Australian business schools: more than ‘commercial enterprise’?

This paper raises important issues for the identity of Australian business schools arising from the debate on the relevance of management education, a debate largely held outside of Australia. The identity theory of Laclau and Mouffe (1985), adapted to organisations by Bridgman (2005), is used as a basis to examine both general issues in the ‘relevance’ of management education debate and their pertinence to Australian business schools based on three competing identities: the ‘academic department’, the professional school’ and the ‘commercial enterprise’. The paper concludes that, although pressures from external government policies and internal institutional priorities have resulted in business schools becoming ‘cash cows’, appearing to privilege the ‘commercial enterprise’ discourse, the values and identities of individual academics and their academic units remain aligned with the ‘professional school’ and ‘academic department’. While the dominance of one discourse or identity is yet to be decided, the debate is highly pertinent to universities in developing their own identities in an environment of competing pressures and discourses.