Why management schools are a real economic actor
The article revisits the main themes of a chapter in a book promoted by EFMD, the network for schools and companies that aim to develop socially responsible leaders and managers.
For decades, business schools thrived in a world that believed unshakably in globalization. Capital moved freely, talent chased opportunity, and management education could be exported across borders with relative ease. That world no longer exists, and business schools must internalize the new reality and change.
What we are experiencing is a structural shift. The post-pandemic economy, marked by geopolitical fragmentation, the return of inflation, active industrial policies, and competition among regional blocs, has radically altered the context in which companies operate. And, as a consequence, the context in which business schools must redefine their mission.
Business schools can no longer define themselves as neutral providers of educational services or as mere educational institutions. They are genuine economic actors. In the era of “slowbalization,” the idea that business schools can retreat into disciplinary silos or a domestic comfort zone is dangerous. Closed economic systems may afford schools oriented exclusively toward local needs; interdependent economies cannot. When production, finance, technology, and geopolitics intertwine, management education becomes part of the infrastructure that determines whether a country, or a continent for that matter, can compete.
The future, therefore, does not need “business schools” as we have known them. It needs “schools of magement”: communities that bring together research and education and are oriented toward responsibility, impact, and the connection between economic value and social values.
Europe, from this perspective, offers much to reflect on. Over the past twenty years, the number of European companies among the largest in the world has declined significantly, and the problem goes far beyond individual firms. Large companies are engines of innovation, magnets for talent, pillars of industrial ecosystems. Their weakness reflects deeper structural limits: fragmented capital markets, weak industrial policies, and, above all, an inability to think systemically about the link between education and economic scale.
Without institutions capable of training leaders for large, complex, and global organizations, the ambition to create “European champions” remains an empty phrase. Business schools sit at the center of this contradiction.
Schools that are unable to engage with large companies, confront the frontiers of innovation, or integrate skills such as data science, artificial intelligence, and geopolitics are destined to lose influence. Their alumni may be employable, but not prepared to lead.
At the same time, the scale of global financial wealth, now many times greater than world GDP, confronts us with another responsibility. Every investment decision shapes the real economy, for better or worse. If value creation becomes disconnected from values, growth itself becomes fragile.
Management schools are bridges between finance and society, between theory and decision-making. Applied research, dialogue with companies, and the education of future leaders are the mechanisms through which financial returns can be realigned with social impact. Management schools shape human capital, orient entrepreneurial ambition, and influence how companies interpret risk, sustainability, and long-term value. Ignoring this means weakening one of the levers capable of steering capitalism toward a more resilient direction.
Caselli, Stefano, Business schools and the new global world: will they never walk alone?, in Cornuel, Eric (ed.), Management education and the rise of uncertainty of global business, Oxford Academic.
