The crisis of scholarship in business schools: From fragmentation to ethos
认为商学院面临学术精神气质的危机，即共享的道德与认知取向被削弱，并追溯了新自由主义、欧洲中心主义和人类中心主义假设如何通过政治、殖民和经济项目形成，最后提出将学术重新定义为情境化、关系性、物质中介和生态嵌入的精神气质。
Business schools are increasingly subject to critique for advancing instrumental, profit-oriented logics, reproducing social and ecological harms and prioritising metric-driven research over teaching and public engagement. While such critiques are often attributed to governance failures or misaligned incentives, this paper argues that they point to a deeper legitimacy problem within contemporary business education. Specifically, it conceptualises the current moment as a crisis of scholarship-as-ethos: the weakening of a shared moral and epistemic orientation that historically linked inquiry, pedagogy and engagement. Adopting a genealogical approach, the paper traces how neoliberal, Eurocentric and anthropocentric assumptions about scholarship emerged through political, colonial and economic projects and were subsequently normalised through audit cultures and managerial governance. This analysis helps explain why decolonial and relational posthuman perspectives function not as external critiques but as responses to enduring epistemic exclusions shaping dominant models of management learning. Building on, and moving beyond Boyer’s typology, the paper reframes scholarship as ethos—situated, relational, materially mediated and ecologically embedded—and develops this framing through selective engagement with Indigenous and non-Western traditions (e.g. Ubuntu and Buen Vivir), Confucian accounts of moral cultivation and relational posthuman thought, treated as plural and historically contingent. The paper concludes by outlining implications for management learning including reforms to evaluation practices and curricular designs that reconnect scholarly work, pedagogy and ecological responsibility.