Business, capitalism and structural violence
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Capitalism, Business and Structural Violence
I’ve written this blog to help you as business studies students understand business in ways business schools will not teach. I have long believed that by teaching an uncritical, inauthentic, unreflexive and incomplete version of business studies to you, we are sleepwalking you — grooming you — into worsening the existential planetary crises we are daily facing.
Business has consequences; it is a cause and effect phenomenon. It impacts the world by bringing consumption to us, but in giving, it must inevitably take, and it is the world we depend on that it takes from. Earth is not infinite and technology will not make it so; it makes no sense to live in such a delusion, if you want your children to experience a stable existence they can afford.
This blog post is designed to help you interpret business studies through something called structural violence, an idea that developed outside and long before business studies, and which is long overdue for a visit. I am deploying it because it will, I believe, help you see our role in mis-educating you, your role in reproducing that miseducation, and the consequences of that misdirection for your own lives, and those of your future children. I’d like to begin with the relationship between capitalism and business, since the two terms are intrinsically interwoven, and then move on to how they combine to produce the existential planetary violence that will define all our futures.
Capitalism is a system of incentives and rules performed by business as its organisational form. It isn't predominantly thought of as animate or subjective or ideological or anything other than a neutral, disinterested and mechanistic purveyor of prosperity. Outside that narrow, self-absorbed and unreflective silo, however, other disciplines show capitalism and business as politically constructed and deeply ideological, and responsible for producing profound destruction and violence across the globe even in ‘responsible’ form. Within business education, criticism typically remains a minority perspective relative to dominant managerial and market-oriented approaches that continue to shape mainstream teaching and practice. Meaningful criticism is domesticated: reduced, reformed, reframed until real world impact is submerged in abstract theorization. Business schools are the handmaids of business and capitalism. They endorse and enforce a violent ideology of extraction and exploitation.
To understand how business produces violence, we have to look beyond business studies. Johan Galtung’s concept of structural violence is central, although Gandhi got there before him. Writing in 1969, Galtung argued that violence is not limited to direct physical harm, like war, or an unavoidable factory accident, or a bar fight. It also occurs
whenever social arrangements systematically prevent people from achieving their full potential.
That sounds massive, and it is. But so is capitalism as a form of far-reaching violence. It is local, regional, global, and now extraterrestrial. Structural violence (violence caused by social structures, in our case, capitalism and business) is embedded in and a product of institutions, economic systems and everyday practices. It’s when organisation impedes potential.
Peter Prontzos once wrote that structural violence refers to the
deleterious conditions that derive from economic and political structures of power, created and maintained by human actions and institutions
Life limiting things happen everywhere because of how our institutions function in the way we have designed them to function. Mary Anglin said structural violence was
the expropriation of vital economic and non-material resources and the operation of systems of social stratification or categorization that subvert people’s chances for survival
And Dan Christie et al have this to say about structural violence:
It is almost always invisible, embedded in ubiquitous social structures, normalized by stable institutions and regular experience. Structural violence occurs whenever people are disadvantaged by political, legal, economic, or cultural traditions
They all identify determinism, a force at work composed of rules that built institutions that project values, decided by people, rather than by random, cruel fate. Avoidable harms caused by how we chose to design our institutions; cause and effect that doesn’t have to be that way because they have been ordered by subjective human action. Structural violence occurs when business arrangements systematically prevent individuals or communities from realising their potential, for example, through unsafe working conditions that cause life-changing accidents, poverty wages that can’t cover food, environmental degradation that damages health, unequal access to healthcare that leads to permanent bodily damage, unequal access to education that prevents social and economic mobility and perpetuates disadvantage and impoverishment, or job insecurity built into business models. Structural violence names the social arrangements that systematically produce avoidable injury, premature death, or diminished life chances; in this case, the social arrangement is business, as organised according to capitalist principles.
These outcomes are often not the result of one malicious decision but of routine organisational practices, competitive pressures, cost-cutting logics and institutional norms that prioritise efficiency or profit over wellbeing. In this sense, ‘organization impeding potential’ means that the very structures designed to generate prosperity can simultaneously constrain health, opportunity, dignity or future prospects, sometimes invisibly and over long periods. Understanding this idea helps business students recognise that economic success and social harm coexist, and that managerial decisions operate within wider systems that shape whose potential is enabled and whose is restricted. For gains, there are losses.
We believe in capitalism; yet structural violence is hardwired into it. It mediates life outcomes across the planet, for all species, far into the future. It is an existential entity, even an unnatural hyperobject, for those that like new language. Structural violence allows us to see more clearly how the conduct of business harms all of us, and that allows us to make more informed choices for ourselves and our futures.
So, for Galtung and others, structural violence refers to
Settings within which individuals may do enormous amounts of harm to other human beings without ever intending to do so, just performing their regular duties as a job defined in the structure (1985: 145–146).
Structural violence is the ordinary, natural, inevitable outcome rather than an exceptional failure. It is constitutive of capitalism and business. Recognising this requires authentic pedagogy that is honest about what business is doing to you, to others, your planet and your futures, and how existential catastrophe is domesticated in the Business School. In business terms, we might call it ‘an honest accounting’ or ‘a balancing of the books’. Less the Wharton School, more the ‘warts ’n’ all’ School. Looking at business studies this way allows us to engage honestly and authentically with the whole story, not just the parts that suit our narratives and the fantasies we have been taught from childhood.
Let me put it another way. Imagine you were studying medicine and they didn’t teach you that surgery hurts, or that some drugs have side effects. It would be like training engineers without studying structural failure, or accountants who never record liabilities. The issue is not simply incomplete knowledge; it is professional education organized so that predictable harms remain excluded. In that sense, authentic pedagogy is not an optional critical add-on but a precondition for professional, and indeed existential honesty.
The purpose of engaging you with these issues is to make the course intellectually honest and complete, equipping you to recognise the persistent global and structural harms that accompany everyday managerial practice. This reflects a responsibility not merely to transfer knowledge but to cultivate critical awareness so that you understand how organizational decisions shape social life, ecological stability and the futures you and your children will inhabit. Such awareness sharpens your ability to assess consequences, navigate competing responsibilities and make informed choices about the organizations you join and the practices you support.
Critical understanding is therefore enabling. It allows you to act deliberately, align professional decisions with personal values and contribute to business practices that sustain rather than undermine human and planetary wellbeing. The concept of structural violence offers language for making these systemic connections visible and for engaging more candidly with the long-term implications of contemporary economic activity. So, how is capitalism so violent? What do critical academics say about it?
Capitalism as extraction, accumulation and dispossession.
You have been taught capitalism is an equitable distributor of resources. But to get to distribution, capitalism depends on extraction, accumulation and dispossession. Bobby Banerjee (2008) uses the term necrocapitalism to describe situations where profit accumulation depends on environmental destruction, displacement or marginalization of populations. Rob Nixon (2011) introduces the idea of slow violence to refer to the environmental harm that unfolds gradually but produces profound long-term damage to the natural world, rivers, oceans, land and vulnerable communities. Together, these perspectives highlight how economic prosperity in one location may depend on environmental degradation, labour precarity or resource depletion elsewhere. Business schools foreground managerial technique, market efficiency, investment strategy, governance reform and ethical voluntarism, but they marginalize, ignore and exclude analyses of disposability, extraction and organised exposure to forms of violence that sustain global business systems.
Structural violence refers to avoidable harm produced not by isolated acts but by organised institutional arrangements that systematically constrain the flourishing of life. Johan Galtung’s formulation directs attention to the causal links between economic structures, everyday practices and long-term outcomes. Although often discussed in relation to human wellbeing, its implications extend more broadly to non-human species and planetary ecological systems.
Capitalism and business operate as highly legitimized social institutions: normalized through participation, reinforced by narratives that present market organisation as inevitable, sustained by governance mechanisms such as corporate social responsibility that signal adequate ethical oversight, and frequently underwritten by faith in technological solutions to systemic problems. The concept of structural violence helps make visible how these institutional arrangements generate consequences that may otherwise appear diffuse or accidental. It connects capitalist organisation to phenomena such as what Rob Nixon calls ‘slow violence’ — gradual environmental harm with cumulative human impact — and what Bobby Banerjee describes as ‘necrocapitalism’, where economic accumulation proceeds through dispossession, ecological degradation and preventable suffering with global repercussions.
We can see, for example, how corporate cost-cutting, regulatory avoidance or environmental externalization lead directly to disasters like the Rana Plaza garment factory collapse in Bangladesh — where over 1,100 workers died after safety shortcuts in a cost-pressured global supply chain. We see how management resource practices and market pressures lead to the Deepwater Horizon disaster that fouled 1,300 miles of shoreline in the US. We can see the structural violence of capitalism in the Flint water crisis that demonstrated how cost-driven policy decisions and regulatory breakdown exposed residents to contaminated, privatized drinking water. In the pharmaceutical sector, aggressive marketing and deliberately misleading claims about the addictiveness of OxyContin, produced by Purdue Pharma, contributed significantly to the opioid epidemic in the United States, leading to widespread addiction and hundreds of thousands of overdose deaths. It was brilliantly covered in an award-winning miniseries drama led by Michael Keaton in 2021.
Similar structural dynamics appear in food systems. The global expansion of highly processed fast food, engineered for affordability, convenience and hyper-palatability, has been linked to rising obesity and associated diseases such as type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular illness. These health outcomes are consequences of the standardized business practices of marketing strategies, supply chains and pricing models optimized for scale and profitability. Capitalism and business cause people’s life chances to shrink not only in terms of mortality but of mobility and employability and opportunity, all the whilst paying to influence legislation designed to protect people from life harms caused by business excess.
The tobacco industry provides one of the clearest examples of structural violence through corporate behaviour. For decades, major tobacco companies denied and obscured scientific evidence linking smoking to cancer and other diseases while continuing aggressive marketing in order to bolster profits. This too attracted the ire of the film industry, who delivered a black satire led by Aaron Lockhart showing how the natural processes of business produced lethal and non-lethal impact on millions, if not billions, of people worldwide.
Similarly, the alcohol industry lobbies against stricter regulation and pricing controls despite clear evidence linking excessive consumption to long-term public health harm, creating illness and dependency as aspects of structural violence for which capitalist practice and profit is responsible. Alcohol is not a capitalist invention, and its harms have long been understood. What capitalism adds is a commercial architecture designed to expand and monetize those harms. Through aggressive marketing, price manipulation, lobbying against regulation and global market expansion, firms can turn human vulnerability into revenue. The result is not accidental damage but structurally incentivized harm: a form of structural violence in which profitability depends upon the sustained circulation of risk and damage.
Few examples show structural violence so starkly across scale as the fossil fuel industry: its effects begin in the womb through pollution and prenatal exposure and extend outward to the planetary climate systems that shape the world future generations will inhabit. Industrial-scale oil, coal and gas production has driven atmospheric warming, air pollution and ecosystem degradation, contributing to premature deaths, displacement, food insecurity and climate instability. These harms are not incidental side effects; they are structurally embedded in a growth-oriented economic system that externalizes environmental costs while concentrating financial returns. Even as climate science has become unequivocal, fossil fuel expansion and continued exploration reflect institutional incentives prioritizing short-term profit over long-term planetary stability. In this sense, the industry illustrates how capitalist accumulation generates systemic, preventable harm across generations paradigmatic case of structural violence.
These discussions lead to a more uncomfortable question about how business is taught. If education normalises prevailing economic arrangements, then curricula shape not only what students learn, but what they are unable to question. Patterns of inequality, ecological degradation and preventable harm are not isolated failures; they are systemic effects of how contemporary capitalism distributes costs and benefits through firms, markets and financial systems. Critical scholars have described these dynamics in different ways. Bobby Banerjee shows how accumulation can proceed through dispossession and ecological destruction. Rob Nixon identifies ‘slow violence’ — harm that unfolds gradually and unevenly across time and space. In Galtung’s terms, such patterns constitute structural violence: institutional arrangements that constrain life chances at human, social and planetary levels.
The pedagogical issue follows directly. When business education frames these outcomes as externalities, technical management problems or opportunities for innovation, it obscures their structural character. Teaching business primarily as a neutral toolkit for growth and efficiency reproduces the system it claims merely to analyse. This is not an accidental oversight; it is a curricular positioning that shapes how future managers understand responsibility, harm and possibility.
Recognising this does not automatically disrupt it. Business schools routinely acknowledge climate change, inequality and public health crises, but they typically present them as managerial challenges requiring better strategy, improved governance or technological innovation. The dominant response is managerial solutionism: the assumption that the same economic model that generated the harm can correct it without fundamental alteration. This dynamic becomes visible in how certain ‘solutions’ are taught. Consider the emphasis on rare earth minerals as central to decarbonization. Business is positioned as leading a radical green transformation capable of preventing ecological collapse. Yet if the underlying growth-oriented model remains intact, and if corporate actors retain substantial influence over environmental regulation, such solutions reproduce extractive patterns under a new technological banner. It just keeps digging up the planet.
The question, then, is how electrification, supply-chain optimisation or climate strategy are framed. When systemic conditions are left uninterrogated, business education extends structural violence by legitimizing and normalising the architecture that sustains it. In this sense, pedagogy does not stand outside the system; it helps reproduce the assumptions that allow it to continue.
The structural violence of the solutions we teach you
If structural violence is embedded in capitalism itself, then education about capitalism cannot be neutral. The teaching of business solutions therefore becomes a critical site where structural violence may be reproduced under the language of progress, innovation and responsibility. The cases that follow — electrification and critical minerals, supply-chain optimisation, climate strategy, pharmaceutical markets, industrial agriculture and corporate responsibility frameworks — are not random examples. They are precisely the domains where business schools claim business is correcting itself. Yet these are also sites where the structural violence of extractive, colonial and unequal dynamics frequently persist. Examining them pedagogically reveals how structural violence can be stabilised rather than challenged.
Electrification, rare earth minerals and technological solutionism
Business curricula increasingly frame electrification and digital infrastructure as pathways to sustainability. But these industries depend on intensified mineral extraction, frequently concentrated in regions historically shaped by colonial resource exploitation. Lithium extraction in South America, cobalt mining in Central Africa and rare earth processing in parts of Asia illustrate how environmental degradation, labour precarity and geopolitical dependency accompany technological transition. When business education emphasizes innovation opportunities without analysing these structural conditions, it presents sustainability as a technical upgrade rather than a systemic transformation. Structural violence thus shifts location rather than disappearing. The environmental and human costs of electrification do not evaporate; they are displaced into extractive zones where regulation is weaker and communities have less political leverage. In parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo, cobalt mining has been linked to hazardous working conditions, tunnel collapses and child labour involvement in artisanal mining sectors supplying global battery supply chains.
Investigations have documented fatalities and serious injuries in informal mining pits, alongside exposure to toxic dust and heavy metals. Lithium extraction in South America’s ‘Lithium Triangle’ has shown groundwater depletion and ecosystem stress affecting Indigenous communities dependent on fragile salt-flat hydrological systems. Rare earth processing in parts of China and Southeast Asia has been associated with toxic waste lakes and radioactive by-products contaminating soil and water systems. Tantalum (coltan) mining in Central Africa has been linked not only to dangerous labour conditions but to armed conflict financing and severe ecological damage in protected forest regions. All of this is connected to Wall Street and global markets, by capitalist organisations and institutions that structure and govern relations and dependencies.
Forests are cleared, topsoil stripped, rivers polluted and communities displaced to sustain supply chains that make renewable infrastructure possible elsewhere. The shift to green technology can therefore reproduce older colonial patterns: extraction in the Global South, consumption and technological benefit concentrated in wealthier economies. Structural violence, in this sense, does not end with decarbonization; it migrates, intensifies in specific sites and remains embedded in the same growth-oriented business architecture.
Supply chains, efficiency and violent colonial continuities
When supply-chain management education sidelines labour vulnerability, wage inequality and regulatory asymmetries, it can make the uneven human and ecological consequences of global commerce appear normal rather than systemic. The field is often taught as a technical exercise in optimisation and efficiency, with far less attention to how those efficiencies redistribute risk, security and environmental costs across workers, communities and regions. Yet outcomes linked to global supply chains — precarious employment, downward wage pressure, weaker labour protections and uneven environmental safeguards — reflect structural features of competitive production systems rather than isolated exceptions. The familiar managerial language of efficiency, flexibility and cost control signals priorities that shape these effects.
A more complete, authentic and responsible business education must therefore examine not only operational performance but also the broader social and ecological consequences through which contemporary supply chains are organised. Concepts such as Galtung’s structural violence, Banerjee’s necrocapitalism and Nixon’s slow violence each illuminate how harm can be embedded within ordinary economic arrangements. They show that domination, extraction and dispossession are not peripheral distortions of the global economy but recurring features of how it operates at scale.
Seen in this light, the global reach of capitalism intensifies both its impact and its responsibility. The cumulative effects of competitive growth, resource extraction and cost externalisation are borne not only by vulnerable communities today but by the ecological systems that sustain life itself. The ultimate scale of this dynamic is planetary: the degradation of the biosphere on which current and future generations — including your own children — will depend.
Business and the structural violence of sustainability teaching
Climate change now occupies a prominent place in business education through sustainability strategy, ESG reporting, green finance and innovation discourse. This presents business as part of the solution. Yet when these topics are framed as opportunities for competitiveness, risk management or market growth, they reproduce the structural violence they claim to address. Rather than interrogating how routine business practices — extraction, perpetual production growth, high-consumption markets and fossil fuel dependence — contribute to ecological instability, students are frequently trained to manage climate disruption without examining its systemic economic drivers.
In this sense, sustainability teaching normalizes the conditions producing environmental harm. Galtung’s concept of structural violence helps clarify this: social and economic arrangements can constrain life chances without visible coercion. Climate change already affects health, livelihoods, displacement patterns and long-term economic stability, with burdens distributed unevenly across regions (like sacrifice zones) and generations (your children). Business responses that remain embedded in growth-driven economic logics shift harms geographically — for instance through intensified mineral extraction for electrification — rather than eliminate them. Violence is geographically structured, in this sense.
These dynamics implicate students directly. Learning sustainability primarily as a managerial toolkit obscures how future professional roles participate in systems shaping ecological risk, economic precarity and planetary stability. A more responsible, complete and critically informed business education therefore examines not only how firms respond to climate challenges, but how business practices help produce them, equipping future managers to recognise intrinsic structural harms and make more informed choices about the economic futures they help create.
The structural violence of commercial healthcare
Another way of rendering structural violence more intelligible is to look at the ongoing privatization of healthcare. Privatised healthcare systems generate structural violence when access to life-saving treatment is determined primarily by market price rather than human need. In the United States, insulin prices rose dramatically over two decades, forcing some patients to ration doses despite diabetes being a manageable condition with proper treatment. The WHO has repeatedly warned about unequal global access to essential medicines, where affordability — not medical capability — determines survival. When treatments for cancer, chronic illness or infectious disease become financially inaccessible, preventable suffering and premature death follow. That’s structural violence: social arrangements — i.e. business deals — restricting people’s capacity to live healthy lives, sometimes exacerbating excruciating long term pain and sometimes killing them.
Privatisation intensifies these dynamics, especially in lower-income or emerging economies where public healthcare infrastructure may already be fragile. When healthcare becomes a commodity, intervention is governed less by medical necessity than by purchasing power. Treatments are patented, monopolized and priced beyond reach. This isn’t a paradox of a system designed to improve health simultaneously excluding those most in need. It is a natural outcome of a business system based on domination, power and possession.
When business education treats healthcare primarily as a profitable industry rather than a life-sustaining social good, it normalizes structural violence. Students frequently learn how to maximise pharmaceutical market share without fully examining how pricing strategies, patent regimes and privatisation shape life chances globally. And speaking of life chances globally, we should probably look at food, especially the food that was alive before we ate it.
The murder machine: industrial agriculture, animals and structural violence
Industrial animal agriculture represents one of the largest ongoing systems of structural violence globally. Each year more than 80 billion land animals are slaughtered for food, with trillions of fish and marine animals killed in capture fisheries and aquaculture. Most land animals are raised in intensive confinement systems designed for scale, speed and cost reduction rather than welfare, meaning suffering is not incidental but built into the economic model itself. For structural harm not to be native to the system, there would need to be investment in the living conditions, which would reduce the profit made from bearing, raising and killing living creatures for food.
The environmental violence attached to this profit capture is profound. Industrial livestock production contributes significantly to greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation for feed crops, freshwater depletion and biodiversity loss. Waste runoff contaminates rivers, lakes and coastal ecosystems, degrading drinking water, fisheries and agricultural land. These effects translate directly into structural violence for human populations: increased respiratory illness from air pollution near large farms, contaminated water supplies linked to disease, reduced food security where land shifts to animal feed production, and heightened climate instability affecting livelihoods and housing. Poorer communities are disproportionately exposed because they often live closest to intensive farming zones or depend most directly on vulnerable natural resources.
When business education treats these impacts as secondary externalities rather than core strategic issues, it normalizes a production system that generates large-scale harm to animals, ecosystems and human wellbeing in order to remain economically profitable. Animals, the planet and people must experience structural violence for profit to be maintained, and that is what we teach you: to accept and project harm on a biblical scale. You deserve to know the fuller story.
Closing: What This Means for You
If there is one point I want you to carry away from this, it is that structural violence is embedded in the economic business systems you are preparing to enter and, crucially, in the ways those systems are taught. Business education frames capitalism as neutral, technical and opportunity-generating, while the social and ecological costs that accompany it are treated as externalities, management challenges or innovation opportunities. That framing does not simply describe the world; it ensures its reproduction.
Seen through a structural violence lens, the environmental instability, economic precarity, public-health inequalities and ecological degradation discussed throughout this blog are not only harms affecting anonymous others. They shape your own life chances, your job security, the affordability of housing and food, the stability of the climate you will live in, and the conditions your future children will inherit. Structural violence is therefore not only something business may inflict outwardly; it is something that also loops back onto those trained to perpetuate it.
This is why examining, and decolonizing, how business is taught matters. Paulo Freire argued that education can either reproduce dominant social arrangements or cultivate conscientization — critical awareness that enables people to understand how systems operate and how they might be changed. When business education presents managerial solutions without examining systemic causes, it socializes students into maintaining the very conditions producing harm. When it openly examines structural violence, it equips students with fuller knowledge, broader moral awareness and greater freedom to choose how they participate in economic life.
The goal, then, is informed agency. Understanding structural violence expands your capacity to make deliberate professional choices — about the organisations you join, the practices you endorse, the innovations you pursue and the futures you help shape. It enables you to align career ambitions with social responsibility, ecological reality and intergenerational justice rather than defaulting to inherited assumptions about what business is for.
Ultimately, the question is not whether you will participate in business systems — most of you will — but whether you do so consciously, aware of their consequences, or uncritically, reproducing them by habit. A more honest business education does not remove opportunity; it clarifies it. It allows you to act with open eyes, to weigh prosperity against harm, and to contribute — if you choose — to forms of economic activity that sustain rather than diminish the lives of people, other species and the planet your children will depend on. In the words of Lynsey Brigman, ‘You have to look with better eyes’.
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