Volume 74, 2018
Teaching Philosophy
Christian Lystbaek
Pages 23-27
Teaching Business Philosophy
Reasoning about Rationality in Management Education
This paper describes and discusses the philosophical underpinnings of teaching business philosophy. Management textbooks and curricula are dominated by a “managerialistic” logic or ideology according to which rational planning, prediction and control is the basis of managerial power and legitimacy. Critics have made clear that this conception of rationality is reductionist. But the critique often dismisses rationality altogether as the failed project of the Enlightenment. My paper will argue that rationality should be seriously engaged with in management education, but that such a serious engagement will illuminate business rationality as a multi-faceted concept. Thus, teachers of Business Philosophy should not be in the “trade” of promoting managerialism, neither in the “trade” of diminishing it. Rather, illuminating business rationality as a multi-faceted concept, allows us to teach Business Philosophy in a theoretical fruitful and ethically engaged manner that challenges us to see rationality as a form of activity or labor.