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Business Education and Neo-Liberal Propaganda
January 9, 2007 - 11:48am
Anyhoo, the prof starts off the first lecture with this following rant:
"If this were 10 years ago, we would be talking about how the BC economy is in the doldrums because of the overregulation of the BC NDP government".
Made me just about want to puke. If I didn't have to take this course, I wouldn't go near it with a ten foot pole.
I'm thinking that this kind of thing is a fairly common occurrence in business courses, given the kinds of people who would teach business courses. It amounts to nothing more than neo-liberal propaganda. I realize that the whole point of business education is to prepare students for a business environment where this kind of attitude leads to success. But holy crap. What is our education system doing to the people who take these business progams? Are we creating a bunch of brainwashed business school graduates who swallow the capitalist neo-liberal propaganda without giving it a second thought?
[ 09 January 2007: Message edited by: Left Turn ]
I know a couple of the profs in the program and they are some of the best teachers at the university.
There is a lot of research by faculty into "green business", social responsibility and other progresivish things.
I've even heard stories of business students reading Marx in classes.
That being said, business students still wear suits to class and stuff, kinda creeps me out.
Move to Montrйal. It's cheaper to become a socialist here.
eta: So here's to hoping we can start a thread on this narrowly focussed sub-topic regarding PSE sometime soon.
[ 01 March 2008: Message edited by: Fidel ]
[img]biggrin.gif" border="0[/img] She couldn't even bribe you with that ? You are mean Fidel! [img]biggrin.gif" border="0[/img]
Seriously, I believe that what we are experiencing now in terms of increased capitalist greed, outrageous widening of the gap between have and have not, the ever fading sense of corporate ethic is partly caused by the capitalists' foot soldiers, the brain-washed MBA crops. Apparently the first Canadian MBA program in Canada was in 1948. We are reaping the result.
Welfare economics is still a marginalized discipline and the prospects that it would ever be mainstreamed is getting dimmer and dimmer.
[ 02 March 2008: Message edited by: adam stratton ]
You might consider starting out by doing some reading in the field of Critical Management Studies.
Although I am not especially familiar with the field, this appears to me to be an attempt to apply a more left-wing perspective to traditional business school studies.
Western 'Mainstream' Extremism: Distortion, Fabrication and Falsification in the Financial Press - by James Petras
http://dissidentvoice.org/2015/11/western-mainstream-extremism/
"The Western imperial regimes (by which we mean the US, Canada and the EU) have exercised their political, military, economic and propaganda powers to 1) eliminate or limit the variety of capitalist options; (2) control the kinds of market-state relations; and (3) secure compliance through punitive military invasions, occupations, and economic sanctions against targeted adversaries."
It's all 'business education'...
Yeah it's useful to point out that sanctions un-authorized by the UN are essentially acts of economic warfare. Western MSM almost treats it as a shopping choice or something like that, trivializing the disruptive effect on international relations it has.
Of course, the hegemon, the Emperor, the Moloch, the Great Satan, i.e., the USA, views itself as the global gendarme, responsible for the international order and is, therefore, above any trivial "international" law, or agreement, and is perfectly entitled to conduct, e.g, a blockade against Cuba for over five decades, urinating in the face of the global community, or forcing the European states to carry out sanctions against Russia for having the temerity not to allow the ethnic cleansing of Crimea, and so on. One wonders if targetted assasinations will become required reading ... in orthodox Economics courses. Because freedom.