The plurality of academic activism: Heterogeneous expression for opening up alternative futures

Being and becoming an academic in the neoliberal business school has become a complex and hyper-political space fraught with competing performative agendas (Wall and Perrin, 2015; Bristow et al, 2017; Cunliffe, 2018), with a precarious landscape “[b]ringing in its wake the worrying manifestations of racism, xenophobia and antiintellectualism” (Bristow and Robinson, 2018: 636). When set against a backdrop of global challenges, for instance social inequalities and climate change, such circumstances reignite critique and criticism around the role and responsibility of business schools and their academics (Shrivastava, 2010; Wall et al 2019). Here, some academics have responded by attempting to confront, challenge, resist, and pre/re-configure (Rhodes et al, 2018) in ways which intentionally move towards alternative futures which re-position people-profit-planet and the dominant sub-categories embedded within (Wall et al, 2019).