Reintegrating Scholarship in Business Schools: Reclaiming Bildung and the University’s Civic Purpose
Bernard Burnes
Stirling Management School, University of Stirling, UK
Brian Howieson
The University of Limassol, Cyprus
Volume 21: 2026, pp. 00-00; ABSTRACT
This paper responds to sustained critiques of business schools as institutions that have
surrendered their foundational educational purposes to the logic of markets, metrics and
managerialism. It argues that the shortcomings attributed to business schools—most notably the
perceived irrelevance of research, the marginalisation of teaching and weak engagement with
societal challenges—stem from a historically-contingent fragmentation of scholarship and an
erosion of the civic mission that once animated European universities. Drawing on the European
tradition of Bildung and on the university ideals of Wilhelm von Humboldt and Cardinal John Henry
Newman, the paper argues for a revitalised conception of scholarship in which the cultivation of
socially responsible citizens is treated not as an aspiration peripheral to academic life but as its
central purpose. The paper situates contemporary business school failures within a longer historical
narrative of institutional drift, tracing the displacement of a unified and ethically-grounded scholarly
culture by narrow performance regimes and neoliberal market logics. It concludes by outlining
conditions under which business schools might recover a more principled, civic and humanistic
orientation, offering a response to the question of what universities are for that is adequate to the
challenges of the twenty-first century.
Keywords: bildung, business schools, scholarship, von humboldt, newman, civic university, higher
education.
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