Back to the Roots: Why Academic Business Schools Should Re-Radicalize Rationality

Abstract

Our paper argues that the criticism that has recently been launched against the concept of rationality as taught by academic business schools outlines deficiencies that were incurred by turning rationality into a mere tool for advancing economic prosperity, a concept that we term utility-driven rationality. Our leading hypothesis is that the commodification of rationality into its utility-driven manifestation expunged the application of epistemological doubt from it, which, because epistemological doubt was originally the precondition of rationality's ethical, political, and societal potential, shut down access to this potential in the process. By tracing this process of commodification from Adam Smith to Max Weber's critical diagnosis of it, we offer the suggestion of re-radicalizing rationality and thus re-introducing epistemological doubt to it to secure the future of academic management education.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.