The History Boys: Critical reflections on our contributions to Management Learning and their ongoing implications

Competing perspectives on democracy

There is a difference between the academic discourse in the papers before Margaret Thatcher won her first term as UK Prime Minister (in 1979) and those that are published from this point onwards. In Michael’s early papers (Rackham and Reynolds, 1971; Reynolds, 1973, 1979), a belief in and enthusiasm for the democratising influence of management education is evident; for the freedoms it is possible to create in the classroom, as well as their disruptive and inspirational qualities. This was a discourse of its time, informed by a sincere belief that democratic structures at work and in society could be created and sustained through collaborative groupwork (Lewin, 1947). Paulo Freire’s (1972, 1976) Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Education: The Practice of Freedom inspired not only experiential management learning but a broader sense that, for example, ‘a war on poverty’ could be won (Banks and Carpenter, 2017) and oppression eradicated through the emancipatory potential of education. Participative management education was seen as an influence for organisational change; as part of an emancipation agenda that might transform the social order.

By 1979, things were changing in management education just as they were changing in UK society. The democratic component of efforts at radical change relating to the quality of human relationships and to the distribution of power at work had given way to a less challenging effort to ‘humanize’ work. In ‘experiential learning: a declining force for change’ (Reynolds, 1979), the argument could not be clearer. If the source of democratic change declines, so will the ideal of improved relationships. If this happens, then learning will regress and ‘will be applied in the interests of efficiency without necessarily modifying social order’ (Reynolds, 1979: 89). Under such circumstances ‘organisation development might ultimately be compelled to assume the status of an underground movement’ (Reynolds, 1979: 90). This analysis was so right and so wrong at the same time. Learning did regress to be applied in the interests of efficiency, and organisation development (OD) started to become a multi-million-dollar industry in support of neo-liberal economic policy. By the mid 1980s, social change had been side-lined because ‘you know, there’s no such thing as society’ (Margaret Thatcher, The Guardian, 2013).

The emotional here and now of the classroom

The explicit hope for university-based management education as an emancipatory practice thus gave way to an understanding that universities socialise us away from democracy through a focus on preparation for conformity to organisational norms and hierarchical relations (Reynolds, 1979). However, for us, a commitment to understanding peoples’ conscious and unconscious complicity in creating and sustaining such norms and relations never completely disappeared from management education. We can also set this personal commitment within the broader context of the growth of CME. In this journal, Hugh Willmott’s (1994) ‘provocations to a debate’ set an agenda that we both enthusiastically aligned with, particularly in the development of critical reflection, critical action learning (CAL), and group relations (all of which are mentioned in Willmott’s paper). A central characteristic of group relations as an approach to management education is the need to work with ‘here and now’ emotions and relations within the Management School classroom as a way to comprehend our individual and collective capabilities not only to co-construct defensive and self-limiting structures but also to create opportunities for learning to challenge and change. One example of this is making difference and the experience of processes generated from difference within educational programmes available as a source of learning (Reynolds and Trehan, 2003).

In the papers we analysed, this theme is represented over time in various ways. We saw the promise and the limitations of ‘T-Groups’ as a medium through which to learn about alternative models for authority and power relationships (Reynolds, 1979). We saw the promise and limitations of action learning, an approach that is explicitly designed to work openly with managerial experience, but that can also help an individual to defend against what such experience means emotionally and politically (Vince and Martin, 1993). Conversely, we perceived both the limitations and the promise of defensive dynamics for learning in groups (Simpson et al., 2000). Ultimately, our experience over time has shown us that emotional and political dynamics surrounding managerial roles ‘have to be felt to be understood’ (Vince, 2011). This involves challenging expectations, paying attention to the complex inter-personal emotions that are generated within a learning space, as well as to the ways in which learning groups create self-imposed limitations and boundaries on learning.

While we were focusing our attentions on emotion, reflection and the psychodynamics of the management classroom, the wider world of management education was preoccupied with management competencies. At the centre of such approaches were popular ‘instruments’ for learning styles, like Kolb’s Learning Styles Inventory (LSI) and Honey and Mumford’s Learning Styles Questionnaire (LSQ) (Honey and Mumford, 1992; Kolb, 1981, 1984). In ‘learning styles: a critique’ (Reynolds, 1997), such approaches were criticised for their tendency to decontextualise learning. They were examples ‘of a preoccupation with method and technique’ (Reynolds, 1997: 121), used to focus on the development of ‘the whole person’ (‘. . . likely to produce a happy but no less mystifying false consciousness’, Giroux, 1981: 66). It was argued that LSI/LSQ was detrimental to efforts towards confronting social inequality in the workplace because they individualised and decontextualised social relations. Therefore, ‘there is a case for learning styles and other versions of labelling to be discontinued’ (Reynolds, 1997: 128). This critique of learning styles helped to set the scene for critical reflection as ‘the cornerstone of emancipatory approaches to education’ (Reynolds, 1998: 183; see also French and Grey, 1996), as well as provoking a well-written counter argument (Sadler-Smith, 2001).

Power, learning and CME

In her essay on its history and development, Perriton (2007) succinctly captures the challenge that CME was seeking to address – to ‘wrestle (management education) out of the utilitarian death grip it had been in since the 1980s’ (Perriton, 2007: 2). Individuals would not study management as training for a prescribed set of professional capabilities, but ‘in order to understand and analyse management as a social, political and moral practice’ (Perriton, 2007: 2). This implied attentiveness to ‘the primacy of power’ (Willmott, 1994). Power in relation to learning is a strong theme in our papers. An early example looks at struggles to implement equalities through an analysis of White, male power – and particularly its strategic expression through ‘management by avoidance’ (Vince, 1991). This paper presents the avoidance of equality issues in public sector bureaucracies: an interconnected set of malign capabilities, practices and inactions that characterised White male managers’ active ambivalence and strategic inaction in the face of differential social power relations. Similarly, management education has largely ignored or suppressed the learning opportunities arising from difference in an educational context (Reynolds and Trehan, 2003). This paper asked the question: can difference in an educational context be learned from without this becoming a subtle manifestation of consensus masquerading as ‘common interest’? The argument is that becoming more aware of the social and political processes associated with difference in learning environments is both a step towards understanding differences and a means of resisting attempts to ‘manage’ them.

Historically, both of these papers have been overwhelmed by the shift from a concern with the learning implications of social power relations, exclusion and difference towards anesthetising discourses of ‘fairness’ and ‘diversity’. Our longitudinal, grumpy discontent at the watering down of the relationship between social power relations and learning could perhaps be softened by a different pedagogy, a ‘pedagogy of refusal’ (Perriton and Reynolds, 2004). Such a pedagogy implies a wider consideration of the role of management education and development and the conflicted role of the critical management educator in the colonising structures of management. However, in the end, we have had to accept, as others have done (Grey, 2007), the importance of engagement between mainstream management education and CME.

Critical reflection and organising reflection

CME, in our shared experience of writing, has been strongly associated with critical reflection. Our mutual concern is with the over-individualisation of reflection, epitomised by ‘the reflective practitioner’ (Schön, 1983). Our response was to outline the characteristics of critical reflection (Reynolds, 1998) and to highlight reflection as an organising process (Reynolds and Vince, 2004b; Vince, 2002). We sought to shift the emphasis from individual reflection towards understanding reflection as integral to: an organisational role, the political process of belonging to and representing organisations, and how an organisation becomes re-established or changed through reflection.

Therefore, critical reflection is not simply about the individual looking back as a way of making improvements. It is concerned with questioning assumptions, its focus is social rather than individual, it pays attention to the analysis of power relations, and it is concerned with emancipation. Within organisations, this perspective is aligned with the notion of ‘public reflection’ (Raelin, 2001), with the idea that giving voice to reflection within a political context can help to broaden authority and accountability beyond individuals to create an environment conducive to multiple interpretation and collective reflection (Vince and Saleem, 2004). Within business and management schools, this perspective implies a distinctive educational methodology, one that engages with the social, political and moral issues at the heart of management practice. For example, a focus on communities of learning has tended to ignore forces of coercion and the assimilation of difference that are integral to notions of community (Reynolds 2000).

We originally saw critical reflection as a process for questioning and challenging existing structures and practices. In the context of management education, this meant questioning whether the function of reflection was to reinforce existing power relations in organisations or to transform them. Over time, we recognised that in practice these two sides represent an organisational paradox, ‘contradictory yet interrelated elements (dualities) that exist simultaneously and persist over time’ (Smith and Lewis, 2011: 382). For example, one of the outcomes of critical reflection in organisations is that it identifies existing relations of power. However, in doing so, it tends to mobilise those relations of power against critical reflection (Vince et al., 2018). We seem to continuously return to Willmott’s (1994) ‘provocations’, to an acknowledgement of tensions as implicit and inevitable within CME. Therefore, it continues to be

entirely possible that they (the insights of critical approaches) . . . will be borrowed as much by those who remain preoccupied with defending established values and priorities as they are by those who are more interested in working towards their rational and democratic transformation. (Willmott, 1994: 131)

Competing perspectives on democracy – emancipation and the realisation of a more just society

This element of critical reflection promotes ideas about working towards democratic values and practices both in organisations and in management learning and education. Strongly represented in critical organisation studies literature (see, for example, Alvesson and Willmott, 1992), and in the development of CME, these values are reflected in the belief that the social and political structures of management education can be designed to reinforce or to disrupt the corresponding discourses of the workplace. In writing papers that reflected this theme, we promoted experiential approaches to learning that addressed the emotional and political context in which learning and organising take place, that emphasised the social as much as the individual, and that promoted participative and publicly visible management. In doing so, we acknowledged the intimate, often unconscious, connections between behaviour in organisations and organisational structure, as well as the complex quality of working lives and relationships. We also remained alert to ways in which apparently participative designs are only partially democratic. We were aware of the inevitable tensions of CME, for example, that participation is always double edged because it involves reinforcing conformity and control as much as encouraging challenge and change. The value of this perspective is also in the fact that such tensions provide a realistic model of our lived experience of everyday management roles and organisational relations.

Power, learning and CME – analysis of power relations

Power in its various forms and practices has been at the core of CMS and CME as an essential element in comprehending dynamics of control and domination that surround and infuse management and organisation. The development and application of participative designs for learning involves examining power relations implicit in both organisational and educational structures and practices. This includes reflection on how difference is managed out of organisations and classrooms (Reynolds and Trehan, 2003) and how differences of gender, ethnicity or class become the basis of manipulation, inequality and injustice. One challenge for critical management educators is also to be aware of how we avoid engaging with difference and inequality; how we interpret our role in working with the tensions of democratic educational values, the institutional pressures of assessment and the requirement to create value for students. We have argued elsewhere for CAL as an approach to management learning that encourages critique of the structures and processes with which learner-managers are working and presents an opportunity for them to challenge if not change them (Reynolds and Vince, 2004a). However, in exploring CAL, we have also found further evidence of how learning approaches that bring power relations to the surface tend to mobilise prevailing relations of power against such approaches to learning (Vince et al., 2018).

The emotional here and now of the classroom – employing a social rather than an individual perspective

The perspectives we adopt to make sense of complex processes in context need to be informed by theoretical perspectives on the social, political and moral issues that underpin practice. The formative years of the critical turn in management studies addressed the concern that existing management knowledge was ‘intellectually inadequate because it is based on a narrow mainstream of knowledge (i.e. functionalist behavioural science) that is out of touch with intellectual developments across the Human Sciences’ (Jeffcutt, 1997: 677). This critique remains relevant for management learning scholars, particularly in relation to seemingly relentless attempts to focus on individual competence and positive thinking (see Collinson, 2012, for a critique of the effects of such positivity on leadership). The broad field of management learning and education still relies on overly psychologised and overly rational interpretations of individuals’ behaviour, responsibilities and choice in organisations. One value of a social perspective is in the way in which it forefronts the importance of understanding how emotions affect and are affected by relationships and social structures. We see a continuing responsibility in management learning scholarship for engaging with the collective emotions, affective relations and shared fantasies that shape and are shaped by our lived experience of organisations.

Critical reflection and organising reflection – questioning assumptions and taken-for-granteds

Central to the academic tradition and very much part of the position taken by CMS and CME is the commitment to questioning assumptions embodied not only in management theories but also in professional practice. This involves raising questions about social, political and moral implications through the reflexive examination of our own position and relationships, both as managers and as educators. Our concern as management scholars can never only be about the technicalities of designs for learning. This aspect of critical reflection is in keeping with an axiom of Critical Theory: to be ‘alert to attempts to pass off sectional viewpoints as universal, natural, classless, timeless ones’ (Gibson, 1986: 172).

Here too there are parallels between educational settings and experiencing and understanding the dynamics of the workplace. To comprehend these parallels, we developed both an organisational and a pedagogical practice of critical reflection (e.g. Reynolds, 1998; Vince, 2011; Vince et al., 2018). Reflection is a cornerstone of management learning because of its importance in the theory and practice of learning from experience. Superficially at least, this suggests that practical relevance and the promise of learning are derived from and anchored in professional experience ¹ . In harmony with the other elements described in this section, we have been preoccupied with reflection as a lens through which we can take account of the relationships and interests that underpin prevailing organisational order and thereby reveal the power relations that sustain ‘the way we do things here’. In the classroom, reflection focuses on the emotions, habits and attachments that students bring with them into the learning environment, and how these are often connected with the organisational dynamics that constrain them.

Continuity

There are constant aspects of knowledge about management learning, which have never gone away, and nor should they. For example, right from the earliest publication, there is an underlying passion and commitment to focusing on the freedoms it is possible to create in the classroom and their disruptive and inspirational qualities for managers. While the emphasis of this may have changed from direct challenges to the social order (alas, there is no underground OD movement), we cannot imagine a scholarship of management learning that fails to connect with the emotional, relational and political context within which learning is implemented, or its capacity to unsettle and to challenge. We think that CME will always need to be rearticulated and reinvented in order to respond to the specific nature of contemporary challenges and to connect directly with contemporary academic lives.

We have both the benefit and the burden of a back-catalogue. Early career scholars are subject to different pressures and expectations than the ones we felt. Business and Management Schools are different places now and the educational and political context has changed, not entirely (we fear) for the better. Rising fees, a concern with maximising student numbers, the unsophisticated measurement of student satisfaction, pressures to publish and growing international competition have contributed to an educational ethos of diminished tolerance for programmes, particularly smaller programmes, based on critical pedagogies (Perriton and Reynolds, 2018; Sambrook and Willmott, 2014; Tosey and Marshall 2017). What has not changed however is the ongoing importance of CME in making clear the modes of domination that exist in organisations and classrooms, that both management and learning are not about techniques but values, and that freedom and control are both intimately bound up with the role of management educator and the political context of management education.

Contradiction

Some aspects of knowledge in management learning generate ongoing contradictions. For example, critical reflection is a fundamental assumption in CME (Reynolds, 1998; Willmott, 1994), and it has implicit tensions that make it difficult to embed in classrooms and organisations. Critical reflection unsettles established ways of working and, in doing this, mobilises reactions in support of the status quo. In addition, in our experience, creating the freedom to feel and think in the classroom is desired and loathed in equal measure (Sinclair, 2007; Vince, 2010). In the future, it will be important to see this much more as an advantage than a problem because it points to a paradox that we think of as integral to management learning (Vince et al., 2018). As we noted above, what makes tensions paradoxical is that they are interrelated, exist simultaneously and persist over time (Smith and Lewis, 2011). We think that it is important to recognise that mainstream management education theory and practice, and theory and practice associated with critical perspectives, do exist simultaneously, persist over time and remain in tension. We see value in sustaining and further exploring ongoing tensions within and between mainstream and critical approaches to management learning.