On Your Mind, Not in Your Face: Encouraging Heterodoxy with Subtle Ubiquity in Business and Management Schools

In this mostly conceptual article, we address calls to promote heterodox thinking within business schools to develop alternative approaches to management, alternative economies and organizations that can better address societal-level ‘grand challenges’ from social justice to ecological sustainability. We illustrate our thinking by discussing the ideas behind a project: Re-Organise. Drawing on the work of Sara Ahmed, we consider the performative dimensions of introducing critical ideas in business and management schools; we argue that students will often have an affective form of resistance to new and challenging ideas, not because of their content per se, but because they are unknown and therefore experienced as challenging. To counter this resistance, we suggest there is value in introducing heterodox ideas in low-level but widespread ways in order to acclimatize students to them. We explain how within Re-Organise we have started developing this approach in three universities in the UK, by asking lecturers and professional services staff to introduce references to heterodox ideas such as cooperatives—into their work. Put simply, we want to expose students to these ideas as frequently as possible, even if this often means only superficial engagement. Whilst this approach is not intended to replace the more far-reaching change in business school pedagogy which we believe is necessary, we think that working towards what we call subtle ubiquity can help slowly produce more positive affective responses.