Acceso usuarios
Riina Koris, Silja Aav
Extant literature is predominantly negative towards business school teaching, questioning its “relevance” (Khurana, 2007, p. 5; Masrani et al., 2011, p. 385), and proclaiming it to be “ethically bankrupt” (Starkey, Hatchuel, & Tempest, 2004, p. 1523), “void of moral values” (Locke and Spender, 2011, p. 61) and the like. Such teaching is said to produce graduates whose only concern is their saleability, instrumentality and the maximization of organizational and personal gains. Since the literature on this topic is heavy on rhetoric and light on empirical evidence, the objective of this paper is to identify how graduates perceive the purpose and role they carry to business in particular and society in general. By employing vignettes (short stories of individuals in context) as a survey technique, we identified that business school alumni perceive their main purpose upon graduation to be that of an educated man or woman who, in addition to being able to run a business, can also critically review existing business practices and approach the management profession as a social, political and moral responsibility. The results show that the rhetoric of extant literature has done an injustice to business schools and their graduates.
