This chapter is an account of my experiences as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Columbia between 2004 and 2012. It describes the role of the dean and the structural position of the Arts and Sciences and the relationship between graduate teaching and research and undergraduate programs and units. It then goes on to characterize conflicts and controversies around the politics of the Middle East, questions around academic freedom and the place of political speech inside and outside the classroom, controversies over ethnic studies, core curricula and debates over “general education” and the “liberal arts” as well as about the relationship between core courses and ideas about the primacy of “western civilization,” university rankings, university budgets in relation to the financial crisis, relations between administration and faculty, and questions concerning intellectual as well as political purity and responsibility.

Until the early twentieth century there has been little basis for thinking about meaningful work in Management Research beyond the perfect match between the supply and demand of labour and technical methods to get as much work as possible out of this breathing factor of production. Then, however, the interplay of political, economic and cultural dynamics forces management theory to reconsider. This is the point in time in which this chapter sets off and illustrates who spread the seeds of meaningful work ideas on the contested soil of economic rationality ideas and with what result. The chapter captures the development that has led to complementary, but also competing thoughts of meaningful work in the domain of classical and contemporary Management and Organisational Behaviour literature. We claim that management interest in meaningful wage labour for employees is based on the idea that such work leads to the kind of work orientations that enhances efficiency and productivity. From this perspective, meaningful work is not a gift from the employer, but the latter’s strategic choice.

This chapter seeks to first empirically establish the relationship between countries’ market failures and their level of infrastructure spending. It then seeks to test the most likely explanations for Chinese foreign spending based on explanations relating to FDI from Western MNCs. Notably, the results do not yield convincing results that these variables can account for Chinese foreign spending patterns. This finding supports the need for a novel approach to Chinese foreign spending in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative.

I conclude by referencing the draconian scenario proposed by Ronald Musto in a recent book in which he suggested the possibility that the modern university would collapse and disappear in much the same manner as did the medieval monastery in sixteenth-century Britain. I suggest that while this is unlikely to happen, the current crisis should not be minimized and action should be taken to begin to restructure the university system, while resisting calls for total disruption and adapting the humanities and the liberal arts to the needs of the future.

A brief history of the university, from Oxford and Cambridge to Harvard and Columbia, then from the University of Virginia to the University of California. The chapter focuses on the Morrill Act of 1862 (known also as the Land Grant Act) and on the influence of the German research university in the late nineteenth century. Considers the analysis of Laurence Veysey that the university was in some respects “incoherent” from the late nineteenth century on, given the competing constituencies made up of faculty, students, and alumni. Traces the twentieth-century history of the American university, especially the role of federal funding for research, the GI Bill after World War II, and then the Master Plan forged between Clark Kerr, President of the University of California, and Pat Brown, Governor of California, in 1960.

In this chapter, we explore this possibility when it comes to the three most known exploitative work forms slavery, serfdom and wage labour. It turns out that they all have an attached ideology, explaining why respective way of organising work is the only morally good and therefore meaningful one. Each work form is portrayed as the single one being beneficial to all involved and thereby meaningful to all. Slavery is good for slave owners as well as slaves, serfdom for feudal lords as well as serfs, wage labour for capitalists as well as wage labourers. Each ideology also says that all other work forms are morally reprehensible and therefore meaningless. The aim of the chapter is to illustrate that the theorisation of the concept of work in the way we suggest opens up the possibility of comparative studies of the meaning of different work forms.

A particularity about the literature on the meaning of work is that the concept of meaning is discussed extensively and deeply, while the concept of work is hardly debated at all. Tackling this shortcoming, we start out by taking up contradictions in the social science debate on definitions of the concept of work. Four such contradictions stand out: (1) Subjective vs. objective definitions; (2) a single vs. several work concepts; (3) certain activities in themselves vs. any activity within specific social relations are to be regarded as work; and (4) empirical vs. ontological basis of the concept. In investigating them, we take help from what are often said to be the three most important classics of social science: How have Émile Durkheim, Max Weber and Karl Marx handled the concept of work? Specifically, can we get inspiration from them to take stands concerning the contradictions? The answers to these questions lead us to suggest this definition: Work is any activity performed in internal social relations that structure the sphere of necessity. Finally, we discuss the three suggested explicit conceptualisations of ‘work’ that we have found in the meaningful work literature.

This chapter begins with examples of experiments of building new universities or investing significant new resources in old universities in India and China to make the point that there seems to be more dynamism in the higher education sector these days in Asia than in America. The chapter moves from this to considering some of the core ideas of the university – to borrow the title of Cardinal Newman’s famous nineteenth-century book The Idea of the University – focusing on the ideas behind the liberal arts. I look at the relationship of the liberal arts to the humanities and consider some of the debates over both curricular requirements and canons as well as more broadly the way the humanities have often been narrowly identified with western civilization and specifically with departments of European language and literature (with a little history, philosophy, and classics thrown in). I consider the tensions and divides between the “arts” and the “sciences” as well as the residual investments of religious belief and values in many understandings and depictions of the liberal arts. I use this to consider issues related to free speech and open inquiry more broadly, as well as the residual tensions between teaching and research.

This chapter is an account of my experiences as a member of the faculty in different universities. I taught at Caltech where I was a member of an interdisciplinary group of faculty in the humanities and social sciences and came to know prominent humanists in other fields as well as scientists such as Richard Feynman, Murray Gel Man, and Max Delbruck. I then moved to the University of Michigan where I joined an active group of interdisciplinary scholars, encountered the attractions and problems of cultural studies, and then began to do institutional work by creating a new interdepartmental PhD program in Anthropology and History. Because of the success of that program, I was invited to Columbia University to chair the Anthropology Department and become the Franz Boas Professor at Columbia.

Clark Kerr, President of the University of California, famously coined the term the “multiversity” to capture the expansion of universities in mid twentieth-century America to the point that they contained multiple and often competing (and indeed conflicting) goals, interests, and trajectories. While Kerr waxed eloquent about the value of the multiversity, he worried about the loss of community and purpose he associated with the smaller undergraduate college – especially in relation to undergraduate education. In particular, he worried that incentive structures for faculty led them to focus on narrow research as well as their own entrepreneurial opportunities outside the university, while they became more detached from undergraduate teaching on the one side, and more resistant to administrative leadership and guidance on the other. I follow up on the tensions between administrators and faculty and the ways in which disciplinary structures impede both intellectual openness and institutional experimentation.

This chapter explains what Strategy Beyond Markets is, and why it is important to business practitioners.