University of Edinburgh Business School Partners in Human Business Initiative

The Human-Business initiative aims to foster collaborations between scholars in the humanities and business studies at the University of Edinburgh and beyond. The network has been established thanks to a grant awarded to Paolo Quattrone, Professor of Accounting, Governance and Social innovation at the University of Edinburgh Business School, and to Michael Northcott, Professor of Ethics at the School of Divinity and the University of Edinburgh.

The aims of the initiative are to:

1. Build a sustainable cross disciplinary network of University of Edinburgh Scholars working in the space between the humanities and business studies.
2. Draw on this collaboration to set up a working group involved in the preparation of a major grant application to study the relationship between humanities and business in historical and contemporary settings.
3. Position the University of Edinburgh as an international reference point in the movement to rethink business studies and practices via the cross-fertilization of business studies and the humanities.

The network aspires to devise novel approaches to teaching that move away from the economic and short term biases which have led to the current financial crisis. The liberal arts have a long tradition in fostering creativity, innovation and wisdom exactly the kind of qualities that the leaders of the 21^st century need and that those of the end of the 20th lacked. Demands for new curricula come from students across the board. This initiative responds to this call.

Amongst the skills that might be added to Business Schools is a more critical approach to ethics and the relationship of ethical judgement - or judgements about human values - to economic values. This would include a more critical approach to the modelling of economic behaviour in macroeconomics, to cost and benefit analysis and the increasing focus on short term pay off over long term benefits, and prices and the accounting procedures and symbol systems - including not only money as coinage but digital money, digital accounts, spreadsheets etc - in which these values are represented.

By bridging the humanities to business the network will explore how value meet values, how calculative practices can generate good not only for shareholders but to wider communities, moving away from an economic bias that drives most decision making today.

The network involves academics at Edinburgh, St Gallen, CBS and Heriot-Watt. The network will engage practitioners and build the network’s visibility to achieve momentum.

This is a very exciting initiative that taps into an opportunity for innovation and intercepts a growing interest in the humanities for business and the crisis of capitalism. These changes require intellectual effort, produce critical reflection and then generate outputs. This project is just beginning.

For further information contact Professor Paolo Quattrone.