In his 2019 book, Making Global MBAs: The Culture of Business and the Business of Culture, Andrew Orta delves into the world of the MBA education—one of the most prestigious of graduate programs in the United States and the world—to show how they engage with and incorporate culture in their professional practice. In revealing how MBAs convert unique cultural specificities into manageable risk factors, Orta also surveys the history of business education and critiques its streamlining disposition towards a complex world and its problems. In this piece, Nazli Azergun converses with Andrew Orta on navigating business settings as an anthropologist, delicacies of conducting ethnographies in organizations, dialogues across sub-fields of anthropology, and the current condition of universities under neoliberal governance regimes.

Nazli Azergun:

In your book, you define the managerial subject as someone who manages by translating unassimilable contextual differences into controllable risk components. What is your own stance regarding this subject position? Do you see any alterations to the managerial subject in the time since the book came out?

“In one sense, this is the magic of MBA programs: they morph and adapt to reinvent and recast the fundamental extractive logics and mechanisms of capitalism. However, it is highly unlikely that they will offer a fundamental rethinking of the logic of capitalism.”

Andrew Orta:

When I was preparing for this research, I was often told that MBAs do not learn anything in their programs, that they are just there for credentials and networks. This was unsettling to me because part of my original plan was to do a content analysis of what MBA students were learning about doing business outside of the United States. In many ways, those warnings were correct––MBA students do not develop a deep understanding of a particular place. However, during my research, I saw how MBAs are getting much more than they bargained for, as the curriculum and other features of the programs instill a specific orientation to time, to knowledge, and to selfhood. This cultivated predisposition privileges fast-paced decision-making and techniques of simplification that render a complex world into manageable problems. As such, MBA programs are rituals of subject formation, connecting this habitus of compression and commensuration to what are presented as timeless truths of capitalism: the time value of money, the magic of markets, and the calculus of risk and rewards. Along the way, they also pick up a sense of being extremely talented and hard-working. And this self-attribution of merit becomes an alibi for their compensation and class privilege. All considered, the MBA programs serve to create subjects with a knack for extraction of capitalist value and also to justify the elite status of these managerial subjects.

I think we all encounter the world through simplifying categories; so, in that sense, MBA students are no different than the rest of us. But the risk entailed by the managerial subject is twofold. First, these managerial subjects command high degrees of power and privilege, and their naturalization of value extraction and risk calculation serves the neoliberal project of economizing multiple facets of life – with social and political costs that we can see clearly. Second, these economistic simplifications of the world are frequently wrong, and when MBAs get it wrong, economic and social catastrophes often follow. One clear example is the 2008 financial crisis. 

The Great Recession prompted a lot of reflection and some reforms of the MBA curriculum. And these responses were still unfolding when the pandemic struck—bringing additional challenges to MBA education and to the capitalist “brand” as all sorts of precarities and inequalities were laid bare by COVID-19’s impact. Many of the ways US programs are currently repositioning themselves are continuous with the changes underway after 2008: aggressively incorporating online education; reducing their dependence on international enrollment, which they will have to continue for the near future as the pandemic stalled the circulation of international students. Further, the propositions held by traditional MBA programs are too far removed from the more environmentally and socially engaged considerations of today’s corporate world––hence the trend toward combined programs that blend fields like engineering, technology design, data science, and medicine, with business education. This shift also brought forth an increased emphasis on social entrepreneurship, in place of a pipeline to finance and banking that was once so central to the MBA brand.

Elsewhere, I’ve described the resilience of MBA programs––weathering economic crises and scandals—as the “zombie MBA.” Applications may go down a couple of years in a row, spurring Op-Eds about the “death of the MBA,” but these programs are remarkably adept at repositioning themselves, always rising from the dead. As part of their current repositioning, they are responding to the overreliance on international enrollment, the protectionist trade policies of the Trump administration, the renewed emphasis on stakeholder capitalism, the rise of the data economy, and the shift towards hybrid workplaces. In one sense, this is the magic of MBA programs: they morph and adapt to reinvent and recast the fundamental extractive logics and mechanisms of capitalism. However, it is highly unlikely that they will offer a fundamental rethinking of the logic of capitalism. Neither should we expect this from MBA programs––the continued fetishization of the market as an omnipotent problem-solving device will always limit the possibilities of an otherwise. Nevertheless, there is a lot of well-meaning and impactful work being done through business schools and their alumni in areas like social entrepreneurship.

“And this is one of the difficult things about anthropology: hearing so many people talk about culture in a way that does not really align with what anthropology imagines culture to be. But I think we should recognize that this particular culture talk is native to the world of business, and we should try to understand it as it is.”

NA:

Business schools rely on a field-specific understanding of culture, which is radically different from an anthropological understanding. How did you feel navigating MBA programs as an anthropologist? Did you experience any tensions between you as the anthropologist and the MBA ‘natives?’

AO:

MBAs obviously have a more streamlined approach to culture than anthropologists, and this approach shifts in coordination with changes in global capitalism. Along the way, there are important engagements with the relevant anthropological literature, such as the influence of Edward T. Hall on the MBA way of teaching culture. Over the post-WWII decades, “culture” was widely acknowledged in the business literature as a useful tool of management. The sort of competence encouraged back then took the quality of regional specialty for the purpose of undertaking business there––namely, MBA programs boasted of “[their] man in Cairo.” However, there has been a shift towards a more universal cultural competence, the idea that any business leader should be able to work anywhere.

This sort of universal cultural competence requires a certain degree of standardization of how we understand cultural difference. The most important contributor here is undoubtedly the Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede, who developed a quantified representation of cultural distance along a set of dimensions like “individualism” or “power-distance.” Of course, this is far from an adequate engagement with culture, it just measures the variation of the means of responses to different survey questions. And as an anthropologist, I am almost required by union regulation to be offended by this reductive approach to culture. And this is one of the difficult things about anthropology: hearing so many people talk about culture in a way that does not really align with what anthropology imagines culture to be. But I think we should recognize that this particular culture talk is native to the world of business, and we should try to understand it as it is. This is also part of a broader challenge for anthropology, as we continue to rethink and critique our ideas about culture, we should not box ourselves into a corner where we are not able to engage with ideas from other fields. In this regard, we can begin by recognizing the important work of anthropologists of business, who are mostly outside of academic settings, such as Genevieve Bell, Ken Anderson, Grant McCracken, Rita Denny, and Gillian Tett.

All this being said, I see a stark difference regarding PhD-level teaching and research in business and the MBA curriculum. Many MBA faculty are doing research that they feel is much more nuanced than they are able to convey in their MBA classes. They teach their most sophisticated insights to their PhD students and then they teach a streamlined version of that to undergraduates and MBAs, who are moving very quickly and can only get a narrow slice of that academic knowledge. So, I think there are indeed MBA faculty who roll their eyes when they talk about Hofstede’s dimensions of difference. However, as aligned with the managerial subject, this approach to culture becomes a useful shorthand that is good enough for managing resources and employees.

There is also some faculty and student pushback around the whiteness of MBA programs and classrooms. During my fieldwork, students of color remarked that they heard little talk about race in their classes. Some international students chafed at the ways that they were perceived by their classmates. International faculty and faculty of color similarly were often aware of the ways they were being deployed as ambassadors of diversity within their programs. 

Surely, there is some pushback against the reduction of cultural complexity but there is also a commonly shared understanding that this is a good enough version of cultural complexity that can be used in the market. I suspect that most MBAs think this is an imperfect, yet relatively effective way of doing what they want to achieve.

NA:

Your book is also a wonderful example of building dialogue across different su