Department of Business Humanities and Law

Our Department in its present form is the result of a merger between Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, CBS Law, the Civil Society group, and the Centre for Leisure and Cultural Services, which took effect 1 July 2018. From 1 January 2023, it was reorganized and renamed Department of Business Humanities and Law. This reflects the centrality of law to the Department and our use of the humanities and interdisciplinary social sciences to address fundamental challenges to humanity in which business is a key agent of social transformation. We also seek, through our learning and research-based teaching, to develop the ethical and entrepreneurial capacities in our students and in ourselves to address these fundamental challenges.

Mission, vision, identity
BHL is a core part of CBS, one of its largest and most diverse Departments, dedicated to critical and cutting-edge research in the humanities, social sciences and law with a focus on the study of the human in society and regarding business and enterprise as key forces of social change.

Our fields of study and backgrounds are diverse. They are from within disciplines, between disciplines and across disciplines but maintain this central concern with the conditions of humans as individuals and collectives, and with the forms of social and business organization and juridical and political regulation. While closely collaborating with many of our sister Departments, BHL is distinguished by the diversity of the perspectives and approaches we offer and our desire to produce the most advanced state knowledge in humanities and social sciences relevant to critical problems. We are concerned to use our backgrounds to rethink the fundamentals of business school education and to establish the basis of lifelong learning in business and social organizations. We critically ground our strategy in the wider CBS strategy by taking a problematizing and self-reflexive approach to the transformations of society, of business, and of the human subject.

BHL is dedicated to research-based education and teaching. Our main contributions to CBS's educational portfolio are the transformative capabilities that humanities and interdisciplinary social sciences bring to business and society. BHL's strengths lie in its broad expertice from a diversity of disciplinary backgrounds as well as a shared commitment and respect for deep disciplinary as well as interdisciplinary and transformative scholarship. Thus, heterogeneity, differentiation, and collaboration across disciplinary boundaries are three interdependent pillars in BHL's approach to research-based education.