Martin Parker – Bristol (UK)

Join Martin Parker for the book launch for Shut Down the Business School at the University of Bristol.

Business schools are institutions which, a decade after the financial crash, continue to act as loudspeakers for neoliberal capitalism with all its injustices and planetary consequences. In this incendiary call to action, Martin Parker offers a simple message: shut down the business school. Business schools are ‘cash cows’ for the contemporary university. If we see universities as institutions with responsibilities to the societies they inhabit, then we must challenge the common notion that ‘the market’ should be the primary determinant of the education they provide.

Shut Down the Business School (Pluto Press 2018) makes a compelling case for a radical alternative, in the form of a ‘School for Organising’. This institution would develop and teach on different forms of organising, instead of reproducing the dominant corporate model, enabling individuals to discover alternative responses to the issues of inequality and sustainability faced by all of us today.

The launch event will be opened by Professor Paddy Ireland, Dean of Social Sciences at Bristol. Professor Parker will then briefly present some of the ideas from the book, with a response from Professor Rick Delbridge, University Dean of Research, Innovation and Enterprise at Cardiff University, who will talk about the idea of a ‘public value business school’. There will then be time for some questions, followed by a drinks and nibbles reception in the foyer of the Priory Road complex. All welcome.

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About the author:

Martin Parker has taught at business schools since 1995, including at Warwick, Leicester and Keele Universities. He is now Professor at the Department of Management, University of Bristol.

Reviews of Shut Down the Business School:

“This is a tour de force of contemporary critical management thinking. All too often, the textbooks and the MBAs get in the way of what should be the future for business – participative, value-creating and sustainable. Read, learn … and shut down the business school” – Ed Mayo, Secretary General, Co-operatives UK

“Business schools are at the centre of the malaise of financialized capitalism… Parker prescribes the nuclear option – termination. His replacement is a focus upon sustainable organising that champions alternatives to more-of- the-same hierarchical organisation, market-based forms of exchange and the necessity of management” – Hugh Wilmott, Professor of Management, Cass Business School, City University London