Business schools, the anxiety of finance, and the order of the ‘middle tier’

ABSTRACT

Financial imagination plays a fundamental, yet ambivalent role in the establishment of hierarchies within and between business schools, and in business life at large. This study examines this process in the ‘middle tier’ of business education: that is, in the social space in which students and instructors understand themselves to occupy a ‘mid-range’ position within an order of excellence and success. Largely articulated through business school rankings, this order strongly relies on the centrality of the financial curriculum, proficiency in which is understood as both a proxy for smartness and a sign of moneymaking capacity. In the ‘middle tier’, this order manifests in the form of an anxiety: an order that, though legitimate, is thought not to be attained, or hardly attainable. The study draws from ethnographic investigation in a ‘middle tier’ business school with attention to how finance is made sense of in relation to an alternative curriculum, and in connection with the aim of ‘making it to the top’. A comparison with a ‘top tier’ business school allows furthering understanding of how the order of business schools relies on the anxiety of finance in order to reproduce an acquiescence to dominant financial imagination.

KEYWORDS:

• Business schools
• financial education
• rankings
• anthropology of finance
• financial imagination

Acknowledgements

This research was presented at the CPO Research Seminar, ESCP Europe (Paris, 24 March 2016), at the Economic Sociology Seminar, Columbia University (New York, 6 October 2016), and at the Performances of Value Workshop (Bologna, 13–14 January 2017). We thank Marceau Chenault, Kimberly Chong, Claire Dambrin, Wendy Espeland, Elena Esposito, Shao Jing, Kristian Kreiner, Teresa Kuan, Daniel Sands, David Stark, Wei Wei and Zhu Yujing for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Horacio Ortiz is associate professor at the Research Institute of Anthropology, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China, and researcher at Université Paris-Dauphine, PSL Research University, CNRS, IRISSO, Paris, France. He researches everyday practices in the global financial industry from the point of view of political anthropology. He is the author of Valeur financière et vérité. Enquête d'anthropologie politique sur l'évaluation des entreprises cotées en bourse (2014, Presses de Sciences Po) and the co-author of Capitalization: A Cultural Guide (2017, Presses des Mines).

Fabian Muniesa is a researcher at the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation, at the Ecole des Mines de Paris (Mines ParisTech, PSL Research University). He is interested in the cultures of business life and the politics of economic expertise. He is the author of The Provoked Economy: Economic Reality and the Performative Turn (2014, Routledge) and the co-author of Capitalization: A Cultural Guide (2017, Presses des Mines).

Notes

1 Horacio Ortiz conducted participant observation as a finance instructor in Middle B-School for three semesters, in 2011, 2012, and 2014, teaching courses in ‘corporate finance’, ‘international finance’, ‘financial markets in Asia’ and ‘country risk’, to students in the bachelor and the master's programs. The context was a part-time teaching engagement with Middle B-School, a circumstance that was treated from the outset as a fieldwork opportunity for a wider project on the anthropology of finance in business education, carried out in collaboration with Fabian Muniesa (ERC Grant No. 263529). Ethnographic materials gathered from the teaching experience were combined with parallel sources, such as access to Middle B-School internal documentation, and regular, onsite, informal exchanges with students, faculty, and the administration, in particular the head of Middle B-School's China campus. Conducting teaching activities also implied regular exchanges with the executive direction of the school based in Europe, in particular with managers in charge of designing the role and content of finance courses. Fabian Muniesa conducted interviews, observations and archival research at Top B-School in 2013 and observations at Middle B-School in 2014, as part of the same project.

2 Surveys were carried out in 2012, 2013, and 2014, and a focus group in 2013. The surveys and the focus group were prepared in collaboration with the head of the China campus at Middle B-School, who was also instructor in sustainable development (henceforth referred to as John Smith).

3 Interpretive claims are sustained with reference to a series of representative empirical illustrations selected from the ethnographic materials. When mention is made of interactions with the finance instructor, these mean firsthand ethnographic observations by Horacio Ortiz in that capacity.

4 Details on the business school ranking methodology are available from the website of the Financial Times: http://rankings.ft.com/ (accessed 15 March 2017). For an examination of the Financial Times rankings and its consequences, see Devinney et al. (2008) and Wedlin (2006, 2007, 2011a, 2011b).

5 Studies of student performance in business education indicate that overall level of achievement strongly relates to results in core disciplines such as finance and economics, and that the failure to master finance concepts links to deficient mathematical skills (Ely and Hittle 1990; Sulaiman and Mohezar 2006; Kaighobadi and Allen 2008).

6 A first version of the questionnaire was submitted in October 2012 to the total population of students enrolled in programs at the China campus for the Fall Term (i.e. about 250 students), generating 41 valid responses; a second version in December 2013, generating 55 valid responses; and a final one in March 2014, generating 215 valid responses.

7 The focus group facilitators were Horacio Ortiz (finance instructor) and John Smith (sustainable development instructor and head of China campus). The focus group was conducted in April 2013. The seven participants were recruited on the sole base of their interest to take part in an after-class informal discussion on finance and sustainable development courses at the China campus.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Research Council [grant no. 263529].