Our focus now shifts to an imaginary MBA class. The class revolves around a screening of Oliver Stone's film Wall Street. The professor intends to use the discussion of the film to explore different perspectives on contemporary capitalism. His touchstone is the great sociologist Max Weber's pessimistic vision of the inexorable rise of capitalism. He is also concerned to encourage the students to reflect critically on their MBA experience. For the sake of dramatic purpose, rather than verisimilitude, the characters are presented as somewhat one-dimensional ‘ideal types’. Any similarity with real MBA students is totally fortuitous.

PROLOGUE

The scene is set in an MBA lecture theatre. A professor enters, checks his technology, wipes his glasses and looks at the class. He clears his throat and speaks.

Professor: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I'd like to start this afternoon's session with a quote from the eminent social scientist Max Weber's most famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber was European and one of the founding fathers of social science, that strange hybrid that thinks that we can study society scientifically and come up with laws that describe its functioning. Weber is summarising how the spirit of capitalism has reached its climax in the United States, thus picking up on a theme we have discussed previously: the different variants of capitalism and whether globalisation is leading us all in the same direction. In the context Weber is describing, the pursuit of wealth for its own sake has become a kind of sport.