I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down

 By Chris Marquis, a professor at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School and the author of “The Profiteers: How Business Privatizes Profit and Socializes Cost.”

This fall, another cohort of ambitious young professionals has arrived at business schools around the world for two-year programs with price tags in the six figures. Their presence at some of the nicest and shiniest buildings on campus renews a familiar question: What exactly is an M.B.A. for?

This question has become more urgent as business education has expanded dramatically in the past decades. Today, nearly one in five American undergraduates majors in business, and the M.B.A. is the most popular graduate degree in the United States.

I have taught in business schools for over 20 years, at Harvard, Cornell and Cambridge. While some students appear to care only about their future compensation, I have met many with nobler goals: engineers who want to commercialize clean energy, physicians determined to fix the health care system, nonprofit leaders who have watched good missions fail for want of good management.

These students enroll hoping to learn what business schools say they teach: how to manage people, how to allocate capital and resources and how to make the world a better place through leadership. But I’ve come to see how the institution can reshape the worldviews of those who enter it, often undermining the very ambitions that brought them there.

This change can take place in a single semester. Again and again, I have watched students abandon their altruistic intentions, instead becoming consumed by whether to choose careers in consulting or finance and who will land a summer internship at McKinsey or Goldman Sachs.

The modern business school is designed to promote dealmaking, simplification and optimization. This mind-set has escaped containment and has spread to the wider world. Business-educated elites increasingly populate political leadership, bringing with them a transactional view of public life. One investigation found that out of 45 current heads of state who had studied in the United States, 10 were business majors, and six of those also earned M.B.A.s. President Trump, a Wharton graduate, has treated foreign policy and government itself as extensions of dealmaking and personal gain.

Surely, not every business graduate governs this way. But recent research by the Nobel laureate economist Daron Acemoglu and colleagues shows what tends to happen when you put an M.B.A. in charge. In both the United States and Denmark, firms that appointed managers with business degrees cut wages and reduced labor’s share of income. Yet these companies didn’t become more productive, nor did they grow sales, investment or employment any faster. What registers as managerial acumen turns out to be wealth transfer — value moved away from workers and toward profits, shareholders and executives.

I’ve come to realize that business schools don’t just reflect our economic system — they actively manufacture its priorities and normalize its harms, training the future leaders who will design and defend the structures driving our overlapping global crises. Tinkering at the margins with a class on corporate responsibility or ethics is not going to help. We don’t need to “fix” business schools. We need to abolish them.

Business schools have always struggled to justify their place in the university. A medical school’s core justification is health, and a law school’s is justice — undisputed public goods. Business schools are organized explicitly around a private good: the pursuit of profit. The American sociologist Thorstein Veblen identified this tension a century ago, criticizing university schools focused on commerce because they “need imply nothing in the way of serviceability to the common good.”

When schools like Wharton and Harvard Business School were established, they were seen as overly vocational, and to build legitimacy their founders framed management as a profession, on par with law and medicine. But education in those fields rested on established bodies of knowledge — centuries of case law, natural sciences like biology — that management lacked.

The solution, devised in the 1920s by the Harvard dean Wallace Donham, was to borrow the teaching style used in law and medicine: the case study. It became the signature method of business education. To this day, professors assign 10- to 20-page descriptions of business challenges culminating in a decision point that students then debate in class. The method is pervasive: In 2024, Harvard Business School sold nearly 17 million case studies to various business programs around the world.

One well-known case study that I have taught many times is “Rob Parson at Morgan Stanley.” The facts are simple enough to produce a lively classroom debate. Mr. Parson has delivered impressive results and is viewed as a star performer, but his abrasive and go-it-alone style has alienated people across the firm. In the classroom, students take the position of his manager, Paul Nasr, and decide whether to promote him, delay the promotion or push him out.

Nearly three decades after publication, it remains among H.B.S.’s most widely used cases, and the dilemma is enduring: Should results be rewarded even when the person producing them damages the culture around him? In class, students vote on Mr. Nasr’s options and often role-play the difficult conversation between him and Mr. Parson. The discussion can be dramatic, engaging and effective.

But my experience has shown that by asking students to inhabit Mr. Nasr’s role, the case study narrows their imaginations to the decision facing one senior manager. Deeper questions — like whether Mr. Parson is himself a product of investment-banking culture — are rarely raised. Mr. Parson becomes an individual problem, when the larger issue may be an industry that rewards rainmaking, hierarchy and masculine performance norms, then acts surprised when they cause conflict.

When the case method is used in medicine and law, it serves a different set of goals. Medical students work through detailed patient scenarios — symptoms, test results, histories and social and economic context. Law students read real court opinions, dissecting facts, arguments and judgments. In both fields, students are confronted by the messiness of reality, and the goal is to foster disciplined skepticism: ask what’s missing, challenge assumptions and test how an analysis could be wrong.

Business school cases operate on another logic, focused not on inquiry but on decision making. H.B.S.’s own overview of the method describes students imagining “themselves in the decision-maker’s role” and “taking decisive action.” The point is to practice acting like the person in charge — or, as George W. Bush, a graduate of Harvard Business School, put it, “the decider.”

By overestimating the importance of individual decision makers, the business school classroom avoids harder questions: Who made this person the legitimate protagonist? Whose knowledge is absent? Why are workers, regulators, communities, ecosystems or citizens rarely given equal standing?

I wrote dozens of case studies during my decade at H.B.S., some of which are described as classics and best sellers. These are not products of independent research, but carefully packaged corporate narratives. The disclaimer printed in tiny type on every H.B.S. case concedes this point: Cases “are not intended to serve … as sources of primary data.” The data they include can be selective, biased or even fabricated.

For the many cases I wrote under the guidance of senior faculty members, events that reflected poorly on the company were softened or omitted and the roles of certain executives were burnished. The companies held final approval, with drafts reviewed by their lawyers and P.R. staff. Rather than being vehicles for disinterested learning, as one might expect at a university, the case studies end up as instruments of reputation management.

Corporate influence feeds a larger problem: The cases almost always feature winners, making it easy to mistake luck or timing for a proven strategy. Failures, dead ends and nonmarket solutions are rarely considered. Before Enron’s fraud was exposed, its business model was presented in admiring terms by at least five H.B.S. case studies. More damning still, the strategies that later led to its collapse — its asset-light model, its trading platform — were portrayed as innovations. Questions about deregulated energy markets, revolving-door oversight and opaque accounting went unasked.

Furthermore, edits that push the case narratives away from reality are often meant to make it “work” in a classroom. Complexity is systematically shaved away, and dissenting voices often go unheard. Real organizations don’t move in clearly delineated phases toward a decision point, but business school teaching materials often do — compressing timelines, dropping messy subplots and smoothing over contradictions to produce clean narrative arcs and satisfying problems to debate.

The result is a curriculum built around false narratives. Some of the most celebrated ideas in management have not been the ones that survived peer review or replication, but the ones that could be turned into TED Talks, consulting frameworks or airport best sellers. Faculty members are rewarded not for knowledge but for performance — selling a big idea with a memorable label that promises “success” or “disruption.”

Credit...Ed Steed

Business schools have a divided mission: They seek to legitimize an economic system focused on private gain while also developing guardrails to tame it. They found a remarkable way to manage this tension: the “win-win” story in which the conflict between private gain and public good simply evaporates.

A classic win-win is the contention that environmental programs like reducing waste or using LED lights can save money or that decent pay and benefits lower costs by reducing employee turnover. Business schools now claim to educate “leaders who make a difference in the world,” as H.B.S. proclaims in its mission, while Wharton pursues a “quest for positive global impact.”

These aspirations are built on the delusional but widely accepted idea of “stakeholder capitalism”: that companies can produce climate stability, fair wages, healthy communities and functioning democracies while also delivering profits. Executives promise that technology will solve our environmental problems; voluntary measurement systems are offered as appropriate alternatives to public accountability; ethics is rebranded as competitive advantage rather than moral obligation.

During the 2010s, stakeholder capitalism was quickly woven into M.B.A. syllabuses. But when researchers examined whether the corporations that signed on to a statement pledging commitment to this ethos actually changed their behavior on wages, investment, governance or climate, they found little evidence of a shift. The statement was less a new doctrine than an effort at reputation management — and a ploy to avoid oversight.

Recent evidence shows that many foundational studies supporting the win-win idea were based on flawed data or couldn’t be replicated. Yet faculty members keep researching, writing about and teaching the topic — suggesting an ideological project more than an academic exercise.

Much of what has happened in business schools turned out to be the leading edge of a broader transformation: the corporatization of the university itself. Institutions now chase rankings, donors and corporate partnerships, tout their contributions to innovation and growth and treat everything else as overhead. Students are “customers,” and the degrees are “products” with greater and lesser “market shares.” University strategic documents talk about “brand positioning” for departments and “R.O.I.s” on tenure lines.

Once you accept this frame, it becomes hard to defend the existence of a philosophy seminar or a history department for any reason other than the revenue it generates. The hiring of non-tenure-track adjunct professors follows: If education is “content” delivered to fee-paying “customers,” why keep full-time scholars on the payroll when you can hire contingent, low-wage instructors?

Business schools’ success in placing their graduates in high-paying jobs boosts their rankings; high rankings attract more applicants and allow higher tuitions; and wealthy alumni fund new programs and buildings that elevate the school’s status. It is a self-reinforcing cycle — a flywheel, in M.B.A. parlance — that pulls money, attention and legitimacy away from the disciplines best equipped to question this logic: history, philosophy, sociology, political theory.

The university’s capacity to cultivate historical memory, moral judgment and democratic imagination is weakened, even as its capacity to churn out data analysts, financial engineers and “innovation” managers grows. The irony — and danger — is that in the age of A.I., the thinking fostered in the arts and humanities is increasingly urgent. The domination of business schools is not only physical and financial; it is intellectual, and it is crowding out liberal education.

Credit...Ed Steed

I’ve come to a grim conclusion: The problem with business schools is not repairable misalignment but the design itself. Business schools are not malfunctioning institutions; they are highly efficient machines doing exactly what they were designed to do. An ethics elective here, a sustainability center there, a “responsible leadership” badge — they all serve to legitimize the machine, not change its output.

The most honest solution I’ve come across is to replace the category entirely. Stuart Hart, an emeritus professor at Cornell and an early sustainability champion, told me he reached that conclusion after trying every internal route to make M.B.A. curriculums more responsible. The institution itself was the problem. At the University of Vermont, Dr. Hart has since developed a new form of business degree focused on societal impact — a small but concrete test of the case for starting over. In this program, sustainability is not a lone elective but run through the whole curriculum, and students spend the summer embedded in a mission-driven company.

What would that clean-sheet logic mean across an entire university? One starting point is the organization theorist Martin Parker’s call to create “schools for organizing” rather than schools for business, centered on how humans coordinate for shared ends. Students would study co-ops, unions and social movements alongside the shareholder corporation. The central question would shift from “How do we maximize shareholder value?” to “How do different forms of organization distribute power, risk and reward — and which should we strengthen?”

Dismantling the business school as a single high-status silo that professionalizes private gain may seem a heavy lift. But universities can create cross-disciplinary pathways for students who want to work in business without submitting them to the business school worldview. Some already offer “business and society” majors or master’s programs in organizations and public purpose, drawing on sociology, law and public policy. The point would not be to abolish the study of markets, but to return it to settings where questions of power, history, democracy and ecological limits cannot be so easily avoided.

For most of my career, I’ve taught electives focused on responsible business and sustainability — gratifying work, but largely preaching to the converted. Recently, at Cambridge, I introduced a required sustainability course filled with future bankers, consultants and tech executives who once would have steered clear.

Many arrive deeply skeptical, convinced that any time a corporation acts in a responsible way it must be a marketing ploy; some push back hard on ideas they see as threats to growth. But forcing them out of their bubbles into a shared conversation about the natural environment, inequality and discrimination has produced the kind of debate that is so often missing in education today.

This is not enough. One required course cannot redeem the business school model. If anything, teaching it has intensified my disappointment. The course is relegated to the very end of the program — a telling signal of its importance — and amid a growing backlash against sustainability, there is some pressure to reduce or eliminate the class, to appease the customers who now drive decisions in higher education.

Still, the experience has reminded me why abolishing business schools cannot mean abandoning the people in them. The goal is not to write off the students as aspiring selfish capitalists; it is to stop funneling them through a machine that narrows their sense of possibility. Many of my students arrive on campus wanting to work on the crises that our economic system has created. What they lack is an institution that is worthy of their better impulses.

Michel Foucault: The Power Thinker

Original, painstaking, sometimes frustrating and often dazzling. Foucault’s work on power matters now more than ever 

Colin Koopman teaches philosophy at the University of Oregon 

Imagine you are asked to compose an ultra-short history of philosophy. Perhaps you’ve been challenged to squeeze the impossibly sprawling diversity of philosophy itself into just a few tweets. You could do worse than to search for the single word that best captures the ideas of every important philosopher. Plato had his ‘forms’. René Descartes had his ‘mind’ and John Locke his ‘ideas’. John Stuart Mill later had his ‘liberty’. In more recent philosophy, Jacques Derrida’s word was ‘text’, John Rawls’s was ‘justice’, and Judith Butler’s remains ‘gender’. Michel Foucault’s word, according to this innocent little parlour game, would certainly be ‘power’.

Foucault remains one of the most cited 20th-century thinkers and is, according to some lists, the single most cited figure across the humanities and social sciences. His two most referenced works, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975) and The History of Sexuality, Volume One (1976), are the central sources for his analyses of power. Interestingly enough, however, Foucault was not always known for his signature word. He first gained his massive influence in 1966 with the publication of The Order of Things. The original French title gives a better sense of the intellectual milieu in which it was written: Les mots et les choses, or ‘Words and Things’. Philosophy in the 1960s was all about words, especially among Foucault’s contemporaries.

In other parts of Paris, Derrida was busily asserting that ‘there is nothing outside the text’, and Jacques Lacan turned psychoanalysis into linguistics by claiming that ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’. This was not just a French fashion. In 1967 Richard Rorty, surely the most infamous American philosopher of his generation, summed up the new spirit in the title of his anthology of essays, The Linguistic Turn. That same year, Jürgen Habermas, soon to become Germany’s leading philosopher, published his attempt at ‘grounding the social sciences in a theory of language’.

Foucault’s contemporaries pursued their obsessions with language for at least another few decades. Habermas’s magnum opus, titled The Theory of Communicative Action (1981), remained devoted to exploring the linguistic conditions of rationality. Anglo-American philosophy followed the same line, and so too did most French philosophers (except they tended toward the linguistic nature of irrationality instead).

For his part, however, Foucault moved on, somewhat singularly among his generation. Rather than staying in the world of words, in the 1970s he shifted his philosophical attention to power, an idea that promises to help explain how words, or anything else for that matter, come to give things the order that they have. But Foucault’s lasting importance is not in his having found some new master-concept that can explain all the others. Power, in Foucault, is not another philosophical godhead. For Foucault’s most crucial claim about power is that we must refuse to treat it as philosophers have always treated their central concepts, namely as a unitary and homogenous thing that is so at home with itself that it can explain everything else.

Foucault did not attempt to construct a philosophical fortress around his signature concept. He had witnessed first-hand how the arguments of the linguistic-turn philosophers grew brittle once they were deployed to analyse more and more by way of words. So Foucault himself expressly refused to develop an overarching theory of power. Interviewers would sometimes press him to give them a unified theory, but he always demurred. Such a theory, he said, was simply not the goal of his work. Foucault remains best-known for his analyses of power, indeed his name is, for most intellectuals, almost synonymous with the word ‘power’. Yet he did not himself offer a philosophy of power. How could this be possible?

Herein lies the richness and the challenge of Foucault’s work. His is a philosophical approach to power characterised by innovative, painstaking, sometimes frustrating, and often dazzling attempts to politicise power itself. Rather than using philosophy to freeze power into a timeless essence, and then to use that essence to comprehend so much of power’s manifestations in the world, Foucault sought to unburden philosophy of its icy gaze of capturing essences. He wanted to free philosophy to track the movements of power, the heat and the fury of it working to define the order of things.

To appreciate the originality of Foucault’s approach, it is helpful to contrast it to that of previous political philosophy. Before Foucault, political philosophers had presumed that power had an essence: be it sovereignty, or mastery, or unified control. The German social theorist Max Weber (1864-1920) influentially argued that state power consisted in a ‘monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force’. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), the English philosopher and original theorist of state power, saw the essence of power as state sovereignty. Hobbes thought that at its best and purest power would be exercised from the singular position of sovereignty. He called it ‘The Leviathan’.

Foucault never denied the reality of state power in the Hobbesian sense. But his political philosophy emanates from his skepticism about the assumption (and it was a mere assumption until Foucault called it into question) that the only real power is sovereign power. Foucault accepted that there were real forces of violence in the world, and not only state violence. There is also corporate violence due to enormous condensations of capital, gender violence in the form of patriarchy, and the violences both overt and subtle of white supremacy in such forms as chattel slavery, real-estate redlining, and now mass incarceration. Foucault’s work affirmed that such exercises of force were exhibits of sovereign power, likenesses of Leviathan. What he doubted was the assumption that we could extrapolate from this easy observation the more complex thought that power only ever appears in Leviathan-like form.

Power is all the more cunning because its basic forms can change in response to our efforts to free ourselves from its grip

In seeing through the imaginary singularity of power, Foucault was able to also envision it set against itself. He was able to hypothesise, and therefore to study, the possibility that power does not always assume just one form and that, in virtue of this, a given form of power can coexist alongside, or even come into conflict with, other forms of power. Such coexistences and conflicts, of course, are not mere speculative conundrums, but are the sort of stuff that one would need to empirically analyse in order to understand.

Foucault’s skeptical supposition thus allowed him to conduct careful enquiries into the actual functions of power. What these studies reveal is that power, which easily frightens us, turns out to be all the more cunning because its basic forms of operation can change in response to our ongoing efforts to free ourselves from its grip. To take just one example, Foucault wrote about the way in which a classically sovereign space such as the judicial court came to accept into its proceedings the testimony of medical and psychiatric experts whose authority and power were exercised without recourse to sovereign violence. An expert diagnosis of ‘insanity’ today or ‘perversity’ 100 years ago could come to mitigate or augment a judicial decision.

Foucault showed how the sovereign power of Leviathan (think crowns, congresses and capital) has over the past 200 years come to confront two new forms of power: disciplinary power (which he also called anatomo-politics because of its detailed attention to training the human body) and bio-politics. Biopower was Foucault’s subject in The History of Sexuality, Volume One. Meanwhile the power of discipline, the anatomo-politics of the body, was Foucault’s focus in Discipline and Punish.

More than any other book, it is Discipline and Punish in which Foucault constructs his signature, meticulous style of enquiry into the actual mechanisms of power. The recent publication of a now nearly complete set of Foucault’s course lectures at the Collège de France in Paris (probably the most prestigious academic institution in the world, and where Foucault lectured from 1970 to 1984) reveals that Discipline and Punish was the result of at least five years of intensive archival research. While Foucault worked on this book, he was deeply engaged in its material, leading research seminars and giving huge public lectures that are now being published under such titles as The Punitive Society and Psychiatric Power. The material he addressed ranges broadly, from the birth of modern criminology to psychiatry’s gendered construction of hysteria. The lectures show Foucault’s thought in development, and thus offer insight into his philosophy in the midst of its transformation. When he eventually organised his archival materials into a book, the result was the consolidated and efficient argumentation of Discipline and Punish.

Discipline, according to Foucault’s historical and philosophical analyses, is a form of power that tells people how to act by coaxing them to adjust themselves to what is ‘normal’. It is power in the form of correct training. Discipline does not strike down the subject at whom it is directed, in the way that sovereignty does. Discipline works more subtly, with an exquisite care even, in order to produce obedient people. Foucault famously called the obedient and normal products of discipline ‘docile subjects’.

The exemplary manifestation of disciplinary power is the prison. For Foucault, the important thing about this institution, the most ubiquitous site of punishment in the modern world (but practically non-existent as a form of punishment before the 18th century), is not the way in which it locks up the criminal by force. This is the sovereign element that persists in modern prisons, and is fundamentally no different from the most archaic forms of sovereign power that exert violent force over the criminal, the exile, the slave and the captive. Foucault looked beyond this most obvious element in order to see more deeply into the elaborate institution of the prison. Why had the relatively inexpensive techniques of torture and death gradually given way over the course of modernity to the costly complex of the prison? Was it just, as we are wont to believe, because we all started to become more humanitarian in the 18th century? Foucault thought that such an explanation would be sure to miss the fundamental way in which power changes when spectacles of torture give way to labyrinthine prisons.

The purpose of constant surveillance is to compel prisoners to regard themselves as subject to correction

Foucault argued that if you look at the way in which prisons operate, that is, at their mechanics, it becomes evident that they are designed not so much to lock away criminals as to submit them to training rendering them docile. Prisons are first and foremost not houses of confinement but departments of correction. The crucial part of this institution is not the cage of the prison cell, but the routine of the timetables that govern the daily lives of prisoners. What disciplines prisoners is the supervised morning inspections, the monitored mealtimes, the work shifts, even the ‘free time’ overseen by a panoply of attendants including armed guards and clipboard-wielding psychologists.

Importantly, all of the elements of prison surveillance are continuously made visible. That is why his book’s French title Surveiller et punir, more literally ‘Surveil and Punish’, is important. Prisoners must be made to know that they are subject to continual oversight. The purpose of constant surveillance is not to scare prisoners who are thinking of escaping, but rather to compel them to regard themselves as subject to correction. From the moment of morning rise to night’s lights out, the prisoners are subject to ceaseless behavioural inspection.

The crucial move of imprisonment is that of coaxing prisoners to learn how to inspect, manage and correct themselves. If effectively designed, supervision renders prisoners no longer in need of their supervisors. For they will have become their own attendant. This is docility.

To illustrate this distinctly modern form of power, Foucault used an image in Discipline and Punish that has become justly famous. From the archives of history, Foucault retrieved an almost-forgotten scheme of the canonical English moral philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). Bentham proposed a maximal-surveillance prison he christened ‘The Panopticon’. Central to his proposal was that of an architecture designed for correction. In the Panopticon, the imposing materiality of the heavy stones and metal bars of physical imprisonment is less important than the weightless elements of light and air through which a prisoner’s every action would be traversed by supervision.

The design of the Panopticon was simple. A circle of cells radiate outward from a central guard tower. Each cell is positioned facing the tower and lit by a large window from the rear so that anyone inside the tower could see right through the cell in order to easily apprehend the activities of the prisoner therein. The guard tower is eminently visible to the prisoners but, because of carefully constructed blind windows, the prisoners cannot see back into the tower to know if they are being watched. This is a design of ceaseless surveillance. It is an architecture not so much of a house of detention as, in Bentham’s words, ‘a mill for grinding rogues honest’.

The Panopticon might seem to have remained a dream. No prison was ever built according to Bentham’s exact specifications, though a few came close. One approximation, the Stateville ‘F’ House in Illinois, was opened in 1922 and was finally closed down in late November 2016. But the important thing about the Panopticon was that it was a general dream. One need not be locked away in a prison cell to be subject to its designs of disciplinary dressage. The most chilling line in Discipline and Punish is the final sentence of the section entitled ‘Panopticism’, where Foucault wryly asks: ‘Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?’ If Foucault is right, we are subject to the power of correct training whenever we are tied to our school desks, our positions on the assembly line or, perhaps most of all in our time, our meticulously curated cubicles and open-plan offices so popular as working spaces today.

It was a bio-power wielded by psychiatrists and doctors that turned homosexuality into a ‘perversion’

To be sure, disciplinary training is not sovereign violence. But it is power. Classically, power took the form of force or coercion and was considered to be at its purest in acts of physical violence. Discipline acts otherwise. It gets a hold of us differently. It does not seize our bodies to destroy them, as Leviathan always threatened to do. Discipline rather trains them, drills them and (to use Foucault’s favoured word) ‘normalises’ them. All of this amounts to, Foucault saw, a distinctly subtle and relentless form of power. To refuse to recognise such disciplining as a form of power is a denial of how human life has come to be shaped and lived. If the only form of power we are willing to recognise is sovereign violence, we are in a poor position to understand the stakes of power today. If we are unable to see power in its other forms, we become impotent to resist all the other ways in which power brings itself to bear in forming us.

Foucault’s work shows that disciplinary power was just one of many forms that power has come to take over the past few hundred years. Disciplinary anatomo-politics persists alongside sovereign power as well as the power of bio-politics. In his next book, The History of Sexuality, Foucault argued that bio-politics helps us to understand how garish sexual exuberance persists in a culture that regularly tells itself that its true sexuality is being repressed. Bio-power does not forbid sexuality, but rather regulates it in the maximal interests of very particular conceptions of reproduction, family and health. It was a bio-power wielded by psychiatrists and doctors that, in the 19th century, turned homosexuality into a ‘perversion’ because of its failure to focus sexual activity around the healthy reproductive family. It would have been unlikely, if not impossible, to achieve this by sovereign acts of direct physical coercion. Much more effective were the armies of medical men who helped to straighten out their patients for their own supposed self-interest.

Other forms of power also persist in our midst. Some regard the power of data – that is the info-power of social media, data analytics and ceaseless algorithmic assessment – as the most significant kind of power that has emerged since Foucault’s death in 1984.

Those who fear freedom’s unpredictability find Foucault too risky

For identifying and so deftly analysing the mechanisms of modern power, while refusing to develop it into a singular and unified theory of power’s essence, Foucault remains philosophically important. The strident philosophical skepticism in which his thought is rooted is not directed against the use of philosophy for the analysis of power. Rather, it is suspicious of the bravado behind the idea that philosophy can, and also must, reveal the hidden essence of things. What this means is that Foucault’s signature word – ‘power’ – is not the name of an essence that he has distilled but is rather an index to an entire field of analysis in which the work of philosophy must continually toil.

Those who think that philosophy still needs to identify eternal essences will find Foucault’s perspective utterly unconvincing. But those who think that what feels eternal to each of us will vary across generations and geographies are more likely to find inspiration in Foucault’s approach. With respect to the central concepts of political philosophy, namely the conceptual pair of power and freedom, Foucault’s bet was that people are likely to win more for freedom by declining to define in advance all the forms that freedom could possibly take. That means too refusing to latch on to static definitions of power. Only in following power everywhere that it operates does freedom have a good chance of flourishing. Only by analysing power in its multiplicity, as Foucault did, do we have a chance to mount a multiplicity of freedoms that would counter all the different ways in which power comes to define the limits of who we can be.

The irony of a philosophy that would define power once and for all is that it would thereby delimit the essence of freedom. Such a philosophy would make freedom absolutely unfree. Those who fear freedom’s unpredictability find Foucault too risky. But those who are unwilling to decide today what might begin to count as freedom tomorrow find Foucault, at least with respect to our philosophical perspectives, freeing. Foucault’s approach to power and freedom therefore matters not only for philosophy, but also more importantly for what philosophy can contribute to the changing orders of things in which we find ourselves.

How Norman Foster made the classic architect studio go global

Celebrated founder has structured his practice in unusual ways to promote creativity 

John Gapper

Lord Norman Foster sits in the open-plan main studio of Foster + Partners by the River Thames at Battersea, recalling the way architects once worked. “It’s probably easier to explain with a drawing,” he says, leaning forward to his notebook to sketch in pencil how rolls of paper were fed to desks before personal computers. 

Much has changed since Foster founded his own architectural practice in 1967 with his late wife Wendy. Foster + Partners has embraced the computer age and is a great deal bigger and more global. It has 1,300 architects (including trainees) among 2,400 employees, and its recent projects range from JPMorgan’s skyscraper on Park Avenue in New York to a new art gallery in Shanghai.

“It started in a bedsit in Hampstead. 16b Hampstead Hill Gardens, first floor,” Foster recalls precisely of Team 4, the firm he co-founded with the late Lord Richard Rogers and others in 1963 before breaking away. Foster + Partners is the largest UK architectural firm and one of the world’s most prestigious, although smaller than global corporate practices such as Gensler and Arcadis.

The Foster practice was driven to expand after finding in the early 1990s that it was overdependent on the UK, which was in a property recession. Having started to work internationally with the Hong Kong head office of HSBC, by 2025 93 per cent of its revenues came from outside the UK. Projects in the Middle East contributed by far the most of any region.

Foster remains executive chair and the firm’s guiding spirit. He is 91 but still energetic and spry, with no intention of retiring although succession is clearly a consideration.

He is confident his practice will endure after he is gone. “Of course there will be differences, but succession has been long planned. There’s an extraordinary depth of talent. It’s like a chamber orchestra. It doesn’t need me as the conductor.”

One of his legacies will be the unusual way Foster + Partners works. The firm is an outlier among architectural practices and other professional services firms in operating globally and on a large range of projects without dividing itself by regions or specialisms. It is arranged in seven studios that work in parallel: the seventh was created this year.

“Anybody can do anything, anywhere, as long as they don’t compete,” Foster summarises. The studios, initially comprising about 60 people each, were formed in 2004 to maintain the creativity of small teams within a large organisation. They also reflect Foster’s nature. “I would go mad having to work just in one place [or] if I had to work on towers, towers, towers . . . that’s ritualistic and bureaucratic and the opposite of what makes us all tick.”

This makes Foster + Partners an interesting place to practise, but it also involves complexity. The studios have their own leadership and pitch individually for new business, although some clients (such as the late Steve Jobs for Apple’s headquarters in California) come directly to Foster. Some projects end up being worked on as joint ventures between studios.

Stuart Latham, managing partner, says any internal tension over who does what is resolved by discussion, although “there is a danger of tripping over ourselves on occasion and sometimes we are not as elegant as we might be”. As the firm has grown, its studios, numbered one to seven, have expanded in size to between 150 and 300 people each.

The closest to an oversight body is a firm-wide design board, chaired by Foster, including full-time members along with the studio heads. But its purpose is architectural rather than managerial. Foster compares its methods to the “jury” tradition of reviews in architectural schools. “You show your work and explain it, and then people start throwing rocks,” says Latham.

Foster has always liked shaking things up. He recalls insisting to the dean of the Yale School of Art and Architecture, where he studied in the early 1960s, that he needed help to design a tower: “I said, ‘I don’t know about tall buildings, I need an engineer.’” Foster + Partners now employs a range of design specialists, including about 370 structural and environmental engineers.

Foster hops around, attaching himself to a variety of projects being worked on by the different studios, currently including an Alpine village regeneration and a planned tower for JPMorgan in London. “The studio system and how you keep it alive is a learning curve . . . like most architects, I’ve had no business training. I’ve learnt it to a degree through trial and error.”

The firm thrives on internal challenge, Foster says. “The organisation is hierarchical in terms of ownership but creatively, it’s a horizontal line. Anybody can come as an intern and say, ‘I think there’s a better idea.’” But his dominance is evident, both in his personal authority and partnership share: Foster and his family hold 9 per cent of the equity, with another third split among 240 partners.

Foster + Partners has been in and out of private equity hands: the UK firm 3i once held a 40 per cent stake but the Foster partners bought this back in 2014.

 Hennick & Co, a Canadian family investment firm, holds a majority stake, which it took in 2021. “It’s essentially a family . . . it has not changed the nature of the practice,” he says of Hennick.

But Hennick’s backing enables Foster + Partners to invest in expansion, including new offices and technology. The firm has been growing briskly: revenue in the year to April 30 2025 reached £571mn from £369mn the previous year and it has recently opened offices in Seoul and Miami. It has also worked on several big projects in the Middle East, including the King Salman international airport in Riyadh.

Foster has used his relationship adroitly with Hennick to reinforce his will. The investor supported him when he wanted to grow further by adding a seventh studio. To his mind, it offered “more succession, more opportunity. I predict, in no time at all, there’ll be an eighth studio”.

Change means upheaval: it has appointed a new studio head and moved the head of another one to a new role, leading research and innovation. Foster says he encountered “entrenched views” among some partners against adding a studio but found “a kindred voice [at] Hennick saying, ‘You’re absolutely right, Norman, we’ve got to work at this together.’”

Growth also helps to keep the firm youthful, one of Foster’s obsessions. “He loves to see a young office. I think he’d be happy if he was the only person here over 40,” Latham observes. Some longer-serving partners have retired and the average age of employees is now 34. About half of its architects are fully qualified, with the rest in the long period of practical training the profession requires.

The founder remains in motion. He is resident in Switzerland but spends a week a month in London and another in Madrid, where he presides over his own foundation. He also crosses the world to the firm’s offices and projects: his last trip took in Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Beijing, Shanghai and Baku. Foster is “more active than he has been in ages . . . he is here and he keeps the rest of us on our toes,” Latham says. As he approaches his firm’s 60th anniversary, there is no sign of him letting go.

Unfinished Decolonisation?

 

By U. Dasin

There is a profound insight in the statement attributed to the founding father of Singapore — Lee Kuan Yew — on the transplantation of Western political institutions into societies whose historical evolution had been radically different from that of the West. The West, he understood, had developed its secular institutions over centuries, against the background of its own particular history of individualism, citizenship, class formation and nation-building. Yet, once Western powers had exported those institutions to the rest of the world — often after having first extracted or expropriated its resources — they tended to assume that the institutions themselves were universal and that the societies receiving them would eventually conform to their logic.

Lee Kuan Yew’s point was not that modern institutions were undesirable. It was that institutions do not float free of history. Beneath the apparently rational and universal structures of the modern state remain older loyalties: family, community, ethnicity, religion, language, memory and collective identity. These do not disappear because a constitution is adopted, a parliament established or independence proclaimed. Indeed, when historical identities are suppressed in the name of an abstract universalism, they have a tendency to return in other forms.

Freud’s famous observation about repression has an unexpected political resonance here: what is driven out of consciousness does not necessarily disappear; it returns, displaced and transformed. The same can happen to collective identities. The modern state may declare all citizens equal, but equality proclaimed at the level of political institutions does not automatically dissolve the historical inequalities, memories and communal structures inherited from the past.

There is an additional irony in the history of Western modernity. The language of universal equality arrived relatively late in the story. It emerged after centuries in which European powers had built empires, appropriated territories and resources, and organised populations according to profound hierarchies of race, class and civilisation. For the populations subsequently incorporated into the modern nation-state, therefore, the arrival of the universal language of equality could not simply erase the material and historical differences produced by the preceding order.

This is one reason why the simple transplantation of Western institutions has produced such uneven results. The problem is not necessarily the institutions themselves. It is the assumption that institutions can be detached from the historical and social conditions that produced them.

Mauritius: A different postcolonial reality

Mauritius presents an especially complicated version of this problem because it does not fit neatly into the familiar postcolonial binary of coloniser and indigenous population. There was no indigenous Mauritian population that existed as a coherent national community before colonialism and could subsequently reclaim its sovereignty. Mauritius was instead constituted through successive movements and displacements of people: enslaved Africans and Malagasy, indentured labourers from different parts of India, migrants from China, Europeans and others, all incorporated into a colonial order characterised by profound inequalities of status, wealth and power.

Consequently, Mauritian decolonisation cannot simply mean the restoration of an original identity that colonialism suppressed. There is no single precolonial Mauritian identity waiting to be recovered. The Mauritian historical experience is instead one of multiple populations becoming, over time, a society. This distinction matters enormously for the way we understand the present debate over Kreol.

The Kreol question

The proposal to begin discussing the introduction of Kreol in the National Assembly is, on its face, an eminently defensible democratic proposition. A language spoken extensively in the everyday life of the country should not be treated as inherently inferior simply because the colonial state elevated other languages into formal institutional domains. Indeed, the parliamentary recognition of Kreol can be understood as part of the continuing democratisation of Mauritian public life.

But the question becomes much more complicated if the matter is framed through the familiar binary of colonial language versus indigenous language. Kreol is certainly a language of Mauritius. But the historical meaning of Mauritius cannot be reduced to Kreol, any more than the history of its population can be reduced to a single ethnic experience. This is where the exceptional complexity of the Mauritian case needs to be acknowledged.

What does it mean to speak of an “indigenous” language in a society whose populations were themselves brought together through slavery, indentureship, migration and colonial structures? What happens when the legitimate recognition of one historically marginalised identity is interpreted, consciously or otherwise, as requiring the marginalisation of other historically constituted identities? These are not semantic questions. They go to the heart of nation-building.

A plurality of histories and identities

For the descendants of indentured populations, for example, “Indian” is hardly a sufficient description of the historical inheritance they carry. The linguistic and cultural histories of Bhojpuri, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi and other communities are distinct. They have generated their own literary, religious, musical and cultural traditions, while simultaneously participating in the making of a distinctly Mauritian society.

This plurality is visible if we care to look: Bihar Diwas, Maharashtra Day, Telugu cultural celebrations and Tamil Heritage celebrations are not simply exercises in religious or folkloric nostalgia. Nor are Cavadee, Holi and Ganesh Chaturthi merely religious festivals in a narrow sense. They are immense collective performances through which language, music, dance, food, dress, ritual, memory and social relations are reproduced and transmitted between generations.

Culture is lived.
It is performed.
It is remembered.

And people understandably become anxious when they believe that the recognition of one identity is being achieved at the expense of another. This is why the distinction between language and ethnicity becomes so important in the Kreol debate. Kreol can be understood as a language, a lingua franca, a literary medium, a language of popular culture and, potentially, a powerful expression of a shared Mauritian inheritance. But none of these propositions automatically makes Kreol the exclusive linguistic expression of Mauritian identity, still less the cultural property of a single community.

Indeed, there is a particularly important distinction to be made between Kreol as a common language of Mauritius and Kreol as an ethnic marker. The former can unite. The latter can divide.

This distinction is especially significant when we recall the work of Dev Virahsawmy, for whom Morisien could signify something larger than the linguistic possession of one community: a collective inheritance produced through the historical encounter of different peoples and languages. In that conception, the language itself becomes evidence of Mauritius’s hybridity. The danger comes when the semantics of language and race are quietly conflated. Once Kreol becomes identified primarily with a particular ethnic community, the very people who might otherwise embrace its wider national significance may begin to fear that they are being asked to exchange one identity for another.

What does decolonisation really mean?

And this brings us to perhaps the most important question of all: what exactly do we mean by decolonisation?

Decolonisation does not end with the lowering of one flag and the raising of another. Independence is a constitutional event. Decolonisation is a much longer historical process. It involves the restructuring of economic power, educational opportunity, cultural prestige, institutional representation, land ownership, social mobility, knowledge systems and the psychological inheritance of colonial hierarchy.

To equate decolonisation primarily with the introduction of Kreol into Parliament would therefore be to reduce an immense historical problem to a single symbolic intervention. The introduction of Kreol may be desirable. But it is not, by itself, decolonisation.

Indeed, there is a danger in allowing symbolic recognition to substitute for structural transformation. This is where Mauritius needs to resist another imported intellectual binary: the assumption that there must be one authentic postcolonial subject — the indigenous, the colonised, the subaltern — and that once that subject has been recognised, the work of decolonisation has been accomplished.

There was never a single Mauritian subaltern

The Mauritian subaltern was never singular. There were — and remain — subalterns, with different histories, languages, religions and memories. Their experiences of colonialism overlapped, but they were not identical.

The indentured labourer from Bihar did not arrive with precisely the same history as the Tamil or Telugu labourer; the enslaved African did not occupy the same position as the Chinese migrant; and none of these histories can simply be collapsed into a single postcolonial identity.

This does not diminish the importance of Kreol. It makes the recognition of Kreol more intellectually demanding. The challenge is to recognise it without requiring anyone else to disappear.

Perhaps this is where Lee Kuan Yew’s insight about ethnicity becomes useful again. His achievement in Singapore was not that he abolished ethnicity. He did something more difficult: he acknowledged ethnicity as a powerful social reality while attempting to prevent ethnicity from becoming the organising principle of the state.

Singapore’s lesson, adapted rather than copied, is therefore not “suppress ethnic identity”. It is almost the opposite: recognise identities fully, while refusing to make any single identity the definition of the nation.

Beyond the hyphen

A Mauritian can be Mauritian-Tamil, Mauritian-Telugu, Mauritian-Marathi, Mauritian-Bihari, Mauritian-Creole, Mauritian-Chinese, Mauritian-Muslim, Mauritian-Hindu, Mauritian-Christian — or simply Mauritian without feeling compelled to specify the second half of the hyphen.

The hyphen need not signify division. It can signify layering.

It can say: I have inherited this history, and I also belong to this nation.

But there is an equally legitimate Mauritian who may not wish to define herself through a hyphen at all. She may inhabit several cultural worlds simultaneously and consider them all part of her inheritance without allowing any one of them to become her political identity. The state must have room for both.

This may be the real challenge before us today: not how to eliminate communal identities, but how to prevent any one of them from claiming exclusive ownership of the national identity.

The answer is therefore neither the old fiction of a completely post-ethnic Mauritius nor the newer temptation to divide the nation into competing claims of historical authenticity. The strongest Mauritian identity may ultimately be the one that does not demand the disappearance of all the others.

Mauritius should not be forced into a binary that was never made for it.

Football and the Reinvention of the Modern Nation

 

Long before the first whistle blew at the 2026 FIFA World Cup, another contest was already underway. It was not a contest for the trophy. It was a contest over identity.

Across Europe and beyond, societies are debating immigration, citizenship, national identity and belonging with an intensity not seen for generations. Elections have been won on these questions. Governments have risen and fallen because of them. Yet for all the speeches, legislation and political rhetoric, perhaps nowhere are these tensions revealed more clearly than on a football pitch.

Football has always been more than a game. It has reflected societies at their most hopeful, their most divided and their most united. For ninety minutes, abstract debates become deeply human. They have a face.

In 2026, that face was Lamine Yamal.

At just nineteen years old, Yamal became one of the defining figures of Spain’s World Cup triumph. His performances captivated audiences around the world, but his significance extended well beyond the football itself. He came to represent a broader conversation about identity, heritage and the evolving meaning of national belonging.

This was never simply the story of one remarkable footballer.

It was the story of a generation.

Nations Change Before Our Definitions Do

International football has long been presented as the purest expression of nationhood. Eleven players. One flag. One anthem. One people.

Reality has always been more complex.

Modern nations are increasingly shaped by citizenship, shared experience and common purpose, alongside the histories and cultures that have always formed part of national identity. A child born and raised in Madrid to Moroccan and Equatorial Guinean parents, educated in Spanish schools and representing Spain throughout his footballing journey is not becoming Spanish. His life has unfolded within Spain’s national story from the very beginning.

The same is true across much of the world. The sons and daughters of families whose histories stretch across continents are contributing to the countries in which they were born and raised, enriching national life while often maintaining deep connections to their family heritage. Football has simply made that reality visible. Yet the sport also reveals a lingering contradiction.

When these players succeed, they are often celebrated as national heroes. When they struggle, questions about identity and belonging can reappear with surprising speed. The standards applied to them are not always the same as those applied to others wearing the same shirt.

Yamal’s story is important not because it is exceptional, but because it is increasingly familiar.

Football Has Become Society’s Mirror

Spain is not alone.

France has wrestled with questions of identity for decades. England has experienced similar debates. Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal and many other nations have all seen football become a stage upon which wider conversations about citizenship, migration and belonging are projected.

Supporters may believe they are discussing football. Often, they are discussing something much larger.

The stadium has become one of the few places where millions of people publicly negotiate what a nation looks like, who represents it and how national identity continues to evolve. Football did not create these debates. It simply placed them under the brightest lights in the world.

Identity Is Not a Choice Between Worlds

One of the enduring misconceptions surrounding modern identity is the belief that it must be singular.

As though being proudly Spanish somehow diminishes Equatorial Guinean heritage. As though representing England weakens Jamaican or Nigerian ancestry. As though playing for France somehow erases Senegalese, Algerian or Congolese family histories. Human identity has never worked that way.

People carry multiple identities throughout their lives, national, regional, cultural, linguistic and familial. These identities do not necessarily compete with one another. More often, they coexist. Football has not created these layered identities. It has simply introduced them to billions of viewers.

Virgil Van Dijk representing the Netherlands / Photo: Getty Images

Africa’s Global Generation

Hidden within this story is another one.

For much of modern history, conversations about Africa have too often focused on what the continent lacked, industrial capacity, investment, geopolitical influence or economic opportunity. Football tells a different story.

Across the world’s biggest sporting stage, African heritage has become one of the defining threads of the modern game. Some of its greatest players represent African nations. Others represent European countries, North American teams, South American teams or nations elsewhere, while maintaining family histories that reach back across the African continent.

This is not a story of divided loyalties. It is a story of interconnected histories.

From Madrid to London, Paris to Amsterdam, African heritage has become an integral part of the story many nations now tell about themselves. Not through conquest or empire, but through families, communities, education, culture and talent.

Perhaps this is one of Africa’s quietest contributions to the twenty-first century.

Not one measured through military power or political influence, but through people whose lives increasingly connect continents rather than separate them.

The Future Already Has a Face

Lamine Yamal represents more than extraordinary footballing talent.

He represents a generation growing up in societies that are increasingly interconnected, diverse and confident in carrying more than one inheritance. His story challenges the assumption that nations possess a single face or a single narrative. History suggests they never truly did. Modern life makes that reality impossible to ignore.

The question confronting many societies today is no longer whether people like Lamine Yamal belong.

That question was answered years ago, in classrooms, neighbourhoods, workplaces and communities where lives were built and identities formed.

The real question is whether our understanding of nationhood has evolved quickly enough to recognise the societies we have already become.

Football did not create this reality. It revealed it. When Lamine Yamal pulled on the shirt of Spain, he was not redefining his country. He was revealing it. Perhaps that is what the 2026 FIFA World Cup will ultimately be remembered for.

Not just the nation that lifted the trophy, but the moment the world caught a clearer glimpse of the nations it is becoming.