Powerless Powerhouses? Business Schools’ Pathways to Empowerment Within Public Universities

Business schools take the view that they generate significant economic value for public universities. This leads to frustration when this value seems to be under-appreciated by universities, and disproportionately redistributed to other disciplines. Business schools seek to use hard power, based on economic resource dependency, to try to bring about the outcomes they desire. Meanwhile, other disciplines use soft power to access economic resources that we, in the business school, may create. Looking at power imbalances within universities through a political capital theory lens, we observe that business schools are under-represented in decision-making structures of universities, and argue that this happens because they are disengaged from key sources of power. Specifically, they are lacking the varieties of political capital on which soft power is based, and which are central to resource distribution and support within universities. This disengagement stems from a combination of business schools’ own strategic choices and other disciplines’ preferences to keep business away from core decision-making processes within universities. We offer practical strategies for business schools’ empowerment within mature public universities. We argue that this empowerment is urgently needed for business schools to thrive and for business to mature as a discipline within the university academic community.