Management Scholars Stopped Being the Guardians of Liberal Capitalism

The field that built the ideological backbone of capitalism is now questioning it

Photo by Redd Francisco on Unsplash

Do you read the Financial Times? Me neither. But as a management scholar, I was recently made aware of a paper criticising the Academy of Management — the most prestigious association of management scholars worldwide, though created and based in the US — for its decision to move its annual conferences from American to European locations. Why? Because European colleagues now prefer to withdraw rather than risk being denied entry to the United States. This is an earthquake, and an affront to mainstream American stakeholders.

It is one battle in the current war between the old world and the new — which are no longer where they once were: they flipped.

Tectonic plates are moving beneath our societies. The management field is turning radical. Wait — what? The field that spent decades legitimising a one-size-fits-all, American-style of formal management, focused on metrics and profit maximisation? The field that took the liberal model as given and built frameworks for innovating faster, crushing competitors, and leaning out organisations?

Technological innovation was always praised as a vehicle for progress — read: more growth, more returns for shareholders. Job losses, work intensification, and occupational stress were treated as marginal concerns, at best side effects. If you become a successful leader, this is because you work hard. In the background stood the Protestant ethic of American capitalism: if you make a lot of money, it is a sign of election.

In recent years, that conversation has shifted — even within management, an academic field with its own journals and conferences.

The mainstream liberal ideas produced a crowded market for a new kind of paper. And in academia, a paper is accepted by a journal only if it offers something new. Ironically, the alternative to the mainstream narrative has itself become a “gap to fill.” Meanwhile, values and interests have changed — particularly in the European space.

A well-ranked publication, the Journal of Business Ethics, has increasingly focused on ethics in management and business decision-making. Recently, it went a step further. One of its special issues is titled *Genocide and Business Ethics*. It began this past summer, in response to the genocide in Gaza. With genocides ongoing in Gaza, Sudan, and the DRC, the special issue aims to offer a broader conceptual articulation of how genocides unfold, how corporations become key players in their perpetration, and what the moral implications of corporate involvement are. The selected articles address the moral responsibilities of business in contexts of genocide and state-led human rights violations, and the organisational dynamics that make genocides possible.

Other special issues follow similar lines: *Business, Human Rights Abuses, and the Climate Crisis: Towards Integrated Responses and [Animals and Business Ethics: Reimagining Multispecies Coexistence in Business and Society](https://link.springer.com/collections/gghhfcdbgh)*.

Other journals are moving in the same direction. Gender studies now appear regularly in publications like Organization Studies and Human Relations. Accounting scholars are increasingly critical of the KPI mindset and of managerial and algorithmic control more broadly.

But guess what? The Financial Times, which publishes the most widely used ranking of academic journals (yes, a newspaper assesses the quality of academic work — imagine that), has recently downgraded precisely these journals. The ones with focus on inclusivity, power asymmetry, stress at work or environmental sustainability.

But this is a battle fought back by the advocates of the old world. Ironically, those who once claimed the future as their own — and dismissed their critics as backward-looking — are now the ones failing to see where that future leads.

The Academy of Management, the famous association of management scholars, now has a dedicated division — Organizations and the Natural Environment (ONE) (1151 members) — committed to advancing research, teaching, and practice on the interactions between organisations and the natural environment, addressing challenges from biodiversity loss and water pollution to climate change.

The Academy also has a DEI Division (1885 members): the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Division, whose primary purpose is developing member capabilities for research and teaching on gender and diversity in organisations, and promoting understanding of the significance of these topics to the study and practice of management.

There is also a Critical Management Studies Division, which promotes views critical of unethical management practices and exploitative social structures. This division (756 members) holds that structural features of contemporary society — the profit imperative, patriarchy, racial inequality, and ecological irresponsibility — frequently turn organisations into instruments of domination and exploitation.

Who cares? You might say, dear reader, that this is just a matter of privileged professors publishing papers just to travel to fancy locations and enjoy small chats over local wine. You may not be entirely wrong. But you wouldn’t be entirely right either.

Academic research in management is translated into teaching in universities and business schools worldwide — and that is how environmental and social concerns enter the classroom, shaping the knowledge of future managers and leaders. It is no surprise, then, that a right-leaning French newspaper has run a piece on major French business schoolas (worldwide recognised) under the headline *When radical ecology infiltrates business schools.*

This article reports that leading French business schools have progressively introduced degrowth and anti-capitalist ecology into their curricula, at the expense of core subjects — and asks whether France is training a generation of executives who will regard it as a moral duty to slow down, challenge, or sabotage the growth strategies of their own companies. (My answer is yes, but tremble, guardians of the old world of the liberal capitalism, this is happening in all Western countries, and South countries are enthusiastically joining).

So, dear reader, do not dismiss management scholars — or at least, not all of them. In an irony that is entirely fitting, they are morphing from the operational ideologists and pillars of the liberal economy into advocates for responsible, accountable companies committed to restorative environmental strategies. It is only the beginning — and the defenders of the old world are fighting back, hard.