Narrating Profit: How Business Education Reproduces Hegemonic Economic Paradigms

Narratives are increasingly recognised as powerful tools for shaping economic imaginaries and enabling transformative change. Yet in business education, narrative capital is frequently, and often unconsciously, mobilised to reproduce hegemonic paradigms centred on rational self-interest and profit maximisation. Although narratives receive growing attention in business education research, they are usually addressed conceptually. To date, no large-scale study has explored how they function in everyday teaching. Drawing on narratology, this study analyses full-lecture transcripts of a business programme at a university in Rotterdam, focusing on plot, events, and narration. The discourse often relies on vague and ostensibly positive formulations, such as “adding value,” which obscure the concrete consequences of business practices. While the narrative structure is, in principle, open to both prioritising social benefit and prioritising financial gain, the analysis shows that when operationalised through actors’ actions and motivations, the latter overwhelmingly overshadows the former. At the extreme, this orientation can go so far as to legitimise manipulation and exploitation. In terms of narration, rhetorical strategies normalise reductive views of human nature, while directive questions guide students toward predetermined responses. In this way, narrative capital is mobilised less for critical exploration than for reinforcing established logics, with even educators critical of such paradigms reproducing them through their framing. Transforming business education must therefore begin at the core, by helping educators recognise and rethink how their narrative capital is deployed, and the ideological assumptions embedded in foundational teaching. JEL Classification A22 · B41 · Q01