Dark Academia: Despair in the Neoliberal Business School

• Author: Peter Fleming
• Published date: 01 September 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12521
• Date: 01 September 2020

© 2019 Society for the Adv ancement of Management Stud ies and John Wiley & Son s, Ltd.

Dark Academia: Despair in the Neoliberal Business

School

Peter Fleming

University of Technolog y Sydney

Although it was supposed to be a faculty ‘Away Day’, we were crammed into a room

only a few hundred metres from the business school. Budgets were tight and depar t-

mental austerity was in f ull bloom.

The Dean took centre stage and gave a ta lk largely consist ing of corporate buzz-

word phrases: ‘signif icant stretch targets’; ‘get our friends in the tent’; ‘the aha effect’;

‘global mindset’; ‘clean up the box we live in’; ‘big buckets you then sharpen’.

A bewildered colleague beside me leant in and whispered, ‘these Away Days are so

bloody depressing’. I nodded in agreement, mirroring the forlorn faces around me.

But worse was to come. Next on the agenda was a team building exerci se involving

African d rumming. As we banged away on our cheap djembes in embarrassment, the

Dean was nowhere to be seen.

Exhausted, ty rannised by of fice email and under pressure to meet performance tar-

gets, the Away Day felt like some kind of cruel joke.

INTRODUCTION

There is something deeply troubling at t he heart of what I dub the neoliberal business

school. By ‘neoliberal’ I mean their overt commercia lisation so they resemble a private

firm, replete with management hierarchies, customers (i.e., students, industry clients,

etc.), cut-throat careerism and a myopic focus on ‘outputs’ and KPIs. While business

schools have financia lly benefited from the marketisation of higher education and enjoy

disproportionate inf luence vis-à-vis other schools, there’s also a dark side, evidenced by

widespread despair and even depression among facult y.

Journal of Man agement Studi es 57:6 September 2020

doi:10. 1111/j om s. 125 21

Address for re prints: Peter Flemin g, UTS Business School, Univer sity of Technology Syd ney, Ultimo, NSW

2007, Sydney, Australia ( Peter.Fleming@uts.edu.au).