Abstract
Meeting today’s grand challenges means changing the economics paradigm that informs both business practice and business/management education. This paper asks whether business schools meet the challenges of the 21st century and argues not without shifting away from the core—neoliberal—paradigm of economics. This essay makes the following argument. Paradigms shape narratives. Changing core narratives is a powerful lever for transformation. Narratives are constructed of core ideas (memes) that replicate readily from mind to mind. Neoliberalism’s memes are pervasive and highly resonant in business schools. To move towards sustainability, the fundamentals taught in business school need to shift away from neoliberalism’s tenets towards what gives life to economic systems. From a theory perspective, neoliberalism’s lack of attention to social and ecological consequences of economic activity plays a large part in shaping today’s crises, including the pandemic, climate change, and biodiversity loss. A new/next economics paradigm is needed that shifts away from an emphasis on only financial wealth and constant economic growth on a finite plant towards life-centered economies that foster wellbeing and flourishing for all, creating what scholars call collective value. The result of this analysis is a conceptualization supporting new memes that include collaboration and competition, stewardship of the whole system, a cosmopolitan to local sensibility, and recognition of humanity’s deep embeddedness and connection with other people, other beings, and nature. The article concludes that business schools need to meet this challenge head on, changing the fundamentals of what is taught and why.
Highlights
The world’s human population is struggling with a number of potentially civilization-threatening socio-ecological crises: climate change, sustainability, and potential ecosystem collapses, growing inequality [1] and attendant social unrest, and the sixth great species extinction [2,3])
The foundational story that informs business/b-school thinking today is based on neoliberal economics It is a fairly extreme form of neoliberalism at that) [32,37]
Core memes associated with neoliberalism include the erroneous idea, drawn from Adam Smith, that humans are always self-interested profit maximizers [41]
Summary
The world’s human population is struggling with a number of potentially civilization-threatening socio-ecological crises: climate change, sustainability, and potential ecosystem collapses, growing inequality [1] and attendant social unrest, and the sixth great species extinction [2,3]). The world is facing topsoil erosion, problematic industrial agricultural and animal husbandry practices, structural racism, as well as poverty [4,5]. These issues, and the list could go on, suggest that the world is facing problems in numerous domains of significant proportions, all of which could potentially benefit from what is sometimes called responsible management and leadership [6,7]. Requires new mindsets, paradigms, and ways of thinking and acting. That is because some of today’s dominant economic and management theories have created significant disparities and ecological issues, and in part because, as Einstein famously said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
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