Insights,Provocations,and Next Steps: Discoveries From the Research in Management Learning & Education (RMLE) UnConferences

For many of us, 2020 has been a year of unprecedented change. These changes have affected many of us in numerous ways including personally, professionally, socially, and physically, to name a few. At one end of the spectrum, many have experienced professional discomforts like the logistical and andragogical challenges of adapting syllabi to virtual platforms or the personal challenges of managing young children schooling from home. At the other end, changes may have included living with a newfound fear of watching your loved ones go to work each day as essential workers, not knowing if their own lives would be cut short in the process, or watching loved ones die in isolation, unable to be comforted in person by friends and family. Circumstances that may never have seemed possible are, in some instances, now realities. In this highly uncertain environment, there is no “new normal” just a stream of states that can best be described as our “next normal” (Husbands, 2020).

In terms of our professional activities, which are often inextricably tied to many of the other aspects of our lives, there can be no doubt that we are in the midst of significant change. The COVID-19 pandemic has simultaneously highlighted numerous weaknesses within the global higher education sector (e.g., Dill et al., 2020; Furstenberg, 2020; Jack & Smyth, 2020) as well as opened the door for positive growth and change (Lea, 2020; Lund Dean & Forray, 2020). Support, innovation, flexibility, and thoughtful adaptation are no longer luxuries, they are now core components for survival. We need to think outside of our proverbial boxes and work together to shape what will inevitably be a different and, ideally, significantly improved educational landscape. Change is here. And we are here to help shape it.

In many ways, the Research in Management Education and Learning (RMLE) Unconference was designed to encourage the type of unfettered, organic, “outside-of-the-box” thinking that we find ourselves in need of today (Arbaugh, 2016; Billsberry et al., 2013). RMLE Unconferences are organic and participant-driven, encouraging generative conversations and novel insights. The fundamental goal of every RMLE Unconference is to bring together interested, passionate, and knowledgeable people in a forum where they can share, learn, engage, question, contribute, discuss, and debate about issues they see as important. Each participant is a contributor, and all interactions take place in a flexible and highly interactive format. Research is the core of every conversation, with the caveat that research processes and outputs are encouraged to be as nontraditional as possible. The more creative, immersive, and engaging the process, the better the outcome.

The inaugural RMLE Unconference took place in 2013 at Bond University on Australia’s Gold Coast. Since then, there have been RMLE Unconferences held at partner institutions located in Denmark (2014), Peru (2015), France (2016), the United States of America (2017), Scotland (2018), Croatia (2019), and New Zealand (2020). Outcomes of our RMLE Unconferences have included numerous international collaborations, journal publications (including Maribel Blasco’s 2016 best paper award in Management Learning), grants, professional development workshops, conference presentations, colloquia, and the creation of a teaching and learning research focused faculty position at one of our partner universities, to name a few.

Given the energy, commitment, and success that RMLE has helped generate to date, we thought it was time to reflect on the myriad research projects that the conference has helped incubate and nurture. What better way to do that than to invite all of our past participants to showcase their research projects and the possibilities that lay ahead for each? As one of the original organizational sponsors for these events and an internationally respected journal for cutting-edge scholarship in the management learning and education domain, the Journal of Management Education (JME) is a natural outlet through which we are thrilled to showcase some of the ideas that have emerged from RMLE Unconferences.

In this themed section, we are delighted to share six articles that provide a representative overview of not only the diversity of topics explored at RMLE Unconferences but also the variety of ways in which participant contributors engage with each other and share their experiences of learning and growing. For more information about these exciting and engaging events, please visit the RMLE website at www.rmle.org.

With changes to the global workforce that were unimaginable at the start of the year, including soaring rates of unemployment around the world, the economies and employment opportunities we are preparing our students for have changed to include a wider variety of job types, formats, and employment relationships. In an article that could not have been more aptly timed for today’s environment, Arran Caza describes the rise of the gig economy with gig work defined as any workplace relationship that is not a traditional ongoing full-time position. In his article, he discusses the challenges and opportunities of gig work as well as numerous questions related to how the gig economy will affect students, faculty members, and tertiary institutions. He encourages us to consider changing not only what we teach but also how we teach. He also urges us to reflect on our own knowledge about the realities of gig work given that many full-time tenure track faculty have no personal experience in that area. He questions whether the rise of gig work will require us to change our metrics for assessing learning outcomes and employment success. His analysis of today’s environment and his associated comments and questions are widely applicable. We believe university educators, career counsellors, and administrators alike will benefit from reading Caza’s article and, where appropriate, incorporating his insights into their program aims and outcomes, research agendas, and curriculum development.

Maria Wagstaff, John Hadjimarcou, and Chiara Chanoi challenge each of us to consider how we can most effectively address issues of gender equality in international business education. With the aim of contributing to the United Nation’s goal of increasing gender equality by 2030, the authors share the results of a literature review aimed at assessing the domains, paradigms, conceptualizations, and potential student reflective outcomes of existing scholarship in international business education as it relates to gender equality. In response to their finding that there is a “complete absence of articles dedicated to teaching and learning in relation to gender equality in international business education,” the authors share a series of potential interventions, next steps, and research questions aimed at helping faculty and students explore, reflect upon, and address issues of gender equality in business education.

Exploring the patterns and intricacies of scholarship in business and management education (BME) is the focus of the next article, written by Carlos Asarta, Regina Bento, Zack Ferrara, Charles Fornaciari, and Alvin Hwang. Looking at scholarship in our field from a macro perspective, this team of scholars is interested in understanding the hows and whys of scholarship in business and management education. Their goal is to not only understand more about these processes but also encourage others to join them in their inquiry. To facilitate this, the authors provide a series of actionable research domains including exploring the relationship between gender and productivity, career trajectories and BME scholarship, and the impact of editorial networks on scholarship. We believe the issues raised will be of interest to everyone reading this special themed issue.

When we think about scholarship and productivity, how many of us consider the value of thoughtful meandering? One of the RMLE author teams, emerging from the Unconference in Croatia, takes us on a journey of collaborative inquiry and conversational learning. Victor Friedman, Sarah Robinson, Mark Egan, David Jones, Nicholas Rhew, and Linda Sama share their own experience of letting go of control as they embarked on a journey of learning and sharing at the 2019 RMLE Unconference. We believe that the authors’ unconventional article serves as a paragon of how participants at our Unconferences collaboratively and organically create research agendas that embody their experiences, reflections, passions, and interests. The authors’ “meandering as method” research agenda is a direct result of their ability to openly engage in the fluid and emergent experience of the Unconference. We hope you both enjoy the experience of walking in their shoes as you read through their reflections and are inspired to explore the benefits of incorporating conscious meandering into your life. We also hope this article ignites a spark in you to join us for a future Unconference where you too can experience this type of unstructured, yet highly engaging, collaborative and productive learning and exploration.

In yet another example of an emergent research agenda resulting from an Unconference collaboration, Rikki Abzug, Adeyinka Adewale, Rae Andre, Pamela Derfus, Peggy Hedges, and Yuliya Shymko have come together to create The Walls Project—a project aimed at examining neglected independent variables that may have a systemic impact on student learning, with a particular focus on those relating to social and environmental issues. In their article, the authors discuss the benefits of working in an interdisciplinary and international project team with the goal of “tearing down the walls among disciplines” to encourage student learning. They describe the utility of having a repository of pedagogical materials to be shared, and they invite others to join them in the search for ways to introduce, examine, reflect, and engage students with variables that may be significant to their learning but are often neglected in traditional teaching materials (e.g., socioeconomic status, empathetic corporate governance). As you read through this article, we encourage you to consider the hidden variables that remain buried in your students’ minds and experiences. We have no doubt that the members of The Walls Project team would be interested in hearing about the teaching interventions and activities you design to encourage comprehensive reflection, examination, and understanding with your students.

In our final article of this themed section, Johan Gersel and Morten Thaning discuss the benefits of utilizing practical deliberation in management learning and education. The authors share their challenges of working with graduate students to create a learning environment where students view their plurality of theories as containing discrete tools to assist them in making actionable, goal-driven, and justifiable decisions rather than simply lenses through which to consider options and potentially disengage from the hard work of decision making. They draw upon their experiences to create five distinct directions for future research, integrating a variety of topics including social constructionism, emotional capacity, philosophy of action, sensemaking, and wisdom, which they hope others will be interested in contributing to.

For each of you, we hope that this themed collection raises some interesting provocations regarding your scholarship and practice. More important, we hope it has inspired you to engage with one or more of the topics explored here. We would love to have you join us for one of our future RMLE Unconferences to discover where your questions, ideas, and concerns related to management education and learning take you, and the rest of us, as we navigate our way through our “next normal” together.