During my Master's degree, I was inspired by the words of Kofi Annan at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg: "We now understand that both business and society stand to benefit from working together. The corporate sector has the finances, the technology and the management to make all this happen. The corporate sector need not wait for governments to take decisions for them to take initiatives."
These words resonated so strongly with me that I decided to do a PhD – combining both business and development thinking. My proposed research was going to be interdisciplinary. I was accepted at a top-ranking UK university and received a scholarship from the Department for International Development. Things were rosy. But I would soon find out that although Annan's ideas make sense in the real world, the academic world sees things much differently. I faced two worlds so separate that any attempt at actual interdisciplinary research would be a struggle, if not suicidal for my PhD project.
The reason for this polarisation is assumptions, taken for granted, that have over time produced disapproval between the two disciplines.
Business academics, for the most part, seek to further the interest of the firm – they research and theorise on how to make companies more efficient, more profitable, faster growing, with more satisfied employees and so on. And as the majority of business scholars express a pro-business attitude, I expected development scholars to similarly be pro-development.
Conversely, as I started engaging with development academics by meeting them and auditing their courses, an entirely different picture emerged. I found development scholars to be inherently critical of development with some even adopting an anti-development perspective. In all honesty, what exactly development scholars do, and what they are trying to achieve, remains puzzling.
It's not that development scholars, or business scholars, are wrong in their means of pursuing knowledge. Any new understanding of the world should be embraced. What I am less appreciative of is when scholars become dogmatic – something that exists within both camps.
When I questioned an African studies professor about this anti-development perspective, she said: "as academics, we are responsible for questioning everything". She dismissed the idea that business schools assume any sense of critical thinking. According to her, "business scholars have always been a slave to the corporation."
This would not sit comfortably with many respected critics of the neo-liberal model that work, or have worked, in business schools, for example the late Sumantra Ghoshal. It is precisely this myopic view of so many reputable academics that constrain the possibilities for interdisciplinary research.
Each discipline is entitled to its own research agenda; usually accompanied by its own ideology. But if these assumptions start to clash too strongly, working together to produce ground-breaking interdisciplinary research becomes unlikely.
Business and development scholars are in fact fighting for the same cause – growth. How they seek to achieve good growth is another matter. As an aspiring young academic this saddens me. Industry does not wait for academia to catch-up. Businesses are integral to development and will go ahead with or without their activities being studied, analysed and theorised about. This unfortunately means that we lose out on valuable knowledge, and as a result, have little to say when it comes to policy.
Corporate social responsibility, which is gaining serious traction in business schools, has hardly made an appearance amongst development scholars. This is only now starting to change with conceptualisations such as Africapitalism gaining recognition.
Admittedly, there are some academics that do actually cross the divide between business and development to work together (for example in micro-finance or small-scale entrepreneurship studies in the developing world). Yet the research they produce seem to have either a development slant (for example, how microfinance affects gender equality), or a business slant (for example, how microfinance creates new business models). Studies that involve big business – those that look at multinationals or business elites and their role in stimulating development – are even rarer. Although these disciplines are sometimes supportive, they are seldom mutually constitutive.
I am not arguing that either business or development does a better job. Rather, a duality needs to exist where both disciplines start to collaborate on equal grounds. If not, scholars will remain in their ivory towers and collaboration will continue to be suppressed.
George Ferns is a doctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh Business School and is fully funded by DFID under the Commonwealth Scholarship. He is also an Associate of the University of Edinburgh's Sustainable Business Initiative
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