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• Personal statement advice: business and management

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Whether talking about a recent news story, how you meet targets in your weekend job, or simply why you want to study business at uni, that spark of genuine motivation and enthusiasm will get you noticed. That's what business admissions tutors told us when we asked them what they look for – and here are some more of their top tips.

Find out everything you need to know about writing your personal statement , including how to write a killer opening and our top tips.

A spot-on business personal statement – in a nutshell

Dr Pam Croney, admissions tutor at Newcastle Business School at Northumbria University, is especially looking for evidence of:

• an independent learner
• a thinker and doer
• an innovator or potential entrepreneur
• a good communicator who likes giving presentations
• an interest in what's happening out there in the business world

Can you demonstrate any of these?

She also likes it when applicants give their own views on a topical issue, like why you think a particular company crashed, what sparked the revival of a vintage brand, or whatever else gets you fired up. Admissions tutors love to know what you’re genuinely enthusiastic about!

What business and management tutors are looking for

• Structure and organisation: to study management, you need to demonstrate that you are capable of managing yourself. Your personal statement needs to be structured, organised, and free of spelling or grammatical errors.
• First impressions count: Sue Blything-Smith, Business and Management Admissions Tutor from University Campus Suffolk, says 'you should aim to be unique and original and provide a good opening line that reveals something about your aptitude and enthusiasm’. She really likes to see statements that demonstrate personality and flair but don't go too over the top: keep it formal and remain objective.
• Examples of your relevant skills: Sue is also impressed by applicants who describe situations where they’ve demonstrated relevant skills like good communication or teamwork, problem-solving, initiative, leadership, or achieving goals.
• Research the course: London School of Economics is keen to know things like why you want to study management, what specific aspects of their course interest you, how it relates to your academic studies, and what additional reading or other activities have led you to apply.
• Entrepreneurial flair: Bournemouth likes its business studies applicants to show they are 'self-starters' who enjoy identifying and solving business problems.

Making your business experience count

It’s not just what you've done but how you've reflected on it. If you work-shadowed the CEO of a multi-national company, that's great, but it will have zero impact unless you spell out what you personally gained from it.

Similarly, if your part-time supermarket job or role in a Young Enterprise programme has helped you develop your skills and confidence, that’s great too. But it will only have an impact on your statement if you explain how or give an actual example.

It's the "how" that brings your statement to life and makes it interesting and personal. So try to think of specific occasions or unique ways you have demonstrated your potential, or maybe something you've observed about customer behaviour, management styles or an effective (or ineffective) marketing campaign.

It's even better if you can then link it to something you've learned in your business, economics, or psychology studies, or read in the Financial Times, The Economist, or on the BBC website.

Or consider the transferable skills you've gained through extracurricular activities and how they can show what the University of Bath describes as 'an active interest in understanding people, work, and organisations'.

Check out our guide to business, management, and administrative studies  to find out what courses are available, areas of employment, and where to find out more about careers.

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Business management personal statement

If you'd like to work in the competitive sphere of business, make sure your skills and knowledge are up to date with a Masters in business management

When writing a personal statement for a postgraduate course in business management you should:

• Clearly articulate why you are interested in pursuing a postgraduate qualification in business management. Discuss your motivation, passion, and the specific aspects of business management which intrigue you.
• Outline your career aspirations and explain how studying business management aligns with your professional goals. Discuss the specific roles or industries you aim to enter after completing the programme, and how gaining the qualification will help with this ambition.
• Demonstrate that you have researched the programme and institution thoroughly. Highlight specific modules, practical elements and/or academics that attract you to this course. Explain how it aligns with your academic and career objectives.
• Highlight how your previous studies have equipped you with a solid foundation for further study. Discuss specific modules, projects, research such as your dissertation or academic achievements which are relevant.
• Mention work experience or extra-curricular activities which will make you successful when studying at postgraduate level, and the transferable skills you have gained through part-time work, internships, participation in clubs and societies.
• Conclude by summarising the key points of your personal statement and reiterating your enthusiasm for the programme. Connect your past experiences, academic achievements, and  goals in a cohesive manner.

This example should be used for guidance only. Copying any of this text could significantly harm your chances of securing a place on a course.

Business management personal statement example

As a recent graduate with a 2:1 Bachelors degree in international business, I find myself at a pivotal juncture, eager to elevate my understanding of the business landscape and progress my professional journey. The dynamic nature of the business world has always fascinated me, and my academic background in this discipline has equipped me with a solid foundation. I believe this MSc in business management is the key to unlocking a deeper comprehension of the complexities ingrained in today's corporate environment, which will allow me to excel in my chosen career.

The MSc programme at X University stands out as the ideal progression where I can refine my skills, broaden my knowledge, and forge valuable connections within the industry. The programme's renowned reputation for academic excellence, research initiatives, particularly in entrepreneurship, and its commitment to providing real-world exposure via professional engagement makes it the perfect springboard for my aspirations.

My career ambition is to work in an advisory capacity as a business adviser or management consultant, roles which demand a deep understanding of organisational dynamics and a strategic mindset. The opportunity provided by this programme to delve into specialised modules, such as 'Strategic Management and Organisational Behaviour', which are integral to developing the proficiency required for consultancy and adviser roles, particularly appeals.

What strongly attracts me to X University is the emphasis on practical learning and industry engagement. The prospect of working on real-world case studies and collaborating with experienced professionals is not only exciting but aligns with my goal of establishing a strong network and building connections within the business community. I am eager to leverage these opportunities to gain insights from industry experts via guest lectures, bridging the gap between academic theory and the practical elements of business management.

The global perspective offered by the course is another compelling factor. Building on my undergraduate degree in international business, in an era where businesses operate on a truly multinational scale, understanding diverse markets and cultural variations is paramount. I believe the MSc in Business Management at X University provides a comprehensive curriculum, which incorporates global perspectives, ensuring graduates are well-equipped to navigate the complexities of the interconnected worldwide business environment.

Furthermore, I am drawn to the entrepreneurial ethos fostered by the programme. The modules on entrepreneurship and innovation will not only strengthen my problem-solving skills but also instill an entrepreneurial mindset, which is crucial for those aiming to provide strategic guidance to businesses in a rapidly changing marketplace. The entrepreneurial focus of the programme compliments my dissertation research investigating the expansion of high-growth tech businesses in Scotland, exploring the policy and education provisions which should be implemented to stimulate further investment. This work equipped me with the analytical and project management skills necessary to pursue further study in business management.

In conclusion, I am enthusiastic about the prospect of enrolling in the MSc in business management at X University. I am confident this course will not only deepen my theoretical knowledge but also expose me to invaluable practical experiences, equipping me with the acumen necessary to thrive as a business adviser or management consultant upon completion. I am excited to contribute to the vibrant academic community at X University and to embark on a transformative journey that will shape my career in the world of business.

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• Search postgraduate courses in business management .
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• Business Management Personal Statement Examples

Applying to business management school? You will need a strong personal statement to support your university application. Use our business management personal statement examples as a guidance to write your own. Also, make sure to check other personal statement examples for more inspiration.

Business Management Personal Statement Example

The key to any successful business is good management. In order to adapt to the constant shifts of the global economy, businesses must apply methodical reasoning to people, processes, and technology. I have demonstrated a similarly flexible, adaptable approach to achieving my goals as a mature student with strong academic achievement in Administration and IT and extensive employment experience.

As soon as I graduated from school, I began working. However, as my desire to return to study grew, I combined my work experience with study to earn HNC and HND qualifications in Administration and IT. The IT component of this course has particularly intrigued me because of my interest in how technological processes impact business. It has also been fascinating to learn the theory behind the administrative and organizational practices I have implemented and observed throughout the years.

My experience as a news agent’s kid has given me hands-on experience in both financial and personnel management, including customer service, stock management, and liaising with suppliers. Having always been involved with business and management within the industry, it was perhaps not surprising when I decided to gain more experience in retail. In order to allow my passions for both the technological and financial aspects of these roles to flourish, I sought out experiences that allowed these passions to flourish. I used my expertise in providing excellent customer service while working as a Telephone Banking Advisor for Porta Wealth Management to counsel clients on the best services, weighing the benefits and drawbacks of various products in relation to their needs. Additionally, I was in charge of looking after databases, working on banking policies, and implementing rules set forth by the FSA. Moving between small, local firms and multinationals has allowed me to study the differences in administration and management, as well as how technology affects these.

As an ambitious student with a keen interest in business and management, I am constantly seeking out new ways to further my understanding and skill set. In my spare time, I delve into a diverse array of management techniques and put them into practice in both my personal and professional life, allowing me to achieve my goals and aspirations. One of the most prominent examples of this is my leadership experience as the Treasurer, and later the Chairperson, of my local Women’s Power Business Group. In this role, I have been actively involved in a variety of volunteer and fundraising initiatives, as well as organizing workshops to support isolated or vulnerable women and their children in my community. Not only has this role given me the fulfilment of making a difference, but it has also provided me with invaluable experience in implementing leadership, teamwork and administration skills in a real-world setting. I have also been able to infuse my other passions, such as my love for walking, by initiating annual sponsored events like a 5K walk for Breast Cancer Research. This unique blend of my interests and skills has allowed me to develop a well-rounded perspective and provided me with a valuable learning experience.

Having a natural inclination toward the management of people and processes as a persistent self-starter with a drive for improvement. As a result of consistently reflecting on myself in my studies and work, I have been able to identify areas for improvement and think critically about my own performance. In my undergraduate studies, I have not only honed this natural tendency but also gained knowledge on technology integration, which I believe will be crucial in the business world of the future. After graduation, I hope to utilize this knowledge and ability to make a significant impact. I’m determined to make a real impact in the business world, whether I start my own company or take on a key role within a larger organization.

Management Personal Statement Example

Being a very determined and studious individual academically, I knew a university degree was an obvious next step. In spite of my broad interests, I am drawn toward a law or business management degree. As far as Business is concerned, I chose it because of its complexity and intrigue. Management blends so seamlessly with everyday issues that I particularly enjoy. In taking the subject at A-Level, my interest has grown and matured, and I can view many businesses analytically and make suggestions regarding improvements. Law is an area which has interested me from an early age. I am an avid reader and believe that this habit is crucial when it comes to pursuing a career in law. I feel that my attributes make me an ideal candidate for the field as I possess a keen attention to detail and am intrigued by work that deals with contemporary social issues and the need to analyze and present evidence effectively. Additionally, I believe that the psychology coursework I have completed has helped me understand how people’s perspectives and recollections can be influenced by various factors. This type of work demands a certain level of self-assurance, which I am confident that I possess and can leverage to excel in the competitive sphere of law.

Throughout my career, I’ve had the opportunity to work in a diverse range of roles and environments, and this has helped me develop a broad range of skills. However, among all the experiences, I’ve had the privilege to work for Royal Worcester in the Debenhams store which I believe has been the most formative of all. Being a sales advisor in such a high-end company has taught me to have a self-assured demeanour, and I have also had to cultivate a good memory to be able to provide customers with accurate product knowledge.

Additionally, I was assigned the duty of training a new employee, demonstrating the great level of confidence my employers have in me.

From holding the role of form captain in secondary school to helping with the planning of large-scale festivities in college, my educational experiences have been quite useful to me. These kinds of responsibilities have enabled me to grow up and take my roles seriously, earning the respect of my coworkers. As English Prefect in Year 11, I was responsible for supporting the entire English department, which took up a significant amount of my time. I also had a piece I wrote against the mistreatment of women on French television published in the daily “Paris Local News” as a result of my interest in the French language. I was pleased to have my opinions represented.

I have always been passionate about languages and during secondary school, I took evening French classes. My dedication and hard work were recognized when I received the ‘The Best Student of the Year’ award for my outstanding performance. These classes required me to manage my time effectively, so my schoolwork did not suffer. Furthermore, being raised by German and French parents has helped me to achieve fluency in the language.

Aside from languages, sports and leisure activities have always been an interest of mine. In college, I used this passion to do charity work and raise money for ZBIN. One of my accomplishments includes raising £1050 and abseiling 120ft down London University. 

Additionally, I played netball for the local Netball Team and competed in the OGI UK Games for the Wembley Stallions AFC team. My performance was recognized with several trophies, as well as a gold and bronze medal in the long jump and javelin respectively.

How to write specific paragraphs of your statement:

I have always been fascinated by business and the way that companies and large organisations work. From my first steps, I have been an entrepreneur at heart, always finding ways to make a little extra money selling lemonade at the promenade or starting school projects. With my personal development, my interest in business has only intensified, and I have come to realise that business management is something I want to study at school. Read more in management personal statement examples .

I believe that a business management degree will open many doors for me and provide me with the flexibility to pursue a wide range of career paths. Whether I decide to start my own business or join an established company, I know that the skills and knowledge I gain will be invaluable. 

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Example of a personal statement for a business degree  .

A business degree personal statement has a big impact on your chances of getting admitted to your desired University.

While grades and UCAS points are an important part of your application, indicating intellectual or academic strength, personal statements are how you demonstrate your character and extracurricular experience.

A personal statement shows your academic achievements in addition to providing context and insight into your passion and goals for business studies. Admissions committees want to know the value you can bring to the university - a personal statement helps them to better determine this.  

This guide will help you write a comprehensive and effective personal statement - one that complements your academic scores with a clear description of your unique talents, experience, ambitions and goals. 

The Structure of a Good Personal Statement

A good business degree personal statement should have a clear and logical structure.

Typically you would want to include the following sections…

Introduction:

• Your motivation for pursuing a business degree.
• Your reason for choosing this course at this university.

Skills and Achievements:

• Key traits and characteristics.
• Your academic accomplishments.
• Any business-related extracurriculars and leadership roles.

Your Business Experiences:

• Work shadow programs, Internships, group projects, or roles that highlight your relevant skills and learning inside or outside of the classroom.
• Key contributions and takeaways from each experience.

Closing Statement:

• Reiteration of your passion and suitability for the course.
• Vision for your future in business.

1. The Introduction: Crafting the Opener

The introduction of your personal statement sets the tone. It's where you explain 'why' you want to study a business degree. The opening lines are important because they capture the admissions committee's attention.

Clarity: Begin with a clear, concise statement about your desire to study business. This could stem from a lifelong fascination, a transformative experience, or a future goal you're aiming for. Explain briefly why you’re interested in this particular course at this particular University.

Personal Touch: Share a personal anecdote or experience that ignited your passion for business. Did a specific event or individual inspire you? Elaborate briefly, connecting it to your broader aspirations.

Forward-looking: Highlight where you envision a business degree taking you. Are you looking to drive innovation in a particular sector? Maybe you aspire to be a future leader in sustainable business practices?

Concise: Keep it short and impactful. Avoid meandering or generic statements. Be genuine about your motivation, ensuring it's specific to your aspirations. Any personal anecdotes should be concise and punchy - to the point.

Your introduction should come across sincerely. It should set the tone by offering a short description of your past inspirations and future ambitions in the realm of business.

2. Skills and Achievements

It’s important to effectively showcase your skills and achievements. Here's how to strategically highlight them:

Traits: Begin by pinpointing key character traits that support and emphasise your suitability for a business course. Are you a decisive problem solver? Perhaps you excel at analytical thinking or demonstrate resilience in the face of challenges. 

Identify your strongest relevant attributes and share them to paint a picture of the potential you can bring to the course. Committees are always looking to find candidates who have traits that will make them good business students and future industry leaders.

Academic: Reference all relevant courses or subjects that align with the courses you're applying to. Did you ace your 'Business Studies'? Why did you settle on the subjects and courses you chose at school? Perhaps you were involved in an olympiad? Make sure to mention any honours or accolades, or academic activities that showcase your academic ability and past performance. 

Academic excellence is always worth mentioning, even in school subjects you might feel are unrelated to business. Bear in mind that ‘business’ is vast, complicated, and ever-changing. It is difficult to predict what knowledge and skills might become critically important to business activity in the future. So, share your academic strengths and interests, whatever they may be. 

Activities: Beyond the classroom. Business schools value real-world engagement, leadership, and teamwork experience . Did you take part in any societies? Did you play a leadership role? Or partake in a notable entrepreneurship competition? Emphasise any leadership roles or participation in business-centric events. These experiences underscore your passion and hands-on involvement in the world of business.

3. Relevant Experience & Roles

A University admissions committee won’t expect you to have started your career already. But they will greatly value any extracurricular initiative. If you have been involved in any entrepreneurial, leadership, or management roles at school, then mention them. If you are a mature student, and have been in the workforce for some time, use any relevant work experience.

Internships or Work Experience: Were you part of an internship or work shadow programme? If so, then it would be excellent to mention how you actively participated in a formal business environment. Describe what business you were a part of, what you did, and what you learned from the experience. Perhaps that experience taught you skills? Any exposure to a business environment is valuable.

Projects & Working as Part of a Team: Perhaps you spearheaded a project at school? Working effectively in a team is a highly valued skill. If you can showcase any team experience that will definitely stand in your favour. Highlight the challenges that you faced, how you resolved them, and show what you learned from your experience working with a group of people. 

Roles: Did you assume any significant roles at school or in a business setting outside of school? Outline your responsibilities, the impact you made, and the insights you gleaned from both your successes and failures. This demonstrates not just your capability to understand a role and its responsibilities, but also your adaptability in changing challenging circumstances. 

If you felt you learned from an unsuccessful project where you had an important role, then share what you might do differently - what you learned. The ability to learn from past ‘failures’ is an extremely desirable trait that admissions committees will value highly.

For each experience, focus on the value you added and the lessons you learned. This will give admissions committees a clear picture of your practical abilities and your potential contribution to their course.

4. Closing Statement: A Strong Impression

Your closing remarks are crucial. They should leave the admissions committee with a good impression and reinforce your fit for the course.

Reiterate Passion: Briefly touch upon the core reasons driving your interest in business, consolidating what you've shared throughout your statement. Perhaps you're motivated by the challenges and opportunities of the evolving business landscape, or you're dedicated to making a positive impact in a specific sector.

Your fit for the Degree: Highlight your alignment with the specific business degree courses to which you're applying. Have you been particularly impressed by their focus on entrepreneurship or their reputation for fostering global leaders? Express how their unique offerings align with your aspirations.

Your Future Vision: Provide a glimpse into your future. Post-degree, where do you see yourself? Leading a startup? Championing sustainable practices in a multinational? Use this chance to project your potential contributions to the business world, showcasing ambition and forward-thinking.

Gratitude and Openness: Express appreciation for considering your application. Showcase your openness to further discussions, signalling your enthusiasm and readiness to engage with the institution.

End on a strong note, ensuring your closing words echo your dedication, clarity of vision, and the unique value you'll bring to the institution. 

Tips & Advice: Helpful Hints to Strengthen Your Personal Statement

Your personal statement is a reflection of your journey, aspirations, and suitability for the business degree. Keep these tips in mind for a standout submission:

• Authenticity: Always be genuine. While it's essential to present your best self, resist the urge to embellish or overstate. Authentic experiences resonate more than grand exaggerations.
• Clarity: Opt for clear, concise language. Admissions committees appreciate directness over dense jargon. Let your true voice shine through.
• Examples: Don't just state; demonstrate. If you claim to be a problem-solver, illustrate with an instance where you tackled a challenge head-on.
• Tailoring: Beyond expressing your passion for business, pinpoint why this specific degree aligns with your goals. Is it their renowned faculty, innovative curriculum, or alumni network?
• Review: Never underestimate the value of proofreading. Ensure your statement is free from errors, reads smoothly, and truly represents you. It also often pays to get someone else to read it and give you constructive feedback.

We hope this guide will help you to create the best personal business degree statement that you can. Best of luck with your applications going forward.

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• Statement of Purpose, Personal Statement, and Writing Sample

Details about submitting a statement of purpose, personal statement, and a writing sample as part of your degree program application

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Statement of Purpose 

The statement of purpose is very important to programs when deciding whether to admit a candidate. Your statement should be focused, informative, and convey your research interests and qualifications. You should describe your reasons and motivations for pursuing a graduate degree in your chosen degree program, noting the experiences that shaped your research ambitions, indicating briefly your career objectives, and concisely stating your past work in your intended field of study and in related fields. Your degree program of interest may have specific guidance or requirements for the statement of purpose, so be sure to review the degree program page for more information. Unless otherwise noted, your statement should not exceed 1,000 words. 

Personal Statement

Please describe the personal experiences that led you to pursue graduate education and how these experiences will contribute to the academic environment and/or community in your program or Harvard Griffin GSAS. These may include social and cultural experiences, leadership positions, community engagement, equity and inclusion efforts, other opportunities, or challenges. Your statement should be no longer than 500 words.

Please note that there is no expectation to share detailed sensitive information and you should refrain from including anything that you would not feel at ease sharing. Please also note that the Personal Statement should complement rather than duplicate the content provided in the Statement of Purpose. 

Visit Degree Programs and navigate to your degree program of interest to determine if a Personal Statement is required. The degree program pages will be updated by early September indicating if the Personal Statement is required for your program.

Writing Sample 

Please visit Degree Programs and navigate to your degree program of interest to determine if a writing sample is required. When preparing your writing sample, be sure to follow program requirements, which may include format, topic, or length. 

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29 Best universities for Management in Moscow, Russia

Updated: February 29, 2024

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Below is a list of best universities in Moscow ranked based on their research performance in Management. A graph of 109K citations received by 29.4K academic papers made by 29 universities in Moscow was used to calculate publications' ratings, which then were adjusted for release dates and added to final scores.

We don't distinguish between undergraduate and graduate programs nor do we adjust for current majors offered. You can find information about granted degrees on a university page but always double-check with the university website.

1. Moscow State University

For Management

2. National Research University Higher School of Economics

3. Bauman Moscow State Technical University

4. Moscow Aviation Institute

5. RUDN University

6. N.R.U. Moscow Power Engineering Institute

7. Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology

8. Finance Academy under the Government of the Russian Federation

9. National Research Nuclear University MEPI

10. Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration

11. Plekhanov Russian University of Economics

12. State University of Management

13. New Economic School

14. Moscow State Institute of International Relations

15. Moscow State Technological University "Stankin"

16. Moscow Medical Academy

17. Moscow State University of Railway Engineering

18. National University of Science and Technology "MISIS"

19. Moscow State Pedagogical University

20. Moscow Polytech

21. National Research University of Electronic Technology

22. Russian State Social University

23. Russian State University for the Humanities

24. Russian State University of Oil and Gas

25. russian national research medical university.

26. Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology of Russia

27. Moscow State Technical University of Civil Aviation

28. Russian State Agricultural University

29. Moscow State Linguistic University

Universities for Management near Moscow

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Marketing and business management personal statement example 1.

Ever since an early stage in my life, I have always worked hard to overcome challenges. This in turn influenced my passion for business. Business can be a risky and competitive industry, but having considered my most desired skills and interests, I know that I am ready to step into the world of business.

My passion for business has reinforced my decision and motivation to study business at a degree level. I am a creative, alert and hard working individual who can work intuitively with a pragmatic approach to studying, and for this reason I believe I can succeed in this course. I am keen to develop my knowledge in marketing as this is an interesting area of work for me. I also like to carry out my own research, and find out new points about business that I haven't come across yet.

I understand that marketing demands a fair degree of scientific thinking. And that it is a complex profession, requiring a broad understanding of technology, an awareness of how to analyse and understand data, plus a good grounding in a variety of other scientific and mathematical principles which I personally believe I have and this would enable me to progress and establish a good understanding.

Some of the modules that I have covered include Finance, Human Resources, Strategic Management and Marketing. With excellent understanding in these subjects that I have covered and an enthusiasm for knowledge, I am confident in my ability to progress further in business as I am keen to further my own skills in education.

I undertook a school-led work experience scheme at a business firm called Bridge Park in Wembley. Being an office-based job, I was able to further my organisational and interpersonal skills as I learnt the importance of professionalism in the work area and the day-to-day pressures of deadlines. During my time at Bridge Park, I recognised how businesses work with one another to gain profit.

During my secondary school life, I captained my football team from year 7-11. This improved my leadership abilities as I learnt how to organise the team, and understood the importance of teamwork, encouraging the players and improving team morale and spirit.

Being a successful captain, I always believed in a democratic team who could interact with each other, giving individual input from each of the members, and my role was to bring their ideas together and make final decisions. Being captain made me gain the understanding of commitment to the team and helping the team to a winning form.

I have been on various trips, one of which was a school trip to Egypt. It was an amazing experience, where I interacted with people from a different background. I was able to acknowledge and understand the values and norms of other cultures. This was thoroughly rewarding and I now have a deeper appreciation of diversity.

I am a believer of pro-actively trying to make a difference to world poverty and even in the current climates of recession I strongly believe that the developed countries have a duty to developing countries today. I'm currently donating monthly to Oxfam and have previously undertaken some volunteer work for the charity organisation, which provides domestic aid to developing countries.

During this time, I was able to help raise money to give aid to the children in Somalia. I found this experience very rewarding as I know that however little my efforts may seen, they have surely provided at least one child a better life. These efforts only strengthened my determination to work hard and achieve to the highest of my ability.

Making full use of the facilities we have in London, I am a regular attendee at my local gym and am a fanatic of sport, from hockey to basketball, but favouring football.

Having read a lot of media reviews on health and fitness and assessed the new approaches to health over the last few years, I am much more aware of the need to be positive about my health and understand the physical importance of taking care of your body and its effect on the mind, than ever before.

I intend to study at university and achieve a high class degree that will greatly help me to pursue my career plans in Business.

Profile info

This personal statement was written by bad_boy_g for application in 2009.

bad_boy_g's Comments

I'm coming to end of my personal statement i just wanted some thought from other people what they think and what i could improve!

Related Personal Statements

Tue, 09/12/2008 - 16:33

im applying for a marketing/advertising degree for 09 entry...still working on a new PS, thought they dont have anything on Advertising and only 3 Marketing statements > not really a gr8 amount of help from any of those...so Ive been reading through some of the Business ones.

So far, urs has really stood out Great statement :) in terms of covering all areas from academic achievements, work exp. extra cirricualar activities etc. while still showing u have a life!/are a well rounded person & without being too big-headed/waffling on/boring or using fancy words which look out of place n dnt rel8.. G00dluck, where have u applied so far?...

Wed, 10/12/2008 - 11:10

I've applied to Kent, nottingham trent, reading, brighton and worcester.! i havent yet sent my statement off going to send it off by today or tomorow what abt u where u applied?

yeh im just finishing up on

Thu, 11/12/2008 - 17:52

yeh im just finishing up on myne and hoping to send it off by tommorrow. I've summed it down to just 2 main unis that i want to go to - Hertfordshire and Northampton, but will probz add another thats in/around the london area maybe..

Very good! Affirmative,

Thu, 11/12/2008 - 21:53

Very good! Affirmative, confident and assertive!

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Personal statement example business management.

Submitted by Cameron

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Business Management

Businesses sculpt and empower the society that we live in today. I want to involve myself in leading how the future will look. I have reflected on the skills I possess and enjoy using to help me select the right university course. I am an entrepreneurial individual who enjoys communicating and developing my social skills. I believe that a career in Business Management and Marketing holds a wealth of potential for me. I have always had an interest in how to develop sales and market products better. My involvement last year in a school-run young enterprise team, where I took the role of marketing director challenged and excited me, especially learning how to develop an online marketing campaign.

To further pursue my interest, I have delved into further reading into what it takes to make it in the business world.

'Reality Check' by the Silicon Valley venture specialist, Guy Kawaski really opened my eyes to the challenges faced by entrepreneurs and the hunger and desire needed to overcome obstacles, which I am confident that I hold.

I've recently managed to gain some valuable insight into business through a variety of work experience placements including Talk Sport, Mitsubishi and running my own gardening services business. One placement that notably stood out was working within the marketing and PR department at one of the world's largest air-conditioning manufacturers, Mitsubishi Electric. Within the marketing team, I was involved in managing their social media campaign, a relatively new venture for an industrial manufacturer. I also joined a sub-team organising a future client event at the Olympic Velodrome. Exploring how a company’s marketing team functions with hands-on experience was wholly beneficial to my learning and further increased my interest in how influential the mass growth of social media has been and will continue to be for businesses going forward. For the PR team, I was left in charge of writing my own press release on a recent project. My strong literary skills acquired from studying English A-level proved their worth as the article was published in the trade press. In addition to my unpaid work, I currently manage three income streams; a bar job, various babysitting roles and I run my own gardening business for 4 households.

The skills developed in my work experience are cross-referenced in my academic subjects. English Literature has allowed me to develop my critical thinking and given me the ability to think outside the box; a skill transferable into many business opportunities. Geography has allowed me to study key aspects of business such as globalisation where industry has a key responsibility to mould the future. My independent investigation researching 'The Microclimate of Leamington Spa' allowed me to utilise and advance my IT and data analysis skills as I converted my raw data into presentable results. My favourite subject is Mathematics as I enjoy developing problem-solving skills; something I hope I can transfer into my degree course. I also believe that the competencies acquired from completing my Grade 8 LAMDA Speaking Award give me a new skill that will always be valuable. Communication and assertiveness is key in a management role; speaking on topics including 'The Benefits of Sports Marketing' allowed me to develop my public speaking ability and as part of the research I also learnt more about how businesses use modern culture and sport to market their products.

Throughout my school life, I have embraced the opportunities offered to me in terms of extra-curricular activities. I have played sport, most notably rugby, at a competitive level for over 10 years, representing both my club and school team up to a national level. I’m keen to continue this sport at University as keeping fit and healthy is important to me. In addition to this, I have played the trombone in various school bands since I joined senior school.

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• Disruption, transformation and silos: medical humanities and the management gurus
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• http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3144-8233 Gavin Miller
• School of Critical Studies , University of Glasgow , Glasgow , UK
• Correspondence to Dr Gavin Miller, School of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK; gavin.miller{at}glasgow.ac.uk

To disrupt, to transform and to break through silos are common sense aims for the medical humanities and other interdisciplinary endeavours. These keywords arise because of the influence upon the academy of management and business gurus, reputed experts who arose in response to the economic crises of the 1980s. Despite the noted analytic deficiencies in the concept of disruption, and its association with product innovation, the term has been extended to academic research, where it connotes radical novelty in research practice, typically accompanied by profound organisational and managerial change. ‘Disruption’ has become wedded to the word ‘transformation’ as national funders seek to support more radically innovative research that will maintain Western economic hegemony. A distorted version of Kuhn’s model of scientific revolutions underpins the discourse of transformation, which fits humanities research to a template in which revolutionary, transformative shifts can be instrumentally favoured by funders, at the expense of inferior ‘incremental’ progress. Disruptive and transformative research are, according to funders, more readily produced in organisations that have broken through silos between disciplines. The silo metaphor misleadingly models academic disciplines as if they were essentially unitary entities, akin to the functionally specialised units of a business organisation. The discourse of silos arises from the guru doctrine of the learning organisation. This theory supposes that the organisation—including the university—is literally a living organism, and thereby susceptible to corporate sickness, mortality, infection and disability. Medical humanity researchers should be aware of, and reject, this vitalist metaphysic in which the optimal organisation is a culturally homogeneous supra-personal organism whose immense capacities are harnessed by visionary leaders. Moreover, a new vocabulary should be developed for research evaluation, superseding the supposed hierarchical opposition between transformative and incremental research.

• Medical humanities
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This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See:  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ .

https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2024-012928

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In 2023, I attended a presentation by Wellcome Trust, a major UK and global funder of research on life, health and well-being. The presentation, on ‘Discovery Research’, cited a recent cover story in Nature , ‘Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time’. The article concludes that ‘papers and patents are increasingly less likely to break with the past in ways that push science and technology in new directions’ ( Park, Leahey, and Funk 2023 , 138). The thesis of a decline was treated cautiously by Wellcome Trust, although the reality of disruptive research was not. However, much disruptive research was around already, and whether it was declining or not, Wellcome Trust was there to help us make more of it—including in my field, medical humanities. In a recorded version of the presentation (no longer available online), the Wellcome’s representative explains that they support Discovery Research in order ‘to disrupt and transform the understanding of life, health and well-being’. The verbs ‘to disrupt’ and ‘to transform’ are left undefined, but they are clearly associated with the production of ‘fundamental, blue-skies research’.

To disrupt , to transform : these are nigh-on common sense aims for medical humanities researchers. A further term often follows in their footsteps: the silo —a metaphor that understands disciplines as typically walled-off from each other, like divisions of a corporation. A distinguished medical humanities scholar cites for instance the ‘potential transformative effect’ ( Macnaughton 2023 , 550) of the medical humanities and argues for the benefits of a ‘less siloed’ approach to the COVID-19 pandemic ( Macnaughton 2023 , 546). As a medical humanities researcher, I have used all three words almost unthinkingly to describe good interdisciplinary research and the kind of organisational life that supports it. This article began in my desire to understand where these words come from and what they mean by analysing them as keywords—what Raymond Williams in his classic discussion calls ‘a cluster’ of ‘interrelated words and references’ ( Williams 1985 , 19). Like Williams, I offer in this article not a lexicographical ‘neutral review of meanings’ but rather an ‘exploration of the vocabulary of a crucial area of social and cultural discussion’ ( Williams 1985 , 21). Like the keywords identified by Williams and his successors, the cluster of ‘disruption’, ‘transformation’ and ‘silos’ has a complexity that is ‘hidden behind a façade of familiarity’ ( Moran 2021 , 1025), and which invites a materialist analysis grounded in ‘the changing shape of capitalist societies’ ( Moran 2021 , 1026–1027).

I explore the economic and organisational meanings of these keywords in the supposed ‘fourth industrial age’ of the information economy. My analysis is in the spirit of critical (rather than ‘instrumental’) interdisciplinarity that informs the medical humanities (cf. Whitehead and Woods 2016 ). Julie Thompson Klein explains that critical interdisciplinarity ‘interrogates the dominant structure of knowledge and education with the aim of transforming it, raising questions of value and purpose silent in instrumental I[nter]D[isciplinarity]’ ( Klein 2017 , 28). I also draw on critical management studies, understood as a pluralistic movement which ‘proceeds from the assumption that dominant theories and practices of management and organization systematically favor some (elite) groups and/or interests’ ( Alvesson, Bridgman, and Willmott 2011 , 7). With the aid of critical management studies, I connect the three keywords of this article to the influence on the academy of management and business gurus, reputed experts who arose in response to economic crises of the 1980s and who have remained enormously influential in succeeding decades. By tracing these keywords back through a variety of textual sources and transformations, I show how the common sense of interdisciplinary research culture has been shaped by the influence of gurus. ‘Disruption’ emerges as term promoted by gurus in response to US anxieties about economic stagnation and the loss of hegemony. The word comes into an alliance with the term ‘transformation’, which is extracted from Thomas Kuhn’s foundational work in history of science, and then widely misused by research funders as an all-purpose label for higher quality research. Disruptive and transformational research emerges, as we all think we know, from organisations that have broken through silos (between disciplines, between researchers and practitioners, etc). Yet the origins of the silo metaphor lie in a contentious and ableist cluster of illness and disability metaphors that authorise the concept of the ‘learning organisation’ as a living organism. I unveil a guru doctrine in which organisations, including universities, are literally alive, and vulnerable to disability, sickness, and premature mortality. Moreover, superior organisational leaders possess an intuitive sympathy with the needs of a potentially immortal supra-personal being—their organisation itself, be it a corporation or a university.

The term ‘disruption’ is commonly associated with digital technologies that have greatly transformed previously ‘analogue’ industries: one might think here of the transportation company Uber, whose smartphone application directly connects taxicab passengers with drivers. Yet the creator of the concept of disruption, the management guru Clayton M. Christensen, has stressed that Uber’s ‘financial and strategic achievements do not qualify the company as genuinely disruptive—although the company is almost always described that way’ ( Christensen, Raynor, and McDonald 2015 , 47). To properly understand disruption in its strict sense, we must turn to the term’s origin in Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma (1997). In this enormously influential book, Christensen identifies various companies where ‘ good management was the most powerful reason they failed to stop atop their industries’—the list includes IBM, Apple, Sears Roebuck, and Xerox ( Christensen 1997 , xii). According to Christensen,

Precisely because these firms listened to their customers, invested aggressively in new technologies that would provide their customers more and better products of the sort they wanted, and because they carefully studied market trends and systematically allocated investment capital to innovations that promised the best returns, they lost their position of leadership ( Christensen 1997 , xii)

Seemingly well-managed companies carefully invest in so-called ‘sustaining technologies’ which ‘improve the performance of established products, along the dimensions of performance that mainstream customers in major markets have historically valued’ ( Christensen 1997 , xv)—yet this performance may outstrip what is needed in marginal markets. Counterposed to sustaining technologies are ‘disruptive technologies’ which though they initially ‘underperform established products in mainstream markets’ have the virtues of being ‘typically cheaper, simpler, smaller, and, frequently, more convenient to use’ ( Christensen 1997 , xv). Although Christensen often uses digital technologies as examples, disruption can be found in other forms: he argues, for instance, that Honda’s marketing of small-engine motorbikes disrupted the North American motorcycle market, which was dominated by incumbents such as Harley-Davidson who focused on powerful bikes for the highway as demanded by established customers ( Christensen 1997 , 153–156).

Disruptive technologies, once established, undergo their own, more rapid sustaining development; though they ‘may underperform today’, they may be ‘fully performance-competitive in that same market tomorrow’ ( Christensen 1997 , xvi). Christensen’s central case study examines the development of hard disc drives for computer storage ( Christensen 1997 , 3–28). He argues that markets have been repeatedly disrupted by physically smaller drives that were initially more expensive per megabyte of storage and thus of little interest to leading firms. However, each disruptive drive technology develops an emerging market of smaller computers—first minicomputers, then desktop personal computers, then laptops—that enables the disruptive product to become performance competitive (price per megabyte) with the previous sustaining technology.

Christensen concludes that well-managed firms fail because to invest in disruptive technologies seems economically irrational: (1) disruptive products ‘promise lower margins, not greater profits’ because they are ‘simpler and cheaper’; (2) disruptive products are ‘first commercialized in emerging or insignificant markets’; (3) ‘leading firms’ most profitable customers generally don’t want, and indeed initially can’t use, products based on disruptive technologies’ ( Christensen 1997 , xvii). Christensen counsels in response various ‘ principles of disruptive innovation ’ ( Christensen 1997, xiii ) in which it may be ‘right not to listen to customers, right to invest in developing lower-performance products that promise lower margins, and right to aggressively pursue small, rather than substantial, markets’ ( Christensen 1997 , xii). However—and this is the innovator’s dilemma—Christensen asserts that established firms struggle to pursue both sustaining and disruptive product development, unless by ‘[c]reating an independent organization, with a cost structure to achieve profitability at the low margins characteristic of the most disruptive technologies’ ( Christensen 1997 , xx).

Despite its enormous popularity, Christensen’s theory has been comprehensively criticised—debunked, even. Christensen is a mediocre business historian, as Jill Lepore argues regarding the history of disc drives: in truth, ‘victory in the disk-drive industry appears to have gone to the manufacturers that were good at incremental improvements, whether or not they were the first to market the disruptive new format’ ( Lepore 2014 ). She also demonstrates that Christensen’s case studies employ unreliable sources, ignore counterevidence and refuse to pursue counter-explanations. Moreover, they are ‘handpicked’, and so may be distorted by confirmation bias. Similar criticisms have been made more methodically by Andrew A. King and Baljir Baatartogtokh, who interview a large pool of experts in order to re-examine over seventy case studies presented in The Innovator’s Dilemma and the later The Innovator’s Solution . Only seven cases fully matched with Christensen’s theory; the ‘majority of the 77 cases were found to include different motivating forces or displayed unpredicted outcomes’ ( King and Baatartogtokh 2015 , 79). Yet, despite these empirical deficiencies, the ‘theory of disruptive innovation has gripped the business consciousness like few other ideas’, and ‘has spread far beyond the business world’ ( King and Baatartogtokh 2015 , 78).

Jill Lepore suggests that disruption suits the post-9/11 mood of the US and its allies: ‘the rhetoric of disruption—a language of panic, fear, asymmetry, and disorder—calls on the rhetoric of another kind of conflict, in which an upstart refuses to play by the established rules of engagement’ ( Lepore 2014 ). Christensen, however, can be positioned in a longer social and cultural history of management gurus. Building on earlier critical work by Andrzej Huczynski ( Huczynski 1993 ) and Stephen Pattison ( Pattison 1997 ), David Collins argues that management gurus are ‘products of the 1980s and need to be located within the socioeconomic context of that turbulent decade’ ( Collins 2021 , 27). The 1980s saw a boom in popular management books alongside the rise of a concomitant industry in management guru speaking engagements ( Collins 2021 , 27–28). Collins takes Tom Peters and Bob Waterman’s In Search of Excellence (1982) as ‘the prototype of modern guru theorising’ ( Collins 2021, 28 ). This book arose in a context of soaring unemployment, inflation and banking interest rates ( Collins 2021 , 31). In Search of Excellence became a bestseller because it addressed managers in a period when

fears of continuing economic decline and predictions of growing Japanese dominance prepared the way for representations of the business of management which diagnosed the cultural roots of the malaise while simultaneously advocating the pursuit of home-grown (and home-spun) remedies. ( Collins 2021 , 38)

This national anxiety, in conjunction with changes in higher education, consultancy, and publishing, launched a guru industry that would endure for decades, ‘offer[ing] salvation to those struggling to deal with the challenges thrown up by a volatile competitive context’ ( Collins 2021 , 52).

Disruption discourse serves a similar function, but specifically addresses later anxieties in High Income Countries (particularly the USA) about the declining rate of technological innovation. After the global financial crash of 2008 and subsequent recession, assorted postcrash visionaries diagnosed an economic malaise. Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation (2011) purports to explain How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better . Cowen argues that the US economy has reached a ‘technological plateau’ ( Cowen 2011 , 7) because of a declining rate of innovation ( Cowen 2011 , 20). The ‘libertarian’ entrepreneur Peter Thiel bemoans the loss of the ‘lofty hopes of the 1950s and 1960s’ in a 2011 essay for the conservative National Review ( Thiel 2011 ). The ‘innovation engine’ stalled, apparently, in 1969: ‘Men reached the moon in July 1969, and Woodstock began three weeks later. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that this was when the hippies took over the country, and when the true cultural war over Progress was lost’. Where are the political visionaries, wonders Thiel, ‘who would make serious cuts to the welfare state in order to free up serious money for major engineering projects’? In a similar 2011 lament, the science fiction author Neal Stephenson diagnoses an ‘innovation starvation’: ‘our inability to match the achievements of the 1960s space program might be symptomatic of a general failure of our society to get big things done’ ( Stephenson 2011, 12 ). The ‘innovation-killer of our age’ is the risk-averse corporate preference for ‘small improvements’—‘a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation’ ( Stephenson 2011 , 16). Handily for Stephenson, part of the solution is ‘for SF writers to start pulling their weight and supplying big visions that make sense’ ( Stephenson 2011 , 13).

MaryAnne M. Gobble locates Cowen, Thiel, and Stephenson among other commentators who voice a ‘worry that America’s [ sic ] age of innovation is past, that the economic engine of past centuries is flat out of gas’ ( Gobble 2012 , 60). This fear helps to explain why ‘disruption’ has been tremendously successful as a category of practice despite its analytic deficiencies. Christensen had left his readers with a narrative cliffhanger: how could the established organisation survive the threat of the disruptive start-up? The Innovator’s Solution (2003) explains to market leaders how they can nurture disruptive innovation by launching their own disruptive subsidiaries. Success depends on a ‘disruptive growth engine’ overseen by (a special brand of) senior executives who, colossi-like, ‘stand astride the interface between disruptive growth businesses and the mainstream businesses’ ( Christensen and Raynor 2003 , 267), and who have ‘the confidence and the power to exempt a venture from an established corporate process’ ( Christensen and Raynor 2003 , 280). Big organisations, be they corporations or the USA itself, need not fear ‘the attacker’s advantage’ ( Christensen 1997 , 55) so long as they know what disruption is and know how to do it.

Christensen controversially extended his model of disruption to learning and teaching in higher education ( Christensen and Eyring 2011 ). His model of the ‘innovative university’ makes sanguine assumptions about the comparability of online learning and hybrid learning with face-to-face learning, and also turns academics into a pool of casualised low-cost teachers who are fungible across the widest possible range of courses ( Bucknell 2016 , 224–225). But leaving aside teaching, Christensen’s model of disruption is hard to extend in a rigorous way even to academic research. For those who explicitly use the vocabulary of disruption, smaller and slower may be watchwords of innovative (or disruptive) research practice. Park et al propose that researchers be given time to ‘keep up with the rapidly expanding knowledge frontier’ by for instance reading widely; universities may reward quality over quantity, ‘and perhaps more fully subsidize year-long sabbaticals’; and funders may support careers rather than projects, allowing researchers ‘to step outside the fray, inoculate themselves from the publish or perish culture, and produce truly consequential work’ ( Park, Leahey, and Funk 2023 , 143–144). Wu suggests their results ‘paint a unified portrait of underfunded solo investigators and small teams who disrupt science and technology’, with the corollary that ‘government, industry and non-profit funders of science and technology’ should investigate the role of small teams ‘in expanding the frontiers of knowledge’ ( Wu, Wang, and Evans 2019 , 382). Many of us will be sympathetic to such pleas for a slower, more individualised tempo within academic research, particularly as a counter to the acceleration of academic temporality within the knowledge economy ( Vostal 2016 ). But is this disruption?

Pleas for a slower research tempo illustrate some supposed trade-offs in academic knowledge production around speed (faster, but more provisional; slower but more consequential). But this change in tempo does not amount, however, to disruption in the analytic sense. Consider, for instance, the key characteristic of disruption: the emergence of new and/or low-end markets whose needs have been overshot by sustaining innovation. Christensen states that ‘[d]isruptive innovations originate in low-end or new-market footholds’ before the innovator then ‘migrate[s] to the mainstream market’, displacing incumbents ( Christensen, Raynor, and McDonald 2015 , 47). The low-end market is less demanding and needs only a ‘“good-enough” product’, whereas ‘incumbents’ offerings often overshoot the performance requirements’ of the low-end market ( Christensen, Raynor, and McDonald 2015 , 47). At any rate, the new-market foothold ‘turn[s] nonconsumers into consumers’ ( Christensen, Raynor, and McDonald 2015 , 47). What then is the equivalent for research purchasers from universities, that is, some marginal or new market that might be met by disruptive innovators in knowledge production who could (a) offer knowledge that was less valuable to core markets, (b) open up a marginal lower-profit market of knowledge purchasers who do not need the ‘features’ of established knowledge products and (c) then rapidly overtake the value proposition of established knowledge production for core markets?

As indicated above, there are ways of playing with the idea of different features of knowledge products—perhaps quicker results are ‘good enough’ for some research purchasers. It is debatable, though, whether the idea of low-profit research maps onto universities, who are non-profit organisations who sell their research at cost (or at a loss) and have no shareholders to satisfy. Moreover, where are the market footholds for disruptive innovation in knowledge production, beyond the incumbent market of governments, business and charitable foundations? The main, perhaps only candidate for potential disruption would seem to be crowdfunded research, whereby projects can be financially supported by the general public, without pre-award gatekeeping by academic peer review ( Ikkatai, McKay, and Yokoyama 2018 ). But crowdfunding is so far a marginal practice, whether in science or humanities; nor, clearly, is it a market within which large institutional funders such as Wellcome Trust would fit, despite their desire to support ‘disruptive’ research. Indeed, crowdfunding may simply remain a marginal or low-end unregulated market for knowledge purchasers—like paying less for dentistry or cosmetic surgery in another country and being willing to take the risks (or being ignorant of them). ‘Disruption’ in the sense used by major funders, and in appeals to them, is not Christensen’s original concept, though it nonetheless clearly connotes radical novelty, along with profound organisational and managerial change. To understand how the word ‘disruption’ is used in practice, I must pursue its semantic connection to another keyword, ‘transformation’.

Transformation

In the Nature cover story alluded to earlier (and highlighted by Wellcome Trust), the authors use citation measures and linguistic analysis to substantiate their claim about the decline of disruptive research. The ‘CD index’ (CD stands for ‘consolidates or destabilises’ ( Funk and Owen-Smith 2017 , 792)) assumes that ‘if a paper or patent is disruptive, the subsequent work that cites it is less likely to also cite its predecessors’ ( Park, Leahey, and Funk 2023 , 139). Linguistic analysis of paper and patent titles similarly shows a decline in the diversity of words, a loss of ‘combinatorial novelty’ (ie, whether words have been used together in previous titles), and a reduction in the frequency of verbs ‘alluding to the creation, discovery or perception of new things’ ( Park, Leahey, and Funk 2023 , 140). The paper invites many questions, including the validity and extent of the claim, and tactics for gaming these measures. But what may be overlooked is the naturalisation of disruption discourse as part of what the authors call ‘foundational theories of scientific and technological change’ ( Park, Leahey, and Funk 2023 , 138). The authors distinguish between research which ‘improve[s] existing streams of knowledge, and therefore consolidate[s] the status quo’, and that, like the discovery of the structure of DNA, which ‘disrupt[s] existing knowledge, rendering it obsolete, and propelling science and technology in new directions’ ( Park, Leahey, and Funk 2023, 138-139 ). While Christensen is not directly cited, the discourse of stalled innovation is invoked via references to Cowen’s The Great Stagnation . Moreover, the CD index comes from earlier work that explicitly employs Christensen’s distinction between disruptive and sustaining innovation. An earlier Nature paper uses the CD index to conclude that ‘smaller teams have tended to disrupt science and technology with new ideas and opportunities, whereas larger teams have tended to develop existing ones’ ( Wu, Wang, and Evans 2019 , 378). They explicitly link this conclusion, and its contrast between disruptive and developmental research, to Christensen’s work, which they cite for their statement that ‘[l]arge teams, such as large business organizations, may focus on sure bets with large potential markets, whereas small teams that have more to gain and less to lose may undertake new, untested opportunities with the potential for high growth and failure’ ( Wu, Wang, and Evans 2019 , 378). The inventors of the CD index also cite Christensen for a similar distinction ( Funk and Owen-Smith 2017 , 792).

The extended grasp of disruption discourse, from business innovation to research innovation, can be explained by the way it complements popularised notions of a Kuhnian paradigm shift glossed by the word ‘transformative’ and its cognates. In Kuhn’s influential model of scientific development ( Kuhn 2012 ), scientific progress consists typically of focused ‘puzzle-solving’ science operating under a shared paradigm. This process continues until the revolutionary creation of a new paradigm which displaces the old by explaining anomalies or counterinstances that the previous paradigm recognised but could not solve. Park, citing Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions , characterises disruptive research as involving the creation of a ‘new paradigm’ ( Park, Leahey, and Funk 2023 , 139); and the CD index itself clearly operationalises Kuhn’s comment that ‘[w]hen it repudiates a past paradigm, a scientific community simultaneously renounces […] most of the books and articles in which that paradigm has been embodied’ ( Kuhn 2012 , 166).

Park’s argument intersects with a broader post-millennial popularisation of Kuhn’s work by research funders which eventually weds the word ‘transformative’ to ‘disruptive’. A historically important 2007 report by the US National Science Board for the National Science Foundation (NSF) offers the conclusions of a task force given the remit to enhance the NSF’s capacity to identify and support transformative research. It opens with a distinction that clearly relies on Kuhn, although without citing his work:

The vast majority of scientific understanding advances incrementally, with new projects building upon the results of previous studies or testing long-standing hypotheses and theories. […] Less frequently, scientific understanding advances dramatically, through the application of radically different approaches or interpretations that result in the creation of new paradigms or new scientific fields. This progress is revolutionary […] The research that comprises this latter form of scientific progress, here termed transformative research , is the focus of this report ( National Science Board 2007 , 1).

The report concludes by proposing a new ‘Foundation-wide program designed specifically to solicit and to support transformational and paradigm-challenging proposals’ ( National Science Board 2007 , 8). The Task Force fears that the NSF (and other funders) have overlooked and discouraged potentially revolutionary work: transformative research ‘is challenging to and frequently crosses disciplines’, and so ‘[e]xperts in the areas being challenged (many of whom may sit on review panels) may dismiss such ideas by pronouncing the research overreaching or without basis’ ( National Science Board 2007 , 4). This anxiety recapitulates the earlier concern, noted above, that a failure to encourage and support transformative research in the US will ‘jeopardize […] our Nation’s ability to compete in today’s and tomorrow’s global economy’ ( National Science Board 2007 , 2).

Some researchers have voiced discontent with funders’ attempts to identify, support and prioritise transformative research. Kuhn’s account of scientific revolutions argues that revolutions can occur only because puzzle-solving science has identified anomalies ( Cooper and Licato 2022 , 276). Kuhn himself says as much in his account of the ‘essential tension’ between normal and revolutionary science: ‘revolutionary shifts of a scientific tradition are relatively rare, and extended periods of convergent research are the necessary preliminary to them’ ( Kuhn 1977 , 227). Moreover, manipulation of the variables that control transformative research may be impractical since scientific revolutions may hard to predict ( Cooper and Licato 2022 , 279), and equally hard to identify even retrospectively ( Cooper and Licato 2022 , 276). A 2019 Danish National Research Foundation booklet on transformative research offers various dissenting perspectives. Not only is transformative research hard or impossible to predict ( Danish National Research Foundation 2019 , 9), it also ‘implies a ranking that favors the transformative, and perhaps forgets the reciprocal relationship between incremental and more radical steps’ ( Danish National Research Foundation 2019 , 10). Moreover, ‘maybe these types of [transformative] progress do not exist in certain fields, or maybe in these fields an incremental breakthrough is as outstanding as it can get’ ( Danish National Research Foundation 2019 , 10).

Such concerns are not eccentric. Post-Kuhnian history and philosophy of science quickly recognised that the model of paradigms and revolutions ill-fitted disciplines in the social sciences. As Murray S. Davis argues, ‘Ambiguity in social science is not the embarrassment Kuhn finds it in natural science’ ( Davis 1986 , 295). Rather than ambiguity being part of a theory’s ‘breakdown phase’, it is instead ‘what helps to make it famous in the first place through the public controversy that surrounds its “correct” articulation and interpretation’ ( Davis 1986 , 296). Classic theories also invite extension into new domains, according to the interests of later researchers ( Davis 1986 , 297). Social theories typically decline not because of breakdown in the face of accumulated anomalies, but rather because of declining relevance to current concerns ( Davis 1986 , 296). Finally, the humanities are another case entirely: no serious observer could suppose that, for instance, literary criticism or philosophy in fact operate within a single disciplinary paradigm, even if there are occasional polemical aspirations (such as Alasdair MacIntyre’s ‘disquieting suggestion’ that we dwell in the ruins of a fragmented and partly destroyed system of moral philosophy ( MacIntyre 2013 , 1–5)).

Transformative results may well be possible only in certain kinds of research. But if universities are required, despite principled objections, to offer a Kuhnian paradigm shift to their customers as a dimension of research quality, then the jargon of disruption finds a natural home: transformation is to puzzle-solving as disruption is to consolidation, because both connote opposition to incremental progress under established organisational and managerial structures.

Silos, Stovepipes, and Tits

The discourse of disruption and transformation arises in the context of ‘academic capitalism’ in which institutions and academics have increasingly made ‘market or marketlike efforts to secure external funds’ that are usually tied to ‘market-related research’ that may be described as ‘applied, commercial, strategic and targeted research’ ( Slaughter and Leslie 1997 , 209). The discourse of disruption and transformation indicates a particular twist in the history, post- c .1970, of the neoliberal erosion of block grant funding from the state ( Slaughter and Leslie 1997 , 209). The emphasis on applied research in the first few decades of academic capitalism led to anxieties that fundamental research would be discouraged ( Slaughter and Leslie 1997 , 129). Since the early 2000s, funders have increasingly tried to redress the focus on applied research by supporting research that they classify as disruptive or transformative. Advanced capitalist nations want to buy this kind of research because, as I have shown, they are beset by anxieties about slowing rates of technological innovation and a consequent loss of international economic hegemony. Universities bid to supply such research—and so they entrench further the associated jargon.

Given that academia has come to ‘treat advanced knowledge as a raw material’ supplied for exploitation to a high-technology economy ( Slaughter and Rhoades 2004 , 17), then any university selling its research services will want to show the buyer that transformative results are likely. The prospective customer—the government, the charitable funder, the business and so on—will be given the documentary (sometimes face-to-face) equivalent of a factory tour. What do research customers of the knowledge economy want to see? The 2022–2027 strategy document for UK Research and Innovation—‘the main investor of taxpayer’s money in research and innovation’ ( UKRI 2022, 5 )—states that there is ‘a new industrial revolution, driven by the pace of technological change’ ( UKRI 2022 , 3). What UKRI will pay for is ‘a more connected and agile system’, which requires ‘break[ing] down silos across the system, nationally and internationally’, whether by ‘the movement of people and ideas’ or by ‘support[ing] collaborations’ ( UKRI 2022 , 8). The document explains the problem of ‘silos’ at greater length: ‘Within the system there are still too many silos separating people and knowledge, acting as a barrier to interdisciplinary work and reinforcing a model in which there is a linear, one-directional relationship between research and innovation’ ( UKRI 2022 , 9).

The term ‘silo’, like ‘disruption’ and ‘transformation’, has become commonplace amid calls for leaner and more agile universities. Hershey Harry Friedman and Frimette Kass-Shrabiam advise the aspiring ‘superior college president’ on how to benefit from the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, or ‘Age of Disruption’ ( Friedman and Kass-Shraibman 2017 , 286). Organisational silos must be met with ‘silo busting’ in order to turn universities into ‘learning organizations’:

organizations that get too large often find themselves with rigid silos and consumed with turf battles. To succeed in the present economy, people from different departments within a firm must collaborate; the same is true in academe when it comes to academic departments and disciplines ( Friedman and Kass-Shraibman 2017 , 293)

For Friedman and Kass-Shrabiam, silo-busting turns universities into learning organisations, which are ‘characterized by the utilization of shared knowledge; an emphasis on cooperation, not turf; a commitment to constant learning and personal growth; an infrastructure that allows the free flow of information and ideas; and an ability to adapt to changing conditions’ ( Friedman and Kass-Shraibman 2017 , 292).

Like ‘disruption’ and ‘transformation’, the term ‘silo’ points to a wider cultural and national history. As Richard J. Harknett and James A. Stever explain, the pre-9/11 US intelligence apparatus was later seen as afflicted by an ‘individual-unit bureaucratic, silo-like orientation’ ( Harknett and Stever 2011 , 700). For anthropologist turned business writer, Gillian Tett, silo effects—which bring about metaphorical visual impairments such as ‘tunnel vision’ ( Tett 2015 , x)—explain a whole range of recent organisational failures. Jerry A. Jacobs shows how the metaphor of the ‘silo’ has been used to criticise the structuring of universities into disciplinary units. Disciplinary silos are alleged to interrupt communication between disciplines, to inhibit innovation and thereby economic growth in knowledge economies, to limit academia’s potential to address problems of a holistic or cross-disciplinary character and to fragment undergraduate education ( Jacobs 2014 , ch2). In a further account of silo discourse in academia, Jonathan Kramnick argues that it offers an ‘instrumental reason for busting up the disciplines’ derived from management theory ( Kramnick 2017 , 74): ‘The vision is fundamentally flat. Every workplace team traffics in the common currency of information and exists in light of some finite project or task or topic drawn from that currency’ ( Kramnick 2017 , 72). The consequent ‘interdisciplinary ideal is of a cluster that might take shape on a given problem or challenge while sharing temporary space on a hiring plan’ ( Kramnick 2017 , 73). Neither Kramnick nor Jacobs find this interdisciplinary ideal appealing. Kramnick suggests that it overlooks a ‘norm of deliberativeness’ in the humanities as well as a ‘tolerance for letting some difficulties stand once they are articulated’ that is particularly evident in literary criticism ( Kramnick 2017 , 74). Kramnick also argues that corporate silos and academic disciplines are fundamentally disanalogous, since the latter exist ‘to explain the highly differentiated constitution of the world’ ( Kramnick 2017 , 72) rather than to respond to ‘what the world demands or the challenges it poses’ ( Kramnick 2017 , 74). For Kramnick, disciplinary specialisation is a virtue because ‘a pluralistic array of disciplines’ corresponds with an ontological plurality of objects: ‘endocrine cells for the biologists, tectonic plates for the geologists, librettos for the musicologists, and so on’ ( Kramnick 2017 , 67). For this reason, ‘the best way to be interdisciplinary is to inhabit one’s discipline fully’ ( Kramnick 2017 ). In a complementary argument, Jacobs contends also that the organisational model of the functional silo has no real purchase on the disciplinary system of the university. Disciplines are in fact ‘dynamic entities’ ( Jacobs 2014, 53 ) that are ‘characterized by extensive differentiation within fields and the lack of sharp boundaries between fields’ ( Jacobs 2014 , 35); ‘disciplines are not silos but rather can be thought of as sharing a dormitory space where they raid each other’s closets and borrow each other’s clothes’ ( Jacobs 2014 , 35). Regardless of formal reorganisation (such as interdisciplinary challenge-led centres), such exchange ‘occurs every day without fuss or fanfare’ ( Jacobs 2014 , 79).

Grant that disciplinary specialisation, dynamism, internal differentiation and contestation and exchanges are a customary feature of the university. Why then has the myth arisen that interdisciplinary research requires a particular organisational form—epitomised by silo-busting centres? The doctrine of the silo emerges from a curious ontology held sub rosa by influential management gurus. Jacobs notes that the term ‘silo’ may have ‘spilled over from the business world to academia’, though he does not pursue any further the apparent precursor, ‘organizational silo’ ( Jacobs 2014 , 18). Kramnick cites Tett’s work on silos and traces the term back to at least 1991 ( Kramnick 2017 , 72). Neither Jacobs nor Kramnick quite manage to pin down the term ‘silo’ within management theory. The word can likely be traced to the organisational consultant, Phil S. Ensor, who identifies in 1988 a ‘functional silo syndrome’ within organisations wherein ‘[c]ommunication is heavily top-down—on the vertical axis’ and ‘[l]ittle is shared on the horizontal axis’ ( Ensor 1988 ). This structure, which is ‘designed to maintain control, rather than to foster trust and proactive problem solving’ means that ‘[t]he organization has a very damaging learning disability—it has not learned how to learn’, ‘[i]nstead, it repeatedly exercises in quick, easy error detection and correction activities which merely address symptoms’.

Ensor’s metaphor of cognitive impairment (which anticipates Tett’s metaphors of visual impairment) indicates the context of his analysis, which is that of the ‘learning organisation’ as conceived by the management guru Peter M. Senge in his highly influential The Fifth Discipline (1990). According to Senge, recent business history shows a ‘high corporate mortality rate’ ( Senge 1990 , 17) that arises because ‘most organizations learn poorly’ ( Senge 1990 , 18): ‘The way they are designed and managed, the way people’s jobs are defined, and, most importantly, the way we have all been taught to think and interact (not only in organizations but more broadly) create fundamental learning disabilities’ ( Senge 1990 , 18). He declares that ‘[l]earning disabilities are tragic in children, especially when they go undetected’, and similarly that ‘[t]hey are no less tragic in organizations, where they go largely undetected’ ( Senge 1990 , 18). In Senge’s nosology, there are seven learning disabilities, of which the core disability is ‘the delusion of learning from experience’, whereas in fact we ‘ never directly experience the consequences of many of our most important decisions ’ ( Senge 1990 , 23). He offers the metaphor not of silos, but of stovepipes: ‘what was once a convenient division of labour mutates into the “stovepipes” that all but cut off contact between functions’, so that ‘analysis of […] the complex issues that cross functional lines, becomes a perilous or nonexistent exercise’ ( Senge 1990 , 24).

According to gurus, organisations that bust silos (or stovepipes) are more intelligent than those that don’t. In the case of universities, silo-busting interdisciplinary research promises to fulfil a key organisational goal: namely, to supply more profoundly innovative research as raw material for the knowledge economy. Yet the jargon of silos reveals a new mystery: corporations can be stupid or clever; they can die or live; they can have learning disabilities (which, in Senge’s casually ableist view, are apparently ‘tragic’, whether in organisations or children). Senge’s peer and interlocutor, the management consultant Arie de Geus (1930–2019), elaborates this discourse in The Living Company (1997), where he offers his own version of the silo/stovepipe metaphor. Geus discusses the differences in the learning behaviour of two common garden birds, blue tits and robins. British tits have learnt to get cream from glass milk bottles delivered to doorsteps by pecking through their aluminium lids. Robins have not, even though individual birds occasionally learn to pierce the bottle tops. The moral of this animal fable is that ‘robins tend to communicate with each other in an antagonistic manner, with fixed boundaries that they do not cross’ ( de Geus 1999 , 162). Robins work in silos or stovepipes, to use Ensor and Senge’s vocabulary. Tits, however, form ‘flocks of eight to ten’ which ‘seem to remain intact, moving together around the countryside, and the period of mobility lasts for two to three month’ ( de Geus 1999 , 162). This flocking behaviour, according to de Geus, allows individual learning to spread throughout the species. Nature’s teachings are clear. Some companies have ‘stronger territorial tendencies. They classify members by their specialty, skill, or mandate’ ( de Geus 1999 , 166): ‘[e]ach robin is allocated his or her territory in the corporate garden’ and ‘these teams communicate as antagonistically as red robins’ ( de Geus 1999 , 166–167). But if organisations can bring people together in flocks, then innovations will develop and spread through the company—it becomes a learning organisation. Flocking requires ‘ mobility of people and some effective mechanism of social propagation ’ ( de Geus 1999 , 163), and it requires ‘ organizational space —freedom from control, from direction, and from punishment for failures’ ( de Geus 1999 , 168).

The fable of the blue tit and the robin anticipates of course the later and more successful discourse of silos (occasionally ‘stovepipes’), and it is part of the rhetorical performance of the management guru, who often relies on brief persuasive narratives. Alon Lischinsky notes that popular management texts ‘often follow a cyclical exemplification/generalization pattern’ in which examples establish the ‘factuality, significance and desirability’ of expert prescriptions ( Lischinsky 2008, 263-264 ). Exemplary narratives also bring a plausible order and significance to the concrete experiences of everyday managerial life (for a fuller analysis, see Keulen and Kroeze 2012 ). Yet de Geus’s commitment to the idea of the learning organisation brings deeper ontological commitments to the existence of a species of supra-personal beings that—without the guru’s intervention—will rule over us and bring the world to ruin. De Geus expresses a peculiar concern about the lifespan of ‘commercial corporations’, which he believes are ‘at a primitive stage of evolution’ evidenced by ‘their high mortality rate’: the average lifespan of a multinational is ‘between 40 and 50 years’ ( de Geus 1999 , 7), but, states de Geus, ‘the natural average lifespan of a corporation should be as long as two or three centuries’ ( de Geus 1999 , 8). Big companies, in other words, are dying prematurely. They do so because managers forget that companies are living entities, in which profitability is merely ‘a symptom of corporate health, but not a predictor or determinant ’ ( de Geus 1999 , 14), particularly in an era in which ‘ knowledge ’ has ‘ displaced capital as the scarce production factor—the key to corporate success ’ ( de Geus 1999 , 24). Managers must understand that companies are organisms that ‘exhibit the behaviour and certain characteristics of living entities’: ‘All companies learn. All companies, whether explicitly or not, have an identity that determines their coherence. All companies build relationships with other entities, and all companies grow and develop until they die’ ( de Geus 1999 , 17). De Geus counsels his perhaps sceptical reader that one does not have to accept the literal truth of this analysis in order to be a good manager; it could just be ‘a useful metaphor’ ( de Geus 1999 , 17). But the inner doctrine is clear: ‘I put forth the hypothesis that “companies can learn.” […] I rarely add the rest of the sentence: “Companies can learn because they are living beings”’ ( de Geus 1999 , 112).

De Geus offers four key determinants of corporate health: ‘its adaptiveness to the outside world (learning), its character and identity (persona), its relationships with people and institutions inside and around itself (ecology), and the way it developed over time (evolution)’ ( de Geus 1999 , 32). Every company thus has its ‘persona’, which may sound like a mask or guise, but which is a term de Geus derives from the German personalist psychologist William Stern (1871–1938). According to de Geus, Stern holds that ‘each living being has an undifferentiated wholeness, with its own character, which he called the persona’ ( de Geus 1999 , 104); the persona is goal oriented, self-conscious, open to the outside world and alive but with a finite lifespan ( de Geus 1999 , 104). When human beings join together in corporations, they form new collective personae: ‘The family, the tribe, and the national government are all living systems in which people join together; so are the trade union, the sports club, and the nonprofit organization’ ( de Geus 1999 , 108). De Geus argues (or asserts) that each collective unit is: goal-oriented; conscious of itself and its boundaries; in an informational and material relationship to its environment; and, of course ‘ alive ’, but with a ‘ finite lifespan ’ ( de Geus 1999 , 109–110). Whether human or collective, such personae are essentially unpredictable because they are always in a self-conscious learning relationship to their environment. Their behaviour is not governed by laws of mechanical cause and effect, as if it were some reflex action ( de Geus 1999 , 105–106).

In constructing his model of the living company, de Geus draws on Stern, and a range of scientific and psychological experts, including neuroscientist David Ingvar and child psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott ( de Geus 1999 , 44–48, 80–82). The temptation may be to assess the fidelity and rigour of de Geus’s adaptations of these ideas: personalism, notably, contains prominent critiques of the organic model of social life, such as that offered by the philosopher John Macmurray ( Conford 2008 ). But to engage in this scholarly way, and to join the recent critical revival of Stern’s work (eg, Lamiell 2021 ; Wertz 2023 ), would be a category mistake. De Geus’s syncretic borrowings are not rigorously argued; they proceed instead from a rhetorical coherence buttressed by the personal authority granted by his professional experience. Consider, for instance, his thesis that organisations have an immune system which can be activated when under attack by ‘individuals or groups of individuals who do not want to be part of the whole’, who are ‘not full members of the community’ ( de Geus 1999 , 192). De Geus is particularly concerned about employees who are threatened (or faced) with redundancy and who might act through their trade union ( de Geus 1999 , 192–193). De Geus has essentially an ‘integration perspective’ ( Collins 2000 , 135) on organisational culture, in which a confession of faith is required of members ( de Geus 1999 , 121). Yet de Geus makes no explicit argument against competing analyses of corporate culture, such as the ‘differentiation perspective’, which proposes that ‘organizational goals are, in fact, created and promoted by certain groups (such as the “gurus”)’ ( Collins 2000 , 137). The espoused aims and values of organisations may typically be the peculiar creation of ‘certain dominant individuals and groups’ ( Collins 2000 , 137), and thereby contested (or ignored) by other individuals and groups within the organisation. Moreover, the organisation is not a ‘cultural island’; there are in reality no ‘definite and impermeable boundaries which seal organizations (and cultural management programmes) from the influence of the wider society’ ( Collins 2000 , 142). No employee is ever a full member of the corporate community.

Conceptual engagement with de Geus’s melange of varying, sometimes incompatible strands of the human sciences misses the point. As Huczynski has argued, guru ideas become common sense by evading processes of internal disciplinary critique. They are instead embedded by a diverse range of external factors, such as: the anxieties of managers, who need to be perceived as active and as informed by management theory; the managerial preference for a range of alternatives to choose from; the sunk costs of the guru product cycle; and the charismatic authority of the gurus themselves (for a fuller discussion, see Huczynski 1993 , 268–296). In this spirit, we might note that the conceptual vocabulary, the animal fables and the central metaphor of collective organismic personhood are authorised by de Geus’s experiential expertise as a senior leader in the hydrocarbon multinational Royal Dutch/Shell: ‘I came to realize that Shell, as a whole, was an unfathomable being. It, too, was alive’ ( de Geus 1999 , 106). The same authorisation by expertise is readily apparent in Peter Senge’s later work. In his commitment to reflection on first-hand experience in Presence (2005), Senge drops any hesitations about the literal truth of de Geus’s doctrine of the living company. He approvingly presents de Geus as claiming that ‘the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of a new species on earth—that of large institutions, notably global corporations’ ( Senge et al 2005 , 7). This new life form ‘has the potential to grow, learn and evolve’ but at the moment companies ‘expand blindly, unaware of their part in a larger whole or of the consequences of their growth, like cells that have lost their social identity and reverted to growth for its own sake’ ( Senge et al 2005 , 8). Senge contends that the most successful entrepreneurial activity requires ‘the capacity to sense an emerging reality and to act in harmony with it’ ( Senge et al 2005 , 13). The ‘core capacity needed to access the field of the future is presence’, understood as ‘deep listening, of being open beyond one’s preconceptions and historical ways of making sense’ in order to ‘serve the evolution of life’, to enter a ‘state of “letting come”, of consciously participating in a larger field for change’ ( Senge et al 2005 , 13–14). This essentially vitalist doctrine of healthy alignment with the life process (‘Use the Force, Luke’) is expressed in a heady syncretism of psychologised wisdom traditions, scientific odds and ends (such as quantum entanglement ( Senge and Dyer 2004 , 22–23)), and sententious maxims: ‘When all is said and done, the only change that will make a difference is the transformation of the human heart’ ( Senge et al 2005 , 26).

In and around the 1970s and 1980s, history stagnated. Not for everyone, of course—but particularly for Americans, or US-Americans, to be exact. For the USA, history had stalled—or even regressed. A new elite emerged: management gurus. Gurus knew how to restart the economic engines of progress. Their knowledge did not come from the ivory tower. It came from experience. They had as many ideas as they had experiences, but that did not really matter; the management guru intuited a reality that the rest of us might grasp only through laborious ratiocination. An important (supposed) intuition was that big organisations were alive, but often stupid. Fortunately, even slow-witted organisations could be made clever. Their learning disabilities, though lamentable (‘tragic’), were not permanent. They could be cured by understanding the organisation as a living being. Let the faint-hearted understand this as a useful fiction ( as if the company were living); the profoundly intuitive know it to be a literal truth. Organisations grow and learn. Or they ought to. If they cannot, they sicken, and they die prematurely. To learn effectively, organisations must be able to learn from experience. But they often do not, because neither information from the world nor innovative responses to it transmit effectively through the company’s specialised functions.

The guru though is a subtle physician. While he (they are mainly male) sees through to the true causes of disorder, the patient’s prescription must yield to the folk remedies of the people. Better, then, to couch it in other language. Even fables of tits and robins may be too flighty for the hardnosed business world. Safer metaphors are found in stovepipes and silos. The latter metaphor—which wins out rhetorically—offers flattering satisfactions, tailored to different moods and contexts. Silos can be straddled, for instance, by senior leaders, the organisation’s colossi. The silo metaphor quietly becomes managerial common sense. When stagnation anxieties renew in the 2000s, the metaphor is further invigorated by the language of disruptive innovation. The US economy, and that of other industrialised Western nations, needs more by way of disruptive innovation. The new, capitalist university plays its part by offering a narrow and misleading model of interdisciplinary research as busting the supposed silos of departments and disciplines. Disciplines are misrepresented as unitary entities, and moreover as institutional organs akin to the functionally specialised units of a business organisation. In a striking misuse of Kuhn’s work on scientific revolutions, the jargon of transformative research develops as a way to make sense of disruption within the academy. New measures are invented to quantify the amount and intensity of transformative knowledge that destabilises rather than consolidates existing research. A lesser kind of knowledge emerges—that produced by merely ‘incremental’ research, which is understood as analogous to ‘sustaining;’ innovation.

To return to the puzzle I posed at the beginning, all this is an explanation—and a critique—of the emphasis by funders and academics on disruption, transformation and the busting of silos. Admittedly, we should allow for something like Kuhnian transformation in the natural and life sciences, though even then we must beware the hype cycle in which ‘[b]eing told that they have to be Darwin or nothing, researchers learn the game and promise the moon’ ( Meyer 2012 , 9) as well as the assumption that transformative research can be foreseen and therefore instrumentally generated ( Meyer 2012 , 8–9). But the medical humanities should more decisively resist unhelpful and deceptive management guru concepts. These concepts have gained credibility in a neoliberal era in which academia produces knowledge as ‘raw material’ for an information economy in which ideas ‘can be claimed through legal devices, owned, and marketed as a product or service’ ( Slaughter and Rhoades 2004 , 17). As the economic and organisational boundaries between universities, state and private sector have been renegotiated ( Slaughter and Rhoades 2004 , 27), so too have the discursive boundaries between these different enterprises, so that models of business excellence have been uncritically adopted as templates for the university. Yet, there is longstanding scepticism as to whether these models capture what is peculiar to successful corporations, or even whether they have identified the most important causal factors, as opposed to more mundane explanations in terms of proprietary technology, geography, market dominance, state support and so forth ( Collins 2022 , 66–71). Moreover, as David and Jack Collins have shown at length, there is a hidden face to many of the corporations that have been ‘celebrated as beacons for change and renewal’ by business gurus ( Collins and Collins 2023 , 37). In a series of case studies in the ‘profane realities of corporate conduct’, they discover ‘policies and behaviour that make a mockery of the core values said to be central to business excellence’ ( Collins and Collins 2023 , 88). These warnings from business studies should counsel medical humanities, and its funders, against assuming that public narratives of leading research environments in terms such as vision, leadership and culture in fact reveal the secrets of their success. There is a need for more rigorous historiography of medical humanities (and similar ‘new humanities’ endeavours) in which searching questions are asked about the causal factors most relevant to the institutions that have succeeded in these areas. Pre-existing wealth, brand prestige, expanded fee income, and a ruthless attitude to employee relations (eg, in casualisation) may count for more than is acknowledged.

The medical humanities can rightly interrogate—or even reject—two canards of the new knowledge economy. First, it can critique the assumption that excellence in medical humanities more readily arises in a particular form of ‘silo-busting’ organisational life—an assumption which could unfairly skew funding decisions, for instance. To describe interdisciplinary research as silo-busting is to conflate disciplines with the functional divisions of an organisation, and to obscure the everyday dynamism of internal contestation and interdisciplinary exchange. Indeed, the term ‘silo’ should be particularly objectionable to the medical humanities. My account traces disruption back through organisational theory to an ontology of the organisation as living organism, and a concomitant discourse of health, sickness, mortality, infection and disability. This ontology (in truth, a set of reified metaphors) is promoted by management gurus and anchored in the authority of their supposed experiential expertise. Organisations, and that includes universities, supposedly have ‘learning disabilities’ that impede their supra-personal aims because of interrupted communication across disciplinary units misconstrued as organically functional specialisations. The model of silos is misapplied to university departments, so that (inter)disciplinary dynamism, multiplicity and contestation are thereby fitted to a Procrustean bed of silo-busting clusters and centres. The language of silos subscribes medical humanities to values and perspectives it would typically disown as ‘uncritical’, including the model of the organisation as a homogeneous cultural island (not to mention that notion of Shell Oil—and your university too—as a supra-personal organism whose immense capacities are harnessed by visionary leaders).

Second, we should no longer praise medical humanities research for being ‘disruptive’ and ‘transformative’, nor deprecate it for being ‘incremental’. There is very little ‘disruptive’ research in the true sense of the word. The term has instead been misused to force Kuhn’s terminology on the humanities, so that something called ‘transformative’ research can be elevated above its supposed polar opposite, the lesser ‘incremental’ research understood as analogous to ‘sustaining’ innovation in the world of product development. The medical humanities should take the opportunity to pioneer a more scrupulous vocabulary for the distinction between (1) research that necessarily has a stronger relationship to a significant body of pre-existing work (so-called ‘incremental’ research) and (2) research that necessarily has a lesser relationship to a pre-existing research context (so-called ‘transformative’ or ‘disruptive’ research). Both types of research can produce excellent results—whether in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences or life sciences. We need to develop a vocabulary that expresses the difference but without implying an evaluative hierarchy. My own suggestion (which I hope is original, although I cannot be certain) is that we express this polarity as the difference between (1) ‘topsoil’ research and (2) ‘bedrock’ research. The former takes root on top of earlier layers, and it promises to flourish quickly, with more certain results. The latter, like a pioneer species such as moss or lichen, develops on previously barren bedrock, offering a layer for potential but uncertain future growth over a longer timescale. This metaphor helps to convey the differences between research at the polar extremes of the opposition, but without implying one kind is better than another. Our metaphorical research ecosystem, like its literal counterpart, encompasses both.

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I would like to acknowledge the helpful and constructive feedback of the anonymous peer reviewers of this article.

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Contributors GM is the sole author and contributor to this article. He is the guarantor of this article.

Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Competing interests None declared.

Patient and public involvement Patients and/or the public were not involved in the design, or conduct, or reporting, or dissemination plans of this research.

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