Decolonizing the Curriculum in the Business School
Updated: 1d
DB Roberts, 2026
In its broadest sense, decolonization means becoming free from systems of domination and control that have been treated as normal, natural, or unavoidable. This includes not only colonial rule itself, but also the continued dominance of certain ways of thinking, cultures, political systems, economic models, and forms of knowledge over others. In its wider sense it requires we realise that minds become colonized first, whether we are colonizer or colonized.
In this sense, decolonising education is not just about adding different voices or perspectives. It is also about questioning which ideas are treated as normal, authoritative, and beyond challenge. When one model of business and economic life is presented as the only realistic or legitimate way of organising society, education can end up reproducing the very forms of dominance and inequality that decolonisation seeks to challenge.
The rationale for decolonising business education is thereby not only moral or political, but educational, institutional, and practical. A curriculum that presents growth-centred managerial capitalism as universal, inevitable, and largely beneficial produces incomplete forms of knowledge at precisely the moment students are entering a world defined by global ecological instability, structural and deadly inequality, technological disruption and delusion, and increasing existential insecurity. This is happening as the business solutions being proposed are the causes of the problems the solutions are needed for, whether managerial, technological or both. The ‘silver bullet’ idea is warped.
Decolonisation therefore seeks to improve the intellectual quality, honesty, authenticity and relevance of business education itself. For students, this means developing greater critical agency over the assumptions shaping their careers, identities, and futures rather than reproducing inherited orthodoxies uncritically. For staff, it creates opportunities for more intellectually plural, reflexive, and interdisciplinary forms of teaching and scholarship. For institutions, it strengthens claims to authenticity, responsibility, and public value by aligning education more closely with the realities and consequences of contemporary life. For business and society, it will help cultivate graduates capable not only of operating organisations efficiently, but of recognising the long-term social, ecological, and intergenerational implications of organisational decisions in conditions of existential planetary crisis.
The objective of decolonising a business school and business studies curriculum is to challenge the dominance of Western, managerial, and growth-centred assumptions that are routinely presented as natural, universal, and professionally necessary within business education. Decolonisation seeks to cultivate forms of conscientization through which students become critically aware of how prevailing business ideologies normalise colonial and contemporary patterns of power underpinning corporate extractivism, ecological destruction, and structural inequality, all while obscuring viable alternatives often originating in places subjugated, marginalised and exploited in routine business conduct. Even if it isn't put as colonial systems of power, it seeks to show where power lies and what the 'real world' consequences of that power are, in ways that impact the lives and future existences of the students we teach. Decolonising business studies is about balancing the books honestly, more completely, and authentically, per the university's latest values
This allows us to see that business education does not simply or neutrally describe economic activity as European Enlightenment perspectives have us believe. It participates in and propagates the reproduction of a global ideological system that has extended imperial capture to colonise the planet and its inhabitants’ minds, and is deeply implicated in ongoing existential, ecological and social polycrisis. Any attempt to decolonise the curriculum must therefore engage not only with the superficial and comfortable matters of representation and inclusion, but also, more challengingly, with the role of business itself in generating structural violence and large-scale intergenerational harm that will affect the lives of the students we teach and of the children they may bear in the near future.
In this sense, decolonising the curriculum is not simply about diversification, but about intellectually and ethically freeing students from forms of epistemic dominance projected through Business Schools that shape how they understand and measure success, progress, consumption, and economic life itself, often conditioning them to reproduce systems contributing to existential ecological crises impacting future generations of themselves. It therefore aims to develop critically reflexive graduates capable of recognising and questioning the social, ecological, and intergenerational consequences of contemporary business practice, while engaging more plural, relational, and sustainable ways of organising economic life. It encourages and enables them to interrogate the location of power in the conduct of business, and how that power is wielded; how such power is maintained and legitimated; and who experiences the varying consequences of that power and its preservation.
With such interpretation of decolonization, this proposal discusses whether and how a business school curriculum can be decolonised in a way that is intellectually coherent and legible, pedagogically meaningful and valid, and aligned with institutional commitments to authenticity and responsibility. It’s set up in a form of Q&A.
1. To decolonise the curriculum, is it necessary to decolonise the business school?
Short answer: Not strictly necessary, but curriculum-only change is typically shallow and unstable. Further, authentically and comprehensively decolonizing the business school would almost certainly require decolonizing the university, which would involve it reconsidering its primary values. In this sense, the question becomes less about whether decolonization can be implemented at a single level, and more about the degree to which institutional values are open to redefinition. Where these values continue to prioritise market alignment, growth, and reputational metrics, decolonizing initiatives are likely to be shaped, limited, or absorbed by those same logics. The business school is not autonomous: it is nested within, shaped by, and reproductive of the wider logics of the university and the growth economy.
In practice, most UK institutions focus on curriculum-level interventions such as diversifying reading lists, incorporating new case studies, or inviting alternative voices. These are relatively straightforward to implement but tend to leave underlying institutional structures and values intact. Decolonial, critical pedagogical and critical management education scholarship show that curricula are embedded within institutional logics, including accreditation standards, rankings, employability agendas, and corporate partnerships. These logics do not simply constrain what can be taught; they actively prioritise forms of knowledge and conduct aligned with growth, profitability, and expansion, when these contribute to ecological crisis, intergenerational harm, structural violence and global inequality. These are dominant values unlikely to be changed soon.
Work associated with Aníbal Quijano and Nelson Maldonado-Torres suggests that reforming content without addressing these structures will reproduce the same epistemic hierarchy. Empirical research on UK higher education further indicates that partial decolonisation often becomes symbolic, resulting in diversification without substantive change.
Conclusion
Curricula can be partially decolonised without transforming the institution, but such changes are likely to be limited, reversible, and vulnerable to co-optation, for example for legitimacy building though PR management. However, the process aligns with institutional values like honesty and authenticity, and early actors will be considered innovators and thought leaders, especially where the process is reliably documented. It remains a better option that decentralised and piecemeal practices lacking uncoordinated direction.
2. Is decoloniality a relevant organising framework?
Short answer: Yes, it is conceptually strong if operationally challenging.
The framework of coloniality, developed by Aníbal Quijano and extended by Walter Mignolo and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, remains highly relevant for business education, reflecting and extending widely recognised work by the esteemed Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire. Coloniality is frequently seen through three lenses.
Coloniality of power is about who holds power and what they do with it. It maps onto global capitalism, supply chains, and managerial authority, highlighting how economic systems produce structural inequality and ecological decimation.
Coloniality of knowledge is about how such power is maintained and justified. It aligns with dominant Western management theory, which universalizes and totalizes these systems as normal, necessary, and inevitable.
Coloniality of being is about who bears the consequences of power and knowledge. It draws attention to whose lives, labour, and futures are marginalised or sacrificed within business activity, contrasting them with who instigates processes of power and knowledge central to these outcomes.
However, the literature identifies several limitations in practice:
The framework can remain abstract without clear pedagogical translation.
It is often incorporated without challenging core assumptions such as growth and profit maximisation, but can be applied meaningfully in ways that develop critical thinking.
It may conflict with accreditation regimes (e.g. AACSB, EQUIS), which reinforce dominant paradigms, but allows for critical questioning of the dominance and necessity of such frames of reference.
Conclusion
Decoloniality provides a strong conceptual spine, but its value depends on how it is translated into teaching practice. Without this, it risks becoming symbolic rather than transformative.
3. Has this approach been successfully undertaken?
Short answer: Only partially, and rarely at institutional scale in western universities.
There is evidence of meaningful initiatives in UK and global universities, including curriculum co-creation with students, inclusion of Global South scholarship, and critical modules addressing capitalism, colonialism, decolonization and development.
However, the literature consistently finds that:
Success is uneven and often confined to individual modules or programmes (but that is still a start).
Efforts are frequently contained within existing institutional frameworks, what Sara Ahmed describes as non-performativity.
Business schools show particular resistance due to their alignment with ideology, industry, rankings, techno-determinism, entrepreneurship, science and employability narratives as well as their intellectual isolation from pertinent existing and pre-existing knowledge.
A central limitation is that many initiatives leave intact the assumption that business is primarily an infinite growth-creating solution-provider that creates and depends on inherited and perpetuated power relations that suppress one at the expense of another. Another is the evolving shift to the intolerant and exclusionary Far Right in political circles in the UK.
Conclusion
Decolonial approaches have been implemented in partial and localised ways but have not been realised at institutional scale within business education.
4. Moving beyond symbolic decolonisation: a combined approach
If decolonisation is to avoid becoming symbolic or contained, it requires a shift in both what is taught and how it is learned.
Re-specifying what counts as business knowledge
Rather than simply adding more ‘diverse perspectives’ to existing modules, this approach redefines what counts as legitimate business knowledge in the first place. It shifts the curriculum away from treating business primarily as a technical or managerial activity concerned with efficiency, profitability, competitiveness, and growth, and towards understanding business as a social, political, historical, and ecological force with existential consequences for the futures of the students we teach.
This means teaching business in relation to the systems and conditions that sustain it. Supply chains would be studied alongside labour exploitation, trafficking, and uneven global production relations. Finance would be taught alongside debt dependency, tax justice, extraction, and negative externalities. Extractivism would be addressed not simply as economic development, but in relation to ecological collapse, displacement, regulatory capture and existential harm. Entrepreneurship and innovation would be examined in relation to ecological limits, alternative models beyond Europe and North America would supplement narrow and damaging interpretations.
More broadly, subjects often treated as external to business education, such as political economy, ecology, labour history, colonialism, and global inequality, would become central to understanding how business operates, who benefits from it, who is harmed by it, and how its consequences are distributed across societies and generations.
Conscientisation as pedagogical process
Decolonisation must also operate at the level of learning. Drawing on Paulo Freire, the aim is not to transmit ‘alternative perspectives’ implying equal value and choice of direction, but to enable students to recognise how dominant business knowledge obscures the conditions under which existential, intergenerational, structural harm is produced. Conscientisation refers to the development of critical awareness of structural conditions and one’s position within them. It represents honesty, completeness and authenticity as means to student empowerment and agency.
In practice, this involves two core mechanisms:
Exposure to delegitimating contradiction
Students are systematically confronted with tensions between business claims and material outcomes, such as CSR narratives versus supply chain realities, or sustainability discourse versus ecological limits and the empirical reality of decreasing climate security. For example, they can be confronted with the question of why, ‘if CSR and sustainability are correct, is the planet getting hotter?’
Interpretive disruption
Students are required to reinterpret familiar concepts. Risk is reframed as structural harm, growth as constrained by ecological limits, and value creation as potentially involving value extraction, each with existential and intergenerational consequences as subjects of critique and debate. For example, students may be asked: ‘If endless growth is essential for business success, how can it happen on a materially finite planet?’ Such questions are intended to destabilise assumptions normally treated as self-evident within mainstream business education. Outside business studies, they are well understood.
Conscientisation does not guarantee, or necessarily seek, transformation. It creates the conditions under which dominant interpretations can be questioned. This approach targets student cognition and interpretation but may be constrained if assessment and institutional incentives continue to reward conventional answers. That doesn’t have to be the case; decolonization of one FYO (final year option) and one 2YO in practice has yielded greater opportunity for critical engagement.
This process also recognises that students do not enter business schools as neutral learners. From early childhood onward, many have already been socialised into consumer culture, competition, individualism, and assumptions that endless economic growth spurred by technology and ‘continuous improvement’ management sloganeering represents progress and success. In this sense, decolonisation involves not only critiquing external systems but also examining how dominant ways of thinking become internalised and normalised within the student body.
Students entering UK business schools often arrive already used to seeing consumption, competition, economic growth, and resource extraction as normal, natural, and unavoidable parts of life. Business education frequently reinforces these assumptions by presenting growth-centred capitalism and managerial thinking as the default and professionally necessary way to understand the world. As a result, students can come to see ecological destruction, inequality, and social instability not as consequences of particular economic choices, but simply as unavoidable features of modern life.
Conscientisation involves helping students question these assumptions critically and honestly. The aim is not to tell students what to think, but to encourage them to examine how business systems operate, who benefits from them, who is harmed by them, and why those harms are so often treated as acceptable, distant, or invisible. For example, students might explore how extractive industries create wealth in some places while contributing to ecological destruction, labour exploitation, displacement, and instability elsewhere. They may also examine how many contemporary business practices continue older patterns of colonial extraction and unequal power.
This matters because the students being taught today will inherit the consequences of the systems they are being trained to reproduce. If business education presents endless growth, extraction, and consumption as inevitable or desirable without seriously confronting their long-term consequences, it risks preparing students for futures defined by ecological instability, worsening inequality, and increasing existential insecurity. Decolonising learning therefore involves creating space for students to question inherited assumptions and to imagine alternative ways of organising economic and social life that are not dependent on permanent extraction and planetary harm, which allow them greater latitude to control the course of their lives.
Strategic embedding within institutional constraints
Given the constraints of business schools, a pragmatic approach is to embed these shifts within existing structures. This involves reframing established topics in ways that remain legible within accreditation frameworks while introducing deeper critique. Strategic Management scholarship is waking up to this possibility, if only in primitive and self-serving ways for now. For example, risk can be expanded to include structural disposability, biospheric damage and existential futures, governance to include power, regulatory capture and accountability, and strategy to incorporate long-term ecological constraints and the tensions of infinite growth amidst finite resources. This approach is more likely to be sustained and scaled but carries the risk of dilution or co-optation, which themselves than carry pedagogic value when revealed in discourses.
5. Alignment with institutional values: authenticity and responsibility
Framing decolonisation in terms of institutional values strengthens its legitimacy. Authenticity requires that business education accurately represents the systems it studies. Where curricula omit or marginalise the role of business in generating inequality and ecological crisis, they produce partial or misleading accounts of reality. Responsibility extends beyond teaching ethical frameworks. It includes ensuring that students are equipped to understand the full consequences of business activity, including its role in producing large-scale intergenerational existential harm. A curriculum that excludes these dimensions risks being neither authentic nor responsible. Integrating them is therefore not an optional addition, but a requirement for intellectual, institutional, human and social integrity.
6. Overall synthesis
The central issue is not whether decolonisation can be fully achieved, but whether business education can present an account of itself that is authentic, responsible, coherent and complete. Current approaches often remain partial because they leave intact the assumption that business is primarily a solution to global challenges. A more grounded approach combines epistemic boundary shifts with pedagogical processes of conscientisation, making visible the conditions under which business knowledge is produced, taught, and applied. This does not resolve institutional constraints. However, it reframes decolonisation as a matter of epistemic accuracy and educational responsibility, rather than optional critique, creating agency for students that gives them greater control over the decisions they will make for their lives, their children’s lives and the life of the planet.
7. Literature and concepts
Epistemic / decolonial foundations
Maldonado-Torres, N. — Coloniality of being
Mignolo, W. — Coloniality of knowledge
Quijano, A. — Coloniality of power
Roberts, D — Epistemes of extinction
Santos, B. de Sousa — Epistemologies of the South
Business and management education
Allen, S. (2023) — Developing decolonial reflexivity: Decolonizing management and organizational knowledge AMLE
Bansal et al (2024) — Strategy Can No Longer Ignore Planetary Boundaries: A Call for Tackling Strategy’s Ecological Fallacy. Journal of Management Studies
Girei, E. (2017) — Decolonising management knowledge, Management Learning
Śliwa, M., Decker, S., Barros, A., Omeihe, K., & Prasad, A. (2025) — Decolonising the business and management curriculum: An ontological modesty perspective, Management Learning
Pedagogy and learning
Abu Moghli, M. & Kadiwal, L. (2021) Decolonising the curriculum beyond the surge: Conceptualisation, positionality and conduct. London Review of Education
Ahmed, S. — The Nonperformativity of Antiracism. Meridians
Freire, P. — Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Gilani, H. (2026) — Beyond the bandwagon: Decolonising the curriculum through student-staff partnerships and the paradox of critical disappointment. The International Journal of Management Education
Luckett, K. & Shay, S. (2020) — Reframing the curriculum: a transformative approach. Critical Studies in Education
Roberts, D (2026). Educating for Extinction? Ethical Simulation, Ideological Student Grooming, and the Future of Management Education. Journal of Management Education.
Roberts, D (2025). To protect and preserve? Explaining the gap between structural and superficial racial equality regimes in North Atlantic Rim universities. British Educational Research Journal.
Comments