by Peter Blunt / December 31st, 2025
The unexamined life is not worth living.
— Socrates
‘In the bad old days when I was embroiled in the business of churning out MBAs from capitalist ‘sausage’ factories masquerading as places of ‘higher education’ (business schools that were “the engine rooms of neoliberal indoctrination and elite formation” – Blunt, 2023), among many other harmful ideas (e.g., Purser, 2025), I used to teach eager would-be managers about ‘sequential’, ‘pooled’ and ‘reciprocal’ interdependence – between organisations and their environments, between workers within organisations, between departments, and between ‘teams’, and so on. Needless to say, ‘harmful’ because it was done with a view to increasing management control, worker docility and productivity, the extraction of surplus value, and shareholder profits.
This is just one of many such examples that I could give, but it will suffice as a vehicle for illustrating how difficult it is once one is ensnared by the capitalist system and ideology to escape, to evade its all-encompassing embrace and to do some good here and there. Even privileged people like me who had the time, money, status, access (to the literature), critical inclination, and capability to break the spell, found it hard to do so.
This essay gives an inkling of the wide and long – and in my case inadvertent – path of destruction that such people can wreck on their road to redemption and to doing (limited) good, and some of the obstacles to be overcome on the way.
Paving the Way for Imperial Predation
As with the evangelists of other religions, it is the duty of capitalist proselytisers to extol its virtues and to convert unbelievers wherever they may be found, particularly in those places with the natural resources and other assets needed to fuel capitalism’s insatiable appetite for perpetual economic growth.
Although I have never considered myself to be an unreflective and committed capitalist ideologue or votary, my work within the prevailing system – and my initial polite attempts to test its boundaries, or be ‘reckless at slow speed’ (Roy in Kumar, 2011) – may have ultimately strengthened and refined that system.
As my books and other publications on management in Africa (some discussed briefly below) demonstrate, this influence manifested itself in three main ways. First, my writing sought to improve the ‘fit’ between Western management theory and the African contexts in which it was applied. Second, as a direct result of this, it helped to expand the geographical reach of such theories. And third, the cultural-fit arguments probably made the ideas more palatable to African audiences. These three contributions – improving the contextual fit, expanding the reach of management theory, and enhancing its palatability – not only advanced academic understanding but also inadvertently bolstered the capitalist framework. Rather than being threatened by these proposals, the underlying capitalist structure was reinforced.
In the words of a slogan used by rural workers in Brazil, I was ‘expanding the floor of the cage’, or making small improvements while leaving the overall structure or the ‘cage’ itself intact (Chomsky, 2011).
Africa. To my enduring embarrassment and regret, I was among the first to inflict aspects of managerialism like interdependence on unsuspecting African audiences, suggesting for example that:
[jobs should] Allow for interlocking tasks, job rotation or physical proximity where there is a necessary interdependence between the output of one group and the input of another. At the very least, this facilitates communication, and lessens friction, recriminations and scape-goating (Blunt, 1983).
[that managers should analyse] workflows through the section or unit in order to determine degrees of interdependence with other groups, and the length and magnitude of the complete cycle of work leading to the group’s output. This analysis should take account of special skill requirements and training needs, and natural breaks in the flow of work which might provide suitable bases for the formation of additional semi-autonomous groups should this prove necessary (Blunt & Popoola, 1985).
And – unrelentingly – ten years later that:
Africa must develop the capacity to turn its ethnic, religious and racial diversity from a source of conflict and misunderstanding to a source of creative strength, mutual interdependence, and synergy (Blunt & Jones, 1992).
I now wince and squirm more than a little when I read these statements and weasel words like ‘synergy’ and ‘teams’. Words which when they were written had the best of intentions attached to them – according to an AI search, because my books on the subject were:
… significant for pioneering a shift from the universal application of Western management theories to a context-driven approach that integrates African socio-cultural and economic realities..
Ironically, I had been drawn to write about Africa partly out of a sense of guilt at having been brought up there, in Kenya, where “even as a young boy, enchanted by the wonders and joys of living in what was surely the world’s Garden of Eden and seduced by the privileges and pleasures of a colonial upbringing, I could not help but notice the fundamental injustices of the imperialist enterprise” (Blunt, 2023, ibid).
But of course the effect of my good intentions – my desire to give back – was to pave the way for and sharpen the edge of neoliberal penetration (or ‘expand the floor of the cage’), and thereby to produce more ‘contented’ and ‘fulfilled’ workers. Workers who had been ‘culturally attuned’ to their enslavement and could be duped into producing more for less.
China. I was primed to do much the same in China where I was part of the neoliberal (storm-trooper) vanguard in the country, beginning in 1990, when for three months a year for three years I was a visiting professor on the pioneering EU-funded Cambridge/INSEAD MBA programme headed by Professor John Child of Cambridge, which was delivered in Beijing. The programme went with all of the usual guff about the good things it would do to help China ‘advance’ and bring it into the (capitalist-enlightened) modern age.
But even to unreflective capitalist dupes like me it was soon apparent that China was different. In many ways Chinese students were unlike those I had encountered in other developing countries I had worked in. One quality in particular stood out. They were clearly not willing to imbibe uncritically what Purser (ibid) refers to as the Kool-Aid of neoliberal managerialism that my colleagues and I were peddling. Unlike the mostly mercenary, mouths agape, keen-to-be-anointed MBA students I had encountered in the West and elsewhere, they seemed to be (politely) sceptical about what we had to say and highly selective about what they accepted.
I believe this quality stemmed largely from a deep-seated confidence and security among them, a palpable self-assuredness regarding the greatness of their ancient civilisation. Unlike the citizens of many other developing countries I had worked in, who seemed desperate to ‘catch up’ with the West and to partake in capitalism’s consumer feeding frenzy, in China there was no fawning subservience to the white devils from abroad to be detected in the conversation and body language of my students.
On the contrary, I can well imagine them thinking that only not-so-long-ago cave-dwelling and club-wielding, English-speaking cossetted white men (there were no female professors or so-called ‘people of colour’ on the programme) would have had the breathtaking gall to presume to tell a five thousand year old civilisation like China’s how to organise itself and how to engage in strategic management and leadership, and so on.
Since then, China’s remarkable progress, its approach to international affairs compared to the US, and the clear disparities in the calibre of leadership between the two countries have clearly vindicated my Chinese students’ circumspection and foresight.
The Beginnings of Redemption and Rehabilitation
It was experiences like these that led me to start questioning more pointedly the limits of Western leadership theories (Blunt & Jones, 1997) and of culturally-loaded Western notions of sustainable human development and good governance (Blunt, 1995).
However, as with my earlier writing about organisation and management in Africa, this too was done within the well-policed boundaries of the ruling (capitalist) paradigm and therefore still a bit ‘clerky and calculating’, as Arundhati Roy would say. Even so, the critiques were unusually outspoken for the mainstream literature of the time, to the extent that AI now classifies those (much-cited) studies as ‘seminal’ and ‘foundational’.
My lame excuse for taking this long (up until about the mid-1990s) to begin to understand the ideology’s disastrous flaws and the consequences of what I was doing was my fixation with ‘making it’ academically. Like my business school colleagues, tail up and blinkers on, my eyes were firmly fixed on scaling the academic greasy pole as quickly as possible.
Dutifully, naively, I had been doing my bit for internationalising the manufacture of consent and preparing the ground for imperial predation of one form or another. Taking a more adapted version of the gospel to places where there was cheap labour or markets or natural resources waiting to be had, and where (often with the connivance of co-opted local elites) there were ‘conducive investment climates’ to be concocted to ‘facilitate’ (another of those weasel words) extraction and ‘economic growth and job creation’.
In the process, I carved out a market niche where I could legitimately claim international recognition and standing, which earned me a tenured full professorship at a relatively early age.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with the idea of reciprocal interdependence per se. Indeed, how we interact with all aspects of our environment is the essence of sustainability. Likewise, there is no intrinsic evil in many of the topics typically addressed in a business school by people in my field: leadership, worker involvement, training and development, and so on. It is the uses to which the ideas are put or the purposes they are designed to serve and what is unsaid or left out that is harmful.
Indeed, an irony of the typical business school discussion of the reciprocal interdependence between an organisation and its environment – which is preoccupied with the presence of competitors and their ‘hostility’, the state of physical and institutional infrastructure, the availability of skilled and compliant labour, the ‘investment climate’ and so on – is that it is conducted just an intellectual stone’s throw away from more enlightened discussion of the topic. Discussion that includes the dangers of the exploitation of the environment and the forms of life that inhabit it and the importance of their sustainability. Links that for obvious reasons are rarely drawn in business schools.
The False Promise of Development ‘Assistance’
At the early stages of my long overdue Chomsky-induced éclaircissement, I attempted to get away from all of this and the growing commercialisation of universities in Australia at the time. Hoping to find institutions that valued reciprocal interdependence for planetary sustainability over exploitation, I resigned my tenured full professorship in 2000 and went head-first into the ‘business’ of development assistance. I believed – wrongly, it turned out – that by leaving academia, I would be able to contribute more directly to creating governance conditions in poor countries that prioritized ecological balance and social justice over profit and exploitation.
But there too, as I have explained at greater length elsewhere, I soon found that it was tough going for ‘enlightened’ consultants who were interested in doing what donors claimed to be interested in doing. That is, consultants who genuinely wanted to provide so-called ‘technical assistance’ that was in the interests of the recipient country – as their terms of reference (misleadingly) required them to – rather than preparing the way for corporate smash and grab raids on natural resources and the like (e.g., Blunt & Turner, 2005; Blunt et al., 2012; Blunt, 2014; Blunt & Sainkhuu, 2015; Blunt & Khamoosh, 2016; Blunt et al., 2017; Blunt, 2021; Blunt et al., 2022; Blunt, 2023, ibid).
I quickly found out that consultants like that had their hands tied and were always on the cusp of being fired.
The unsurprising reason being that conventionally (from Blunt, 2021, ibid):
“…. ‘technical experts’ and ‘agents’ were (and continue to be) despatched to developing countries bearing notions of Weberian bureaucratic rationality and managerialism, good governance and leadership that had been imprinted in their professional DNA by the management ‘education’ dispensed by business schools and their ubiquitous Master of Business Administration (MBA) programmes and by courses on development studies. Indigenous bureaucrats from developing countries graduated from the same institutions, or their carbon copies at home, providing for donor-government discourse that could be conducted in a common language, a consistent patina of good graces for public consumption or ‘a haze of development cliché—participation, empowerment, facilitation, capacity building, coordination, harmonisation, ownership and so forth—(that) helps all involved to mask real meanings and intentions while maintaining politically correct outward appearances’….”
The difficulties and repercussions for consultants who wanted to do otherwise – and for the governments they were trying to help – are illustrated by the two examples set out below, both of which involve the notion of reciprocal interdependence. A notion whose meaning has never been more crucial than it is now, as our planet teeters on the brink of catastrophe and we stand by and bear witness to its, and our own, calculated demise.
Mongolia. In the Mongolian case, I was fired by my employer, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), for two main reasons. First, for producing SDC-sponsored research results, and arguments and recommendations based on them, that proposed the tightening of legislation governing the requirement for foreign mining corporations in Mongolia to provide compensatory development funding to nomadic herder communities in their areas of operation. The delicate balance maintained by indigenous communities of nomadic herders between their livestock and the vast and vulnerable open steppes upon which they depended, which had been nurtured for thousands of years, in many parts of the country had been badly disrupted by mining activities. My research recommended that the legislative tightening that was needed to compensate for this be reflected in the community development agreements that governed the recompense provided by foreign mining corporations. Community development that my research had shown to be woefully inadequate and often poorly designed and misdirected.
My summary of the report on this work, which was published after my dismissal by SDC, states (from Blunt, 2014, ibid):
“This is a case study of ‘development assistance’ that demonstrates how the interests of the supposed beneficiary of such assistance – Mongolia – were discarded as soon as there appeared to be the slightest risk that, if served, those interests might have jeopardized the economic or political interests of the donor country (Switzerland) and/or those of its (Western) trading partners and their mining corporations. Donor interests were deemed to be put at risk by a government and donor sponsored research report that made a case for strengthening mining legislation pertaining to community development agreements in Mongolia. The offending research report also challenged the establishment view of the aetiology of the ‘resource curse’, emphasizing the predisposing conditions established by neoliberal design and international financial institutions and the roles of foreign mining corporations, which are rarely mentioned in conventional accounts. The case provides further evidence for the view that Western ‘development assistance’ rendered by state capitalist ‘democracies’ (and others) is first and foremost designed, directly or indirectly, to serve the interests of the countries providing such ‘assistance’ and that development rhetoric and practice is intended to create an impression of altruism where, in reality, little or none exists.”
The second – and precipitating – factor in my dismissal was that the research findings referred to above, which had been banned by SDC, nevertheless found their way to sympathetic sites in the Government of Mongolia. What ensued is summarised by Blunt and Sainkhuu (2016, ibid) as:
“… a policy development process [that was] designed to advance the sustainable development of mining-affected communities in Mongolia and, indirectly, to invigorate debate concerning resource nationalism and community resistance to corporate predation. The policy process arose from a research report on community development agreements whose findings reached interested parties in Mongolia despite the ban placed on them by the donor research sponsor. The findings highlight, first, the lengths to which development assistance will go in its defence of foreign mining interests and the corporate-led assault on the commons; second, the serendipitous and vigorously contested nature of policy development; and third, the swift, variegated, muddled, uncompromising, yet effective, reactions of power to perceived threat. It is argued that Mongolia’s interests will best be served by a strong form of resource nationalism and that its predominantly indigenous population will be crucial to achieving this and to the defence of the commons.”
An irony of the case is described by Blunt and Sainkhuu (2025, ibid) as follows:
“Were it not for their potentially serious negative effects on rural communities and the commons, such blatant hypocrisy, such muddled thinking and such clumsy and disproportionate retribution [on the part of the donor officials involved] could also be seen as faintly comical, as their effects clearly ran counter to the very self-interests that they strove so frantically to defend and conceal. The failure to recognize the simple logic that shows that CDAs can make significant and low-cost contributions to stable political and conducive investment climate conditions suggests that donor petty officialdom is quickly out of its depth, and founders, in anything other than the safe and shallow waters of its own neoliberal rhetoric and development platitude. The ensuing thrashing about in response to real or, as in this case, imagined threat enables it to accomplish the quite tricky feat of being unhelpful to all sides at the same time – to mining-affected communities, to government at all levels, to local business interests and to international corporate investors and their national progenitors.”
Pacific Island Countries (PICs). In the second case, in Samoa, I was forbidden by the (Australian) donor that funded my employment to research and report to government on the vital importance to society and economy of the reciprocal interdependencies or ‘fateful synergies’ between global warming and non-communicable diseases in the PICs.
The work was squarely within my terms of reference.
The donor gave no reason for its refusal to allow me to do the work or to publish the results, which were based entirely on secondary sources that were freely available in the literature. Neither did the donor question the validity of my arguments and conclusions.
Several years after the completion of my contract in Samoa, I published an up-dated version of the work and explained its significance as follows (from Blunt, 2025a):
“The two gravest and most immediate threats to equitable and sustainable development in the Pacific Island countries (PICs) are global warming and non-communicable diseases. Regional vulnerabilities to these threats are greater than anywhere else in the world. In some important respects, the threats are interdependent, feeding off each other in ways that are multiplicative rather than additive. This fateful synergy could shrink national economies by more than 20% per annum for decades and cause untold social harm. To date, the threats have been treated largely in isolation by governments, usually by line ministries. However, their magnitude, immediacy and interdependence demand that their effects and associated costs on economy and society be assessed at the same time, that such assessments be accorded the highest priority by PIC governments and that national responses be led from the centre of government, by offices of the prime minister, ministries of finance and national security bodies. The production by national governments of valid evidence on the fiscal risks associated with these threats and their interdependencies will make the profound public policy changes that are called for much harder to resist politically and provide solid grounds for much-needed international assistance.”
The only plausible reason for the donor’s refusal to allow this message to be conveyed to the Government of Samoa and more widely was that it would strengthen the PICs’ case for seeking financial support for mitigation and the development of refugia for affected populations. As a significant contributor to the problem of global warming and the principal bilateral donor in the region, Australia would have been among the first ports of call for such assistance.
These examples demonstrate the implacable intransigence of capital to even relatively minor threats to its interests and the great difficulty of doing genuine good if you are part of the system and subject to its control. The broader implications for preventing global warming, nuclear war, growing inequality, and authoritarian control are just as clear.
The examples also help to explain why it is unlikely that even the straightforward commonsensical reforms of development assistance suggested in the papers referred to above and proposed by Blunt (2023, ibid), some of which are mentioned below, will be implemented:
“… the best-case scenario for the reform of [latter day imperialist) LDI bilateral technical assistance would be that the proposals for change set out in this book would constitute a small but significant part of more fundamental and far-reaching reform of the main drivers of climate change and inequality by the major powers. Our gloomy assessment in this chapter makes that possibility seem highly unlikely. But the heavy dependence of our proposals on LDI donor willingness to ‘universalise issues’ and on empathy and fair dealing, that is, a willingness to treat others as we would have them treat us, also casts a dark shadow over even our worst-case scenario. This consolation prize, where the implementation of our proposals renders some kind of palliative care to the recipients of technical assistance in the hope that policies directed at the root causes will be developed and applied before it is too late, also seems unlikely. In the circumstances, perhaps the best that we can hope for is that some LDI donors in some places will do as we recommend for the reasons that we suggest, and that, forlorn as it may seem, sufficient pressure is put on them by recipient governments and by an ‘organised public’ to force policy makers to devise and implement measures that forestall the apocalypse (Chomsky, 2021b).”
Our latest discussion of these matters (Blunt et al., 2025) reaches a similarly sobering conclusion:
“… in keeping with the likes of Chomsky (e.g., Chapter 1; Chomsky, 2020; Chomsky and Pollin in Polychroniou, 2023), Roy (e.g., Roy, 2024a), Sachs (e.g., Sachs, 2024a, 2024b), and Varoufakis, perhaps the best we can do as humanity approaches the end of its long race to the precipice is to help prepare the ground for change as thoroughly and convincingly as possible and do the same with the crafting of policies that will bring about the conditions discussed briefly above. The construction or rehabilitation of the institutional means to do so – in what we have called that vital middle ground – will be messy and unpredictable and may or may not result in the global systemic change that is so urgently needed. The ascendancy and tenacity of capitalism, the adversarial character and structure of international relations that it has created, and the unrelenting quest of its self-professed chief executive – the US – for ‘full spectrum dominance’ surely suggest that it could not be otherwise.
Unlike others such as McCoy (2024), under President Trump, we cannot see why the US would allow its hegemony to be overthrown or undermined without a fight. More so than his predecessors, the idea that the new egomaniacal, narcissistic, and dictatorial president (and his gang of policy sycophants) would readily abdicate the position of global emperor and go gently into the night seems fanciful to say the least (e.g., Cirincione, 2024; Hedges, 2025c; Zhang, 2025).”
Black Marks as Badges of Honour
Like so many others (e.g., Robinson, 2018), I am heavily indebted to the towering and tireless Noam Chomsky – whose heretical work was of course verboten and virtually unknown in business schools – for my eventual redemption and rehabilitation.
The revelations were life-changing and marked the beginning of an intellectual journey, which I have described elsewhere as follows:
“My questioning of the historical structural violence of imperialism and of the ideological packaging in neoliberalism of its neo-imperialist successors began to feature more prominently in my writing following my belated discovery of Noam Chomsky’s work in the 1990s (e.g., Chomsky, 1987,1996, 1997; Herman & Chomsky, 1988; Blunt, 1995a, 1995b; Blunt & Jones, 1997; Blunt & Rondinelli, 1997). More rein, and fuller expression, came from my reading of Arundhati Roy’s evocative and scathing essays on power and international relations published from the turn of the twenty first century (e.g., Roy, 2003a, 2003b, 2004; Blunt & Lindroth, 2012). Soon thereafter, Yanis Varoufakis burst on to the scene with his laser-like gaze, his penetrating analyses of the global economy, and his damning account of Greece’s mistreatment at the hands of the European Union (e.g., Varoufakis, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2020; Blunt, 2018; Blunt et al., 2022). What little was left of my ‘normal scientific herding instincts’ (Blunt & Khamoosh, 2016), of any lingering sense that there were no alternatives to the dominant ideology of neoliberalism, disintegrated under the red dot and was blown away.”
But as we have seen above and others will know defectors are not treated kindly by the system.
My first black mark (and badge of honour) for dissent was earned many years ago during my time as a university student in Durban when I was banned for my antiapartheid views by the Government of South Africa. The ban was lifted at my request in 1993 after the release of Nelson Mandela.
In the same way, I count as badges of honour and testaments to my (political economy) redemption and rehabilitation my dismissal by the Swiss (SDC) in Mongolia and my ‘close shaves’ with the Australian Government (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade) in Samoa where I was constantly under threat of being fired.
The same is true of my brushes with USAID in Iraq, where I resigned in disgust after three months (see Blunt, 2012), stating in my letter of resignation that (from Blunt, 2023, ibid):
Perhaps the most telling and damaging aspect of the project was that it had been designed with little or no apparent consultation with the Government of Iraq. In a now sovereign country, the project therefore had no legitimacy, meaning that in the absence of formal authorisation from central government it should not commence operations. But it also meant that the project’s design was likely to be seriously deficient.
By the end of December 2011, more than three months after project commencement in Iraq, formal government approval of the project had not been obtained, and no invitation had been extended to government to comment on or to influence the project’s design.
And with the British Government (Department for International Development) in Afghanistan where, among others, my attempts to persuade the donor to address the question of the thousands of Afghan civilian deaths arising from friendly fire and other illegal acts carried out by the occupying forces were rejected peremptorily (see Blunt & Khamoosh, 2016, ibid; Blunt et al., 2017 ibid; Blunt, 2025b).
These days, I also find some consolation (and honour) in the fact that my recent publications (e.g., Blunt, 2023, ibid and Blunt et al., 2025, ibid), which include articles in this journal and others like it, almost certainly mean that I would fail the new visa eligibility rules that have been introduced recently under the Trump administration in the US, and that officially I would (quite happily) be declared persona non grata there.
Undoubtedly, the relevant authorities in the US, the UK, and Australia, and other places that pose as bastions of freedom and tolerance, have already drawn up blacklists of dissenting voices. These lists will have been produced by nets cast far more widely than ever before. As the crack-down on dissent accelerates and becomes fiercer and more widespread in the West (e.g., Kenny & Munro, 2025; Oberg, 2025), we have good cause to fear that not just the dissenters, but their vicariously tainted husbands and wives, and close friends and descendants could be blacklisted too.
‘The stench of fascism’ that Roy declared to be ‘on the breeze’ more than a quarter of a century ago (Roy, 1998) is now overwhelming.
Peter Blunt is Honorary Professor, School of Business, University of New South Wales (Canberra), Australia. He has held tenured full professorships of management in universities in Australia, Norway, and the UK, and has worked as a consultant in development assistance in 40 countries, including more than three years with the World Bank in Jakarta, Indonesia. His commissioned publications on governance and public sector management informed UNDP policy on these matters and his books include the standard works on organisation and management in Africa and, most recently, (with Cecilia Escobar and Vlassis Missos) The Political Economy of Bilateral Aid: Implications for Global Development (Routledge, 2023) and The Political Economy of Dissent: A Research Companion (Routledge, forthcoming 2026). Read other articles by Peter.
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