Abstract
This paper explores Business School academics’ ambivalent relationship with failure and problematizes the common assumption that we learn from failure. Set within the neoliberal university context of excellence and performativity where failure is pervasive yet not allowed, we draw on interviews with 30 mid-late career Business School academics asking the question: How do business school academics experience failure? Our findings point to complex, ambivalent relationships constructed between failure and learning on three arenas of failure: knowledge production; the classroom and the career. On one hand failure, takes a huge emotional toll on the other failure is rejected and depersonalised as an everyday learning experience. We argue that learning from failure discourses are both part of academics identity work to reject failure and a form of identity regulation which serves to individualise systemic failure. We call for collective identity work to aid Business School Academics to ‘fail better’.