Neil’s co-authored paper is titled ‘Teaching (Cooperative) Business: The ‘Bluefield Experiment’ and the Future of Black Business Schools’
Race matters and racism still exists. However, although growing critical scholarship has recently questioned business schools’ management research and teaching practices, both the historical trajectories of Black Business schools and the legacy of the African American academics who shaped them remain largely unexplored.
In this paper, published in the Academy of Management Learning and Education, 4*/A+ journal in the 2021 list of top journals in the field, the authors address this intellectual lacuna by providing a critical history of experiential business teaching at the Department of Business Administration at Bluefield Colored Institute.
Building on insights from Critical Race Theory (CRT), they reconstruct how management education at Bluefield during the 1920s-1930s was influenced by Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois’ pioneering ideas and Prof. W. C. Matney’s practical experiments on economic cooperation. They then consider the relevance of cooperative economics and business education as well as experiential teaching to modern Black business schools, contributing to debates on both curriculum reform and how mono-cultural histories of management constrain present and future developments.
Neil comments: "Reminding ourselves of past attempts to create social justice through business informs current practices - and stimulates the imagination as we develop solutions to today's challenges. Encouraging students to experiment and learn social entrepreneurial skills remains as important today as in the past. "
You can find the paper at: Prieto, L.C., Phipps, S.T.A., Giugni, L. and Stott, N. (2021) “Teaching (cooperative) business: the ‘Bluefield experiment’ and the future of Black business schools.” Academy of Management Learning and Education (DOI: 10.5465/amle.2020.0127) (published online June 2021)
About Dr Neil Stott
Neil Stott is a Faculty (Professor level) in Management Practice, director of the Master of Studies in Social Innovation Programme and Co-Director of the Cambridge Centre for Social Innovation.
Read Neil’s full profile here.