Chilean management education: rhetoric of pragmatism, consumerism, individualism and elitism

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to understand the character and the role of higher education in business in relation to the wider institutional and structural contexts within which they function. Being loyal to that widespread background, business schools in Chile have become efficient providers of appropriate goods and services for their respective clients and consumers, behaving more like corporations and businesses rather than educational institutions. From this perspective, business education’s alignment with the wider political and socio-economic shifts associated with the developments of market economies and economic globalization is a necessary reflection. In this paper we will provide an account of our problematization of management education practices in Chile. This practice was pictured as one of the main characters at the forefront of the Chilean neo-liberal revolution during the final years of the last century.
In particular, we will unravel more closely the chain of signifiers articulating the meaning of Chilean higher business education. This articulation is recuperated mainly around how those involved in the management education practice talk about (our)themselves. As well as specialised press writings, some academic accounts and fragments from our own ‘ethnographic’ involvement are used for this purpose. Particular attention is paid to the social, political and fantasmatic logics (GLYNOS; HOWARTH, 2007) as key elements of our own explanation of this practice, which in turn informs our critical standpoint.