A note on the management ideology as promoted in MBA programs: a critique

A note on the management ideology as promoted in MBA programs: a critique (information from perplexity.ai)

My question 1: "Highlight the main ideas of management ideology that have been generally promoted in MBA programs."

The reply: "MBA programs have historically promoted a management ideology that treats managers as rational, analytically trained leaders who create shareholder value while increasingly being asked to balance this with ethics, sustainability, and stakeholder concerns. The dominant ideas combine quantitative, market-oriented thinking with leadership, organizational behavior, and a more recent emphasis on global, innovative, and socially responsible management.

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Core economic and market logic

MBA education is built on the assumption that markets are the primary coordination mechanism and that management is about using analysis to win in those markets. This appears in the centrality of strategy, finance, and economics courses that stress competition, efficiency, and value creation, often framed in shareholder-value terms.

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• Emphasis on competitive strategy (e.g., Porter’s Five Forces, positioning, advantage) as the core lens for thinking about firms.
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• Focus on financial metrics, valuation, and capital allocation as the main way to judge managerial performance.
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• Acceptance of managerialism: the idea that professional managers, with the right tools, should control organizations and drive performance.
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Manager as analytical decision maker

MBA ideology presents managers as rational problem solvers who apply formal tools and models to complex situations. Quantitative analysis and evidence-based decision making are portrayed as superior to intuition or purely experiential judgment.

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• Heavy use of frameworks (SWOT, SMART, Blue Ocean, PDCA, etc.) to structure diagnosis and action.
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• Training in statistics, modeling, and data-driven decisions to legitimize managerial authority as “scientific.”
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• Case-method teaching that socializes students into thinking like general managers who compare alternatives and make disciplined trade-offs.
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Leadership, culture, and human behavior

Alongside hard analytics, MBA programs promote an ideology in which leaders shape culture, motivate people, and manage change. Organizational behavior and leadership courses frame the manager as a shaper of norms, meaning, and high performance.

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• View of organizations as systems that can be designed and steered through structure, incentives, and culture.
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• Importance of soft skills: communication, emotional intelligence, influence, and team leadership as necessary complements to technical skill.
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• Human capital as an asset to be aligned with organizational goals via HR, performance management, and talent development.
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Ethics, responsibility, and sustainability

Since the 2000s, MBA programs have increasingly woven ethics, CSR, and sustainability into the dominant ideology, though often within a performance frame. The “good manager” is expected to deliver results while considering environmental, social, and governance impacts.

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• Courses and modules on business ethics, corporate governance, and responsible leadership.
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• Framing sustainability and CSR as both moral imperatives and strategic opportunities for long-term value creation.
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• Stakeholder language (employees, communities, environment) layered onto an underlying competitive-market logic.
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Globalization, innovation, and entrepreneurship

Contemporary MBA ideology stresses a global, innovative, and entrepreneurial mindset as essential for modern managers. The manager is encouraged to think like a change agent who operates across borders and embraces disruption.

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• Global mindset: sensitivity to cross-cultural differences, emerging markets, and international competition.
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• Innovation and entrepreneurship as core capabilities, not just for startups but also for established firms.
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• Continuous learning and adaptability as virtues, aligning with a growth mindset and lifelong development narrative."

My question 2: "Highlight 5 main critiques from each of the two lens of (1) Frankfurt School of Thought and (2) Romanticism on the management ideology as promoted in MBA programs, notably on the MBA dissertation project practices."

The reply: "MBA programs promote a management ideology of rational efficiency, shareholder value, and analytical leadership, which draws critiques from the Frankfurt School for perpetuating capitalist domination and from Romanticism for suppressing human creativity and emotion.

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Frankfurt School Critiques

The Frankfurt School views MBA ideology as an instrument of capitalist ideology that rationalizes exploitation and stifles emancipation, extending to dissertation practices that reinforce commodified knowledge production.

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• Ideology masks exploitation: MBA teachings propagate "false consciousness" where market efficiency and managerialism obscure systemic inequality, treating dissertations as tools to legitimize corporate power rather than critique it.
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• Culture industry parallel: Management education functions like mass culture, standardizing thought through case studies and models, while dissertations prioritize performative metrics over genuine social critique.
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• Rationalization dehumanizes: Weberian-inspired bureaucracy in MBA programs reduces humans to cogs, with dissertation projects enforcing positivist methods that suppress dialectical or critical inquiry.
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• Instrumental reason dominates: Profit-driven analytics trump ethical reflection, as seen in dissertations focused on optimization rather than emancipation from alienating labor structures.
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• Reification of knowledge: MBA ideology commodifies research, turning dissertations into neoliberal artifacts that prioritize employability and "competitive advantage" over transformative critique.
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Romanticism Critiques

Romanticism critiques MBA ideology for its mechanistic rationalism that erodes authentic human experience, imagination, and organic community, particularly in dissertation practices that favor abstraction over lived passion.

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• Suppression of emotion: Rational models idolize detached analysis, ignoring Romantic emphasis on feeling; dissertations become sterile exercises detached from personal intuition or artistic insight.
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• Heroic leadership romance: MBA promotes over-romanticized "great man" leaders, yet Romanticism decries this as false idolatry that crushes collective creativity, mirrored in leader-centric dissertation topics.
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• Alienation from nature: Industrial efficiency ideology severs humans from organic life, with MBA projects quantifying everything and dissertations ignoring holistic, pre-capitalist harmony.
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• Quantification of life: Exchange-value trumps use-value and individuality, as Romanticism laments; MBA dissertations reduce complex human phenomena to metrics, stifling qualitative depth.
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• Loss of authenticity: Managerialism enforces conformity, eroding Romantic self-expression; dissertation practices demand standardized formats that suppress unique voice and revolutionary spirit."

My question 3: "Suggest 5 main ideas in critical management studies that may not be compatible with the management ideology as endorsed in MBA programs."

The reply: "Critical Management Studies (CMS) challenges the mainstream MBA ideology of rational efficiency, shareholder value, and managerial authority by emphasizing systemic power imbalances, ethical indeterminacy, and the need for emancipation from capitalist structures.

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CMS Idea 1: Management as Domination

CMS views management not as neutral expertise but as a mechanism of social control that perpetuates inequality and exploitation, incompatible with MBA's portrayal of managers as value-creating heroes.

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Dissertations in MBA programs often reinforce this by analyzing "best practices" without questioning underlying power dynamics.

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CMS Idea 2: Skepticism of Moral Defensibility

CMS rejects the moral neutrality of management practices, arguing they systematically erode social justice and ecological sustainability, contrasting MBA's amoral, performance-focused analytics.

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This clashes with MBA dissertations that prioritize profit metrics over critiques of injustice.

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CMS Idea 3: Ideology in Mainstream Knowledge

CMS sees mainstream management theories as ideological tools serving elite interests, not objective science, undermining MBA's claim to scientific rigor and universal applicability.

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MBA projects typically apply these theories uncritically, ignoring their role in sustaining capitalism.

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CMS Idea 4: Inevitability of Values in Management

CMS insists management is inherently political and value-laden, rejecting MBA's positivist separation of facts from values in favor of explicit ethical and philosophical engagement.

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This incompatibility appears in MBA dissertations that treat data as value-free while advancing neoliberal agendas.

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CMS Idea 5: Emancipatory Critique Over Reform

CMS prioritizes radical transformation of oppressive structures over incremental improvements, opposing MBA's reformist focus on optimizing existing systems for competitiveness.

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MBA dissertation practices embody this tension by framing research as tools for managerial effectiveness rather than systemic change."

A collection of blog notes on using chatgpt for research purpose.