13.10.2026

“The intellectuals are the dominant group’s ‘deputies’ exercising the subaltern functions of social hegemony” – Antonio Gramsci (p. 145)¹

The picture is bleak: seven of nine planetary boundaries breached, inequality spiralling, authoritarianism and tech-fascism rising, and genocides ongoing. Business is central to creating, amplifying and reproducing these crises. Yet business schools largely fail to address them because business education has become, we believe, the utopia of neoliberalism.

Admiring the courage of socialists to be utopian, Hayek urged his followers to do the same: Making the implementation of his so-called free society “a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds” (p. 384).² His neoliberal dream came true in the market managerialism of the business school. As Parker observes, business education is indeed a “sort of utopia for the wealthy and powerful” (p. 158): It naturalises the capitalist system through its “hidden curriculum” (p. 18).³ The logic is simple and powerful: While many students are aware that purely profit-driven corporations exploit people and destroy the planet, business education rarely explicitly shows them that systemic alternatives exist. Instead, it offers incremental and market conforming ‘solutions’.^3,4 This is what we call the assault of the business school on imagination – one of its most profound failures.

In this blog post, we first cursorily define the tenets of neoliberalism to show how they infuse business education through the WEIRDo framework – a form of hidden curriculum. In contrast, we thereupon propose and develop the WISER framework as a way to reclaim the imagination and make business schools fit for responding to the multiple crises of the 21^st century.

Understanding the problem with business education: the hidden curriculum of WEIRDo neoliberalism

We understand neoliberalism as free-market activism, an ideology built to justify the dominant social paradigm and its destructive consequences.^5–7 Its core function is to naturalise capitalism, eradicating the rich history of alternative ways of organising from what seems achievable or even desirable and so winning what Graeber called “the war against the imagination” (p. 113).⁸

Clearly, times have changed since Friedman’s rant against corporate social responsibility, and no business course would explicitly argue that ending discrimination or avoiding pollution is preaching socialism. Today this ideological defence is done through a ‘hidden curriculum’: whenever these issues surface, their origins are not thoroughly investigated or causally tied to the capitalist logic. Instead, they are mechanically framed as ‘Grand Challenges’ for whose resolution the involvement of market and corporate actors is indispensable.³ As we argued elsewhere, such forms of implicit justification are based on Wasteful (and polluting), Extractivist, Imperialistic, Reductionist and Domination-oriented policies and practices that protect industrial and corporate capitalism against any kind of (so-called) ’socialist threat’.^9,10 This is what we call the WEIRDo framework:

• Waste and pollution appear as “win-win” opportunities for profit-making, understood as problems smart entrepreneurs led by the magic of market signals can solve.
• Extractivism is dissolved by techno-optimism: if the market is God on Earth, innovation is its saviour, a logic that runs from Julian Simon (Hayek’s anti-environmentalism heir) through much of what Hoffman describes in today’s business school curricula.⁴
• Imperialism is normalised because the exemplary firm is always the successful multinational penetrating new markets; global expansion reads as an achievement even when it destroys local economies and reinforces the dominance of the Global North .^3,11
• Reductionism reigns through an obsession with metrics that funnel attention to the business case and shareholder value, all in service of fetishised metrics such as GDP.⁴
• Domination is naturalised: management and hierarchy are taken for granted, never posed as potentially counterproductive, or as unnecessary despite everything we know about democratic self-organisation.^3,12–14

A simple diagnostic follows to find out whether a business school curriculum implicitly promotes some form of neoliberal ideology. Does it feature only large international corporations? Does it present organisations in need of hierarchical management? Does it frame Grand Challenges as mere opportunities for entrepreneurs and profit-making? If yes, then it is teaching a WEIRDo neoliberal agenda that is implicated in the very crises which we began with.

Overcoming the problem: toward WISER business education

What is most striking about neoliberalism is that it pits the market against democracy.¹⁵ We believe an alternative economic system should be built on its strict opposite: namely, that business can be aligned with, and infused by, democratic life. This form of economic democracy, is exactly what the WISER framework places at the core of the economy.¹⁶

WISER, which stands for Wellbeing, Inclusivity, Sufficiency, Empowerment and Resilience, grows out of a post-growth reading of the Sustainable Development Goals.¹⁷ The SDGs were adopted by all member states of the UN and thus is expected to, at least, partly resonate with what most people value across the world. That resonance is also a tactic. Because few would openly argue against wellbeing, inclusivity, sufficiency, empowerment, or resilience, WISER works as a kind of hack on the neoliberal narrative, reclaiming some of the vocabulary that neoliberalism has successfully watered down. In other words, we are all too aware that the WISER terms have themselves been neoliberalised: Wellbeing turned into some form of “happiness industry”, Inclusivity reduced to EDI tokenism, Sufficiency captured by the “circular economy”, Empowerment portrayed as “consumer responsibilisation”, and Resilience read through the lens of “disaster adaptation”.

However, as Hoffman insists, no rival ideology can ignore the dominant ideology it grows from.⁴ Marx made a similar point in The Eighteenth Brumaire, as well as Graeber and Wengrow after him.¹³ History sets the terms of what can be built, and WISER reclaims these already-shared ideas in a more ambitious and democratic way.

When read against WEIRDo, WISER is its positive and constructive inverse:

• Wellbeing overcomes Reductionism, moving beyond GDP and shareholder value toward what sustainably lets people and the planet flourish.
• Inclusivity overcomes Imperialism, starting from stakeholders and local communities that are often silenced by expansionist firms.
• Sufficiency overcomes Waste, accepting that we cannot grow forever and must preserve our natural resources.
• Empowerment overcomes Domination, giving employees real voice and challenging shareholder primacy.
• Resilience overcomes Extractivism, thinking long term rather than accelerating depletion in the faith that technology will rescue us.

More broadly, WISER points beyond the business school toward the concrete utopia of what Parker calls a “school for organising” (p. 178).³ At its core it is about pluralism in teaching – de-naturalising the capitalist mode of production and liberating the collective imagination by exposing students to the many ways humans have organised, holding together autonomy, community, and responsibility toward others, human and non-human alike. This can bring about a move away from the taken-for-granted ‘exceptionalism’ fostered by neoliberal ideology, which posits that the market escapes the ecological principles that govern all other forms of life, toward a new ecological paradigm that is based on harmony between society and nature.¹⁸

Importantly, these are not abstractions. Worker-led firms such as Suma and Premium Cola show this operating in practice, and the search engine Ecosia shows that even technology can be built to be inclusive, planet-centred and resilient rather than driven by greedy venture capitalists.³ The contrast between WEIRDo and WISER becomes particularly obvious in the case of AI where consequential impacts are currently imposed on wider populations by a small and techno-feudal elite. A WISER lens here allows to ask different questions that empower to collectively decide on how to regulate the ownership and uses of AI. Under economic democracy, such decisions would not be taken by a broligarchy but discussed collectively.

Taken together, our points aim to expand management education beyond market supremacy and purely technological innovation, include organising strategies for people and the planet, and expose students to the possibilities of economic democracy and other forms of social innovation in an attempt to overcome the neoliberal assault on the imagination. Reclaiming the classroom as a “radical space for possibility” (p. 12)¹⁹, where we turn “the taken-for-granted into the up-for-grabs” (p. 79) is urgently needed.²⁰ Given that most of the world’s economic elite passed through the roughly 13,000 business schools on the planet, changing their curricula may be one of the most effective strategies of responding to the multiple crises of the 21^st century. In light of our crisis-ridden times, this may well be not just a voluntary choice, but a collective responsibility.

Authors

References →