Abstract
Mount Saint Vincent University, Canada
Fundação Getulio Vargas Escola de Administração de Empresas de São Paulo (FGV-EAESP), Brazil
University of Bath, UK
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Management Learning marks its 50th anniversary in 2020. Management Learning has a long history of publishing critical, reflexive scholarship on organizational knowledge and learning. This Special Issue provides a forum to celebrate and build on this history through critical and reflective engagement with the past, present and future of management learning, knowledge and education. Taking a historical approach is all the more pressing given recent and impending crises – geo-political, technological, environmental and humanitarian – since some crises only make sense when seen in the fullness of time (Casson and Casson, 2013). We therefore encourage scholarship that challenges the disciplinary past of management knowledge, learning and education and enables more diverse, innovative futures to be imagined.
There are a growing variety of approaches and conceptual frameworks in management and organization studies for writing histories of organizations (Maclean et al., 2016; Rowlinson et al., 2014), management thought (Bucheli and Wadhwani, 2014; Cummings et al., 2017) and researching management in historically conscious ways (Jacques, 1996; Kieser, 1994). This has been accompanied by a rise in critical organizational histories (Cooke, 1999; Ibarra-Colado, 2006; Scott, 2007). Although diverse, this scholarship is characterized by reflexivity (Cunliffe, 2002), anti-performativity – history is generated for reasons beyond improving future business efficiency and effectiveness – and commitment to an agenda of de-naturalizing both hegemonic organizations, by exposing problematic pasts and dominant historiography like positivism that seeks unitary truth (Fournier and Grey, 2000). The rise of critical history research has involved scholarship on management learning and education that challenges the dominant history of management thought in a number of ways (Mclaren et al., 2015; Jacques, 1996). While some have exposed processes of exclusion and marginalization of management knowledge in textbooks (Cummings and Bridgman, 2011; Grant and Mills, 2006), others have uncovered knowledge politics and marginalization around geographical boundaries.
Postcolonial histories have incorporated voices and perspectives from the global South, illustrating the ethnocentricity of the content and form of management education (Cooke and Alcadipani, 2015). Strict demarcation of gender roles and boundaries has been the focus of feminist research which draws on critical histories to problematize the gender-neutrality of our disciplinary past. The latter, they argue, is highly problematic because it features centrally as the normative curriculum of management education (Acker and Van Houten, 1974; Mills and Helms Hatfield, 1998). Feminist work involves exposing the absence of women and re-writing history that acknowledges their contribution to management thought. Historical approaches also problematize the treatment of fixed identity categories, for example, through queer scholarship (Rumens, 2017) and highlight the importance of reflexivity (McDonald, 2016).
Management Learning has contributed to these discussions and debates by publishing historically informed organizational research. Over the years, the journal has looked to its past to inform its future (Editorial, 1976; Snell and James, 1994; Vince and Elkjaer, 2009). In earlier years, the precursor title, Management Education and Development, adopted a more descriptive historical approach. Examples include tracing the rise of management training and development in Europe (McNay, 1973), and drawing on case histories to map implications for course evaluation and institutional image (Mmobuosi, 1987). Over time, and especially since the 1994 transition to Management Learning, the focus has shifted towards consideration of the potential of history as an approach (Alcadipani, 2017) that promotes reflexive practice (Maclean et al., 2012).
These changes inform this call for papers which focuses on how we view the past 50 years of Management Learning and how we craft organizational histories. Reasons to write historically about the history of our discipline and mobilize history as an approach to probe critical and reflexive management learning are plentiful. Kieser (1994) offers that workplace behaviours are outcomes of ‘culture-specific historical developments’ (p. 609) and historical research can ‘teach us to interpret existing organizational structures not as determined by laws but as the result of decisions in past choice opportunities’ (p. 611). If we agree that organizational practices assume their composition by virtue of their past, then researching, writing and thus doing management learning in critical and historically conscientious ways provides opportunities to destabilize hegemonic practices and disturb normative organizational theory. It allows us to trace our collective identity and celebrate agency in this sensemaking process. The potential of critical and reflective history in Management Learning is open – let’s enact it!
This Special Issue welcomes contributions that build on work in historical organizational studies by addressing the following questions:
How can historical approaches inform the future direction of Management Learning as a journal, a discipline as well as in pedagogy and practice?
How can we learn from the past and history of management and adopt an approach to management learning that is informed by looking back before we look forward?
How can historical methods and methodologies be mobilized to interrogate the discipline and practice of management learning and education?
How can we (re-)write reflexive and critical histories of management learning that expose the power and politics of knowledge production and transmission?
How can we write historically about the relationship between learning and culture, gender, ethics, power, and emotion?
How can an historical approach to management learning and education encourage a non-hegemonic, bottom-up perspective that allows marginalized voices to be heard? How can an historical approach help to mobilize decolonizing, feminist and queer perspectives in management learning?
What are the histories of theoretical perspectives on learning and knowing? How can we mobilize a historically informed approach to develop new theoretical perspectives on knowing, learning, development and management pedagogy?
How can we write historically about or write the history of processes and practices of learning, including relationships between learning and experience, formal and informal learning, and the roles of language, symbols, narratives and metaphor in learning and knowing?
Management Learning for what? What are the social struggles and causes that might call upon the contributors to this journal now? How can the historical tracing of past contributions and debates with a societal agenda inform us of possibilities for future impact?
What could feature on the future agenda of research in critical historical management education and learning?
To discuss your article prior to submission, please contact the Special Issue Editors:
This call is open and competitive; manuscripts will be double-blind reviewed and a limited number of papers will be selected by the guest editors for publication in the Special Issue. Submissions must fit with the aims and scope of Management Learning: https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/journal/management-learning#description as well as with this special issue call. All submissions should be made online: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/management_learning in accordance with the journal submission guidelines.