Science

So is all of Economics and US-style MBA education and "Management science" corporate fluff.

I know it hurts for some people to admit, but Economics is a belief system, a religion without a god but full of cryptids such as "rational economic actors". It is not a hard science concerned primarily with pursuing the truth but rather a social exercise of maintaining and supporting specific narratives that benefit the ruling class by seeking out evidence for them.

There are people who push back from within Economics and do actual science but they will never be empowered enough to challenge status quo beliefs held by the broader Economics/business community. I consider the few scientists in Economics doing good work to be held hostage within a larger host that is hostile to them.

As far as I am concerned, shut down Harvard Business School, it has hardly done anything but hurt the world by trying to convince us it has answered difficult, meaningful scientific questions with junk work resting on hollow foundations.

This comment on the article from Alex L about sums it up

From my experience in social science, including some experience in managment studies specifically, researchers regularly belief things – and will even give policy advice based on those beliefs – that have not even been seriously tested, or have straight up been refuted. Especially when it fits their prior and/or preferred narratives and/or when it’s just a nice story (I guess ‘companies that do csr stuff outperforming those that don’t’ ticks all those boxes for a lot of people). In that sense, a single study is already a strong basis, comparatively speaking, depressing that may be. Agreed that serious researchers wouldn’t do that, though.

Or this quote from another commenter

incentives don’t work that way in business schools, where career success depends upon creating a clear “brand.” People do not care about science or good research, they care about being known for something specific. So in the case of the junior author on EIS, his career has been built entirely on being “guy who has shown that corporate sustainability is profitable” rather than “guy who does good work on corporate sustainability.”

Plus there are (bad) outside incentives that exist in business schools. As the word “brand” suggests, there are also very lucrative outside options to be gained from telling people something that they want to hear (“sustainability is profitable!”) and very little profit to be made from telling people something inconvenient (“sorry folks, there is no clear relationship between sustainability and profitability, if you want to be more sustainable you’ll have to find some other argument to convince your shareholders”).