Article: What should business schools do?
SSE Riga Assistant Professor Xavier Landes and SSE Riga Director of Information Services Christopher Rieber have written an article about the responsibility of business schools when educating future leaders.
"For several years, discontent has been mounting against business schools. They have been accused of being responsible for the 2008 crisis, for training defective or immoral managers. In particular, one piece published earlier this year in The Guardian controversially asked whether business schools should be bulldozed.
In this tribune published in Satori in Latvian and in Slate in French, we take on some of the most common criticisms and show that while most of the time exaggerated, they nevertheless contain some spot-on concerns in regards to how future managers, entrepreneurs and executives are trained.
More particularly, we claim that business schools should broaden the topics they are teaching, especially in relation to social sciences, for giving a fair understanding to students of how markets work and the need for public regulation. We also claim that business ethics, understood as applied ethics, should be taken seriously.
Contrary to what many believe or tend to assume, business schools don't have the responsibility to train "good" (i.e. ethical) citizens, but "good" (i.e. ethical) managers, entrepreneurs and executives. And more broadly, there is the need to train students in critical thinking, in order for them to be better equipped to face a fast-changing and utterly complex world. All these responsibilities are actually rendered extremely pressing when one considers the challenges humanity is currently facing in terms of climate change, pollution as well as economic and political instability. It is where business schools' social responsibilities lie."