The uniform of business school academia — the professors, associate deans, thought leaders and consultants who shape management education from Boston to London to Singapore — is the branded Patagonia fleece vest or polo shirt. For the junior faculty and graduate students – desperately in need of legitimization – it is the blue blazer or pant suit.
Visit one of the tribe’s conferences and you’ll see hordes of credentialed professionals, aged 40 to 65, in the establishment’s kit that whisper “I’m casual but serious.” For a tribe member to appear otherwise would be a revolutionary breach, and business school academics don’t do revolutionary breaches — they write case studies about them three years later.
Business school academia is under unprecedented pressure from online learning platforms, declining MBA enrolments, corporate disillusionment with theoretical frameworks, and students who actually want jobs. This tribe hopes to ward off multiple catastrophes at once by following its trusted method: commission another five-year research project, then publish in a journal no practitioner reads. To understand its ineffectiveness requires understanding the well-meaning people who staff it.
This tribe defines itself by publications — typically articles in Academy of Management Journal, Strategic Management Journal, or if they’re feeling edgy, Harvard Business Review. All have been rigorously trained to think inside very specific theoretical boxes. Some tribe members did stints at consulting firms, where they learned PowerPoint slide design and fell for frameworks with 2×2 matrices that now dominate their teaching despite bearing little relation to how businesses actually function.
Though they remain proud of their h-indexes, their sense of personal relevance has been dimmed by the tribe’s disconnect from reality since… well, arguably always. Their education emphasized methodological rigor over practical insight. They know sophisticated regression techniques but can’t read a balance sheet under time pressure. More of them can explain agency theory than have ever managed a team. Their exposure to actual business is so limited that any member who spent five years in industry before academia gets treated as a war hero returning from the front.
Almost by definition, tribe members live near elite universities, seldom encountering the managers and entrepreneurs they theorize about. Much of what they know about business comes from teaching cases about companies that no longer exist. They support whatever management philosophy is currently fashionable and form almost the last demographic in which people unironically use terms like “synergy” and “strategic alignment”. I once saw a practicing CEO at a tribe gathering: she politely sat through three presentations on “dynamic capabilities” before checking her phone and leaving early. I sensed she craved, above all, billable hours.
Tribe members are serious, hardworking people (except during sabbaticals) who genuinely believe in evidence-based management and the theories they published to get tenure. Still, they aren’t kidding themselves entirely: they know their MBA students are often going through the motions. Their conferences are in pleasant university towns with adequate coffee, and members draw comfort from each other’s citations, but the discussions are recursive, sometimes circular. Nothing in their methodology training prepared them for a world where their students can get better business advice from podcasts. They have landed in a disrupted industry equipped only with tenure and theoretical frameworks.
They know they need to jump from academic rigor to practical relevance — for instance, by actually talking to businesspeople regularly. They would like to influence corporate practice, prepare students for real careers, engage with current business challenges, etc. But they are constrained by publication requirements that demand years-long review processes and incentivize incremental theoretical contributions over useful insights. Their articles have rigorous methodology, whereas practitioners want answers by Tuesday.
This elite lacks the adaptive instincts of the entrepreneurs they study. It gave in to executive education demands partly for fear of losing revenue, but academics still don’t link compensation to impact like executives do. Nor do they fundamentally redesign curricula that haven’t changed in decades, or question why they’re teaching strategy frameworks from a pre-internet era or seriously consider that their PhD programs might be optimized for a bygone academic job market. But one thing the tribe has done is add a required module on AI that looks suspiciously like modules on critical thinking that they added 30 years ago when that was the fad of the late 20th Century.
Any elite has one ultimate aim: to remain the elite. For the blazered, pant suited, fleece vest wearing, the existential threat isn’t obsolescence or irrelevance. It’s losing their position before retirement along with the comfortable salary, the pleasant campus, and respected title.
Note: I wrote this while in a meeting (so no research or teaching time was wasted on this article) after having read an article in the Financial Times on the Bureaucratic Tribes within the EU — thinking that sounded familiar. The image is AI generated as I can’t draw a straight line.
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