Business Schools Rex: Warwick University Ltd

On Wednesday 3 June 1970, Warwick University’s Board of Social Studies discussed a memorandum cautioning against the expansion of ‘business studies’ by John Rex, the recently arrived professor of sociology. Distinguishing industrial relations from business studies, he argued that the latter should not be taught as an undergraduate discipline. Coming so soon after the issue of the ‘Warwick Files’, Rex’s memorandum was delivered into a charged situation in which many students and staff had become profoundly disenchanted with the university’s management.

However, fifty years later the business school now dominates Warwick and almost all UK universities, being both its cash machine and its operating language. Industrial relations has been eclipsed as a field of enquiry but more important is the way that business and management practice now provides the operating language and governance of the university itself. It is now far too late to imagine that universities might have nothing to do with business, but there is an opportunity to radicalize what ‘business studies’ means. If we shut down the business school, then we must replace it with the School for Organizing, a place for studying how we rescue ourselves from carbon capitalism.