Bullshit Empowerment: Why Black and Brown Scholars Fail to Effect Change in Business Schools

Weaving in our experiences with bullshit empowerment as Black and Brown scholars, and drawing on autoethnographies, we assert that some powerful (predominantly White male) Business School academics mobilize ‘the Hobson’s Choice’ to maintain a socially unjust status quo. A Hobson’s Choice reflects a myriad of options that such powerful actors seemingly allow to emerge from ‘specialist’ team deliberations on what we aggregately term as ‘Grand Social Justice Projects’. Notwithstanding, the powerful agents often kill those choices in favor of their already pre-determined decisions reflecting their (dominant White male) ideological stances. As—albeit theoretically—a dimension of noncooperative spaces, a Hobson’s Choice can ultimately induce the resignation of the Other formally attached to the ‘specialist’ teams. Resignation in this context means that the Other relinquishes their agency in giving (own) voice, and merely maintains a bodily presence within such teams. Our study seeks to debate social justice in its broad sense and the Business School.