Head Games: Introducing Tomorrow's Business Elites to Institutionalized Inequality

Abstract

The author, who teaches in a business school where much emphasis is placed on managing the imperatives of the `global economy' and committing the 4 P's of marketing to memory, argues that, important as these technical concerns may be, the most pressing strategic business issues remain the enduring ones of human dignity and engaged citizenship. Accordingly, this article describes an empirical exercise that revisits an annual campus event in an attempt to alert students to the local gender, racial, and class hierarchies that they collectively, and `mindlessly', reproduce. Originally conceived as an early exposure to the workings of institutionalized dominance, this exercise evolved into a reflective account of just how difficult a `rethinking through' of this kind can be: testament to the perversely obdurate nature of lived theory.