From the article:

When schools like Wharton and Harvard Business School were established, they were seen as overly vocational, and to build legitimacy their founders framed management as a profession, on par with law and medicine. But education in those fields rested on established bodies of knowledge — centuries of case law, natural sciences like biology — that management lacked.

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The solution, devised in the 1920s by the Harvard dean Wallace Donham, was to borrow the teaching style used in law and medicine: the case study. It became the signature method of business education. To this day, professors assign 10- to 20-page descriptions of business challenges culminating in a decision point that students then debate in class. The method is pervasive: In 2024, Harvard Business School sold nearly 17 million case studies to various business programs around the world.

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I wrote dozens of case studies during my decade at H.B.S., some of which are described as classics and best sellers. These are not products of independent research, but carefully packaged corporate narratives. The disclaimer printed in tiny type on every H.B.S. case concedes this point: Cases “are not intended to serve … as sources of primary data.” The data they include can be selective, biased or even fabricated.

For the many cases I wrote under the guidance of senior faculty members, events that reflected poorly on the company were softened or omitted and the roles of certain executives were burnished. The companies held final approval, with drafts reviewed by their lawyers and P.R. staff. Rather than being vehicles for disinterested learning, as one might expect at a university, the case studies end up as instruments of reputation management.

Corporate influence feeds a larger problem: The cases almost always feature winners, making it easy to mistake luck or timing for a proven strategy. Failures, dead ends and nonmarket solutions are rarely considered. Before Enron’s fraud was exposed, its business model was presented in admiring terms by at least five H.B.S. case studies. More damning still, the strategies that later led to its collapse — its asset-light model, its trading platform — were portrayed as innovations. Questions about deregulated energy markets, revolving-door oversight and opaque accounting went unasked.

Furthermore, edits that push the case narratives away from reality are often meant to make it “work” in a classroom. Complexity is systematically shaved away, and dissenting voices often go unheard. Real organizations don’t move in clearly delineated phases toward a decision point, but business school teaching materials often do — compressing timelines, dropping messy subplots and smoothing over contradictions to produce clean narrative arcs and satisfying problems to debate.

The result is a curriculum built around false narratives. Some of the most celebrated ideas in management have not been the ones that survived peer review or replication, but the ones that could be turned into TED Talks, consulting frameworks or airport best sellers. Faculty members are rewarded not for knowledge but for performance — selling a big idea with a memorable label that promises “success” or “disruption.”

Business schools have a divided mission: They seek to legitimize an economic system focused on private gain while also developing guardrails to tame it. They found a remarkable way to manage this tension: the “win-win” story in which the conflict between private gain and public good simply evaporates.

A classic win-win is the contention that environmental programs like reducing waste or using LED lights can save money or that decent pay and benefits lower costs by reducing employee turnover. Business schools now claim to educate “leaders who make a difference in the world,” as H.B.S. proclaims in its mission, while Wharton pursues a “quest for positive global impact.”

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Recent evidence shows that many foundational studies supporting the win-win idea were based on flawed data or couldn’t be replicated. Yet faculty members keep researching, writing about and teaching the topic — suggesting an ideological project more than an academic exercise.

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What would that clean-sheet logic mean across an entire university? One starting point is the organization theorist Martin Parker’s call to create “schools for organizing” rather than schools for business, centered on how humans coordinate for shared ends. Students would study co-ops, unions and social movements alongside the shareholder corporation. The central question would shift from “How do we maximize shareholder value?” to “How do different forms of organization distribute power, risk and reward — and which should we strengthen?”

Dismantling the business school as a single high-status silo that professionalizes private gain may seem a heavy lift. But universities can create cross-disciplinary pathways for students who want to work in business without submitting them to the business school worldview. Some already offer “business and society” majors or master’s programs in organizations and public purpose, drawing on sociology, law and public policy. The point would not be to abolish the study of markets, but to return it to settings where questions of power, history, democracy and ecological limits cannot be so easily avoided.