In the UK, the business school academic generally lacks cultural capital, largely because the economic utilitarianism of business has always sat uneasily with the pretensions to cultural reproduction which are held in other parts of the university. Knowledge about business might claim to be really useful knowledge, but it is unlikely to help the Professor of Management have tea with the Professor of History. But this is not a stable state of affairs. As the business school becomes a central part of the university, and the university becomes more like the business school, it becomes possible to absorb disciplines that seem to have nothing to do with management. It is hence quite possible that a wider sense of culture and history might become the next fashionable turn that would begin to provide the cultural capital that is widely lacking within the business school. Just as corporations gain some reflected status by sponsoring The Rolling Stones, Mick Jagger plays Ned Kelly, and Keith Richards becomes Jack Sparrow’s dad in the third Pirates of the Caribbean film, so could management academics sponsor themselves by claiming to understand cultural resistance. The business school has managed to ingest everything else that it has been faced with so far, and there seems to be no good reason why the economic outlaws and their alternative businesses might not become both a topic and a resource, too, inlawed whether they like it or not.

Martin Barker, Alternative Business: Outlaws, Crime and Culture