Making Managers: Towards an Understanding of how Textbooks, Lectures and Management Case Studies Interact to Inculcate Linguistic and Managerial Habitus in Undergraduate Business Students

Abstract

Habitus, whether it is labeled as such or as managerial/organizational socialization or culture, acts as the principle means of control among white collar professional workers within organizations. Others have argued that the principle task of the business school curriculum is to instill anticipatory socialization of trans-organizational regimes in traditional age undergraduate students. This paper takes a Bourdieusian perspective on both the issues of governmentality and the inculcation of appropriate habitus in traditional age undergraduates, and examines in particular how that part of the undergraduate curriculum that consists of textbooks, lectures and management case studies focus on one particular element of this general managerial habitus, specifically, the inculcation of a new linguistic habitus that both shapes how these proto-managers both speak about and begin to view the world.