Challenging social inequality in the global south: Class, privilege, and consciousness-raising through critical management education
Academic Article in Scopus
Copyright of the Academy of Management, all rights reserved.In this article, we study the nexus between class privilege and social inequality through management education. To do so, we conducted exercises with management students at an elite private business school in the Global South (i.e., Pakistan) with the specific intent to invoke reflexivity among these students about their own class privilege. These exercises prompted students of elite socioeconomic backgrounds to consider how they relate to toilet cleaners¿those untouchables doing the most culturally stigmatized of work in Pakistani society. Drawing on findings from the exercises, we sought to answer two interrelated questions: How is class privilege enacted to reproduce social inequality through discursive identity-making processes by which individuals make sense of self and other? and What are the possibilities for reflexivity in business school settings to disrupt, or otherwise undo, the cultural taken-for-grantedness of class privilege? By juxtaposing these two questions against the toilet as the empirical location, we illuminate the subversive power of knowledge produced at the most marginal of sites. This study identifies pedagogical trajectories through which to move toward redressing social inequality in the Global South specifically, and contributes to important debates in the field of critical management education on the significance of reflexivity more broadly.
