ABSTRACT
The critique of higher education for its increasingly shortsighted focus on profitable skills rather than on the education of competent democratic citizens (for example, Nussbaum 2010) is prominently directed at business schools. Did they not create the kind of graduates whose focus on being ever more economically productive led to the most recent financial crisis? In turn, it has been suggested that if there is any positive aspect to this crisis, it is perhaps the opportunity it offers to bring business studies and the humanities into a fruitful dialogue. Integrating liberal learning with business education can ‘enable students to make sense of the world and their place in it, preparing them to use knowledge and skills as means toward responsible engagement with the world’ (Colby et al. 2011: 4; Sullivan, Ehrlich and Colby, this volume). If such a promise is to be realized, however, it demands a break with the way in which the humanities and business education are typecast.
