 1991; Stone, 1985). Profit sharing, mutual benefit societies, and cooperatives were among the solutions that had been identified by European social thinkers. Yet, for Du Bois and his fellow antiracism advocates, the social question was not purely an issue of class but also of race, and his writings on Black economic cooperation reveal how he was able to reframe alternative approaches to economics that emerged in Europe as a means by which to secure collective African American autonomy.Particularly relevant to the Bluefield experiment were the arguments put forward by Du Bois (1898, 1907) in his two reports on African American social betterment and economic cooperation, which were for decades the only in-depth studies of Black cooperation, until Gordon Nembhard’s (2014b) Collective Courage was published in 2014. The reports chronicled how Black communities overcame a deficit in economic initiative—which, Du Bois argued, had been effectively “robbed from slaves” (1898: 21). According to Du Bois, Black communities had then engaged in three types of collective organizing: cooperative behaviors, benevolence, and business—once again, all practices inspired by communitarian African thinking (see Prieto & Phipps, 2016). Cooperative behaviors included joint efforts to mitigate or resist slavery (often initiated and sustained by Black religious leaders), improve slave life, and latterly, the work of free Black abolitionists. “Cooperative benevolence” emerged instead, in the activism of Black churches, which, following emancipation, were “pressured” by “race prejudice” to provide their communities with cemeteries, orphanages, and hospitals (Du Bois, 1898: 24). It was precisely in Black churches, as well as in civil and secret societies (e.g., the Masons), that Du Bois identified the initiators of pioneering African American economic activities, such as insurance, savings and loans companies, and ultimately, actual cooperative businesses (Du Bois, 1907). And it was this trailblazing model that Bluefield educators attempted to explore and implement for their students’ benefit.A final, key insight that may help shed light on Bluefield’s trajectory can be extracted from Du Bois’s (1907) volume Economic Co-operation Among Negro Americans and concerns the emancipatory power of the Black “group economy.” There, Du Bois noted that numerous Black-led enterprises in areas with significant African American populations “tended to become a closed economic circle largely independent of the surrounding White world” (1907: 179). He highlighted the extraordinary growth and complexity of such businesses, which catered for the needs of the Black community and approached a self-sufficient “complete system” (Du Bois, 1907: 179). While not advocating complete separation from the White economy (Tauheed, 2008), Du Bois emphasized how the depression of the late 1920s and persistent racial prejudice had thrust Black communities into widespread impoverishment. Frustrated by the lack of solidarity shown by the Black middle class toward their fellow African Americans, he urged community leaders to convert their private businesses into philanthropic organizations or cooperatives and reinvest profits into community projects (Higbee, 1993). Critical of “individualistic” approaches to entrepreneurship (Du Bois, 1917: 9), he also explicitly recommended that African Americans collaborate to control the main factors of production. In his own words:under economic cooperation we must strive to spread the idea among colored people that the accumulation of wealth is for social rather than individual ends. We must avoid in the advancement of the Negro race, the mistakes of ruthless exploitation, which have marked modern economic history. (Du Bois, 1915: 312)It is crucial to point out that Du Bois did not simply spread cooperative ideas via his scholarship. A passionate teacher and organizer and a charismatic networker, he tirelessly promoted cooperation by organizing conferences for academics and church, business, and community leaders and by corresponding with other activists and contributing journalistic articles to multiple magazines (Lewis, 2000). In particular, he worked hard to bring together various groups and stakeholders interested in establishing Black cooperative enterprises across the United States (Du Bois, 1919: 48). One such meeting, organized in August 1918, saw the participation of William Matney, future professor and director of the Department of Business Administration at Bluefield Institute, and thus initiated the chain of events that led to the Bluefield experiment (Gordon Nembhard, 2014b).THE BLUEFIELD EXPERIMENT: A CRITICAL HISTORYProfessor William C. Matney and His Time at BluefieldWilliam Clarence Matney (1897–1988) was born in Virginia and attended normal school (secondary school) at Bluefield Institute (Ancestry.com, 1936: 46). According to his short biography in Sphinx magazine, published by his fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, he had always had an interest in business. After graduating from Ohio University, he attended Harvard Business School from 1921 to 1923 (Business School Alumni Bulletin, 1925: 11) and was one of the first African Americans to earn an MBA (The value of business education, n.d.). According to Hancock (1935: 8), while at Harvard, Matney steeped himself further into the theories of the cooperative movement and seemed interested in little else, as it related to two causes that were particularly close to his heart: social reform and the advancement of Black communities. As mentioned, in 1918 at age 21, he had had the opportunity to meet Du Bois (also a member of Alpha Phi Alpha), who was by then already a leading activist, senior intellectual, and one of the chief figures within African American intellectual and political circles. Importantly, it was during that first meeting that, along with other attendees, Du Bois and Matney founded the Negro Cooperative Guild, an organization charged with assisting Blacks in the formation of cooperatives (The value of business education, n.d.).After Harvard, Matney moved back to West Virginia, where in 1923 he was appointed professor and then director of the Department of Business Administration at Bluefield Institute (We doff our hat, 1930: 24). Through our archival research, we managed to reconstruct how, since the early days of his tenure, Matney had become determined to teach his Bluefield students an alternative to traditional capitalism that would benefit African Americans. As he summarized in two later pieces, his association with Du Bois and other fellow social progressives had by then convinced him that: “to ask a colored man to go into the grocery business or to open a dry goods stop or to sell meat, shoes . . . in competition with the chain store, is to ask him to commit but almost inevitable economic suicide” (Matney, 1929: 406). On the other hand, he firmly believed that:cooperative industrial and commercial enterprise is the basis on which the Negro can become an economic power. It is the method by which the Negro race can marshal its forces in the most effective manner for the good of the race. It is the method by which N