Should B-schools add a sociological perspective?

Sociology and Management Education

Author: Manish Thakur

Publisher: H Routledge

Pages: 114

Price: Rs 5,028

The Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and other leading business schools (B-schools) in India and the world are seen to be doing everything right in terms of the topics they cover in their syllabuses as judged by the starting salaries their students get as well as speed with which every year’s batch is placed. But this book raises a few questions worth a debate.

For instance, a faculty member in any IIM knows that his career progress will be speeded up the more research papers he gets published in American academic journals. Similarly, an invitation to speak at an American research conference is also something that will embellish his resume. No amount of research publishing and speaking engagements in Indian research journals and Indian research conferences can match the esteem of even one such success in the American ones. The author, currently a professor at an IIM, rightly turns his introspective gaze on these types of questions.

Such a tilt towards American applause is also evident in management schools’ efforts to rank high in the business schools’ annual rankings games. Without a high ranking, business schools will soon struggle to attract top quality students and to get them to pay the high fees that business schools in India and elsewhere in the world charge.

The author sees all this from a sociology professor’s point of view and asks whether all of these circumstances exist because business schools throughout the world are part of “a global institutional complex of higher education [that] is undeniably dominated by the United States. Academics and scholars in much of the world work in the shadow of this central complex in terms of their disciplinary practices….”

He makes the case that the single-minded perspective that the role of managers in an enterprise is to devote themselves to maximising the value of the business to its shareholders is undergoing a change even in the United States. One of the many examples of this shifting perspective he quotes is a question in a Harvard Business Review article: “It Is Time to Make Management a True Profession”.

“Managers have lost legitimacy over the past decade in the face of a widespread institutional breakdown of trust and self-policing in business. To regain society’s trust, we believe that business leaders must embrace a way of looking at their role that goes beyond their responsibility to the shareholder to include a civic and personal commitment to their duty as institutional custodians. In other words, it is time that management finally became a profession. True professions have codes of conduct, and the meaning and consequences of those codes are taught as part of the formal education of their members. A governing body, composed of respected members of the profession, oversees members’ compliance. Through these codes, professional institutions forge an implicit social contract with other members of society: Trust us to control and exercise jurisdiction over this important occupational category.”

Some of the blame for the lack of questioning on such matters the author assigns to sociology scholars in India. He says that while India has offered an opportunity to study the sociological processes under such waves that we have seen in India such as colonialism, followed by a period where economic nationalism and a planned economy dominated thinking to a shift to free enterprise market-driven capitalism, Indian sociologists have been stuck in what he calls the “cultural perspective” and thereby missed a great opportunity to study and unravel the social processes underlying these economic transitions.

Even more, as the author says, “Ironically, management education, in due course, became the prime mechanism for creating and sustaining a new class of elites: the well-educated manager, the consultant, the investment banker, and the like. It evolved into an exclusive club of newly professionalised elites with a shared discursive and semiotic universe of its own….”

In a certain sense, this book is well timed. The world is undergoing a dramatic shift to a “networked” world perspective and researchers all over the globe are looking at the sociological study of networks and mathematical techniques are being developed to trace the patterns of networks and communities within these networks. Perhaps this book will give business school professors and boards a gentle nudge in that direction.

ajitb@rediffmail.com. The author is a former Chairman of the Board of Governors of IIM Calcutta