Preface for Business School and the Noble Purpose of the Market

PREFACE

Why I Am Writing This Book Now

“Speak the truth and all nature and all spirits help you with unexpected furtherance. Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear you witness.”

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON

This book is a provocation and a call to arms. It comes at a time when business education, as I have experienced it, is at a crossroads. Systemic failures of shareholder capitalism, notably (but not only) climate change and income inequality, pose threats to the stability of the natural and social worlds on which we depend and must coexist. And yet, while many, both inside and outside the market system, call for change, business schools have been slow to respond, continuing to teach the same curriculum that feeds those systemic problems within capitalism. It is time for a fundamental rethink of business school education and research.

I come to this conclusion after having spent the last thirty years in business schools focusing on environmental protection and sustainability. In the early 1990s, the simple choice to study these issues in a business school was viewed as radical, or perhaps misguided. More recently, the topic has gained acceptance but only insofar as it is adapted to fit within the market’s existing norms and structures, framing issues like climate change and species extinction as market concerns and ways to increase profits. I employed this approach early in my career, thinking it would appeal to business leaders who could address these issues as business problems to be solved without delving into their underlying implications. Over time I came to see that this approach has two significant drawbacks.

First, it oversimplifies complex issues, ignoring their moral aspects. As journalist Anand Giridharadas has argued, “When [the market] becomes the only language . . . it leaves us with a very impoverished sense of how to live together. It’s good for creating wealth and creating things and building things, but it’s not . . . a useful vocabulary for living together.”¹ Instead of making the business case to address climate change, for example, author Duane Elgin asks, “When will humanity express its moral outrage that it is wrong to devastate an entire planet for countless generations to come, just to satisfy the consumer desires of a fraction of humanity for a single lifetime?”² As business schools continue to fixate on the business case to justify any action our students can take as business leaders, we are leaving them impoverished for addressing many of the serious challenges they will face.

Second, I came to realize that we must shift from fitting sustainability into existing capitalist systems to reshaping these systems around sustainability. Climate change is not, in its truest sense, an environmental issue; it is a systems breakdown. By the same token, wealth and income inequality—another focus of this book—is not just a simple problem that requires a band-aid fix. While some conveniently call these problems “externalities” or “unintended consequences,” they are actually embedded in our economic systems. We are creating them by misguided design. Therefore, the solutions must go far deeper. To fix these systemic failures, we must fix the systems that caused them. Those systems are business, the market, and capitalism.

So, in recent years, I’ve revamped my teaching approach, developing new courses that address the deeper questions that face capitalism today, focusing on the intersection of the market, business, public policy, and society. In one course, “Business in Democracy: Advocacy, Lobbying and the Public Interest,” I bring together business and public policy students in a cross-listed format to examine the issue of responsible lobbying and ways in which business and government can work together. In another, “Reexamining Capitalism,” I teach business students to be stewards of the economy by exposing them to the foundational thinking of capitalism (both analysis and critique from Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and more), how it is viewed today from both the left and right ends of the political spectrum, the many forms that exist around the world and ways that it can be amended. In a third course, “Management as a Calling,” I guide students through exercises to discern their vocation in business to serve society. This last course challenged me to adopt a different mode as professor, acting less as a knowledge source and more as a guide, placing students into a context in which they can discern their own path and purpose for themselves.

I am proud of these courses, and all of this new teaching informs the contents of this book. But they are still not enough. Offering individual electives in a broader curriculum that remains fixated on stale notions of shareholder primacy and virtuous greed can only have limited effect. We need to rethink the structure, pedagogy, and purpose of business education. Just as we need systemic solutions within the market, we also need systemic solutions within business education.

That is where my attention now lies. At this point in my career, I am shifting my emphasis away from the extrinsic metrics by which college professors are judged—publishing only academic journal articles to amass endless citation counts—and more towards the intrinsic motivations for why I got into this profession in the first place—to make a difference in how business interacts with the natural environment and makes a better society. I am now in a position where my focus is not on elevating my own professional status but instead helping those who come after me and the institutions in which they are being developed.

So, with this book, I want to encourage others to do the same, whether they be students, faculty, administrators, alumni, recruiters; anyone who cares about business education and its role in creating a better future. The market is a place where we can—indeed we must—address the grand challenges of our day. I want to encourage all who read this book to follow essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson’s admonishment to “speak the truth” and help transform business education. If you do, Emerson offers the encouraging news that “all spirits help you with unexpected furtherance.”³ Visionary business leaders are needed more than ever, and I want to motivate all who read this book to embrace the challenge of being a catalyst for constructive and aspirational change in a world that desperately needs it.

Andrew J. Hoffman

Ann Arbor, MI

Notes

1. As quoted in K. Tippett, “Anand Giridharadas: When the market is our only language,” On Being, November 15, 2018.

2. D. Elgin, “Global warming and carbon dioxide ethics,” Huffington Post, October 23, 2012.

3. R. W. Emerson, Commencement Address to the Harvard Divinity School, July 15, 1838.