By Alessia Contu.
“We hardly get a chance to talk about race in class. So the discussion we just had on racial colour blindness was refreshing,” a management student recently remarked to me.
She was spot on.
Business schools don’t offer many opportunities for addressing and re-dressing race, diversity and inequities. Diversity tends to be “mere decoration” while the focus stays on the “bottom line”.
Banu Ozkazanc-Pan, Brown University.
The American dream is built on the notion that the U.S. is a meritocracy. Americans believe success in life and business can be earned by anyone willing to put in the hard work necessary to achieve it, or so they say.
Thus, Americans commonly believe that those who are successful deserve to be so and those who aren’t are equally deserving of their fate – despite growing evidence that widening inequalities in income, wealth, labor and gender play a major role in who makes it and who doesn’t.
And this very fact – that Americans believe their society is a meritocracy – is the biggest threat to equality, particularly when it comes to gender, as research by myself and others shows.
By Stephan Manning.
Just a few decades ago it was unthinkable that a computer could ever be as smart as a human. But in 1996, the super-computer Deep Blue beat world champion Gary Kasparov in chess, and in early 2017 Google’s AlphaGo defeated the best human player in Go. In his fascinating new book Homo Deus, Yuval Harari argues that the combination of big data and self-improving algorithms will soon outsmart humans entirely and make human decision-making obsolete. Even today, it just takes 150 Facebook likes for psychometrics software such as Cambridge Analytica to know your needs, fears and hopes better than your parents do, and just over 300 likes for such software to know you better than you know yourself. All based on analyzing your likes against Millions of other likes and profiles. No wonder the Trump campaign made effective use of that software last year to better target their voters. But this is just the beginning: Recently, researchers from Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa, were able for the first time to directly link a human brain to the Internet – creating the first ever ‘Brainternet’. Based on increased connectivity, smart algorithms may soon be able to monitor and analyze all our biological functions, thoughts, interactions, and purchases, and know much better what we want and what makes us happy than we do. Harari argues that in the end humans may delegate all important decisions – choices of careers, partners and places to live – to algorithms that exceed our brain capacity manifold. So will big data algorithms eventually control our lives?
By Erynn Beaton, Maureen A. Scully and Sandra Rothenberg.
Ample research indicates that the growing problem of wealth and income inequality could stunt U.S. economic growth and undermine our democracy while stirring political polarization. Given that the federal government shows little interest in fighting economic inequality and many states are ill-equipped to do much about it, what else can be done?
Studies have also found that the rich exert far more influence over government than the rest of us. This imbalance means that wealthy people who do something about inequality may have more power to make an impact than everybody else. As scholars of social change, we wanted to learn more about how a small number of affluent Americans choose to spend their own time, clout and money fighting inequality.
By Alessia Contu.
A professor of politics in an elite US liberal art college recently remarked to me: “I must confess my stereotype of someone working in a business school is of one who serves the one per cent.”
Noting our shared political and intellectual persuasions, she questioned: “how can you work in a business school?”
My colleague is right, of course. Business schools are not perceived as intellectual ‘hotbeds’, and even less crucibles of critical and progressive thinking.
Business schools are often portrayed as universities’ ‘cash cows’, something former minister of universities and science David Willetts acknowledged in 2013. A Chartered Association of Business Schools Report in March confirmed that business schools are big business worth more than £2.4 billion annually.
Guest Post by Anonymous Trump Fan.
Greetings, dear Americans! As our new President appears and promises to change this system and make America great again, it’s time we look at one of the things he could do to really make America great, and it’s in his specialty, business.
By Stephan Manning and Juliane Reinecke.
We live in a world burdened by large-scale problems that refuse to go away: the refugee crisis; terrorism; rising sea levels; frequent floods, droughts and wildfires; not to mention persistent inequality and violation of basic human rights across the world.
What do these problems have in common? They resist any simple solution. In policy research they are called “wicked.” This is because cause-effect relations are complex and solutions unclear; many of these problems are urgent, yet there is no central authority to solve them; their magnitude is often hard to estimate; and those trying to solve them may even contribute to causing them.
The EU refugee crisis, the topic of a recent U.N. summit, is a good example: Driven by regional conflicts and poverty, and assisted by trafficking networks, people from Africa and the Middle East continue to take enormous risks to enter EU territory by land or sea. For several years now, thousands of refugees have died on this journey each year and no solution is in sight. EU member countries continue to blame their neighbors for either taking in too many refugees or for refusing to help, while there is little shared interest and limited capacity for actually addressing the sources of the problem.
What’s the best way to effectively address these types of wicked problems?
