London’s Business Schools: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly?

As an educational hotspot, London is a forerunner laboratory of simultaneous neoliberal policies, deregulation, and powerful governmental interventions in Western Europe. The UK’s crowded capital hosts around 40 university-based, degree-awarding business schools. In addition, an eclectic mix of 200 various kinds of operators offer business and management degrees, including a large number of so-called ‘alternative providers’ (APs). Despite a unifying ‘London factor’, we assert that there is no single business school business within this stratified and heterogeneous educational hub. More specifically we ask, what types of business schools exist in London, and how have they emerged? Based on empirical analysis, we present a typology of five kinds of business schools: Physics Envy, Pluralist, Production Line, Pragmatist, and Phony. We argue that our typology helps to understand both historical diversity and recent emerging models. More importantly, the typology helps to anticipate the potential impacts of higher education policies and thus makes it possible to describe, explain, and predict new forms of business and management education.