The crisis of scholarship in business schools: From fragmentation to ethos

Abstract

Business schools are increasingly subject to critique for advancing instrumental, profit-oriented logics, reproducing social and ecological harms and prioritising metric-driven research over teaching and public engagement. While such critiques are often attributed to governance failures or misaligned incentives, this paper argues that they point to a deeper legitimacy problem within contemporary business education. Specifically, it conceptualises the current moment as a crisis of scholarship-as-ethos: the weakening of a shared moral and epistemic orientation that historically linked inquiry, pedagogy and engagement. Adopting a genealogical approach, the paper traces how neoliberal, Eurocentric and anthropocentric assumptions about scholarship emerged through political, colonial and economic projects and were subsequently normalised through audit cultures and managerial governance. This analysis helps explain why decolonial and relational posthuman perspectives function not as external critiques but as responses to enduring epistemic exclusions shaping dominant models of management learning. Building on, and moving beyond Boyer’s typology, the paper reframes scholarship as ethos—situated, relational, materially mediated and ecologically embedded—and develops this framing through selective engagement with Indigenous and non-Western traditions (e.g. Ubuntu and Buen Vivir), Confucian accounts of moral cultivation and relational posthuman thought, treated as plural and historically contingent. The paper concludes by outlining implications for management learning including reforms to evaluation practices and curricular designs that reconnect scholarly work, pedagogy and ecological responsibility.

Keywords

business schools scholarship ethos neoliberalism audit regimes genealogy decoloniality posthumanism Boyer ecological education

Introduction

Business schools have long been criticised for advancing instrumental, profit-oriented ideologies that marginalise ethical, social and ecological responsibilities (CABS, 2021; Colombo, 2023; Fotaki and Prasad, 2015; Ivory et al., 2006; Jabbar et al., 2018; Locke and Spender, 2011; Parker, 2018).¹ These critiques have intensified as business schools are increasingly implicated in widening social inequalities and in sustaining economic practices that contribute to environmental degradation. More recently, they have been characterised as reproducing an economic and ecological status quo that sits uneasily with the scale and urgency of the climate emergency (Akrivou and Bradbury-Huang, 2015; Benn et al., 2014). At the same time, research cultures oriented towards career advancement and publication metrics continue to privilege forms of inquiry with limited societal or ecological relevance (Alvesson et al., 2017; Bennis and O’Toole, 2005; Khurana, 2007). The globalisation of “publish or perish” norms through audit regimes has further fragmented the academic role, elevating journal outputs while devaluing teaching and engagement with practice (De Rond and Miller, 2005; Hosein, 2017). The cumulative effect is a widening disjunction between what is researched, what is taught and what is practised (Dostaler and Tomberlin, 2013), leaving the curricular aims and scholarly practices of business schools poorly aligned with planetary challenges.

This paper contends that these difficulties cannot be understood solely as the outcome of governance arrangements or misaligned incentive structures. Rather, they reflect a deeper erosion and fragmentation of scholarship itself. Instead of operating as a unifying foundation for research, teaching and engagement, scholarship has increasingly been organised into discrete and hierarchised functions. This reduction has narrowed the intellectual and moral horizons of business education, reinforcing curricula oriented towards profit, performance and individual advancement while marginalising questions of collective responsibility and the common good (Colombo, 2023). Re-examining the idea of scholarship is, therefore, analytically central to understanding the contemporary predicament of business schools.

To develop this argument, we draw on the notion of ethos in its classical sense, understood as both a place of dwelling and a collective moral character. Viewed in this way, scholarship is not merely an intellectual or technical activity but a situated, relational and ethically charged practice. It is shaped by institutional environments, material conditions and ecological contexts and, in turn, shapes how scholars and students come to understand responsibility, judgement and the purposes of knowledge. Conceptualising scholarship as ethos provides an integrative lens through which debates about neoliberal governance, epistemic colonisation and ecological crisis can be examined together rather than treated as parallel or additive concerns.

The purpose of the paper is to re-examine the nature of scholarship and to consider how it functions as an ethical and epistemic foundation for business education in an age of planetary crisis. While the analysis is critical of the neoliberal reduction of business schools to narrow market logics, it also highlights the risk of reproducing instrumentalism in alternative forms—for example, by framing the value of business schools solely in terms of producing socially responsible graduates for human ends. A broader analytical horizon recognises that business schools are embedded within, and implicated in, more-than-human worlds. This perspective brings into view questions of accountability—not only to human communities but also to ecological systems, non-human life and planetary commons (Haraway, 2016; Næss, 1989). Engagements with Indigenous and non-Western traditions that foreground relationality and reciprocity—such as Ubuntu in African philosophy and Buen Vivir in Andean cosmologies (Gudynas, 2011; Metz, 2011)—are, therefore, treated here as analytical resources rather than normative ideals, illuminating alternative orientations to scholarship without assuming their inherent ethical or ecological superiority.

Accordingly, the paper advances a twofold theoretical contribution. First, it develops a conception of scholarship as an ethical ethos that integrates research, teaching and engagement rather than treating these as separable or hierarchically ordered activities. Second, it extends this conception beyond Euro-American traditions by engaging selectively with Confucian, Indigenous and relational epistemologies that foreground interdependence and responsibility to more-than-human worlds. These perspectives are mobilised not as prescriptive templates but as ways of unsettling taken-for-granted assumptions about the ends, scope and responsibilities of scholarly work.

The central claim advanced herein is that the contemporary crisis of business schools is best understood as a crisis of scholarship-as-ethos. Neoliberal governance, epistemic colonisation, ecological neglect and the fragmentation of academic roles are analysed not as parallel or additive problems but as interconnected expressions of a deeper erosion of scholarship as a unifying moral and epistemic orientation. Rather than offering a descriptive inventory of challenges, the paper develops a conceptual synthesis in which scholarship is reclaimed as the integrative foundation linking research, teaching and engagement. This framing provides the analytical thread connecting historical developments, critiques of neoliberalism and engagements with non-Western and Indigenous epistemologies across the paper. While the paper is motivated by concerns about the ethical and ecological responsibilities of business schools, its primary contribution is analytical rather than prescriptive. Normative considerations are grounded in historical analysis, critical theory and comparative epistemologies and are used to clarify what is at stake in alternative conceptions of scholarship rather than to advance uniform institutional solutions. Where evaluative language appears, it reflects a concern with institutional purpose and moral orientation rather than an attempt to dictate specific reforms across diverse contexts.

Our aim is to interrogate the nature and purpose of scholarship in the business school context and to consider how a reoriented scholarly paradigm might illuminate the sector’s current impasse. Drawing on Boyer’s (1990) model of scholarship and moving beyond it, the paper incorporates global epistemologies, including Confucian, Indigenous and relational posthuman perspectives alongside insights from organisational studies, higher education policy and critical management education. It argues that a decolonised, unified and ethically grounded conception of scholarship provides a coherent basis for rethinking how business schools engage with business, society and the planet.

To advance this argument, the paper proceeds in four stages. First, we examine how neoliberal reforms have displaced scholarship from its institutional and ethical “place” within contemporary business schools, fragmenting academic work into hierarchised functions. Second, we revisit the historical formation of scholarly ideals in order to recover alternative understandings of scholarship as a situated and morally charged practice. Third, and building on this analysis, we develop a plural and ecologically grounded conception of scholarship-as-ethos and show how it can reorient the purpose and practice of business education. Fourth, we conclude by outlining the institutional and pedagogical transformations required to restore scholarship as a shared ethical and civic endeavour.

When scholarship loses its place: Neoliberalism and ethos

Business schools’ legitimacy crisis is multifaceted. They have become emblematic of the neoliberal transformation of higher education. Once envisaged as spaces of professional formation and critical inquiry, they are increasingly governed by logics of marketisation, commodification and performance metrics (De Vita and Case, 2016; Parker, 2014). This trajectory has implications not only for universities as institutions but also for the epistemological foundations of scholarship—what counts as legitimate knowledge, who produces it and for what purposes. Business schools are often characterised as financially profitable “cash cows” that sustain universities while placing pressure on academic standards. Curricula remain dominated by corporate capitalism, frequently presenting managerialism as the default organisational form. Research output—driven by rankings and performance indicators—tends to privilege journal publications over broader societal contribution (Alajoutsijärvi et al., 2015).

Public scepticism towards business schools has intensified in parts of Europe where the notion of the common good remains politically salient (Standing, 2019). In such contexts, neoliberal restructuring—and arguably the broader logics of capitalism—has increasingly positioned universities in tension with civic and public purposes. This has sharpened questions about whether Anglo-Saxon business schools can draw analytically and institutionally on alternative contexts including Scandinavian traditions of participatory management and African, Asian and Indigenous epistemologies that foreground community, reciprocity and stewardship.

More generally, the crisis of the business school can be located within the broader neoliberal restructuring of higher education. Three interrelated dynamics are particularly salient: the fragmentation of the academic role; the erosion of ethical and civic commitments; and the marginalisation of alternative modes of organising and knowing. While focusing primarily on the UK context, the discussion also draws on international variations that indicate how neoliberal models have functioned as Anglo-Saxon exports, displacing locally grounded traditions in countries such as Sweden and Poland. In this context, the neoliberal business school has been described as a “loudspeaker for neoliberal capitalism” (Parker, 2018), presenting managerialism and shareholder primacy as universal truths rather than as historically contingent and ideological constructs. Academic roles have been fragmented in at least three ways: teaching has been devalued, increasingly governed by student satisfaction measures and treated as a commodified “output” (Barnes and Jenkins, 2014); research has been instrumentalised for rankings and accreditation, privileging “REF-able” outputs over broader intellectual contributions (Moosa, 2018); and ethics has frequently been relegated to peripheral gestures with courses in business ethics or CSR sometimes functioning as reputational cover rather than as sites of substantive critique (Parker, 2018). The cumulative effect is a form of business and management education oriented towards employability and performance rather than critical inquiry, ecological sustainability or social wellbeing.

From this perspective, neoliberal reforms can be understood not only as structural or governance changes but also as transformations of institutional ethos. As Snell (2000) argues, moral ethos operates as a form of “hidden curriculum” constituted through everyday norms, rules-in-use, social pressures and the quality of relationships. These forces shape how participants come to understand what is good or bad, valuable or expendable, legitimate or marginal. Under audit-driven regimes, institutional climates are increasingly oriented towards competition, metric performance and individual advancement with relational, place-based and civic forms of responsibility progressively crowded out. The fragmentation of scholarship into hierarchised functions is, therefore, not ethically neutral; it reflects and reproduces a particular scholarly ethos.

The neoliberalisation of business education is not confined to the Anglo-American world. What is often portrayed as a “universal” model of business education can be interpreted as an Anglo-Saxon export whose global diffusion has crowded out epistemic alternatives, flattening local traditions and diverse modes of knowing. In Sweden and Poland, for example, traditions of cooperativism and worker self-management once shaped management education but were displaced by neoliberal reforms during the 1990s (Kostera, 1995). Kostera’s (1995) critique of the “modern crusade” of Western-driven management education in post-communist Europe illustrates how the imposition of Anglo-Saxon models—often under the guise of modernisation—marginalised local traditions and reinforced epistemic dependency.² This “missionary approach” privileged unilateral flows of knowledge while displacing cooperative and Indigenous approaches to organising.

The global diffusion of Anglo-Saxon models of business education can, thus, be interpreted as a process of epistemic deterritorialisation: the uprooting of scholarship from the social, cultural and ecological contexts in which it is embedded. Such models impose a universalised managerial ethos that marginalises locally grounded traditions of organising and knowing. In contrast, African philosophies such as Ubuntu, Indigenous epistemologies and Scandinavian traditions of participatory governance foreground alternative moral orientations in which scholarship is inseparable from community, reciprocity and stewardship. These traditions are invoked here not as idealised normative templates but as analytical contrasts that illuminate scholarship as a situated ethos cultivated within particular histories, places and relationships.

On this reading, the neoliberal business school is less a universal model than a historically specific project that exports Anglo-American managerialism at the expense of epistemic diversity.

The UK case: Marketisation and managerialism

Situated against four decades of neoliberal reform in UK higher education, the UK case illustrates how managerial practices and market-driven governance have reshaped universities’ roles as sites of critical inquiry. A substantial literature documents how economic instrumentalism and measurement imperatives have reconfigured teaching, learning and the student experience in higher education (Molesworth et al., 2011; Ransome, 2011). Learning and teaching have become increasingly commoditised along input–output lines analogous to industrialised processes (Barnes and Jenkins, 2014; Sayer, 2011). These developments have coincided with a sustained critique of business schools and management education. Kitchener and Delbridge (2020), for example, draw on Weber’s distinction between instrumental and substantive rationality to analyse the tensions involved in attempting values-driven change within institutional settings structured by instrumental rationality. Harley (2019) similarly discusses an emerging crisis of confidence in management studies, linked to diminishing academic and practical impact, narrowing intellectual focus and intensifying pressures on both publishing and teaching. Kitchener et al. (2022) extend this analysis by tracing how the expansion of the global business school sector was underpinned by a relatively standardised strategy centred on teaching shareholder primacy to fee-paying, increasingly international student cohorts. They suggest that as leaders focused on sustaining this model, two shifts became increasingly evident: stakeholders began to question the societal contribution of business schools and businesses and investors increasingly challenged shareholder primacy in light of its association with inequality, exploitation and environmental harm. As Kitchener et al. (2022: 52) note, this dynamic produces an irony in which calls for corporate purpose are mirrored by criticisms that business schools themselves prioritise accreditation, revenue and outcomes over purpose.

As business schools have proliferated, critiques of their role, purpose and behaviour have intensified with some questioning their contemporary legitimacy (Akrivou and Bradbury-Huang, 2015; Alajoutsijarvi et al., 2018; Fotaki and Prasad, 2015; Nash, 2019; Parker, 2014; Starkey and Tempest, 2008; Starkey and Thomas, 2019). In the United Kingdom, their perceived role as revenue-generating units has contributed to concerns that academic integrity has been compromised in pursuit of income growth (Craig et al., 1999; Jabbar et al., 2018). The British Academy (2021: 42) notes “an ongoing tension between delivering high-quality research while teaching vast numbers of students.” Relatedly, managers have been accused of instituting regimes of control and intimidation to secure revenue growth (De Vita and Case, 2016; Parker, 2014). There is substantial pressure on staff to publish in world-class journals to secure favourable RAE/REF outcomes (Irwin, 2019; Moosa, 2018; Parker, 2014). These pressures have contributed to differentiated academic labour, including transfers to teaching-only contracts where research is not deemed “REF-able” (Jabbar et al., 2018; Leisyte et al., 2009; Nash, 2019). In 2019/2020, 56.7% of staff were on teaching-and-research contracts, 38.5% on teaching-only contracts and 4.5% on research-only contracts (British Academy, 2021). The appointment of teaching-only staff, alongside teaching assistants and part-time staff, is frequently discussed as a mechanism through which research-active staff can concentrate on research (Elton, 1987, 2000; Parker, 2014; Smyth, 2017).

From a broader perspective, and in terms of scholarship, Colombo (2023) raises concerns about the inadequacy of management education for addressing complex problems confronting business and society including ecological and climate emergencies. Her critique traces these outcomes to deeper assumptions—self-interest, instrumental rationality, capitalist organising and mechanistic worldviews—that can generate self-fulfilling prophecies. As researchers focus increasingly on narrow domains and teaching workloads expand, opportunities to share and debate a common knowledge base diminish (Barnett, 2005; Dostaler and Tomberlin, 2013; Parker, 2014; Rowlinson and Hassard, 2011; Willmott, 2011). These dynamics are reflected in debates about the separation of research rigour from practical relevance (Gulati, 2007; Irwin, 2019; Polzer et al., 2009). Evidence also suggests that intensified teaching and publishing pressures reduce time available for fundamental research (British Academy, 2021). The cumulative effect is a narrowing of vision in which instrumental rationality displaces substantive values, increasing the risk that business schools become disconnected from pressing ecological and social challenges (Colombo, 2023).

Neoliberal reforms have, thus, contributed to a trifurcated model in which research is valorised over teaching, “impact” is defined in economistic rather than civic or ethical terms and ethical commitments are treated as secondary to performance and revenue goals. These conditions raise questions about the purposes of scholarship within business education and their relationship to institutional legitimacy. The UK case illustrates these dynamics in sharp relief, while the comparative perspectives from Sweden and Poland underscore the wider diffusion of Anglo-Saxon managerialist models that marginalise locally grounded traditions.

Scholarship, power and history: A genealogical re-reading of business education

This section adopts a genealogical approach to scholarship—not as a neutral recounting of institutional history but as a critical analysis of how particular epistemic assumptions about knowledge, value and responsibility became normalised within the modern university and, later, the business school. Genealogy matters here because neoliberal and anthropocentric conceptions of scholarship did not emerge as technical solutions to organisational problems; rather, they were historically produced through specific political, colonial and economic projects. Tracing these formations clarifies why contemporary decolonial and posthuman critiques are not external additions to management education but responses to sedimented epistemic exclusions embedded within dominant scholarly models. Simply put, examining how management education has developed reveals that decolonial and posthuman critiques are required to respond to enduring exclusions in how knowledge has been defined and organised within the field.

A brief genealogy of European universities is, therefore, instructive in this respect not for its historical detail but for the orientation it reveals. Early universities organised knowledge as a public and ethical practice, while later models—most notably Humboldt’s vision of the unity of teaching and research—explicitly resisted the fragmentation of scholarship into discrete functions. The rise of managerial governance and audit regimes in the late twentieth century disrupted this unity, reconstituting scholarship as hierarchised outputs rather than as a shared institutional ethos. This genealogy underscores a central claim of the paper: the contemporary fragmentation of scholarship is historically contingent rather than inevitable and reflects shifts in governance and values rather than intrinsic features of academic life. Moreover, managerial logics have intensified divisions between research-intensive and teaching-focused academic roles (Parker, 2014). Boyer’s (1990) influential framework sought to expand the meaning of scholarship by recognising discovery, integration, application and teaching. While this intervention legitimised diverse forms of academic work, subsequent research demonstrates that reward structures have continued to privilege research above other scholarly contributions (Braxton et al., 2002). This, we contend, is ongoing. In practice, Boyer’s typology has often been mobilised in ways that enable managerial stratification rather than fostering holistic scholarly integration. Although progressive in its historical context, the framework remains grounded in an individualistic and Eurocentric epistemology that prioritises human-centred outcomes. Within business schools, it has frequently been interpreted in ways that reinforce utilitarian aims such as employability, managerial effectiveness and economic growth.

At this juncture, it is instructive to consider the use of the term posthuman. In this paper, it is intentionally circumscribed. We do not advance a comprehensive posthuman ontology nor align with a single theoretical tradition. Instead, we draw selectively on relational strands of posthuman thought, particularly those associated with Braidotti (2013, 2019) and Haraway (2016) to support a non-anthropocentric understanding of scholarship. From Braidotti, we take the critique of human exceptionalism and the emphasis on relational ontology; from Haraway, the concept of sympoiesis, which foregrounds co-constitution, interdependence and shared responsibility among human and more-than-human actors. Posthumanism, thus, functions here as a critical orientation rather than a totalising framework offering conceptual resources for rethinking scholarship as an ethical practice situated within ecological and planetary systems.

Relational posthuman and Actor–Network Theory (Latour, 2005) perspectives challenge these assumptions (self-interest, instrumental rationality, capitalist organising and mechanistic worldviews) by foregrounding the agency of non-human actors—technologies, infrastructures, ecologies and planetary systems—in the co-production of knowledge. Indigenous epistemologies similarly emphasise relationality, reciprocity and intergenerational responsibility (Standing, 2019), while Confucian traditions situate scholarship within the cultivation of virtue, harmony and relational ethics (Ryan and Louie, 2007). These traditions illuminate alternative orientations to scholarship that challenge extractive and instrumental logics by foregrounding stewardship, care and community. In engaging Indigenous and Confucian epistemologies, we do not treat these traditions as inherently ethical, harmonious or ecologically benign nor as unified or static systems of knowledge. Like Western epistemologies, they are internally plural, historically contingent and shaped by power relations and exclusions. Our engagement is, therefore, selective and reflexive, drawing on particular orientations—such as relationality, reciprocity and moral cultivation—to illuminate alternative possibilities for scholarship without reproducing epistemic romanticism or essentialism.

Viewed through the lens of ethos, this genealogy reveals scholarship as a form of moral dwelling in which knowledge production is inseparable from obligations to community, place and future generations. Scholarship has never been a purely intellectual endeavour—it has always been situated, materially mediated and ecologically embedded. Contemporary abstractions of knowledge as universal, disembodied or placeless obscure these ethical entanglements and facilitate extractive approaches to research and education. Furthermore, business schools often draw on simplified and sanitised histories of management that legitimise current practices while obscuring the colonial, political and ecological conditions under which dominant forms of knowledge were produced. In this regard, critical organisational scholarship has increasingly challenged such uses of history. Cummings and Bridgman (2016), for example, argue for a wider and more engaged historical sensibility that incorporates diverse voices and treats the past as contested rather than settled. Decker et al. (2021) emphasise historiographical reflexivity, while Durepos et al. (2021) advocate for critical organisational history attentive to marginalised perspectives. In addition, other scholars highlight how history is rhetorically mobilised during organisational change to shape identity and legitimacy (Maclean et al., 2018) and how the “historic turn” in management studies has expanded methodological pluralism and ethical awareness (Mills et al., 2016). Taken together, this literature suggests that history in business schools need not function to legitimise orthodoxy. Rather, it can cultivate pluralism, reflexivity and imaginative engagement with alternative social imaginaries. Starkey and Tempest (2025) argue that business schools remain constrained by an “end-of-history” mindset, echoing Fukuyama’s (1989) thesis that liberal capitalism represents the culmination of social development. Such a worldview limits engagement with alternative futures and reinforces neoliberal assumptions. Attending to the history of ideas, they argue, is central to fostering reflexivity, pluralism and ethical awareness in management education. Therefore, from a decolonial perspective, the silences and simplifications produced by dominant historical narratives are not incidental. They actively reproduce epistemic hierarchies by positioning Western managerial knowledge as universal while rendering alternative traditions local, informal or non-scholarly. Genealogy, thus, reveals how epistemic authority is constructed and sustained within business education.

The ecological implications of this argument are significant. Just as ecosystems are destabilised by climate change, moral life within neoliberal institutions is shaped by deterritorialised knowledge, extractive research practices and metric-driven governance. These conditions disrupt the moral climates within which judgement, responsibility and care are cultivated. Reimagining scholarship as ethos, therefore, provides a way of analysing how institutional arrangements shape ethical and ecological orientations. From this perspective, curricular reform appears not simply as the addition of new content but as the cultivation of a different scholarly ethos. Illustrative possibilities include integrating ecological literacy and Indigenous perspectives across core curricula; reorienting governance towards participatory and relational accountability; and developing research agendas that address climate change, inequality and biodiversity loss as interconnected challenges. These examples are not prescriptive models but indications of how scholarship-as-ethos can materialise within existing institutional contexts.

Taken together, this genealogical analysis clarifies why debates about scholarship cannot be resolved solely through technical reform or curricular adjustment. The fragmentation, instrumentalisation and anthropocentrism of contemporary business education are historically produced conditions rather than accidental distortions. Decolonial and relational posthuman perspectives, therefore, do not reject scholarship’s past wholesale but interrogate how particular versions of it came to dominate and with what consequences. Reimagining scholarship as ethos entails holding these historical lineages in view while cultivating alternative orientations grounded in relationality, responsibility and ecological embeddedness.

Revisiting scholarship: Beyond Boyer, beyond the West

Reinterpreted through ecological and posthuman lenses, Boyer’s model can be read not merely as a classificatory framework but as a scaffold for rethinking scholarship as an ethically expansive practice. Discovery may be understood as inquiry into how business practices shape ecological systems; integration as fostering dialogue across management studies, ecological sciences, environmental humanities and Indigenous knowledge systems; application as addressing harms associated with industrial production and extractive supply chains; and teaching as cultivating planetary literacy. Read in this way, Boyer’s framework foregrounds interconnectedness rather than segmentation. Such a reading shifts scholarship from knowledge as product to knowledge as relationship and from research as extraction to scholarship as stewardship. Rather than prescribing specific reforms, this reframing highlights how epistemic assumptions shape curricular design, research agendas and institutional priorities.

Reimagining business schools: Towards interconnected, globally attuned scholarship

The critique of fragmented scholarship in business schools invites a rethinking of scholarly purpose that extends beyond narrowly human-centred outcomes. Viewed through ecological and posthuman perspectives, fragmentation appears not simply as an organisational or curricular issue but as a constraint embedded in how knowledge, responsibility and value are conceptualised within business education itself.

Re-read through these lenses, Boyer’s (1990) dimensions can be interpreted as supporting a more expansive ethic of scholarship. Rather than operating as discrete domains, they can be understood as interrelated orientations. For example, Discovery may involve inquiry into the entanglements of business activity with ecological systems, biodiversity and planetary health. Application extends beyond managerial problem-solving to engagement with the social and ecological harms associated with extractive industries and organisational practices. Integration, in turn, can be understood as fostering transdisciplinary collaboration across management studies, ecology and the humanities. Teaching can be framed as the cultivation of ecological and planetary literacy, incorporating historical, Indigenous and non-Western perspectives. Read in this way, Boyer’s framework foregrounds relationality and interdependence rather than segmentation.³

This relational interpretation also draws attention to the consequences of separating teaching and research. As recent analyses suggest, their growing disjunction undermines both student learning and broader societal engagement (Dandridge, 2023). Scholarship, thus, appears less as a set of separable activities and more as a relational practice shaped by governance arrangements, reward systems and evaluation regimes. Extending the analysis beyond Western contexts further highlights the importance of engaging Indigenous, non-Western and decolonial epistemologies, many of which foreground relational ethics, stewardship and context-sensitive approaches to knowledge. These perspectives also reveal the uneven ways in which neoliberal managerialism and scholarly fragmentation are enacted across regions and institutional settings.

Although the argument advanced here is primarily conceptual, elements of a more integrated and ethically oriented scholarship are already visible—albeit unevenly—within existing institutional constraints. For example, Copenhagen Business School has embedded sustainability and responsibility within its institutional strategy, shaping curriculum design, research priorities and external partnerships rather than confining ethics to discrete modules. Aalto University has developed transdisciplinary platforms that integrate management, engineering and design, enabling research-led teaching oriented towards societal and ecological challenges. In a different geopolitical and epistemic context, the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business has incorporated Ubuntu philosophy into leadership education, explicitly linking scholarship, pedagogy and community engagement. While these cases do not constitute comprehensive alternatives to neoliberal business education, they demonstrate that ethical, relational and ecologically attuned forms of scholarship can materialise within contemporary governance, accreditation and funding regimes.

These developments are unfolding against a backdrop of intensified scrutiny of business schools’ role and legitimacy. Critics have characterised business schools as privileging managerialist knowledge and financial imperatives over broader public purposes. At the same time, pressures for relevance, employability and performance measurement have driven increasing specialisation and fragmentation. Such dynamics constrain the capacity of business education to engage meaningfully with systemic challenges including climate change, inequality and democratic erosion. From this perspective, debates about the future of business schools are inseparable from questions about the nature and purposes of scholarship itself.

A reunified conception of scholarship, therefore, is best understood not as a technocratic solution or prescriptive model but as an alternative orientation to academic work. Rather than treating knowledge as an instrument for narrow economic or organisational ends, scholarship is framed as an interconnected, relational and ethical endeavour encompassing both human and more-than-human worlds. This framing situates the analysis within critical management and organisational scholarship while drawing on historical debates and global epistemologies to illuminate alternative possibilities.

At a practical level, such an orientation is reflected in a range of institutional practices: embedding ecological literacy and Indigenous knowledge across core curricula rather than relegating them to electives; developing governance arrangements that emphasise participatory accountability involving staff, students and community stakeholders; orienting research agendas towards interconnected social and ecological challenges; and adopting pedagogical approaches that foreground systems, ecosystems and supply webs rather than isolated organisational performance. Together, these practices point towards a shift beyond instrumentalist and anthropocentric paradigms towards a more ethically grounded and ecologically attuned conception of scholarship. The history of scholarship reveals enduring tensions between unity and fragmentation, ethics and utility. While Boyer’s framework remains influential, it is insufficient for contemporary conditions. Engaging Indigenous, Confucian, posthuman and ecological perspectives enables scholarship to be reframed as relational, ethical and materially grounded. For business schools, this reframing extends Humboldt’s vision of the unity of teaching and research into a more expansive, global and more-than-human paradigm. Reunified scholarship, thus, emerges not as a fixed template but as a set of orientations shaping curriculum design, faculty evaluation and engagement with accreditation and quality assurance regimes.

These possibilities coexist, however, with significant constraints. For example, initiatives oriented towards ecological or decolonial perspectives are frequently marginalised as peripheral “add-ons” while participatory governance experiments may struggle in contexts where rankings reward individualised research output. In addition, accreditation regimes, performance frameworks and global rankings continue to privilege instrumentalist logics, shaping institutional priorities and academic labour. These tensions underscore the extent to which debates about reunified scholarship are inseparable from broader questions of governance, legitimacy and institutional purpose. When interpreted through pluralistic and ethically grounded conceptions of scholarly excellence, however, they may also function as partial levers for change. In this respect, empirical cases suggest that such structures can be negotiated or reinterpreted when coalitions of students, faculty, communities and policymakers articulate alternative criteria of value. Examples from Copenhagen, Aalto, the University of Cape Town and Indigenous business education initiatives in Canada illustrate both the possibilities and limits of reform.

Taken together, this analysis suggests that reunified scholarship is best understood as a practical and ethical orientation shaped by historical lineages, institutional constraints and epistemic pluralism. Rather than offering a blueprint for reform, it illuminates how business schools might reposition scholarship as a relational practice attentive to social, ecological and planetary interdependencies.

Conclusion: From fragmentation to institutional and pedagogical transformation

This paper has argued that the legitimacy crisis confronting business schools is best understood as a crisis of scholarship itself. More specifically, it can be analysed as a crisis of scholarship-as-ethos: the erosion of a shared ethical and intellectual orientation capable of integrating research, teaching and engagement. Neoliberal governance, metric-driven evaluation and the global diffusion of Anglo-American models of management education have not simply reshaped institutional priorities, they have contributed to the fragmentation of the moral and epistemic foundations of academic life.

Reframing scholarship as ethos enables a synthesis of concerns that are often treated in isolation—neoliberalism, epistemic diversity, ecological responsibility and institutional reform—within a single analytical horizon. From this perspective, the challenges facing business schools are not limited to curriculum design, research relevance or accreditation pressures but concern institutional purpose more broadly. Scholarship has increasingly been organised as a set of hierarchised outputs rather than cultivated as a collective practice oriented towards judgement, responsibility and care across human and more-than-human worlds.

This conception of scholarship has important institutional implications. Governance systems that privilege isolated research outputs over teaching and engagement tend to reproduce fragmentation rather than integration. Analysed through the lens of scholarship-as-ethos, incentive structures, evaluation regimes and leadership practices emerge as central mechanisms through which particular moral climates are sustained. Institutional reform, on this reading, is not only managerial but ethical, insofar as it shapes how academic work is valued, recognised and made meaningful.

The pedagogical implications are equally significant. A unified conception of scholarship is unlikely to be realised through the addition of discrete ethics or sustainability modules to otherwise unchanged curricula. Rather, it foregrounds forms of education that cultivate relational judgement, historical awareness and ecological literacy across programmes. This perspective draws attention to pedagogical approaches that move beyond firm-centred case studies (mostly private sector we suggest) towards engagement with interdependence, systemic responsibility and the entanglement of business with social and ecological systems. Teaching, in this account, functions not as a secondary activity but as a central site for the formation of scholarly and professional ethos.

Extending scholarship beyond Eurocentric and anthropocentric frames further sharpens this analysis. Indigenous, Confucian and relational posthuman perspectives foreground relationality, reciprocity and ecological embeddedness offering critical resources for questioning instrumental and extractive models of knowledge production. Engaging these traditions does not imply romanticism or epistemic relativism. Rather, it expands the ethical and epistemic horizons within which business schools operate by highlighting the situated, contested and historically shaped nature of management knowledge as well as the existence of alternative imaginaries of organising and flourishing.

Our analysis suggests that reclaiming scholarship as a unified, ethically grounded and ecologically attuned practice provides a way of moving beyond piecemeal reform towards a more fundamental engagement with the legitimacy crisis of business schools. Such a reframing draws attention to the limits of metric-driven governance and to the importance of epistemic plurality and broader forms of accountability. In a context marked by social inequality and planetary crisis, scholarship-as-ethos offers an analytical foundation for understanding how business schools might reposition themselves as sites of ethical reflection, critical inquiry and relational responsibility rather than as instruments narrowly aligned with neoliberal imperatives.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

William Howieson

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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