Educating for Belonging: Practical Wisdom Against the Technocratic Drift in Business Education

Abstract

This paper advocates for a humanistic transformation of business education, drawing on three converging scholarly traditions: the capabilities approach (Sen 1999; Nussbaum 2011), the humanistic management tradition (Melé 2003; Pirson 2017; Dierksmeier 2019), and Pope Francis’s vision of integral ecology ( Laudato Si’ , LS 137–139). It offers a philosophical and pedagogical critique of the technocratic paradigm that dominates sustainability discourse in business schools — a paradigm that Critical Management Studies (Alvesson & Willmott 1992; Spicer & Alvesson 2025) has shown to be structurally resistant to transformation, operating through the slow formation of identity and desire rather than through explicit instruction alone. Through a normative lens, the paper re-centers practical reason, affiliation, and moral imagination as the foundations of transformative leadership formation. It argues that genuine reform is obstructed by structural barriers — accreditation pressures, ranking systems, and market forces — that systematically incentivize instrumental over ethical formation. At the same time, it identifies emerging alternatives in business education that point toward viable pedagogical reform. In response to both this diagnosis and these possibilities, it proposes principles for an education capable of forming leaders with the practical wisdom, relational depth, and moral imagination that a crisis-ridden world demands.