Although belated, management research is paying increasing attention to socioeconomic inequalities (Amis et al., 2020; Bapuji et al., 2020). Despite the vibrant research on the role of management, organizations, and decision-makers in socioeconomic inequalities, concerted scrutiny of the links between management education and re/production of socioeconomic inequalities has been limited (see Fotaki & Prasad, 2015 for similar acknowledgement). This silence is more telling at a time when socioeconomic inequalities are widening, globally (Piketty, 2020).

The limited attention on inequalities in management education and learning is particularly significant as higher education is often considered a crucial site of social mobility and integral to alleviating inequalities, globally. In what has since come to be known as the “rhetoric of rising”, the idea that those who had hitherto been at the receiving end of inequalities could move ahead in life, depending on their talent, ability and hard work gained ground (Sandel, 2020). Among others, the meteoric rise of business schools in post-World War 2 USA has been attributed to this expansion of state-funded higher education, which was premised on the idea that societal well-being required large numbers of university graduates (Khurana, 2007).

However, recent studies have since debunked the myth of merit-based social mobility as the solution to inequalities. In fact, more than countering, educational institutions are increasingly being recognised as sites of transmittal of pre-existing and creation of new inequalities. Khan (2010), for example, outlines how elite institutions train their students to embody their privileges. That is, entitlements arising due to class and cultural capital, and racial identities are mobilized and enacted in educational settings. Building on which, extant scholarship (albeit limited) from the field of management education and learning has been insightful in terms of scrutinizing business schools as sites of reproduction of inequalities and enactment of privileges (Zulfiqar & Prasad, 2021). Its extensive use and reliance on economic orthodoxy further sediments the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism – and exacerbation of economic inequalities (Fotaki & Prasad, 2015).

The growing pressure on business schools and management education to address inequalities between the rich and the poor (Khurana, 2007) has culminated in calls for activism within business schools and reimagining them as questioning spaces (Contu, 2020; Dar, Liu, Dy & Brewis, 2021). Such scholarly calls for examining the role of management education and learning (and business schools, in particular) have become all the more critical in the context of decolonizing and Black Lives Matter movements, which have presented a thoroughgoing critique of racialized capitalism in the Global North and its hegemony.