Getting lost to find direction: Grounded theorizing and consciousness-raising in management education

Abstract

The design of an implemented, innovative management course for French Master’s of Science students revolves around a field assignment in which they must visit and study an unfamiliar organization, diagnose what is going on, and apply their critical thinking to the situation to identify its causes, consequences, and implications for management action. This report makes the case for a pedagogic experience that uses grounded theorizing to raise consciousness among management education students. Such theorizing has a unique impact on students’ ability to become conscious in their thinking and helps them discover new avenues of thought, entailing notions of understanding people as they work in their context, making sense of complexity, engaging in critical introspection, and accepting personal revelation. The authors conclude by noting the teaching implications of this course and its potential impact for research in pedagogic innovation.

Keywords

Complexity critical management education critical pedagogy experiential learning management education

It is 2:00 a.m., and five management students stand in the corner of the emergency room of North Hospital in Marseille, trying to understand what is happening. They are surprised by the violence the nurses confront. The students have thus far interviewed six nurses, one chief nurse, and two doctors. They will never look at a hospital in the same way; they have gained a deep appreciation for the complexity these people face in their jobs.

In another region of the city, the music is loud, the place is small and crowded, and a man on the scene is presenting two groups of hip hop dancers that will perform a dance improvisation for the competition. Three management students worry about how they will be able to conduct interviews in such a frenzied atmosphere. “Let’s take everything we can,” says one of them, “and we will see later what we can do [with the data].”

“How can this humanitarian association, Emmaus, be financially independent, without any subventions [subsidies]? It shouldn’t be; it is too big: 15,000 people, 1/3 of them employees, 1/3 volunteers, and 1/3 former alcoholics or socially lost people.” And who are these lost people? Reflecting on the management approaches in each setting, one student notes that it is “more complicated to do something constructive with [the Ph.Ds] than with the old tramps.”

These vignettes all summarize the experience of students registered for a course entitled Management and Complexity. But what were management students doing in a hospital’s emergency room, a hip hop improvisation competition, and a social welfare organization? They were fulfilling a course assignment: spend 2–3 days with an organization, interview 10–13 people, observe and engage, make sense of what’s going on, try to understand how people handle the complexity of their working lives, and reflect about its meaning for yourself as a human being and manager. As students, they have moved away from the management classroom and into the actual workings of organizations that interest them. They meet unfamiliar people and explore new territory. Then they return to the classroom with a “life experience,” as one called it, new ideas, and grounded theories about people, work, management, organizations, and themselves.

The resulting classroom interactions revealed some notable insights. “It’s incredible how intelligent hip hop dancers can be. I thought they were a bit crazy—good dancers but not intellectually bright,” reports one of the students, thinking afresh about stereotyping and creative people at work. “Remember the young nurse. She was courageous. It was her first day and nobody had told her what to do, she just had to manage herself,” said another. A parallel emerges: this is like their class field assignment in that way.

Business Schools pass on knowledge to prepare managers. So, one student wonders,

How is it possible that a young employee with no diploma working for Emmaus has better expertise in management than me, I mean I will never be able to do what he does …. What does he know that I don’t?

This question prompts a large group discussion about what is important to learn in management? The field-experienced students now speak about empathy, openness, bravery, trust, and the ability to cope with complex situations—namely, clearly human qualities needed by people and organizations. The dialogue then cycles more deeply into what it means to be a manager: “I mean, the nurse saves, the dancer makes people happy, and Emmaus helps lost people to rejoin society. What is your sense of being a manager?” The group is silent for a moment, and then one student quietly responds, “I feel the only thing we can do is hurt people.” This revealing comment prompts other students to speak about their personal hopes and anxieties, both in terms of the positive potential of managing and its dark and dehumanizing aspects.

The conversation closes with reflections about their engagement with an organization and its people. “We have learned what we have learned because we met the people and because we had to adapt to them. They were the expert and we were not,” offers one student as a summary. Another says, “This was very far from schoolwork or homework or exercises we do in class. It was a personal experience, something we will always remember.”

Understanding management and complexity via grounded theory

The Management and Complexity course was offered at a French business school. The course design drew on grounded theorizing (Glaser and Strauss, 1967) as a strategic teaching method to create a transformative experience that would enhance students’ awareness of the complexity underlying human behavior and organizations. This method would immerse students in a new and unfamiliar setting in which they would have to make sense of what is going on mindful of their own preconceptions, assumptions, and in-the-moment thoughts and feelings. The intent of this situational- and self-scanning is to increase students’ consciousness of the complexity of human and social dimensions of organization and transform the way they think about and engage the world around them. The transformative experience, variously characterized as “deutero” (Bateson, 1972; Schön, 1975) and “vertical” learning (Kegan and Lahey, 2009; Rooke and Torbert, 2005), is marked by increasing cognitive complexity, self-questioning, and empathic engagement with others and the situation observed. The intent is to help students develop as critical thinkers, prospective managers, and mindful human beings.

This pedagogic innovation was offered for three academic years (2006–2009). The data in this article come from 593 written accounts from students and 177 semi-structured interviews between teacher and student groups, in which the students recounted their experiences. The first author developed and led the course. The second and third author informed the analyses of the data, drawing on their experience designing and analyzing the impacts of consciousness-raising experiences for practicing managers.

There were epistemological, pedagogical, and practice-related reasons for using a field immersion experience and grounded theorizing in this course. We consider them next as they relate to the learning process, content, and personal development of students in the management classroom.

Learning process

How should students learn about management? Consider the growing movement in management education toward “evidence-based management” (EBM), in which students learn a corpus of management principles and the facts behind them, typically generated via academic research. The guiding rationale for EBM is that it “links how managers make decisions to the continually expanding research base on cause-effect principles underlying human behavior and organizational actions” (Rousseau, 2006: 256). Furthermore, its logic holds that human behavior and organization actions are objective “things” that can be ordered into reliable cause-and-effect relationships, whether in an absolute sense or contingent on other factors. In management classrooms, such relationships may be expressed as the links in means–ends chains or as problems and solutions. Through the scientific enterprise, the relationships can be modeled on the basis of theory (Pfeffer and Sutton, 2006; Van Aken and Romme, 2012). That is, the theorist strives to reduce the complexity of the problem to a formal mathematical or symbolic representation such as a theorem or propositions (Kepes et al., 2014). The researcher then translates the theoretical elements into discrete and measurable variables, gathers data that reliably represent the variables, and tests their relationship, ideally in a controlled experimental study or through statistical analyses.

Teaching that follows this tradition mimics this investigative process. A typical assignment for students would be to apply an EMB model of human and/or organizational behavior to a case study or a “real-life” situation to explain what is going on (diagnose the problem) and then recommend remedial actions (propose solutions). This process “tests” whether students can apply established concepts and delineate a defensible plan of action for management.

This movement is criticized and discussed within the scientific community. Archibald considers that “the dominant approach to making non-formal education more evidence-based … is seriously flawed” (Archibald, 2015: 146). Holmes et al. (2006: 180) define EMB as “outrageously exclusionary and dangerously normative with regards to scientific knowledge.” Furthermore, Morrell and Learmonth (2015: 528) argue that “in seeking to quantify and aggregate, EBM denies a great deal of people’s experiences … as most sophisticated measures and techniques can never capture all the intricacies of the simplest everyday human conversation.” So, EBM propagates an oversimplification about management by denying diversity and variety because it “defines evidence narrowly and inflexibly, whereas problems in management can always be understood in different ways and from different perspectives” (Morrell and Learmonth, 2015: 521). In this context, “simple answers just do not work” (Waddock and Lozano, 2013: 265), so multidisciplinary integration; “soft”-skill development; the development of a global perspective, ethics, and corporate social responsibility; and experiential learning are needed (Navarro, 2008; Stepanovich et al., 2016).

Similarly, Senge et al. (2004) also claim the need to develop a capacity for presence or “being fully conscious and aware in the present moment [and …] deep listening, … being open beyond one’s preconceptions and historical ways of making sense” (p. 13). Mirvis (2008) calls this consciousness-raising—the pedagogic experiences that enhance reflection, self- and other-awareness, personal generativity, and the consciousness of personal purposes and motivations. For Dwyer et al. (2014), the pedagogic stance should enhance “reflective judgement,” which is “an individuals’ understanding of the nature, limits, and certainty of knowing and how this can affect how they defend their judgments and reasoning in context” (p. 691). So pedagogy can provide a “heightened awareness of multiple points of view and context, as well as the evaluation of one’s own thought processes before reaching a conclusion” (Dyck et al., 2012: 344) and so teach students and future managers how to “make decisions in complex situations” (Glen et al., 2014: 663).

Grounded theorizing responds to this demand. Scholars in this tradition immerse themselves in a setting and infer the pertinent variables, concepts, and theories from their observations “on the ground” (Glaser and Strauss, 1967). Researchers who adopt this interpretive approach put themselves personally into the situations they study and convey how those situations are experienced in situ. This subjective methodology can thus communicate a greater understanding of the phenomenon of interest; it makes no claims about universal cause-and-effect mechanisms. The underlying assumption is that human behavior and organizational actions are not “things” but instead “social constructions” made to seem real by the words, symbols, and communication that surround them (Berger and Luckmann, 1967; Geertz, 1973).

In the management classroom, grounded theorizing would demand exploration, personal engagement, and inductive logic, as opposed to the more focused, impersonal, and deductive approach with which students tend to be more familiar.

Content

The traditional content of management education can also favor immersion—but immersion into “facts” and knowledge frameworks rather than immersion into a context or situation. A typical management class and its text presents human behavior and organizational action through a series of “chapters” on discrete topics, which students must master and then build into a more comprehensive theory of management as a whole. There is nothing fundamentally “wrong” with this approach to learning, of course, but it has its limits. There is another, complementary way for students to develop rich insights into managing. The focal Management and Complexity course presents students with a holistic experience and invites them to deconstruct its origins, manifestations, and meanings. The starting point is complexity, rather than simplicity, such that students have a chance to experience the whole as more than the sum of its component parts.

We also note the logic behind and locus of control embodied in a typical text and class. The material focuses on the external motivation and direction of people who seek to define organizational goals and their management using tools, plans, frameworks, and figures of formal authority. Of course, some texts, faculty, and courses take a critical stance toward this framing of the organization and management work (Anthony, 1977; Clegg and Dunkerley, 1977; Freire, 1972; Irwin, 2002; Prochaska et al, 1994; Zald, 2002) and challenge otherwise taken-for-granted formulas about, say, human motivation or organizational effectiveness (Chiapello and Boltanski, 1999; Kanter and Mirvis, 1989). For example, Hatch and Cunliffe (2006) contend that postmodernists often “reframe” management principles by adopting a critical or aesthetic stance, whereas modernist scholars too often uncritically (i.e. without awareness or reflection) adopt the perspective and interests of managers to the detriment of lower level employees and of society.

Yet the aim of the Management and Complexity course was not to indoctrinate students into postmodernism or critical theory as alternatives to other management precepts. Instead, students are invited to see for themselves what life and work is like in an organization and to thoughtfully make sense of it through reflection and dialogue. Thus, students, together with faculty, serve as co-inquirers, and the teacher raises more questions than she provides answers.

Personal development

Finally, a typical management school pedagogy might emphasize cognition, getting to the right answer, and building students’ confidence in their capacities to master the practice of management by doing things correctly. In keeping with Perry’s (1970) stage theory of intellectual development, many students believe that knowledge consists of learning the right answers and reproducing them in tests and applications.

The focal course, rather than having students apply an existing map to the learning terrain, puts their boots on the ground and requires them to map their own observations, experiences, and dialogue with faculty and other students about their findings. This form of discovery learning embodies the theories of Jean Piaget (1963), who postulates that humans are “amateur scientists” whose cognitive development advances through experiences that modify their existing “schemas” about how the world works, as well as of John Dewey (1938), who stresses the importance of direct experience followed by reflection as a way for people to understand the world around them.

In keeping with these traditions, the immersive experience in an unfamiliar and uncharted organization allowed students to get “lost” and invited them to find direction not only through cognition but also through emotion and lived experience. It also aimed to open their eyes to what is really going on in organizations and to raise consciousness about its meaning for the practice of management (e.g. not “Am I getting the right answer?” but “Am I doing the right things?!”). Foster and Wiebe (2010) highlight the importance of developing educational projects for students that will help them be introspective, develop empathy, engage in critical thinking, and understand complexity. Furthermore, evidence indicates that consciousness-raising experiences enlarge and enrich managers’ moral compasses through exposure to social, environmental, and economic conditions in the world and business (Mirvis, 2008).

Investigating this pedagogic experience

Investigating complexity

The teaching philosophy, epistemology, and chosen pedagogy of the Management and Complexity course were responding to its choice to create a transformative experience for students; help them gain a greater consciousness of not only the complexity of organizational settings but also the range of human and social situations; and develop as critical thinkers, managers, and human beings. It largely derived from a constructivist paradigm (Lincoln and Denzin, 2000); thus, its assumptions contrast with those associated with a traditional management classroom, as outlined in Table 1.

Table 1.

Traditional management course versus Management and Complexity.

	Traditional course	Management and Complexity
Nature of reality	Objective, fixed, and verified	Subjective and socially constructed
How the world works	Causal determinism	Complex and indeterminate
Knowledge accumulation	Building blocks adding to edifice of knowledge	Sophisticated reconstruction
Quality criteria	Generalizability, conventional benchmarks of rigor	Trustworthiness and authenticity
Management principles	Facts and laws (EBM)	Representations and interpretations
Teaching about managing	Learn principles and apply them to the “real world”	Engage the “real world” and derive principles
Learning outcomes	From theory to practice: Competent professional	Critical thinking: Transformative experience
Assessing learning	Demonstrates mastery of principles in application and practice	Demonstrates understanding of setting(s) and how to know, do, and be
Faculty stance	Teachers define and pass on knowledge to students	Teachers guide students to build personal and contextual knowledge
Student stance	Use rationality, logic, and distance to assimilate and replicate knowledge	Use personal engagement, values, and emotion to explore and create knowledge

EBM: evidence-based management.

Considering these assumptions, the first author made grounded theorizing the centerpiece of her course on managing and complexity, in line with assumptions that reality is subjective and socially constructed. In practice, the methodological protocol for grounded theory involves immersion in an environment, detailed qualitative interviews, and the capacity to suspend preconceived ideas to consider alternative forms of thinking. Each student chose and engaged with a site, met people and conducted multiple qualitative interviews, analyzed content with an emergent coding protocol, and conceptualized the emerging ideas to derive understanding. These methods mimicked those recommended by Charmaz (2000) for researchers who want to undertake grounded theorizing (Table 2).

Table 2.

Comparison of instructions for researchers by Charmaz (2000) and for students in “Management and Complexity.”

Instructions	Charmaz (2000)	To students
Choice of case study	Favor the study of subjective experiences and marginal environments.	Choose an environment based on the following criteria: you are interested in this environment; you are unfamiliar with it; integration is possible in the short term (avoid political, criminal, or religious settings).
Integration	The researcher must fit in to the environment of the respondents.	Spend time in situ. Put yourself in the place of someone who does not know, who wants to discover, understand and share. Get personally involved.
Data collection	The researcher must collect a wealth of detailed data. Data collection must be intertwined with the analysis, enabling them to adapt the collection of data to new questions that emerge from the analysis.	An abundance of detailed data must be collected, comprising in-depth interviews, observations, and minutes of meetings. This is done over a 5-week period before analysis. During this time, you must record your impressions and initial ideas in a memo but remain open to any new information. In general, try to collect as many different points of view as possible, even if at first you do not understand them or they make no sense to you. Don’t try to interpret or rationalize comments. Try especially to develop your understanding by always clarifying your questions and the responses of interviewees.
Data analysis	Data analysis is undertaken by systematic coding, line by line.	Data analysis is done by systematic coding, line by line. Interviews must be transcribed word for word. All summarized interviews will be rejected. Analysis is conducted step by step, without haste and remaining open to links and to any meaning emerging from the data. To undertake this content analysis, we will practice during lectures.
Formulation of theories	The theory is developed in parallel to the definition of codes and code categories until a saturation of information is obtained.	In parallel to the definition of codes and code categories, you must progress in the development of your ideas. Upon completion of the analysis, you should come up with your own interpretation, which is based on all the data you have collected.

Three groups of approximately 250 students each took part in this study; each group corresponded to one school year (2006–2007, 2007–2008, and 2008–2009). The groups were comparable in their level of study (last year of a Master’s degree in management), mother tongue and nationality (French), age (20–23 years old), and gender distribution (mixes of men and women).

Appendix 1 summarizes the course curriculum. The early coursework aimed to prepare students for their immersion experience; it also involved presenting the logics and methods of grounded theorizing. Subsequent sessions entailed work on data analysis and inductive theorizing, culminating in a class presentation by the student groups.

Student data

Throughout the course, students recorded their individual views and feelings about the use of grounded theory and what they experienced, leading to a total of 593 written comments. The average length of the individual comments was one page, though with considerable variation (ranging from 10 lines to four pages). In addition to the data gathered from these written comments, the teacher and each student group engaged in face-to-face interviews. The sessions began with one question: Can you describe your experience of grounded theorizing? The follow-up questions varied with the responses the students offered.

Through these group interviews with students, we aimed to revisit their written comments, clarify their meaning, and verify their intent and authenticity. We excluded 38 written comments by students who could not convincingly demonstrate that they had participated in the case study.

Analysis of written comments

We coded the data according to standard grounded theory protocols (Miles and Huberman, 2003; Strauss and Corbin, 1990). In concrete terms, we classified the student comments according to the generic themes that emerged from the interviews and then grouped them together analogically. The progressively grouped extracts formed more than 800 groups, which constituted 5 themes, 15 subthemes, and a handful of overarching categories.

To accommodate the very large volume of data, we used NUD*IST software to separate and classify the text. This tool is particularly well adapted to analyzing content by emergent coding, because it is not restricted in its number of codes and their analogue grouping, and it also allows for the introduction of new categories (Crang et al., 1997; Lincoln and Denzin, 2000).

Categorizing the transformative experiences of management students

The results of the emergent coding identified five forms of consciousness enhancements among the management students, each related to the course learning goals: (1) being conscious of thinking reflexes, (2) discovering new thinking avenues, (3) connecting emotionally to others, (4) recognizing complexity and making sense of it, and (5) introspection and personal revelation in outlook and perspective. We discuss the experiences recorded by students in the 3 years of the class according to these categories.

Becoming conscious of thinking

Many students expressed anxiety about the sense of the unknown that this teaching method provoked. In the material that follows, each quote is completed with the first name of the student, the year of experience, and the context for their case study experience:

It’s the first time that I have used this method. You are so used to drawing up a plan and completing the boxes that it isn’t easy to start from zero with such a wide scope. (Emilie, 2009, Emmaüs)

The grounded theorizing approach required students to explore a territory with little precision and no guarantees about the results. In contrast, throughout their education, most students had only experienced—and favored—a logical-deductive model of inquiry. Their resistance was manifest in their claims that “what is true is rational” and that they believe in being objective and reject emotions. Furthermore, as future managers, they described their desire to organize everything and “use familiar and certified tools,” which would enable them to avoid surprises and “be sure of the end result and of [our] control.” One student summarized this resistance effectively:

Managers are asked to give clear and specific answers; that’s probably why we look for clear and consistent information. We have always learned that management means organization and efficiency, managers have problems to face and solutions to implement, and if the solution is complicated then we have to adapt and find another one. The methodology we have to use in this class means that we have to define the problem and the solution by ourselves; it’s very new for us. (Elodie, 2007, theatre improvisation)

This anxiety even raised doubts about the legitimacy of the methodology:

Frankly, at the start, I was not really taken with this course. I didn’t believe in the method. I thought it was a waste of time meeting people, that they had nothing to really tell us. I didn’t really feel like working and quite frankly I was not comfortable with this method. (Sylvain, 2008, emergency services)

Eventually, as they began to work on their case studies and received information contained in an epistemological lecture, this anxiety produced a more constructive discussion:

At first, when I saw what we had to do, I panicked. What do we do exactly? Where are the questions? Then, I realized that these fears came from the fact that I (and others, too) was used to defining my ideas and acting on them. Setting off without knowing how it will work out was not at all what I was used to. (Julien, 2009, management of an advertising agency)

Discovering new thinking avenues

The experience of interviewing and participating in emergent coding convinced many students that knowledge could exist and be legitimated by canons other than deduction and objectivity. Thus, they had to unlearn comfortable methods and expected roles while trying out new ones—a slow and sometimes stressful transition.

The experience of meeting unfamiliar people at work to observe and listen to them, rather than “studying them” according to a regimen of testable hypotheses and structured interviews, raised several introspective conversations among the students. They reflected on the difficulties they faced when they needed to not impose one’s plan for the interview, to accept moments of silence, to not interrupt, and to remember to say thank you. For example,

In choosing our own subject to study, I subconsciously created my vision based on what I knew (making hasty comparisons) and I found myself faced with the truth that it was not going to easy to conduct interviews and to remain open-minded and impartial. I think that it was a real lesson in life which goes far beyond any words and assertions that we can offer. (Johan, 2006, studying improvisation)

The students expressed their surprise, and embarrassment, when they realized that they tended to “make judgments,” “impose our own ideas,” and have difficulties “to fully understand” their interviewees:

We often want to know and control what is going to happen. We are used to drafting questionnaires with lots of questions. It helps us control the situation. With the inductive method, we don’t have a questionnaire so we feel lost. We don’t know how the interviews will go and we are not in control, and this is perhaps the hardest thing to accept. (Jérémy, 2007, artists’ association)

Other challenges stemmed from having to accept different points of view and to put themselves in the place of the interviewees. Thus,

In the beginning, I wasn’t very comfortable. I tended to interrupt the speaker. It really helped me to listen, to try to understand, not about myself, but to rather to try and understand what other people think. (Elodie, 2008, on the merging of two companies)

Finally, the experience of grounded theorizing offered some students a new avenue for thought, in the sense that

Our way of thinking is so well established in us that it is a natural reflex and this course questions this. Why should we not be allowed to think in a different way? Are we really capable of this given that we have been brain-washed from birth? (Carole, 2006, business start-up)

Connecting to others with emotional impact

Some of the management students were afraid to be rejected by the people at their chosen sites. They expressed anxiety that people would not agree to speak to or spend time with them:

In the fire station, after returning from a call-out, I was scared we might bother them. We came back the next day and I’ll never forget the discussion we had with them. (Magali, 2006, fire station)

Frequently, the immediate trust and generosity exhibited by the interviewees seemed “amazing and a lesson given.” Finding an organization, engaging with it, and interviewing its people thus had emotional impacts for most students:

In generalizing the experience, I am tempted to believe that we have every reason to learn from others and that each person is a source of learning. (Anatole, 2006, extreme sports—base jumping)

The connection created during some interviews led to several constructive, common projects. The students who worked with the humanitarian association Emmaus, for example, decided to create an “Emmaus day” as a school event. Others volunteered with the association themselves. Students who studied an improvisation group theater decided to practice these techniques themselves. Another pursued an internship in India to promote social innovation projects. Overall, the students discovered that experience could be shared.

The empathy students felt for interviewees was most notably expressed during the interviews that took place in conjunction with lectures 8 and 9 (see Appendix 1 for descriptions of each class meeting). When describing their interviewees, the students used emotional, sensitive, and personal vocabulary and struggled to share the intensity of their experience. Common expressions asserted, “you can’t imagine!”; “it was deeply touching, moving, disturbing, emotional”; “I was impressed, concerned, honored, grateful”; “it was amazing, incredible, crazy, unbelievable”; and “it changed everything.”

From complexity to sense-making

Instead of trying to avoid or simplify complexity, the students discovered that it was useful to explore the richness and diversity of organizational life:

This course helped me discover an environment that I really didn’t know as well as I thought I did. The lives of different people now appear much more complex to me than before. (Hervé, 2006, freelance artists and stage performers)

Many also found the grounded theory methodology liberating and a means to open their minds:

This course taught me that you cannot enter a flow of information into a pre-defined model. You cannot address the quantity and variety of testimonies collected with ideas or preconceived tick-boxes. You must adapt to the information as it appears and then adapt your method to reality. (Julien, 2008, police drugs unit)

One student even created a new word to sum up the experience: “The course helped me ‘complexify’ my mind.”

Finally, on a more emotional note, students gained a new perspective on their fellow human beings, injustice, and the mental prisons people create for ourselves. Several observed that “people’s lives are difficult” involving “difficulties that one cannot judge.” Others recognized the “inequalities between people and individual psychology” and “the unfairness in life, which is not linked to willpower.” One student’s reflexive sense-making about how the world works is particularly notable:

By meeting people, you realize that we are being manipulated by being fed simplistic explanations, making us believe that people deserved what happened to them and that nothing can be done to change this (that we should just accept the working methods), or that if we think differently we are not being realistic or intelligent. (Nicolas, 2009, extreme sports)

Critical introspection and personal revelation

The course concluded with a challenge: the students should reflect deeply on the lessons learned and the implications for their lives and careers. Naturally, this request stimulated some self-criticism regarding the “superficiality of thinking reflexes”: “We don’t think for ourselves,” “we don’t think things through,” “we don’t question things,” and “we are brain-washed, conditioned, alienated, or imprisoned.” But by the end of the project, many students also derived some constructive ideas.

The students indicated their comprehension of life and managerial lessons: “this class really convinced me that there are other ways of thinking than our own and that we can learn them”; “we are very proud of the work we did, it might not be perfect but it is ours and we feel it’s the first time that we created something that is really ourselves, that nobody else has done before”; and “understanding others and differences better brings respect. It makes me more modest….” They largely affirmed that the class was “a real experience” that had a “deep impact on their personal development” and “on the choices we should make for our future lives”:

I understood that getting out onto the ground, we could see and learn things that we would never even have thought about before. This course questioned our way of thinking and made us realize that there are other approaches and other ways of seeing things. (Valentin, 2007, Linux)

Reflections on transformative experiences and consciousness-raising

In reference to transformative experiences, Mirvis (2008) writes that “along one dimension, it is a set of activities that expand people’s consciousness of themselves, others, and the larger world around them” (p. 175). Several elements of the focal course served these purposes for management students. First, they were thrust into an unfamiliar organization, often without any background information about the people or setting, lacking any sort of map of the terrain or “a precise methodology that defines where we are, where we need to go, what tools we will have to use, and what we need to find.” This scenario can provide a powerful stimulus for unlocking mindsets and unfreezing assumptions about how things work. For example, Schein (1990) notes that involving people in unfamiliar situations that stretch their understandings and boundaries often triggers self-reflection. The risk is that the anxiety evoked proves overwhelming (i.e. three student groups could not choose an organization) or blocks learning (i.e. many had difficulties letting go of their preferred thinking mode).

Second, students’ actual encounters with working people and the workings of the organizations they observed ensured an expanding awareness of the other, in the sense that observation and interviews with diverse sets of organizational actors demand perspective-taking and empathy. Students had to “crawl out of their own skins” to define work life through the lenses and experiences of others. Empathizing is central to what Fromm (1956) calls the “art of loving,” and in this case, it produced testimonies to the bravery, integrity, and goodness of people, as well as to their wisdom and managerial acumen.

When it comes to making sense of and theorizing about the world of work, organizations, and management, many studies document that surprise stimulates search and uncertainty catalyzes learning. Research at the psychophysiological level, for example, indicates that the brain embodies inherent variability that increases with the presentation of new stimuli. Germana and Lancaster (1995) report that uncertainty opens up the organism to experience, causing it to investigate the environment with enhanced receptivity, preparing it for different behavioral actions, and facilitating the central processing and encoding of information received from such renewed exploration. Searching, exploring, and trial-and-error behaviors indicate psychophysiological uncertainty and accompany the appearance of reorganization, stability, and progressive development or learning (Lee, 1998: 2). Such progressive development was evident among many students as they undertook their learning journey in this course.

Third, “consciousness raising experiences deepen awareness of the self, others, and the larger world” (Mirvis, 2008: 175). Therefore, the discipline of recording observations, coding and sorting them, and reflecting on them with fellow students and faculty was crucial. The grounded theory methodology is well suited to immersing students (and researchers) in phenomena and moving their thinking from specific knowledge to abstract conceptualization, similar to the path that Holland et al. (1986) model from induction to discovery. Peer dialogue, involving both clarification and challenges, pushed the students along this path. Finally, they faced the challenge of finding personal meaning in their experiences for themselves as managers.

Pedagogical experiments in a business school

Moving beyond the particulars of this case and classroom experiment, we find both strategic and practical implications for undertaking pedagogical experiments in a business school. In particular, we argue that management education is at a turning point. Two competing epistemological directions are pushing faculty members simultaneously toward teaching that relies on EBM principles and toward helping students critically understand and engage with complexity in organizations and management. This competition also is reflected in the dilemmas faculty members face in their choices about what they study, how they conduct research, whether their work is publishable and where, and who they are as scholars and contributors (Mirvis, 2014). Here, we focus on teaching and “the active role academics can take in delivering value to management students” (Moosmayer, 2012: 155).

In the past 10 years, hundreds of publications have addressed contemporary management education, mostly with increasingly critical comments. Many articles examine rankings of business schools, growth in management research, and the relative emphasis on rigor versus relevance, but others address subjects being taught in business schools, the teaching methods used, and faculty’s capacities to train future managers to operate in an unstable economic environment. Questions about how well faculties are preparing students to manage environmental and social sustainability also are increasingly coming to the fore.

In this context, we note the clarion calls for business faculties and teaching to become more introspective, critical, and grounded. Similar to Antonacopoulou (2010) and Currie et al. (2010), we think, “it would be dangerous to not seize the current opportunity to rethink teaching practices” (Antonacopoulou, 2010: 6). In line with Ford et al. (2010), we also think that the capacity for critical reflexivity must be upheld. For a teacher, introducing a new teaching pedagogy with constructivist and critical features raises questions of identity and legitimacy (for both teacher and students), requires new mindsets and skills (again, for both teachers and students), and opens a dialogue about what management concepts to teach, which methods to use, and why

Fortunately, several texts and resources can help students reflect on the complexity of managing and the social construction of management principles. Gareth Morgan’s (1998) Images of Organization presents a range of perspectives on understanding organizations; Bolman and Deal (2008) specify four lens for students to use to see what goes on in organizations; Hatch and Cunliffe’s (2006) volume on Organization Theory peers “behind the curtain” by situating the course concepts that students will encounter into modern, symbolic, and postmodern traditions. In addition, growing numbers of management faculty have adopted an interpretive approach to research, making them available for the purposes of legitimacy, guidance, and role modeling.

Considering learning outcomes

The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB, 2012) offers Standard 15 (Management of Curricula), which requires business schools to use a well-documented, systematic process to develop, monitor, evaluate, and revise the substance and delivery of the curricula of degree programs and to assess the impact of the curricula on learning. Although traditionally management schools have had the freedom to establish their own outcome assessment processes, AACSB parameters indicate the need to specify learning outcomes and their objective measurement. Therefore, some educators recommend that management schools should measure students’ learning of key management principles (cum facts) through objective tests involving, say, true–false or multiple-choice response options. Such testing is “intended to minimize scoring error by making scoring criteria unambiguous” (Shaftel and Shaftel, 2007). For example, one US business school incorporates more than 300 management principles in its introductory Organizational Behavior course curriculum and measures students’ learning on the basis of their ability to recall these facts in response to multiple-choice questions.

Faculty also can use projects, field studies, and students’ interventions to demonstrate their ability to apply management principles to “live” situations. The problem, educators note, is that such situations and students’ resulting work products are apt to be complex, such that their evaluations necessarily lack inter-rater reliability and create difficulties comparing students within a course, let alone across multiple courses or versus students in other management schools. The focus on objective measurement thus provides for quality control and curricular improvement, yet codifying every pedagogic practice also reduces complexity and risks standardizing the curricula and the student evaluation process. Such an approach might “leave no management student behind,” but it also can leave faculty who seek pedagogical experimentation with no students to teach.

The Management and Complexity course offers a response to these paradoxical demands of gaining normative accreditation and helping students learn about the complexity of organizations and its social construction. As a mandatory course for students applying for a Master’s degree in management, it entered into the accreditation processes. Because the pedagogic innovation pertained to the complexification of management, a complex assessment process clearly would be needed. Students and faculty therefore worked together to test the trustworthiness and authenticity of work products, with particular attention paid to the students’ assessments of the experience for their own learning.

Vince and Reynolds (2004) contend that grounded theory promotes “the emergence of ideas resulting from the discussion and not from the transmission of unilateral truths … and has the advantage of highlighting complexity, ambiguities, conflicts in meanings inherent in all actions and organizational knowledge” (p. 450). Two student testimonials are instructive in this regard:

This assignment definitely had a profound effect on me, especially meeting people and then the difficulties I had in analyzing the content from them. I felt there things were going in all directions. I was scared that I wouldn’t be able to do it and in the end, I am really happy. I really felt that it opened up my eyes to other ways of thinking. (Justine, 2009, Emmaüs)

Our work enabled us to pursue our ideas to the end and helped us contribute something which belonged to us. (Adélaïde, 2008, massive employees dismissals)

The broader point is that finding an agreeable, accreditable method for assessing learning outcomes in such non-traditional courses is no small feat. It demands a lot of both faculty and students.

Implications for teaching

For a teacher, the development and delivery of a course based on grounded theorizing require considerable personal commitment. First, it is not easy to countenance the use of an inductive method in an environment generally steeped in deduction. Even if students and members of the institution are interested in developing innovative methods of teaching, growing anxiety and suspicion tend to color their enthusiasm as the project takes shape. Despite any legitimacy gained through the growing reputation of the course, its acceptance during accreditation procedures, or the quality of work produced, it remains daunting to consider extending such pedagogical innovations to institutional levels. The recent mergers of French institutions tend to amplify these trends. As our institutions are dominantly managed through classical management methods, the look for restructuration, productivity, and performance is mainly acquired with the rationalization and standardization of programs. In this context, the creation of Pedagogic Innovation departments follows the same trend. They concentrate their actions on the implementation of massive e-learning and on the use of new technology in the classroom, but invest little attention on more human or grounded approaches. More often, a course such as Management & Complexity gets treated as a welcome exception, but the existence of such a course does not change or question the general posture.

Second, teaching in this manner means a lot of work! The course was designed to be a transformative experience for students, but it also was transformative for the faculty. It is a delicate, demanding matter to take a position as a participant in the process of creating knowledge. The first author had to learn a little bit about every organization that the students engaged with; work alongside them to digest and code notes; and discuss a wide range of material about people, organizations, managing, and continually deal with surprises—some of which were less than pleasant. In these regards, the course was also a remarkable lesson in grounded theorizing.

Third, the course can be unsettling for students who are more comfortable with traditional pedagogy. In its first year, the faculty hosting this course offered only minimal instruction to students about grounded theory, its logic, and its rationale. Faced with requests for more detailed and formalized explanations, we had to increase the amount of educational support we provided the students. This more formalized approach helped convince them of the legitimacy of the teaching method and guide their field work, but it also may have detracted somewhat from their sense-making and the “learn by doing” philosophy of the course. We thus note a constant tension between organizing teaching in a methodical form and keeping it sufficiently open-ended to constitute an existential experience, which by definition is unique and individual.

Fourth, as the Master program is international, we worked also with some multinational classes. These multinational classes were composed of students from various cultures in English-speaking settings. Although we have not conducted specific research on these multinational groups, we can share our experience with the difficulty of working with multicultural groups of students. For instance, in these classes, most multicultural students could not immerse in French-speaking organizations and conduct interviews or analyze them. In response to these difficulties, we tried to find multinational organizations whose employees could speak English or the native language of the students. In many cases, we encouraged the students to work with multinational student organizations within the school.

More broadly, our difficulties were also pedagogic and human. As the pedagogic strategy we developed suggested exploration, personal introspection, and expression, we faced profound differences regarding the culture of students. The pedagogic background of the occidental teaching culture was helpful for students who could overcome their first opposition, develop critical thinking and personal expression. The challenge was much more difficult within the Asian culture, notably cultures that value silence and avoid conflict and criticism. In particular, the Chinese students had trouble in engaging in this process. Personal expression was a challenge and exploration without a step-by-step method was a source of considerable stress. To overcome these difficulties, we had to help them more closely throughout the process and we engaged the students to work on their own diversity and understanding of grounded theorizing as a way of making sense of their individual experience in working in groups. This did not match perfectly with the pedagogic strategy we had designed, but this was an opportunity to work on tolerance, diversity, and self-discovery. As Elliott and Reynolds (2014) suggest, we found no perfect answer, but many strategies were built thanks to the class interactions, efforts, openness, and well-intentioned collaboration between students and tutors.

Finally, this kind of course undermines the image of the professor as the embodiment of a font of knowledge, by putting him or her in direct competition with other teachers and learning encountered on the ground. Despite the initial anxieties and discomfort of students with this experimental pedagogy, they came to value the lessons learned from their immersions:

I am astonished by the impressions that this work has left me with. This is all new to me and the education system which I grew up with has forged my thinking that first and foremost learning required a professor and a course. This was called into question following the work given that the mass of information and knowledge that I was able to acquire from interviewing people and analyzing their comments. (Thierry, 2008, artistic improvisation)

Studying pedagogical innovations

The participating faculty studied the process and results of Management and Complexity using a grounded theory approach, which we recommend for anyone undertaking pedagogical innovations. Nevertheless, there are limitations to the validity and generalizability of what we discovered about the student experience. In particular, considering our pedagogical preferences, emphasis on critical thinking, and insistence on introspection, the student comments and their coding likely were influenced by these demand characteristics.

Although many students began to develop a certain critical view of management, we do not know how it will affect their future actions in a real-life working environment. This certainly would involve longitudinal data collection and new research projects.

Footnotes

Appendix 1 Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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