The Corporatization of American Business I could not agree more with this excellent essay, speaking as a marginalized professor similar to those described in this essay. I included several articles and essays in my self-published book Business Voyages, first published in 2008, dealing with issues similar to these. See especially my case in Business Voyages The Georgia Southern Business School. The biggest battle of my academic career was getting a required capstone case method integrative course added to the Georgia Southern business school undergraduate curriculum in 1973, called Business Policy. Most business faculty detested the case method because it required class participation for grades, making it unsuitable for true-false, multiple-choice questions testing how well students had memorized business dogma and doctrine in text books. I taught about two courses of Business Policy every quarter or semester throughout my 35-year career, grading students on the quantity and quality of ideas they sold in the class market. I gave about 10 percent As. My overall g.p.a. in the course was about 2.5, whereas almost all other teachers in the course had g.p.a.s of over 3.0, some as high as 3.8, implying all their students were good and excellent, which is well nigh impossible in a case method discussion course because there is no way all students in the class can be good or better relative to all students in the class discussing factual cases that really happened. Around 1985 my colleagues in the course insisted on changing the name of the course from Business Policy to Strategic Management, to better describe what they purported to do in the course, teach students how to implement strategies, rather than figure out the ethics of business policies and what to do, reflecting the increasing corporatization of American business, that is, doing what the boss says, not thinking for yourself. A couple of retired lt. colonels teaching the course strongly advocated changing the name of the course in the university catalog. I continued to call the course Business Policy on my course syllabus and in class for another 20 or so years. See my case BA 450, Business Policy & Strategy, in the case section of Business Voyages. I came through the university teaching system in the best of times, finishing my doctorate in 1969 at age 29, skipping the assistant level, becoming a full professor with tenure at age 36, becoming the youngest and longest tenured senior professor in the history of our business school, retiring in 2005; but it was not easy. Just punch Business Voyages into Google to see the whole saga. Richard John Stapleton, effectivelearning.net, June 24, 2014
Posted on: Tue, 24 Jun 2014 04:03:29 +0000
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