Reimagining Business and Management as a Force for Good

Abstract

The literature has called on business and management scholars to help understand the global challenges we face and to find solutions. The prevailing narratives that have implicitly informed our understanding of business and management knowledge and practice as good need to be reimagined. We question whether our existing theoretical lenses, along with fundamental underlying assumptions about what constitutes labour, value and its creation, and the nature of assets, liabilities and materiality, act as a barrier to advancing business and management practice as a force for good and explore whether we need to go beyond applying existing theory to new research questions. Both Agency Theory and Stakeholder Theory have proven ineffective in aligning social and economic interests, while our disciplinary and publishing customs constrain our imagination and impede conceptions of fundamentally new ways of practising business. We explore why we need to reimagine business and management; what we mean by reimagining business and management and what it means to be a force for good. We conclude that if the purpose of business needs to be reimagined, business schools will also need to change to be major catalysts in this process.