Thinking Sociologically About (and Beyond) Contemporary Capitalism: Envisioning Real Utopias in the Business School

The shrinking in sociology departments started in the 70s in most of Western countries and the massive investments to establish higher education institutions focused on business and management studies, generated a significant “movement of sociologists” towards the latter (Parker, 2015).

In fact, business schools’ departments and units are nowadays populated by a large number of academics with educational backgrounds and PhDs in sociology and research agendas stretching far beyond the usual “business school triad” of sociology of work, industrial relations, and sociology of organisations (ibidem). While a fair amount of research has explored the role of sociologists and sociological concepts in the business school – with the British Sociological Association regularly organising events and talks on the topic1 – this article focuses more specifically on the pedagogical possibilities and practices arising when sociological authors, concepts and frameworks are deployed in a business school for the study and problematization of contemporary capitalism.

The study of capitalism has been traditionally at the core of sociological canon and sociologists employed in business schools usually embed some of the key ideas into their teaching in business and management subjects. However, despite the omni-present tenet that the goal of business higher education today is to prepare future generations of managers and entrepreneurs to solve the world’s “great challenges,” it is still rare to hear an academic discussion about how capitalism can be defined, historicised and critically assessed, in sociological terms, inside a business school classroom.

Some scholars have described this blatant omission by stating that “capitalism is a ghost in the walls of the business school,” invisibilized and replaced with the more neutral and less politicised term “economy” (Kociatkiewicz et al., 2022). Others have aptly pointed out that business schools’ historical purpose to “impart the necessary skills to steer the emergent mass production in the industrial world” in the post-WWII era is still influencing the ways in which curricula are designed and subjects are thought today, and that “it might be time for a radical overhaul of management’s education underlying philosophy” (Fotaki and Prasad, 2015: 564-565). Along similar lines, Parker underlined that “since current social and economic relations produce the problems that ethics and corporate social responsibility courses treat as subjects to be studied, it is those social and economic relations that need to be changed” (Parker, 2018).