ISSUES
: Business and Trade
Chapter 1: Business today
12
Time to roll out real-world business
studies?
An article from
The Conversation
.
By Mike Haynes, Professor of International
Political Economy, University of Wolverhampton
T
oday in Britain there is hardly a major business
that has not been accused of wrongdoing. From
the banks to GlaxoSmithKline and BP, both of
whom have had their coffers lightened somewhat after
paying fines, to G4S and Tesco who face investigations
for alleged offences, the list goes on and on.
But where does this leave the 100,000-plus students
who are studying business? Economics students have
protested against an irrelevant economics curriculum,
but little has been heard from those studying business
even as the enormous scale of bad and/or criminal
behaviour by the world’s biggest companies stares us
in the face.
There is a structural problem here. Business schools
could be about business but too often they have to
present themselves as for business. They demonstrate
the importance of a business agenda in higher
education. Students are encouraged to see themselves
as entrepreneurs even though the chances of their being
involved in genuine business entrepreneurship are small.
Courses tell them about leadership when the best that
most of us can achieve is some form of followership.
We preach about opportunity but practise hierarchy
and social selection. Indeed given the diminishing
patterns of social mobility in the UK, and the preference
for those with public school and Russell Group
backgrounds, the prospects are poor for students
in most ordinary university business schools to rise
anywhere near the top.
Company of wolves
Business schools seem to treat bad behaviour as the
exception rather than the rule. But is it? In the 1930s
Edwin Sutherland risked his academic career in the US
by keeping a set of index cards about the prosecutions
of major companies. With this simple research method
he was able to make the explosive argument that
business violation of the criminal law was common.
More, many major corporations were recidivist, serial
offenders.
His work became a sociological classic. But Sutherland
made less impact in the world of business studies
where men in suits still struggle to ethically negotiate
0%
3%
6%
9%
12%
15%
People who want to start a business, by age
2002-04
2003-05
2004-06
2005-07
2006-08
2007-09
2008-10
2009-11
2010-12
2011-13
7.6%
4.6%
8.4%
5.1%
8.3% 8.1%
7.6%
7.1%
6.5%
6.8%
11.1%
12.1%
5.0% 4.7%
4.4% 4.1% 3.8%
4.2%
5.5%
6.0%
Source: GEM APS 2002-2013, rolling average.
Published in The Report on Small Fiirms, 2010-2015, By the Prime Minister’s Advisor on Enterprise, Lord Young, February 2015
18-24 years
25-65 years
