When Professor Martin Parker joined the faculty at Warwick Business School eight years ago, he was struck by the architecture of the place. The neat, “generic-modern” buildings sat away from the shabbier environment of the main university, the front entrance facing away from the rest of the campus. The back door, he says, was password-protected.

Prof Parker says similar architectural divisions are the convention at most UK business schools attached to universities, and at the University of Bristol’s Department of Management, where he teaches organisation studies today. He is right: business schools usually occupy a physical world apart from their parent institutions.

This habit of constructing rarefied and separate buildings to project efficiency and confidence — what he calls “places that matter” — for the purpose of teaching contemporary capitalism is, he argues, not only a clunking great metaphor for elite status and pedagogical intent, it is also an attempt to look and behave like a successful business rather than a mere academic institution.