Abstract
Background: A Paradigm in Question
The recent report from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Rethinking Undergraduate Business Education: Liberal Learning for the Profession (Colby, Ehrlich, Sullivan, & Dolle, 2011) that has inspired this special issue begins with a gesture back toward the previous Carnegie report (Pierson, 1959). Half a century ago, business school faculty were urged to develop a scientific paradigm worthy of its place in the modern university. What happened then has been well researched (see Augier & March, 2011; Bobko & Tejeda, 2000; Chew & McInnis-Bowers, 2004; Datar, Garvin, & Cullen, 2010; Friga et al., 2003; Hatchuelle, 2013; Karakas, 2011; Khurana, 2007; Menand, 2011; O’Connor, 2011; Pfeffer & Fong, 2002; Podolny, 2009; Zald, 1996): An epistemological paradigm took shape among business academics that embraced logical empiricism (LE) as an account of the relationship between knowledge and the world, rational choice (RC) as an account of how people exercise knowledge in practice, and agency theory (AT) as an account of how people in organizations relate to each other.
This so-called “LERCAT” paradigm has produced several generations of business school graduates who are “purely linear thinkers who see only one-way causation” (Colby et al., 2011, p. 31). This epistemological paradigm has serious implications for management practice; indeed, “the current troubles of the world economy . . . may stem in no small part from blind trust in an exclusively economic view of business and the world” (Colby et al., 2011, p. 29). As a corrective, the recent report sets forth an agenda for business education that involves a “double-helix” integration of liberal learning and business education. In order to pursue this integration, management educators begin by reflecting critically on their own epistemological assumptions about the relationship between knowledge and the world.
We have seen firsthand how these critical reflections have stirred up scholarly conversations. We conducted interviews with management educators attending the Academy of Management Annual Meeting in 2010, 2011, and 2012, asking them whether they already integrate the humanities into their teaching. 1 In that context, we found that the humanities were frequently used in the classroom as a way to engage students who welcomed a short holiday from the dominant LERCAT paradigm.
We convened the “Copenhagen Roundtable: Integrating the Humanities and Liberal Arts in Business Education” in the fall of 2011, gathering more than 100 management scholars from universities across the EU (as well as some from North America). 2 In that context, we found that management academics in the EU consciously think of themselves as humanists and see the business school as a place where students learn managerial skills as well as philosophical concepts that enable them to think critically about the world and their future careers. Professors also implied that more classroom engagement could be inspired by contemporary visual art as well as the performing arts, stimulating the development of valuable aesthetic sensibilities.
We also convened professional development workshops (PDWs) at the 2012 and 2013 Academy of Management Annual Meetings, where hundreds of participants debated the meaning of the concept of practical reasoning as defined in the Carnegie report. In that context, some scholars viewed practical reasoning through a psychological lens as an individual-level phenomenon that can be studied using empirical laboratory manipulations, while others insisted that it is fundamentally relational, involving interpersonal, social and cultural dimensions.
In 2012, a group of 30 schools and hundreds of faculty from the United States and EU (ours included) joined together in the Aspen Institute Undergraduate Business Education Consortium to discuss institutional constraints for rethinking business education. In that context, we heard how cross-disciplinarity can conflict with conventional academic careers; how competition on both school and university levels hamper new initiatives; and how everyday bureaucracy like student and faculty schedules, evaluation and assessment procedures, course management systems, accounting systems, logistics, and so forth makes collaboration between institutions difficult.
Finally, beginning in 2013, we have participated in a series of workshops sponsored by the Haniel Foundation. European schools with deep traditions of integrating the arts and humanities in business education 3 have joined together to promote faculty collaborations, including a multiyear effort to produce a “European Carnegie Report.” A related initiative currently under way is the CEMS Faculty Group on “Humanities, Art & Management.” In both of these contexts, it seems clear that the European landscape has not been shaped by the LERCAT paradigm so much as in the United States, and yet faculty disagree stridently about how and why the arts and humanities should be further developed within the business school.
This special issue thus does not come out of the blue. It has been shaped by key questions that remain unanswered through these various conversations, namely: How should we balance the scientific and the humanistic? How can existing teaching practices be reframed to emphasize normative, practical judgment rather than objective, scientific analysis? How can faculty and students engage in the cocreation of new, practical knowledge? How might the process of integrating the humanities and business studies be enabled by digital technologies? And finally, what roles can be played by the classical and contemporary arts?
Voices in a Conversation: Integrating the Humanities and Arts in Management Education
The individual contributions to this special issue appear as voices that add theoretical precision as well as concrete practical considerations to these ongoing scholarly conversations. Taken together, we believe their voices tell a compelling story about the past, present, and emerging future of business education.
The issue opens up with an article on the history of management education in the UK. Wilson helps us to see that the Carnegie double-helix integration cannot be understood simply as a pendulum that swings back and forth over time between quantitative and qualitative, thinking and feeling, science and art, and so forth. Instead, the integration appears as a balance people must strike on an ongoing basis in specific contexts. Wilson’s historical close-up of the Urwick report moreover makes it clear that the institution of business education in the UK has its own unique dynamics that should not be reduced to or confused with the United States, even though the two contexts have overlapped considerably. Business might be global and international, but business education is rather less so. Whereas in the United States, Herbert Simon was inspired by Rudolf Carnap (Koumakhov, 2014) to crusade against management academics like Chester Barnard, Dwight Waldo, and Peter Drucker because they relied too heavily on classical political science, in the UK Urwick envisaged a form of management education where analytic technical skills were seamlessly interwoven with elements of “practical wisdom” that could not be reduced to a set of rules, a computer program or some other purely rational standard. 4
Why then did Urwick’s balance not take hold in the UK? Wilson attributes the rise of scientific management in the UK to several factors, including the massification of the university as well as the rise of the faculty “expert” who seeks to produce scientific knowledge within an increasingly narrow domain. Undergraduates without any work experience were being educated in masses by academically specialized faculty who deliberately refused to see the big picture—it is no wonder, Wilson argues, that business people began to confuse the map with the terrain.
Wilson’s recommendations for how to address this confusion in the UK echo the current Carnegie report’s recommendations for the United States. Students should be educated more broadly, but it is not simply a matter of requiring business students to take courses in the college of arts and sciences (what the Carnegie authors call the “barbell” structure, with only a thin connection between two areas of emphasis). We cannot assume that in times of economic crisis, the humanities will somehow come to the rescue. On the other hand, humanities faculty often valorize knowledge for its own sake and denigrate any attempt to “apply” the humanities to business as a kind of cheap and vulgar instrumentalization. But Wilson explicitly encourages us to avoid such absolutist, binary logics and approach the field in its complexity. Just as there are business academics working within the LERCAT paradigm who have acknowledged its limitations and reached out to the arts and humanities (think of March’s “technology of foolishness”), there are also traditions of the humanities that consider all knowledge and understanding in terms of how they arise within concrete contexts for human action (e.g., the American pragmatists). Wilson’s essay helps us to see the roots of our own conceptions of the relationship between knowledge and the world by tracing the contours of a longstanding debate about what the business school can and should teach.
Surely one of the most fully elaborated and original attempts to understand the relationship between knowledge and the world—that is, experience—can be found in the work of the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer. In the second paper in this special issue, Rendtorff considers the use of the case study in business education as an exercise of practical reasoning, or phronesis, as defined by Gadamer. Following Rendtorff’s argument, the case study appears as one of the ubiquitous but latent ways in which the humanities and business education are already integrated.
Cases allow students to zoom in on a managerial reality, though it would be naïve to suppose that they “are” reality. Traditionally, it is assumed that by repeatedly exercising judgment about particular representations of reality, a meta-level analytic skill is developed that provides insight into more general principles that govern the practical world. Rendtorff offers a different conceptualization in which the case study functions as a way to demonstrate the limitations of any particular analytic perspective, forcing students to confront the irreducible particularity of any organization and its circumstances.
According to Rendtorff, Gadamer accepts that there cannot be a science of wisdom because the complexity of the human social world makes it impossible to identify universal principles that provide the basis of predictive hypotheses about future behaviors. Gadamer frames the relationship between abstract theories and concrete actions as a process, however. When confronted with the hermeneutic process of interpretation that is embedded in Rendtorff’s version of case teaching, economic theories no longer retain their privileged epistemological and metaphysical status. People who engage repeatedly in case-based learning processes do not move vertically, acquiring some kind of universal, theoretical overview of practice. Instead, case-based teaching has to do with opening horizons to different worlds of understanding, and thereby becoming a bit more sensitive and responsive to different phenomena. Rendtorff talks about how case studies make “theory” reappear as “prejudice,” as something that can be enlarged, overcome and reshaped. Following this line of argument, the LERCAT paradigm appears as one of many possible epistemologies of management education. More provocatively, if the relationship between theories and experience is processual, then what happens in the business school classroom can be relevant to research—faculty may even have their own interpretative horizons expanded in dialogue with students.
To be sure, the LERCAT paradigm remains dominant in many U.S. business schools, and many faculty present prepackaged, orthodox research findings in the classroom as abstract tools that may be applied in any variety of concrete situations. Yet as Spee and Fraiburg point out, the tradition of business education that emphasizes critical thinking, personal reflection and normative judgment has also thrived in certain institutional contexts. Spee and Fraiburg helpfully review some of the scholarly literature in which organizational researchers had already explored the integration of the humanities prior to the recent Carnegie report. In a case illustration, they also show us how to subvert the LERCAT paradigm by asking students to read great works of literature, history, philosophy that bear upon management practice, and then to begin a process of critical reflection that includes experimenting and forming their own knowledge. Engaging as producers rather than consumers of knowledge, students and teachers can approach concepts such as “work” or “globalization” in a mood of “deconstruction, détournement and dérive” to use the artistic terms introduced by situationist Guy Debord. Ideas may be taken apart and reassembled by business students just as an artist would create a collage, and this artistic competence is relevant for the students’ professional careers. Thus, whereas for Rendtorff the case study provides an occasion to develop a capacity for reasoning practically, for Spee and Fraiburg the classroom additionally becomes a site for knowledge production, where the teacher’s role becomes more of a facilitator or coach, helping the student to loosen the stiff habits associated with unreflective information-mongering.
The next four papers in this special issue suggest that these dynamics may be further intensified by integrating the arts and business education. Katz-Buonincontro reviews the extensive organizational research literature that deals with arts-based management education and suggests that educators frequently experiment with arts-based learning processes because they provide an occasion for students to cultivate empathy and exercise their creative imagination. Empathy and the imagination provide modes of understanding and relating to the world that extend beyond the LERCAT paradigm. In her search for ways to cultivate human understanding among business students, Katz-Buonincontro opens up a treasure box of different art forms including improvisational theatre, storytelling, and poetry. These art forms involve texts and language, but they emphasize the performative dimension of language rather than the representational. The arts are in this respect not only effective tools to communicate information in the classroom; additionally, they can bring about playful exploration of the social and thus also the ethical aspects of organizations. By experiencing art in a business course, students can become more sensitive to the needs of others, and more imaginative in their responses to those needs.
We believe these phenomena extend beyond individual-level psychology and include what contemporary artists and philosophers refer to as relational aesthetics (Bourriaud, 2002). Thus we suggest that the field of contemporary art (perhaps more so than the traditional categories of heritage and classical fine arts) includes a wide variety of practices dealing directly with this collective dimension of human experience that may inspire future innovation in the business classroom. Of course, it is not as if the humanities or the arts comprise some kind of undifferentiated, inert mass that may be integrated, more or less, within business education. Each of the art forms, as well as each of the scholarly traditions that address those forms, is itself myriad and includes many contestations and slippages of meaning. Following the Carnegie report, business educators can consider these traditions as fractals that reveal additional complexity and detail to each glance.
Smith continues the conversation by pointing out that the visual aspects of education were not addressed directly in the recent Carnegie report, and then by focusing a single visual art form, photography. This article shows us how visual research methods that have been developed by anthropologists and used by artists can also be utilized to great effect in the business school classroom. Not only are there various ways and techniques of using and producing images that go beyond the analytic models that comprise a traditional business school curriculum. Beyond that, when students open up to a presentational mode of inquiry, then the traditional emphasis on the discursive mode of inquiry is disrupted. More specifically, Smith claims that by utilizing specific techniques such as photo-elicitation and photovoicing, students are given an opportunity to reflect critically on their own experiences. Undergraduates may lack work experience, but Smith shows how they can articulate aspects of their campus experience in order to understand what practical reasoning in the workplace might entail. In this way, students develop themselves as professionals by expressing and reflecting on their own values through the arts. Smith thus frames art as a mode of action rather than as a medium of representation.
In the sixth paper, students engage in a similarly active reflection process, but instead of photography they utilize iPads to create “digital stories.” Nesteruk’s essay builds on the humanist tradition of narrative studies and reflects on his own experience bringing new technologies to bear on ancient questions of personal and collective identity. He claims that traditional liberal arts skills such as research and argumentation were “transformed” by the digital media in part because the course moved decisively away from the world in which knowledge is presented and communicated exclusively through discourse. The cases were “verbal, visual and aural,” and they were created by the students themselves, not downloaded from some archive of templates or derived from some set of universal principles. Nesteruk notes how this transformation requires flexibility and reflexivity on the part of the instructor as well. Not only must we keep up with the pace of technological change, it seems we must also defer authority to the students, respecting the pedagogical value of a “well-placed silence.”
Finally, Barry and Meisiek recount their search for ways to extend management education beyond the realm of texts and cognition. But whereas Katz-Buonincontro, Smith, and Nesteruk focus on particular artistic media, Barry and Meisiek focus on the physical and architectural spaces within which art is traditionally made. Their notion of the “business studio” provides an account of how business education might itself become more artful. They usefully describe the landscape of business studios using four different lenses—materiality, space and place, process, and theme—that, taken together, appear as a set of heuristics for how to redesign management education. Of course, we educators already design our syllabi around a theme, and we do often take aspects of the learning process into consideration. However, aside from jockeying with colleagues to teach in the most desirable classroom, we usually do not design our courses in ways that deal directly or explicitly with space or place, much less with the materiality of the learning process itself. As Barry and Meisiek note, experimentation with space, place, and materiality can be resource-intensive, and it can be viewed as disruptive by students, faculty, and administrators. Yet surely these dimensions of the educational experience must be considered as relevant to the double-helix integration of humanities and business as well as the development of practical reasoning.
An Emerging Paradigm? The Arts, Practical Reasoning, and Collective Action
It may be too early to judge whether the Carnegie report and the conversations that it has inspired will succeed in providing an appropriate corrective to the LERCAT paradigm. Will management educators develop a new epistemological conceptualization of the relationship between knowledge and the world? Will business school graduates capable of nonlinear thinking and normative judgment work to create economic as well as social and environmental value? Time, as they say, will tell. And yet already in these articles, we believe that there are hints that a new paradigm is taking shape today.
Knowledge: How to Reason Practically?
The primary challenge for Carnegie-inspired teaching remains epistemological—what do we think the relationship is between knowledge and the world (see Hatchuelle et al., 2013)? The realization that language (natural as well as artificial) might be much more limiting than we think was actually the starting point for the philosophy of logical empiricism. 5 But while the logical empiricists attempted to forge a language that truly mirrored reality, the conclusion reached by our contributors is that because language can never fully and perfectly represent reality, we must instead embrace the capacity of the visual, performing and narrative arts to connect us to the real world.
Contemporary humanists generally accept the notion that language does not mirror, but instead makes, the world we live in. While the first Carnegie report was written in times when models were seen as depictions of reality, the second report appears when models and theories are commonly understood to have performative effects (see MacKenzie, 2006). Yet if we cannot presuppose a representationalist account of language, we similarly cannot assume that people express knowledge of action exclusively by making rational choices. Even economists increasingly concede that rational choice is an ideal seldom encountered in reality. 6 And as the Carnegie report and the articles in this issue suggest, a lack of rationality, whether full or bounded, does not necessarily involve irrationality. Instead, within the emerging paradigm, scholars move beyond rational choice as an account of how people exercise knowledge in the world, and focus instead on practical reasoning that includes emotional, affective, and aesthetic dimensions of human experience.
Art: How to Gain Experience?
Much contemporary art makes personal experience explicit and visible, and we tend to forget that almost all the masterpieces in museums or artwork in art shows actually emerged as ways to capture concrete experiences of the real world before the appropriate words and concepts had formed that could make such a discourse possible (see Guillet de Monthoux, 2004). Some aesthetic philosophers would go further and claim that once we talk about reality, we enter a mental mist that actually obscures our capacity to connect to it. No doubt management education could profit from the traditions of art criticism that are engaged in showing how art makes us see the real world long before we can talk about it.
Indeed, management educators already have the sense that they can encourage higher levels of student engagement by employing the arts and the humanities, and that increased engagement contributes to overall learning outcomes (Taylor & Statler, 2014). We however believe that emotional engagement in the learning process is only a starting point for the development of deeper appreciation and understanding for action rooted in contemporary arts and humanities (see Austin & Devin, 2003). Again, as inspiring as the model of the U.S.-based liberal arts college may be to some people, because the model involves the pursuit of truth and beauty for their own sake, it still leaves the task of integration or application to the student. Within the emerging paradigm, scholars move beyond logical empiricism as an account of how people gain knowledge through experience, and embrace the contemporary arts as a source of pedagogies of experience and action.
Politics: How Act Collectively?
In the introduction above, we presented an account of how quickly business school stakeholders have organized roundtables, consortia, workshops, and other forums in response to the Carnegie report. And yet a variety of institutional dynamics—including the nature of the tenure process, the journal rankings system, the lack of process synchronization between and among different schools, and so forth—block changes. How can we secure the sustainability of individual initiatives such as the ones reported by our contributors?
The Carnegie report focuses only on the United States, and the tradition of scientific management within the business schools originated in the United States. But when it comes to what is known in the United States as the “humanities” or the “liberal arts,” a variety of European traditions have depth and diversity that is not always fully appreciated by LERCAT dogmatists. Adding European voices to the U.S.-based Aspen Consortium has thus enriched the debate—indeed, the Wharton or Harvard notion of “business” can be usefully contrasted with the German “betreibswirtschaflehre”; the French “gestion”; the Spanish “empresa”; and the Scandinavian “företags-” (Sweden), “ehrvers-” (Denmark) “bedriftsekonomi” (Norway), generating more than just a list of synonyms. Some new international platforms may be developed within existing institutional structures such as the AOM and EGOS professional associations to encourage the teaching of teachers in a Carnegie spirit.
But more fundamentally, researchers working within the new paradigm are moving beyond agency theory as an account of how people work together in organizations and embracing the fact that management knowledge is more about how “firms” evolve through collective processes (Helin, Hernes, Hjorth, & Holt, 2014) than about how individual managers make economic decisions (Danielsson, 2010; Hatchuelle, 2013). In this sense, the Carnegie report opens a door in the business school to theories of the social world that with respect to organizations focus on collective action rather than agency relationships.
Conclusion: Teaching-Based Management Research
The articles in this special issue tell a story about how the dominant LERCAT paradigm is being reframed—we can call this new paradigm or set of educational practices CAPRA. Agency theory (AT) is being extended and supplemented by theories of collective action (CA) in order to account for how people in firms and organizations relate to each other. Rational choice (RC) is being complemented with insights in practical reasoning (PR) as an account of how people exercise knowledge to design their worlds. Finally, logical empiricism (LE) as an account of the relationship between knowledge and the world is today being balanced with notions of experience drawn from the arts (A). If our account of this new, Carnegie-inspired paradigm holds water, then further research on future management education needs to consider (a) the ontology of knowledge, including basic assumptions and conceptualizations of what practical reasoning is, how it develops, and how it relates to the world; (b) the specific practices undertaken by contemporary artists, and the integration of these forms of action within a business school; and (c) the broader, institutional-, political-, and societal-level dynamics that might enable the emerging CAPRA approach to take root and grow.
But beyond these implications, it seems that the business school classroom can become a forum for research focused on how the LERCAT and CAPRA approaches can be integrated. While LERCAT dogmatism engenders a separation of research and teaching, CAPRA legitimizes an experimental approach or set of practices for identifying and addressing practical problems. In this light, it may not be enough to represent practical reasoning by speaking about it; instead we must walk the talk and also learn to “exemplify” it (Chia & Holt, 2008 ) in the classroom. The articles in this issue suggest very concretely how we can engage in action with contemporary philosophers and face reality with contemporary artists. Nesteruk had to become more fluent in digital technologies, Smith had to develop new visual interpretation skills, and Barry and Meisiek had to spend lots of time hanging around artist studios. So too, we business educators need to take our own professional development a step further. It is not sufficient simply to recall what we learned reading the great books as undergraduates—we need to become more familiar with the contemporary arts and humanities, and to see how these disciplines are evolving in parallel to (and sometimes directly through) the institution of business.
We conclude from the contents as well as the process of editing this special issue that management educators have an increasingly rich field of opportunities to refine the excellence of our own teaching craft, to conduct research focused on that process, and thereby to contribute to the well-being of society.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.