Leveraging the Financial Crisis to Fulfill the Promise of Progressive Management

The financial crisis has the potential to unite two long-simmering threats to the legitimacy of business school research and pedagogy into a single conflagration. Business schools have come under increasing attack for their espousal of a strong form neoliberal belief system rooted in the discipline of economics and a lack of attention to practical and, in particular, heterogeneous national institutional contexts. A key insight emerging from a growing chorus of retrospective analyses of the crisis is the need for research and pedagogy to draw upon the breadth of social sciences to inform decision making under uncertainty and more prominently features cross-national variation in institutional context as well as systemic linkages between the behavior of individuals, organizations, academics, regulators and policy makers. While business schools are theoretically ideally positioned to offer such innovation and have done so in the past, the institutional barriers to change are substantial. Drawing on paired historical narratives of institutional changes to business schools and economic policy making, I outline a political strategy that leverages neoliberalism's legitimacy crisis to forge alliances with government and civil society actors who share an interest in fulfilling the promise of progressive management.