Is Small Always Beautiful? A Dialogue

• Published date: 01 December 2016
• Author: Gordon Pearson,Martin Parker
• Date: 01 December 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/basr.12102

Is Small Always Beautiful?

A Dialogue

GORDON PEARSON AND MARTIN PARKER

ABSTRACT

For quite a few years the two authors have been engaging in

dialogues about management issues. Using as a model Pla-

to’s dialogues between Socrates and his various students, we

have tried to clarify the nature of a concept by asking ques-

tions and thinking carefully about the answers. We disagree

about many things, but agree that we respect each other’s

opinions, and can clarify our own viewpoints by debating

them respectfully with another. For this dialogue, we decided

to focus on the question of the scale of business operations.

One of us has a particular preference for small scale enter-

prise, and for the localisation of the economy, because he

believes that the giganticism of corporations is behind many

of the problems we face today. As you will see, the other pro-

tagonist disagrees, arguing instead that other issues than

scale are at the root of why some businesses do bad things.

For quite a few years, but in a very intermittent manner, the

two authors have been engaging in dialogues about

management issues. So far, they have been concerned with

business ethics, capitalism, alternatives to management, and

Gordon Pearson is an Honorary Senior Researcher at Keele Management School, University of

Keele, Newcastle-under-Lyme, North Staffordshire, ST5 5BG, UK. E-mail: gjp@gordonpearson.

co.uk. Martin Parker is a Professor of Organization and Culture at University of Leicester

School of Management, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK. E-mail: m.parker@le.ac.uk.

V

C2016 W. Michael Hoffman Center for Business Ethics at Bentley University. Published by

Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington

Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK.

Business and Society Review 121:4 549–567

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management education (Parker and Pearson 2005, 2013; Pearson

and Parker 2001, 2008). This all started when we were teaching

business ethics together at Keele University, England in the mid-

1990s, and we found that debating our differences in class, in front

of the students, seemed to be a good way to teach. Thinking about

Plato’s dialogues between Socrates and his various students, we

liked the way that he would clarify the nature of a concept by ask-

ing questions and listening carefully to the answers, and we decid-

ed we would try and do the same. We disagree about many things,

but agree that we respect each other’s opinions, and can clarify our

own viewpoints by debating them respectfully with another.

For the reader to find this format engaging, you might like to

know something about the two characters who are staging their

disagreement here. Gordon spent around thirty years in various

companies, mostly with responsibilities for strategy. He then com-

pleted a PhD studying innovation, strategy and culture and joined

academia. He is convinced, along with Sumantra Ghoshal, that

bad theories have corrupted good management practices (Ghoshal

2006) and should be set aside in favour of the lessons provided by

practical experience (Pearson 2015). Martin, on the other hand,

has spent most of his working life as a “critical management stud-

ies” academic and believes that imagining alternatives to market

managerialism is ethically and politically important (Parker 2002,

Parker et al. 2007, 2014). He agrees that business schools often

teach bad theory, but thinks that means we need to teach better

theory. The two participants below might be characterised as a

“practitioner idealist” (Gordon) and an “academic idealist” (Martin).

For this dialogue, we decided to focus on the question of the

scale of business operations. Martin has a particular preference for

small scale enterprise, and for the localisation of the economy,

because he believes that the giganticism of corporations is behind

many of the problems we face today. As you will see, Gordon dis-

agrees, arguing instead that other issues than scale are at the root

of why some businesses do bad things.

THE DIALOGUE

“How then can we rightly order the distribution of the land?

In the first place, the number of the citizens has to be

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