2.10: Business
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- Susan Rahman, Prateek Sunder, and Dahmitra Jackson
- CC ECHO
A business is an organization that strives for a profit by providing goods and services desired by its customers (Gitman et al., 2018).The administration of a business includes the performance or management of business operations and decision-making, as well as the efficient organization of people and other resources to direct activities towards common goals and objectives (Thuis & Stuive, 2019). Business students learn about leadership, management,financial knowledge, communication, collaboration, and marketing skills through studies in business administration and can also receive hands-on training to start their own venture through courses in business entrepreneurship (Business, n.d.).In a society organized under capitalism, business students learn to operate businesses within the capitalist system. Inherent in capitalism is racism. In an effort to identify and address this, there is a growing demand for business students of color to call out the racist systems in the discipline. In the current era where white supremacist policy are subordinating people of color, things will not change unless they are called out and dismantled. In their 2020 article,The Business School Is Racist: Act up!,Dar et. al. explain that business schools per se do not acknowledge race as a salient factor in understanding business, “In the Business School specifically, knowledge production has erased race from business scholarship, resulting in the continued omission of the roles of Indigenous genocide, extractive settler-colonialism and Black chattel slavery in contemporary capital accumulation and wealth disparity”(Dar et al., 2020).Scholars of color must survive in educational environments where their knowledge is seen as not worth knowing. The emotional toll this takes on students of color makes thriving in school differently difficult than of their white counterparts. Finding activist scholar spaces helps students of color identify the systemic racism they face in business schools and create a space for healing. The physical and emotional toll the present system places on students of color are vast and unacknowledged.
In a global marketplace the business school must rise to the challenge of teaching effective business processes beyond borders. There is an absolute need to work alongside scholars in the global south and seek out diversity of voice in innovation. An expansion is overdue on the narrow understanding of a discipline that has left so many out of idea production and solutions generation in order to move towards a business model that re-imagines success and questions the status quo (Dar et al., 2020). In a globalized marketplace,diverse knowledge about commerce, trade and consumerism can only strengthen the field.