Reckoning with Slavery: How Revisiting Management’s Uncomfortable Past Can Help Us Confront Challenges Today

Abstract

As we rethink the goals of business education, we need to consider both the ways such training can be used and the ways it has been misused. The history of slavery offers valuable insights for those who care not just about running profitable businesses, but ethical ones as well. Beyond a general cautionary tale, slavery offers specific lessons for the ways managers use data. In our data-obsessed moment, reflecting on slaveholders’ calculations can help us to see how quantification can erase and obscure human costs. Slaveholders left behind lots of account books—essentially paper spreadsheets of output, valuations, and lives. These records offer insights into how numbers and balance sheets erase some things even as they make others visible.