Criticality and Collegiality

Introduction: Designing Wisdom-Seeking Education

Learning, knowledge, information, training and development, education and skill are now more actively managed than ever before, and numerous masters programs have sprung up to “educate”, “develop” and credentialize the professionals concerned with managing them. The institutions of education and learning, both public and corporate have become a significant part of the socio-political and cultural spheres. (Fox & Grey, 2000, p. 7)

This article documents how we, as two university educators, have attempted to intervene in the credentialized system through the provision of a simulated workplace-learning context designed explicitly for mature ¹ managers. The postgraduate capstone Masters of Human Resource Management Innovation and Change course that we have developed takes Fox and Grey’s (2000) contention that management education is embedded within a sociopolitical cultural milieu as a starting point to help managers make more informed choices from their increased situational awareness. Our field of Critical Management Studies (CMS) ² research, located in the domain of organization studies, interrogates workplace decision-making processes from the perspective of sociopolitical power relations regarding, for example, the relationship between values, ethics, inequity, and in/efficiency, and relates these factors to the socialization of managers through analysis of the normative effects of managerial identity scripts. Predominately, reflecting sociological and philosophical backgrounds in terms of disciplinary training, its advocates have been critiqued of late for being overly negative. This has led to a positive “performative” emphasis involving tactics, which seek out potentialities for more affirmative approaches to change (Alvesson & Spicer, 2012).

It is this progressive pragmatist underpinning that appeals to our sense of obligation to our practicing managers to impart knowledge that is of applicable value to them and why we engage this particular lens for teaching purposes. Crucially, validating this decision and underpinning the justification for this article, we have found that by using this kind of research-based material, in a participatory-learning classroom setting, management students demonstrate and report increased relational understandings and demonstrated reflexive capabilities. ³ Drucker states that as we move into a postindustrial “knowledge economy” context, the kind of knowledge workers that our students represent “must accept responsibility for managing relationships and communications in the workplace since the maintenance of trust in organisations demands nothing less” (cited in Srinivasan, 2007, p. 12). He contends a shift to an ethics-based culture is fundamental to ensure the level of employee commitment required to deliver innovative potential, as participants in the knowledge economy are more self-directed. To meet this objective, Srinivasan (2007, p. 4) points out that Drucker argues that the whole basis of management education needs to change moving away from a narrow functionalist technical focus to include input from an array of disciplines, including the arts, the humanities, and the social sciences, in order that students can learn to “synthesize knowledge” from a broader base of situational analysis.

The course that we set up reflected this agenda, attempting to expand our management students’ capacities to address these contemporary conditions, by developing a specific “method of study” (as Drucker recommends) that the article documents. The authors attempt to demonstrate through self-reporting evidence, gained from the course contributors and ourselves, that the coupling of CMS analytical studies (framed here as “troublesome knowledge”) with associated “threshold concept” ⁴ (Wright & Hibbert, 2013) translations (relational and reflexive skills) can assist managers struggling with the complexity postindustrial workspaces represent.

The Manager as an Informed Social Agent

The article outlines how, as educators, we attempted to model the value of troublesome knowledge through the application of thresholds concepts as learning tactics in simulated “knowledge organisation” contexts. Because of that specificity, the objective of the article is not to produce a prescriptive course design paper but rather to introduce our course as representing the kind of pedagogical experiment Drucker calls for, where we applied critically evaluative learning methods to assist management students become better informed about current conditions and more reflective about their own place and practices within such a context. However, the article does attempt to make a contribution to the field of management education in terms of showing how teaching relationally sensitive leadership (Uhl-Bien, 2006) attributes can contribute positively to an integrity-based managerial approach, which reflects Drucker’s observation that the knowledge worker is a “social” not just economic agent (Srinivasan, 2007, p. 3). We also hope that the experimental aspects of the course that we document firsthand will encourage readers to become more mindfully reflexive about their own teaching approaches given that Drucker implies we should all continuously renew ourselves as knowing subjects.

Equally, while our CMS background meant that we sought coursework content material informed by this frame of reference, this approach is not intended to be prescriptive either. Indeed, recent CMS scholarship is less concerned with proselytizing than making a contribution to local sites pertaining to everyday organizational life (Alvesson & Spicer, 2012). In that light, we consider then that possibilities for progressive practical change, at the local level, can arise as managers develop “relational” awareness (regarding intersecting factors and pertaining to working with others) and build “self reflexivity” capacity as a consequence (Hibbert, 2012; Hosking & Pluut, 2010).

In other fields, this approach would be called “appreciative inquiry” due to the latter’s generalist change emphasis; however, our more “particularist” change focus means we are concerned with individual transformation (attained through an intersubjective learning environment) as the first step to enable microlevel change. It is this promise that led us to adopt this approach pedagogically because it has become clear to us that managers need a new lens attuned to more innovative workplace design potential. While, as suggested, other educational researchers will no doubt choose material informed by their own specific mode of training, the only proviso we would make is that the research evidence introduced needs to engage students in critical evaluation and thoughtful questioning reflections (Yanow & Tsoukas, 2009) to advance a more “passionate knowing” (Gherardi, Nicolini, & Strati, 2007) ethically informed basis to their managerial practice. Our overarching contextual justification, in line with Drucker’s contention (and the recent global financial crises), is that we have never more needed educational approaches that meaningfully combine theory and practice to equip managers to face the new millennium.

Accordingly, the theoretical material we engage is a means to an end not an end in itself, with the objective that just as we seek to debunk naïve celebratory accounts of managerialism so too we are keen to move away from abstracted theory formulations that bore students and leave them disinterested in the subject areas. Indeed, it is the integration of conceptual and practical knowhow, to achieve pragmatic outcomes, which represents our passionate knowing drive to “inspire and enable a better world” (Adler, 2014, p. 209—quoting the vision of the Academy of Management). The following section further outlines the context and impetus underpinning the need for more expansive educational programs for managers before proceeding to the heart of the article, which documents the course parameters in detail and with reference to student contributions.

The Limits of the Mercantilist Economic and Social Interface

Managing in the privatized, marketized, commodified, and global environment has turned out to be a much more turbulent experience than was anticipated in the 1980s when financial and trading deregulation, and the collapsing of national borders, began to intensify. As a result, Intezari and Pauleen (2011) contend that

the world we live in is volatile and unpredictable: in a word, complex. Knowledge, as a past-orientated entity [is] insufficient for managing future complexity, where emergent phenomena may require one to seek new ways of handling unpredictable situations. For this reason, we argue that education should not be overly focused on the accumulation of knowledge, but rather develop and teach students how to make decisions based upon an understanding of situations and to take action within a framework of ethics to manage this complexity. The time has come to stop teaching knowledge [as a prescriptive tool-kit and instead to work with] an integrated framework that includes the teaching of practical wisdom. (p. 1)

Linking to Intezari and Pauleen’s call and, our previous remarks, our quest in this article is not to validate any particular theory, but to argue that analytical material can turn out to be remarkably practical for managers when coupled with associated skill-building methods. This impetus reflects the ethos of the learning program we developed in liaison with our students where they reported that the exposure to theoretically informed research content, and the novel context of learning, enhanced their everyday “practical wisdom” capabilities. ⁵ Given the competition, all manner of business fields are encountering, in a postindustrial global context of technical and social complexity, the related need for innovation as a prime output means that senior managers can no longer expect to have all the necessary know-how to meet the diversity of organizational needs, as Taylorism implied in the industrial era. Consequently, more and more reliance moves to the creative capabilities of employees and other stakeholders, not just middle and senior managers.

Along with management-learning specialists like Drucker, a growing number of organizations are beginning to reveal awareness of these issues, and some explicitly voice concerns regarding the limits of a utilitarian view of human activity. Business group representatives, managers, and employers, who come to speak at our business school, for instance, complain that graduates come to them ill-equipped to problem-solve the variety of issues their organizations face daily (e.g., they demonstrate an incapacity to evaluate arguments rigorously, to work through a range of possible solutions, or think in more interconnected, interdisciplinary terms). Ingols and Shapiro (2013) note that, in the U.S. context, employers are demanding an

“expanded focus on many of the softer skills in MBA programs” defined in terms of attributes as being “ethical, able to work under stress, willing to learn, flexible and a team player [along] with problem solving, taking initiative and interpersonal effectiveness” [capabilities]. (p. 413)

Relevant to our focus, Inamdar and Roldan (2013) suggest that

the ability to face, frame and build solutions to ambiguous, highly uncertain situations is par for the course in today’s rapidly evolving and globalizing business settings. [Yet while] a key skill for successfully navigating these situations is reflection, our findings showed that reflection is both the least taught skill in business schools and, not surprisingly, one that is challenging for most MBA students in capstone courses. (p. 767)

Clarke and Butcher (2009) point out that because traditional business education positions managers as “morally neutral technicians” (p. 596), then in the current global climate, where large companies can be dominant in a number of regions, there is a growing expectation that, as educators, we have a moral obligation to encourage practitioner professionals to think and act differently (Gherardi et al., 2007; Janssens & Steyaert, 2012). Relatedly, as organizations are beginning to see their ethical reputation with stakeholders as a potential competitive advantage than a more expansive “practical wisdom,” facilitative learning approach could aid this development. As Dey and Steyaert (2007), two critical management educators, put it, “Contrary to expectations, the spirit of the times might in actual fact be conducive to [such] an endeavour” (p. 448). In the following delineation of our approach, we seek to justify that contention due to the opportunities to build reflexive and relational student capabilities that flow on from opening up postindustrial spaces to interrogation from a broader perspective (Hibbert, 2012).

Passionate Knowing: Beyond Reductionist Managerialism

Questioning taken for granted systems can be perceived as threatening and needless, especially when one’s career is dependent on the current system. Therefore one of the major challenges of teaching . . . from a critical perspective lies in persuading students of the need to think differently about leadership [and management], organizations and themselves as leaders [and managers]. (Cunliffe, 2009, p. 87)

As noted in the discussion above, the “commodification of knowledge” educational approach is beginning to be found wanting in a global market context where more expansive reflective human and technical knowledge capabilities are key production factors. A number of CMS scholars, like Cunliffe, have responded to this situation by turning explicitly to “troublesome knowledge” (Wright & Hibbert, 2013, p. 431) based teachings to create a wisdom focused change agenda for their adult educational socialization programs (Clarke & Butcher, 2009; Janssens & Steyaert, 2012; Segal, 2010). Cunliffe (2009), for instance, draws on phenomenological conceptualizing and readings to develop her executive postgraduate students understanding of the value/s of relationalism, reflexivity, and ethics as meaningful “threshold concepts” informing contemporary leadership practice.

Cunliffe (2009, p. 88) demonstrates that an interrogation of managerialism and its relationship with unrealistic hyped-up expectations of individual leadership can be important for practitioners in revealing that prescriptive remedies cannot address the many and varied demands they face. Like Cunliffe, we have found the enlightened understanding that accompanies more critically reflective analysis, when grounded by such specific “threshold concepts,” allows practitioners to reread ambiguous situations productively through the “troublesome knowledge” lens. Moreover, connecting the new learning with their own history of relationship experiences at work gives rise to more positive passion-driven forms of engagement (Dey & Steyaert, 2007).

The “passion of knowing” is a theme of Gherardi et al.’s (2007) Management Learning special journal edition. They point out that given the industrial project “engendered a socially constructed blindness to all experience that could not be related to instrumentality, rationality and utilitarianism” (p. 317), then, in the postindustrial era, a sense of ourselves as emotionally centered beings needs to be reclaimed in relation to our more design-centered working lives today. In the work-integrated-learning masters course that we have taught collaboratively, the recognition that passionate sensual expression is linked to our intellectual capacity, as a means of creative output, is an underlying theme that allows our Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM) students to contemplate how to build the kind of innovative “social capital” focused organizational prospects Drucker calls for.

Having outlined contextual justifications for the introduction of a critical approach, the article now proceeds to explore how the CMS research material facilitated an associated flow on effect such that the consequential relational and reflective threshold concepts translated into meaningful individual experiential attributes. The relevance of such educational encounters for management practice are documented by the students themselves, threaded throughout the article, with the participative learning exchanges that emerged nominated as key to the appreciative acumen developed. The conclusion draws out the benefits of exposing students to a historical and political overview of managerialism on the grounds that the reflexive skills of cultural interpretation they acquire directly plays back into their own capacity to manage in more human-centered deliberative ways. Having provided validation for a more questioning pedagogy, designed for practicing managers, the following section lays out the frame of reference for the course.

Connecting Learning and Critique: Striving for a Subtle Form of Radicalism

By the sub-title “connecting learning and critique” we express concern that the hype surrounding the idea of learning (the “learning organization,” the “learning society,” etc.), and its liberal adoption . . . tends to emphasize on the one hand it’s connection to economic instrumentality and on the other the feel-good factor of humanism . . . [However,] if the idea of management learning is to be more than just another applied functional field of management studies we need to attend to the vexatious difficulties of critiquing learning and at the same time learn to critique more subtly. (Fox & Grey, 2000, p. 8)

Bearing in mind the double trick tension Fox and Grey (2000) refer to, the twofold objectives of our course were to

As noted earlier, this is itself twofold, in that relational awareness refers to

To enact these aspirations, the two educators and their mature students undertook a 13 weeks × 3 hours–long journey designed to discover if the awareness of working managers, regarding wider implications of current organizational conditions, and their own functioning, could be substantially increased. Relating to Fox and Grey’s quote, those of us who have been teaching radical scholarship to practitioners for some time have witnessed how overarching, overgeneralized, and overrevolutionary academic zeal, preached at students in the classroom, leaves them disinterested, disappointed, and untouched by such encounters.

These observations meant that our driving concern in structuring the course was to provide a learning space where subtle critical analysis of taken-for-granted practices prevailed in order to stimulate, not stifle, imaginative responses regarding practical interventions. We were also aware of how important an aesthetic use of social space is to human receptiveness and to fuel creativity, hence we turned to “design thinking” for ideas on how to facilitate the emergence of a heterotopic ⁶ environment (Beyes & Michels, 2011). Inamdar and Roldan (2013) point out that Schon (1987) advocates the take-up of

a reflective practicum, more akin to curricula in the design disciplines, where students [are] provided the opportunity to apply classroom learning and try out ideas in practice situations. (Inamdar & Roldan, 2013, p. 766)

Hence, as well as the basics of using, seminar style, cluster-grouped seating, in a flat-structured classroom to engender the growth of interactive relationships, we engaged a variety of multimedia formats from which to create an integrated combination of textual, visual, and verbally based material. These included

This set of lively resources balanced out some of the heavier weekly readings that analyzed the more negative aspects of managerial control systems drawn on as examples to address some of the more Draconian approaches that continue to dominate organizations today.

Experimental Learning Exchanges

Besides attempting to set an example of potential SHRM innovation and change strategies, the input of both analytical and descriptive material was intended to avoid the situation where students (even mature ones) expect to be provided with simplified learning packages that require little effort on their part. To counter this tendency and encourage their active involvement, we structured the course in terms of small-group facilitation sessions, whole class discussions, conceptual and empirical case study analysis, mini-lectures, and guest presentations, in which student involvement was central to each scenario. As educators, we were mutually involved in all teaching sessions taking alternate roles introducing content and/or facilitation. The expectation of equal participation for all was designed to challenge “developments affecting higher education where students are treated merely as consumers and learning merely as consumption” (Beyes & Michels, 2011, p. 523). While this kind of class structuring is becoming relatively common, the accompanying adoption of a narrative driven, and critically reflective, open, and informal dialogical approach was key to the dynamic processual focus that emerged. Relatedly, the requirement for a cooperative relational style of management to be adopted for all presenters (modelled by ourselves) was discussed at the beginning of the course, and the students soon learnt they were responsible for the quality of these kinds of “threshold concept” learning processes, not just the educators. As one student framed the results,

The educators teaching style assumed knowledge, which was learned through experience and gained from the substantial weekly readings provided to the class. This assumed knowledge allowed the educators to further develop these concepts and principles during class time, rather than regurgitate to us information we could read for ourselves. This progression of ideas helped develop my understanding of managing people and leadership principles in a practical sense rather than just covering the basic theories.

As one of the three assessment items (attracting a third of the coursework mark) involved a group enactment session, the simulated organizational learning environment enhanced the heterotopic aspect of the classroom space (Berggren & Söderlund, 2011; Kakavelakis & Edwards, 2011). This was because the three to four students presenting each time tended to come from diverse identity/cultural/social backgrounds ⁷ and were asked to prepare creative engagement exercises in which the conceptual material was directly related to their own work contexts. We emphasized that the assignment should avoid replicating the situation where managers talk-at their “subordinates” in a dictatorial manner, which engenders the common passive-resistance response. Instead, the groups were to design imaginative practical activities to allow the class to work through the problematized innovation and change process issues outlined in the readings relating to the weeks topic. The presenting group’s role then was to facilitate rather than directly lead the class to demonstrate what “relational management practice” might look like. We modelled this ethos ourselves throughout the course, often introducing autoethnographic style input from our own organizational experiences, to empower students to debate ideas with us to allow for a plurality of perspectives to flourish. In relation to the take up of threshold concepts, a didactic instructional delivery platform was thus replaced by a demonstrative one, which led one student to respond thus:

[teachers names removed] . . . showed genuine respect and support to all students, assisting students to participate and succeed in their studies. [ditto] . . . demonstrated sensitivity and understanding to diversity and different ways of learning and experiencing. This supported the development of students as individuals.

The students responded to this challenge to trial experimental learning exchanges and talked about how this gave them confidence to apply the methods in their own team management environment. The sense of freeing up roles was thus productive, and we consider our own demonstration of the benefits of collegiality was key to the positive outcomes, as indicated by this student:

The teachers are passionate about the subject and it shows in their classes, resulting in interested and enthusiastic students. This is demonstrated in high attendance and supported by the students.

We also mirrored the dual aspects of theory and practice we were attempting to unite as one of us has a more conventional social science academic background while the other trained as an HRM practitioner, prior to gaining her PhD. We believe that this combination of conceptual and applied expertise was key to facilitating the evident growth of practical wisdom on the part of students and to our gaining respect from these mature managers.

Work-Integrated Learning Practice: The Starting Point for Relational Understandings

Relational interactions are occasions in which we enact our social identities. (Goffman’s 1959 conception as cited in Uhl-Bien & Ospina, 2012, p. 90)

While initially hesitant, students soon responded to the challenge to create their own learning approaches and became quite competitive in terms of the innovative design of their presentations capitalising on their unique differences in perspective and lived experience. ⁸ This made for a distinctive plurality in terms of formats for the presentation of ideas, which in turn added an air of anticipation to each class and fed into the emergence of a distinctive “community of practice” (Kerno & Mace, 2010) sensibility. As Beyes and Michels (2011) point out, this kind of expressive configuration “expands processes of knowing beyond cognitive limits to potentially include the body, the emotions, the affective mode of understanding, intuition, receptiveness, empathy, introspection and aesthetic understanding” (p. 532)—in short, it enables the impassioned embodied framing we were seeking to model and stimulate.

As we had an ambitious agenda to develop the managers “political leadership” (Clarke & Butcher, 2009) capabilities, we choose CMS research material that would immerse them in the details surrounding the contemporary role of management from day one. Early on, as in Clarke and Butcher (2009), ethnographic studies of management as an emergent relational process and Wright’s (2008) situating of the problematic HRM role managers occupy in the evolving knowledge economy, helped them begin reflect more broadly on their own situation in their organizations. While these CMS studies are critically reflexive conceptually, as they engage with everyday practices this initial set of resources soon led to fertile debates. The reference point of heroic and post-heroic scripts also provided a narrative entry to explore managerial identity perceptions, helping them recognize how management is promoted and performed ideologically in given contexts. As well as the areas of sense making and managing knowledge, other weekly topics included managing knowledge economy cultures, the role of creativity and innovation, celebrating diversity, working with a sustainability ethos, and managing people ethically. The relevant CMS material, sourced from a range of academic journals, enabled the students to reread situations they had experienced first-hand through a different, more challenging, lens. Resources like Wilkinson and Mellahi’s (2010) “Slash and Burn or Nip and Tuck? Downsizing, innovation and human resources” and Gollan’s (2005) “High Involvement Management and HR Sustainability,” for example, alerted them to wider concerns they had not previously contemplated.

Two readings were set weekly, and while each engaged critical analysis, this was complemented by firsthand case study material and/or other empirical references. As noted previously, practitioner perspectives/evidence was also drawn on in the mini-lectures to maintain balance and allow for integration. Again, one educator coming from a theoretical sociological and political philosophy background and the other from a combined CMS training and extensive practitioner base supported this approach. The small size of the class, 20 to 30 students, facilitated the team atmosphere which allowed for the intensive small group affiliations for assessment undertakings to be created over the semester while still preserving the wider group capacity for in-depth verbal interaction in terms of debating ideas. Indeed, nearing the end of the course, students talked to us about the intense relationship building that had occurred within the whole class, as well as with particular individuals. While the following student quotation suggests satisfaction with the teaching, we believe that it also says much about the class morale itself:

There was one particular event, which I think emphasised how much the students valued the teachings. The event was the very last session. As we did not have a final exam there was no real reason for students to turn up for this last class, however when you looked around at this final seminar almost everyone was there. This did not happen in any other classes I attended.

A Collegial Method of Learning

As discussed, to achieve expansive outcomes requires students to take ownership of their own active learning, and we are usually not disappointed. We put this down to the effectiveness of enacting this particular set of threshold concepts where the

We believe that the latter, in particular, is why we rarely received negative class feedback. Also, we constantly asked them if they considered the structure or processes needed changing and followed through on suggestions wherever possible. Indeed, we consider flexibility, on the part of educators, is key to the viability of this kind of student-led collaborative learning program.

Providing evidence of their immersion in the learning process, in situations where certain students did struggle with the material, from time to time, we observed that other students would offer translations and provide everyday examples. This meant that students became less afraid to own up to confusion or a lack of ideas. Importantly, it appeared that the emergent relational underpinnings were leading to levels of tolerance we had not previously witnessed in our undergraduate classes. Hence, while analytical feedback is usually restricted to the educators, in this case, it expanded to include classmates.

As well as the demonstrations of relational skill, a rubric of skills achieved from the reflexivity impetus emerged from encouraging the students to

To facilitate such competency, the students were expected to address these specific criteria in each of their assignments, hence they formed part of the assessment criteria and feedback. While much of the assignment work related to individual laboring, we do not consider that the students would have been prepared to exert the intensive effort we witnessed without the inspiration gained from the collective learning environment. Hence, while Drucker suggests a structured “method of learning,” specifically designed for the knowledge economy manager, can promote an “intellectual omnivore” (Srinivasan, 2007, p. 5) drive in students where their object of desire becomes continuous learning; with our students, we also observed that the object of desire became “intellectual relationalism,” as they seem to relish extending their understanding through the context of collaborative debate. This suggests that knowing from a relational perspective is linked to engagement in meaningful encounters rather than off-the-shelf, techniques orientated, saleable products.

Integrative Curriculum: A Key Design Factor

Integration was a feature of the set formal assessment too, as like Berggren and Söderlund’s (2011) manager education focus, we sought to “combine academic rigour with personal change and organizational action” (p. 377) by balancing the experiential, action based pedagogy with expectations of direct applications of the critical material in each of the three assignments. As well as the group creative oral facilitation exercise, there was a reflective learning journal, and a final take-home reflexivity-based essay. The ratio of overall marks for each assignment, respectively, was 30%:30%:40%. The formats stipulated for each project also mirrored the course ethos in terms of informal structuring; intersecting theory and practice; an open-ended, work-in-process approach; and a storytelling rather than didactic, autoethnographic style of delivery. Each of these aspects was discussed in-depth with the students and linked to the central theory-practice integration course theme. The students reported a sense of freedom on learning that fallacious objectivist pretensions could be abandoned in favor of expressing themselves in a first person sense in their written and verbal assignments.

Assignments were also timed to allow the students to build their critical thinking skills; hence, the facilitative group assignments did not commence until Week 4 to allow for a number of foundational readings to be covered and to ensure in-depth discussions had begun to take place, which stimulated the students’ imagination. Equally, the reflective journal entry submission was not due until Week 7 (although they submitted a single draft of a week’s reading in Week 4 to gain feedback on their proficiency with critical analysis along with their ability to link the set material to their own situational experience). The final assignment, a take home reflective essay covering the second part of the course, was due 2 weeks after the end of the course to allow adequate time to draw together their thoughts and impressions on the overall learnings achieved. The students overwhelmingly endorsed the in-house assessment system as they considered external formal exams did not allow them the reflective space that the continuous learning program facilitated. Indeed, they submitted an appeal to the department to have all assessment on the masters programs conducted this way, without success unfortunately.

As well as the reflective learning outcomes, each assignment was designed to build a particular set of managerial relational practice skills. For example, students reported that the group-work was challenging because of the requirement to relate intensively with each other to come up with inventive learning approaches, using the diversity of their identity backgrounds, while keeping the scenarios open-ended to allow for their wider fellow student cohorts participation. This contrasts with traditional presentations where polished prescriptive pronouncements prevail, delivered to passive (often pensive) people.

Providing Space for Personal Growth

Both the students and our treatment of the weekly CMS source material, rather than being based on a full account of the readings, involved teasing out a skeleton framework of problematic issues from a “troublesome knowledge” perspective that they were expected to address. This summarizing approach, in requiring them to trial analytical appraisals, takes students beyond mere descriptive overviews where they typically get bogged down in instrumental detail, as this manager indicates:

As a mature age student with over 20 years experience in middle management, I undertook this course in the belief that it would provide concrete solutions and a workbook type of teaching that I could adapt and apply in my own work environment. The reality was an interactive course that built from the experience and expertise of the class members to develop the class into a community of practice. This in essence made the course a living teaching model as the material that was being studied was modelled in the weekly classes and the assignment material. The course was not a recipe book but used the academic theory to stimulate reflection and discussion within the class based upon our own experiences. The result was not a lecture type model of teaching but an interactive personal development model. The material covered was exactly what was modelled in class and this led each week to me reflecting upon past and present management situations—how I handled various scenarios and how this course was teaching me to reflect and adapt my management style to support my personal growth and development.

This approach fits with Schon’s (1987) notion of reflective practicum where students are “given free time to reflect on their own learning and empowered to use reflection to actively manage their own learning across various classroom and practice settings” (cited in Inamdar and Roldan, 2013, p. 766).

The second assignment, the learning journal, analyzing selected readings and relating them to their own personal and management background, also built skills of synthesis and individual reflective capabilities as by this stage students were beginning to understand how “socially constructed” discourses influence our sense of identity, scope of experiences, and awareness. The students initially struggled, in these early assignments, through trial and error, with learning how to see the wood-from-the-trees in terms of deciphering key issues and being able to meaningfully link them to their own relevant practical examples. We consider this is because, unlike managerialist readings, which often provide students with simplistic and superficial behaviorist accounts of SHRM (and the like), interrogatory CMS style material delves into the multilayered complexity managing people and systems, in the knowledge economy, entails.

This meant the opportunity for a draft submission, for the journal assignment, proved to be crucial to build the necessary competencies as the students, probably because of their maturity, responded well to the extensive feedback we provided. Given that writing teaches us to “think” more reflectively regarding intricate issues, we have become aware that critically orientated formats do require educators to provide this kind of one-on-one student–educator support. The downside is this kind of approach can add considerably to an educator’s workload. The level of commitment does pay off ultimately, however, as the students repeatedly remarked that the work-in-progress exercise was beneficial in building their reflexive skills and that, although it required an intensive level of engagement, it also resulted in a sense of achievement. This kind of continuous assessment process meant, as one student reported, that their journal entries varied considerably in style and substance from the prescriptively based material they usually submitted as scholarship:

[teacher names eliminated] . . . teaches at a level expected of a strategic course. Unfortunately it is not a level that is reached in most subjects. [Ditto] . . . delves a lot deeper. The content, the method of instruction, experiential, facilitative and interactive, and the assessment are far more sophisticated than other courses, necessitating students to really reflect on the content of the course and have a far deeper understanding of the theory and practical application.

Reflective Integration: Enabling Epiphanies

Given the seemingly infinite possibility of critique, we must bear in mind a notorious danger: [that] critique remains an intellectual undertaking, which does not necessarily have real effects on the level of practice (Dey & Steyaert, 2012, p. 101).

Bearing these reservations in mind, our course was structured in two parts. The first module, covering Weeks 1 to 7, focused on developing the students’ reflective understanding and critical thinking skills through intense classroom discussions based on the contemporary interrogation of SHRM provided in the readings. The second module, covering Weeks 8 to 13, was built on this foundational awareness of the limits of practice by taking a more constructive line. This involved creative set material being drawn on, as discussed earlier, to enable the students to explore a range of possibilities for innovative change prospects. To further ground this conceptual threshold learning process, empirical material was studied detailing, for example, what a move, from traditional high-performance work systems to high involvement management processes, might entail in terms of creating mutually respectful, relationally led interactions (Fletcher, 2012, p. 95).

Case study examples, like Cutcher’s (2009) critically based investigation of an Australian bank, were drawn on to illustrate the concepts and linked to specific practices in order to canvas a range of productive options. This kind of input was effective in demonstrating the shortsightedness of, for example, the city-based banks attempt to impose a narrow, finance-driven, customer interface on their regional centers, when a culture of morally based relationships was already productively underpinning the customer–staff interchange to everyone’s (including the banks) benefit, in this context. Given current postindustrial work pressures, exploring the dynamics and benefits of the “community of contributors” model, which the bank staffs were enacting, this instance provided the students with a viable managerial model they could apply to their own work situations. This kind of close scrutiny of workplace practices demonstrates how a critical lens can be applied to more productive purposes than traditional descriptive (and usually prescriptive) case studies achieve.

Overall, the combination of local, and big picture analysis led to a wealth of ideas being promulgated by the students in the simulated work-integrated-learning context, often trialed by the facilitating groups. The second module was thus deemed effective in developing the managers’ relational understanding and related connectivity facilitation skills. The strength of interpersonal relationships forged among the class, for instance (many report ongoing friendships), and the communications we continue to receive from the students, some considerable time after the course finished, suggests ongoing evidence for such capacities.

Educationally then, it appears that CMS style analytical material, in combination with an applied program, is capable of producing transformational outcomes for work experienced students precisely because its “relational orientation . . . takes as primary the nexus of relations in organizations, rather than focusing on discrete, and abstracted phenomena” (Seers & Chopin, 2012, p. 44). Hence, the modeling effects of a more holistic approach to knowhow appeared to overcome the limits of the segmented instrumental educational focus referred to at the outset of the article.

We witnessed this in the high standard achieved generally in the final assignment, the reflective take-home essay, where students demonstrated a significant increase in their capacity to integrate reflective analysis with relational experiential accounts compared with their earlier submissions. As one ex-student commented to us through a LinkedIn correspondence recently, in relaying their resistant response to a conventional leadership-training course, they had just attended:

At this point I smiled thinking of how much your “reflective practitioner” course has influenced me and now appears to be standard practice in my everyday life really helping me with sense-making.

Raising the Bar on Unethical Systems

We believe that Drucker’s contention that a distinctive “ethically based method of learning” is required for managers in the knowledge economy context vindicates our adoption of the troublesome knowledge and threshold concepts combination format. His consideration (Srinivasan, 2007, p. 3) that “the traditional socio-economic arrangements between organisations and knowledge workers will have to be rethought [with both agents] redefining themselves, as not just economic agents, but as learning subjects [because] intellectual capital becomes the primary source of competitive advantage” further validates our focus on developing the kind of continuous “learning to learn” ethic he recommends. He describes a two-part student feedback system, in which the individual develops a form of critical reflexivity, much as we have described, and where an external agent helps an individual focus on a “new trajectory” (Srinivasan, 2007, p. 9).

In our case, the latter relates to the students learning to value relating to others in a mutually supportive environment rather than a competitive one. We have pointed out that as well as feedback from ourselves, acting as external agents, the students encountered the added bonus of their fellow peer-group feedback. This is important because as companies like Google and IDEO demonstrate “knowledge economy,” innovative capacity is not just an individualist capability but is extended through collaborative settings and work processes. In that regard, our learning methods and feedback approach is somewhat different from Drucker’s. His focus is a more individualist psychological perspective in which subjectivity and “the act of individuation” underpin his model of the learning process. Our perspective is more sociological in that intersubjectivity (knowing-the-self-in-relation-to-others) learning principles underpin the course structure. Equally, we consider that the CMS contextual material facilitates personalized learning about how as individuals they are drawn into particular ways of seeing the world, which restrict alternative challenges.

Drucker’s methodology is particularly appropriate for educational psychologists, and there are many overlaps here with a CMS pedagogical approach, specifically the notion that students need to understand the ethical implications of the actions they take consequentially and that managers need to aspire to make a difference in the lives of others by becoming continuous reflexive learners. However, we hold that to reach this level of comprehension, students need a broader awareness of situational conditions/ing. For Drucker, this comes about through exposure to interdisciplinary material. In contrast, for CMS educators, the focus is on the interplay between the individual and the wider social systems with “troublesome knowledge” contributions enabling students to better appreciate and thus more readily cope with the many contradictions and pressures that impinge on their contemporary managerial role. Indeed, as Srinivasan (2007) calling on Drucker notes,

Knowledge workers will have to ask themselves questions pertaining to their identity, their strengths, the modes of work that they feel comfortable with, the places where they have a sense of belonging, the range of contributions that they can make in organizations, and learn to take responsibility for managing relationships. (p. 10)

Our students demonstrated in their assignments and verbally in-class that these became key issues for them by the end of the course. The following section of the article identifies some of the conditions that affect them and how we attempted to address them before going on to present our conclusions.

Naming the Fear to Create Safe Relational Spaces

Alvesson and Deetz (2005) contend that the “command and control” style of managerialist authority has seen the “progressive rationalization and colonization of nature and people, whether workers, potential consumers, or society has a whole” (p. 11).

In specific terms, Fulop and Rifkin (1997) note, for instance, how as a part of the socialization of labor process, expressions of fear in organizations have become associated with shame, such that they are often repressed producing a lack of resistance to the difficult conditions being experienced. This emphasizes the importance for educators to create learning conditions where mutual disclosure and relations of trust can flourish to allow for a more empowering embodied workplace ethic to be practiced. The creation of such a safe space to explore life-changing possibilities, in relation to management operations, was the agenda we set for the course and which students took up themselves. As it is increasingly apparent that there are structural limits to rationally driven control mechanisms, we encouraged our students to reclaim their corporeal bodily presence and acknowledge the relationship-centeredness which marks our lives, in spite of the presence of restrictive formal hierarchies.

The students learnt that this awareness has win-win prospects given, as Gherardi et al. (2007) state, there are consequences of imposing rationalized, sterilized, and moralized regimes of control derived from a managerialist fear of lack of control. As they put it,

[t]ake sensation, embodied desire, and the aesthetic experience out of the act of human activity . . . and what you are left with is a pale representation of both how people know and what it means to be human. (p. 316)

As the course set out to demonstrate, these negative consequences are no longer merely restricted to the subjects of power but now include organizational outcomes as disembodiment equates with participant disengagement.

We have documented the postgraduate class we taught collaboratively, designed to raise our students’ (and our own) reflective awareness, to demonstrate the utility of integrative educational strategies. Moreover, like Dey and Steyaert (2007), we believe that what was valuable about the approach we took was that we “strived to strike a balance between the pragmatic, economic demands of management education and the possibility of genuine invention” (p. 438) by working with a grounded mediated form of critical analysis. By mediated, we mean the content of CMS material was continuously interrogated by the management students with reference to their lived experience. It is this dialogical approach—which grew in sophistication as the students appreciated how each body of conceptual input contributed to their increased understanding of forms of practice—that ensured the content material was not left at an abstract level.

We have developed our case through the inclusion of the voices of the students to mirror the central role they played in the classroom encounters and to relay the transformational life effects they laid claim to. For instance, a number of students spoke of being happier at work due to having developed more meaningful relationships with their staff and having learnt tactics to fend off unreasonable senior management demands. While the articles engaged difficult issues related to environmental sustainability, ethical issues, and the like, as the students were already living these dilemmas, the opportunity to develop ways to redress some of the more onerous practices was welcomed. Indeed, as the middle managers reported facing a range of ambiguous everyday organizational pressures they found difficult to resolve, while retaining a sense of personal integrity, these concerns were confronted continuously throughout the semester, as live reference points for the topic areas.

This led to one manager reporting that the coursework learnings had translated in the prevention of his staffs feeling disenfranchised as his company went through a transformational change program. The manager noted that rather than facing staff resistance and disaffection, as had previously occurred in a number of such circumstances, he succeeded in building alliances through newly informed actions, learnt from the course, thus managing to contribute positively to the change processes underway. For example, his increased confidence to work collaboratively enabled him to share strategic information and trust participants to take up the issues productively, which in turn facilitated more meaningful relationships being created with a number of employees at different levels.

Exposing the Vulnerable Educator

We also believe our collegial presence and concern to mirror more ethical, respectful ways to work with organizational participants, made a unique contribution to the efficacy of this project. To this end, in attempting to lay the groundwork for a community-of-practice teaching approach, we rejected the “dispassionate, objective and rational knowledge” (Gherardi et al., 2007, p. 319) of academic educator persona. In so doing, like Cunliffe (2009), we made the students aware that all forms of knowledge are socially constructed and therefore contestable—ours included. In this way, we attempted to hold ourselves accountable by striving in our own management style to avoid parallel forms of individual/institutional dominance when adopting critical management education pedagogy (Fenwick, 2005). This meant, as with the practical wisdom management approach we were advocating, we paid our mature students the respect of not hiding behind the formal educator position associated with status and authority. Instead, a heterotopic space was created where personal, informal reflections were welcomed along with concerns and hesitations, pertaining to the course structuring and processes (along with support for managerialism, if they were initially so inclined). This led one student to comment,

The lecturers continuously asked the class for feedback regarding the effectiveness of the class activities, as well as the teaching methods, with the intention of refining the lessons accordingly. I have never experienced this type of endorsement of student participation in lesson planning.

Conclusion: Reflecting on the Value of Reflexivity

Of late, there has been much reference to the value of relational and reflective learning processes (Hibbert, 2012), we have attempted to contribute to this debate by providing a schema as to how these threshold concepts might be applied in the everyday classroom. As Wright and Hibbert (2013) note, the distinctive characteristics of threshold concepts involve

an “integrative” capacity where “crossing the threshold brings the new connections and patterns in the focal area of study into view through the new conceptual lens”; that the material is challenging in the “troublesome knowledge” sense; that a meaningful mindset change is attained; [and] that the outcomes are transformational and sustained. (p. 431)

We hope the reader agrees that the students’ voices in this text add credence to the substance of these potential educational change components. In marking the student assignments, and in classroom observations, we certainly witnessed aspects of practical wisdom being enacted. We consider it was the expansion of the boundaries of management, both intellectually and expressively, which was key to the students embracing the threshold concepts principles ¹⁰ and overcoming their tendency to negate theory. The latter point relates to their suspicion of theory (fear) due to the way that practice is privileged in the management community, indeed reified, without recognition that all practices are informed by particular sets of conceptual assumptions.

We are also clear, however, that this kind of integrative program is only likely to work with students who have extensive practitioner experience and, indeed because of the intensive analytical program, is primarily suited to postgraduate students with a strong commitment to their own learning development. ¹¹ As one mature student reflected,

The learning model offered within this subject, in my experience, provided a far richer and deeper learning experience than any other teaching format I have experienced to date. The learning process was not only about providing the “right” answers in an exam or assignment, but it challenged me personally by taking me on a journey of seeking to understand by using the knowledge, experience, reflections and debate provided by both the lecturers and other students.

In that sense, our Australian-based program appears to compare more to executive MBA style programs overseas. We are also fortunate, in that our cohorts are invariably made up of middle managers at a turning point in their careers, often frustrated with the proliferation of constraints they face and thus seeking new trajectories. This means we cannot take the credit for the transformations they report. However, in relation to other educators pursuing a parallel critically evaluative, integrative line, an individual’s teaching persona is inevitably tied to their own distinctive identity; in our particular scenario, we believe the important elements were the consistent modelling of values, our openness to challenge and critique ourselves, and having had a long-term mutually respectful relationship with each other as educators.

Win-Win Institutional Prospects

Practically, while the presence of more than one educator is critical to ensure the high work level can be maintained without burnout, as universities, like any other organization, become increasingly subjected to the rationalization of “efficiency,” such possibilities may become more remote. In this case, the department accepted the doubling up because one of the educators was already rated as overloaded. As we consider the collegiality modelled by us was key to demonstrate the efficacy of relational approaches, we would hope that progressive business schools might take a broader view of the extra labor costs involved. For example, such investment is likely to provide potential enrolment advantage resulting from increased student satisfaction and achievement outcomes—factors that we find students communicate to others.

Organizational benefits translate too, for instance, one middle manager reported receiving repeated positive feedback, relating to his increased facilitation skills, from his senior managers and other staff. Also, for universities to provide an experience of community for students, rather than just replicate the preoccupation with individualistic self-management auditing, is an important way to readdress some of the current institutional deficits. As Inamdar and Roldan (2013) reflect, addressing the instrumental fetish educationally means that both individuals and organizations themselves can benefit by

providing our students with the confidence and skills to step back and reassess a situation, before returning to the fray, [should ensure they reject] the “shoot from the hip” solutions that address only part of a problem in the very short term and create and compound problems in the long run. (p. 767)

The focus for this article has been to avoid a prescriptive classroom design model for educators to attempt to imitate as we believe the strength of such participatory programs is the particular subjective (and intersubjective) strengths the particular participants, including the educators, bring to the setting. This is why every class will vary considerably in terms of group dynamics as to what can be achieved. Fittingly, the article has been written in a firsthand, autoethnographic, style—much in the manner we encourage our students to partake—to demonstrate the relational framework we attempt to inhabit, not just teach didactically.

The purpose of the article has been to show the reader what can be achieved when the emphasis is on student development gained through their direct involvement in the educational process, and where educators take the risk to introduce challenging conceptual material interrogating managerial identity and its practical consequences. We have pointed out that given its experimental character, we envisage the usefulness of the article for other educators will relate to potential for reflective insights into qualitatively orientated teaching approaches. Hence, the takeaway for educators, hopefully, will be a “comparative and contrasting” know-how basis, in relation to their own practices.

To recapitulate, we noted earlier in the article that we had witnessed radical scholarship being taught too didactically to no avail pedagogically, hence, we argued that for this kind of critical content to be meaningful for students requires a specific kind of collegially engaged process. As the methodology of combining analytical content, with a simulated organizational context, facilitated by a participatory approach, bore results in terms of increased quality of assignment achievement and positive reports from the students, it may well be that other educators seek to trial parallel approaches. If so, an extended community of collegial collaborators could be formed to allow the sharing of comparative insights regarding the pedagogical issues that arise when educators adopt more problematized perspectives. Institutionally, we believe this focus is justified on the grounds that the move beyond an instrumental focus toward a more questioning R&R (relational and reflexive) competency-based learning framework can serve both the organization’s and the manager’s needs for innovative skills.

Ultimately, at least for this particular cohort, we learnt from their enthusiastic responses to the gaining of relational understanding, regarding how “contextual forces operate on micro level interactions” (Fletcher, 2012, p. 84), that such learning programs can productively affect their working lives. We contend this is because the combination of novelty of context and content, coupled by a respectful work-integrated-learning methodology, equips them to trial more “passion” driven and ethically based staffing management practices, as Dey and Steyaert (2007) and Gherardi et al. (2007) advocate. We also hope we have demonstrated that by advancing more democratic networking styles of engagement between educational academics and mature practitioner students, both groups may enhance their “practical wisdom” mindfulness capabilities, bearing in mind that this refers to the integration of knowledge, experience, understanding, and insight.