Homo responsabilis as an extension of the neoliberal hidden curriculum: The triple responsibilization of responsible management education

Abstract

In the responsible turn in business school education and management learning, the responsibility approach is proposed as a possible panacea against a hidden curriculum which leads to damaging business practice. The explicit promise of responsible management learning and education is that homo oeconomicus can be re-formed in the image of a responsible business subject, what we here call ‘homo responsabilis’. We explore how a business school curriculum centred on responsibility affects key subject positions such as consumer, employee, manager, entrepreneur, investor and leader. In three responsible management learning and education illustrations at our business school, we observe three layers of responsibilization of the individual: responsibilization for self-enhancement, responsibilization for economic prosperity and responsibilization for social and environmental sustainability. We find that these three layers of responsibilization impact business school subjects in several problematic ways: excessive moral burdening of consumers, overburdening of self-managing employees and fantasmatic gripping of prospective entrepreneurs. Our contribution to critical studies of responsible management learning and education is twofold: (1) we show how explicit responsible management learning and education curricula tend to extend the neoliberal HC, and (2) we complement studies calling for re-politicizing responsible management learning and education by suggesting transformative learning ways to generate explicitly ethico-political imaginations that can help in resisting individual responsibilization in business school education.