De-disciplining humanity: the humanities’ case for Critical Management Literacy

Crisis? What Crisis? The trap of disciplinary knowledge segregation

The cover of the album Crisis? What Crisis? which the English rock-band Supertramp released in 1975 shows a man sunbathing in a deckchair under an umbrella, seemingly unaware of the devastating destruction happening all around him. This image is an appropriate metaphor for the attitude which is often ascribed to the humanities today. In what Braidotti (2013) calls ‘the explosion of humanism and the implosion of anthropocentrism’ (p. 1), the idea of humanity developed by classical humanism has been shown up for a normative concept endorsing all kinds of power hierarchies instead of being, as it claims, ontologically rooted in a universal conditio humana. At the same time, the idea that humanity is the centre of the universe has been blown out of the water by the understanding that all – human and inhuman – elements making up our world are enmeshed with each other in a symbiosis of mutually dependent relations (Rose et al., 2012: 3). Yet the humanities are perceived to sit quietly in their disciplinary deckchairs, oblivious of the fact that the object of study their name claims as their very own domain, that is, humanity, has changed beyond recognition. In consequence, prominent voices like that of Serres (2006) feel it incumbent to proclaim the humanities ‘shipwrecked – with all hands aboard, so to speak – sometime around the 1970s’ (p. 228), around the time Supertramp published the soundtrack to the question raised by their album’s title.

The question itself, however, remains to be answered. Like the pieces of music presented by the album, the theories and arguments put forth to declare the humanities shipwrecked are so diverse in terms of both methodology and subject matter as to defy any attempt at sorting them into cohesion. This indicates that the crisis in question is not so much – or anyway not only – a crisis of the humanities but rather a crisis of the principles guiding the production and administration of academic teaching and research within a framework whose societal legitimacy still rests on the disciplinary segregation of knowledge (Östling, 2018). Where practical interdisciplinary knowledge transfer is needed, the question of what crisis academic education is asked to deal with by means of such knowledge transfer looms large: What exactly is the nature of the crisis which demands reformulating our notions of how to create and distribute academic knowledge? What are we dealing with here?

As to the field of management studies, the answer to that question seems obvious. The recent financial crises together with an increasing number or corporate scandals have shown just how dangerous mistakes made by managers are not only for individuals, but also and especially for society as a whole, whether those mistakes are made deliberately or out of ignorance. This leads to questioning managers’ education: ‘Did they fail because the education has failed, or did they fail because they did not partake in it?’ (Czarniawska, 2006: 10). Opinions in recent management education research tend towards the former. Hendry’s (2006) denouncement of the ‘twin tyrannies: economic thinking and technique’ offers a succinct diagnosis: ‘Economic thinking frames the world in terms of financially measurable costs and benefits, and in terms of property rights and agency relationships. It privileges private property over the common good, and arm’s length market over face-to-face relationships. It prioritizes short-term over long-term interests, and treats money as the measure of all good. . . . Economy has replaced humanity as the core value of political discourse.’ (p. 22f.). Coupled with what Hendry calls ‘technique’, that is, the bureaucratisation of management processes which ‘replaces context-dependent moral norms and critical decision-making with general and abstract rules, to be followed without question’ (Hendry, 2006: 23), classical management education teaches organisational design ‘as a system of tasks and roles which can be formally communicated and consciously learnt’ (Gagliardi, 2006: 4). The result is that management students are being – and are expecting to be – outfitted with a prescriptive toolkit of instruments fabricated towards economic efficiency without being taught to question their usefulness in terms of the common good, or even only as to possible ideological agendas behind them.

This instrumental approach to management education on both undergraduate and postgraduate level today is perceived to come at a high price. Ghoshal (2005), for instance, saw a clear link between this kind of management education and the misuse of said toolkits: ‘Our theories and ideas have done much to strengthen the management practices that we are all now so loudly condemning.’ (p. 75). Management education’s fall from grace, he argued, began with management studies turning to the natural sciences for the modelling of their theories and research designs, which, with its hyped understanding of cause-and-effect rationality, worked to ‘the exclusion of any role for human intentionality or choice’ (Ghoshal, 2005: 76). Thus, the complexity of management processes was simplified to an extent which often yields unfortunate results for those who carry this type of knowledge into the realm of practice and, in consequence, for those who are societally affected by such practice.

At the same time, in adhering to an instrumental understanding of knowledge academic business schools are widening the much-quoted gap between theory and practice to the point where not only practitioners but society as such are rapidly losing trust in the value of academic reasoning, especially since, as Spender has pointed out caustically, their research has yet to come up with a consistent concept of what exactly a business is:

To put it baldly, if we do not know what firms (or organizations) are, what kind of firm-management ideas are we purveying? . . . Yet the paradox may be that . . . it is the very stability of our discipline’s unwarranted assumptions about firms that explains why the business school curriculum has changed so little. But perhaps these assumptions are stable because they are irrelevant to real firms and managing them – un-criticized and un-changed because practitioners care little about what we do . . . . (Spender, 2014: 431).

Following Spender, the gap between theory and practice therefore appears to be a result of the attitude of business schools towards their disciplinary subject matter instead of being intrinsic to it. In other words, it is a product of interpretative choices which are habitualised to an extent that they are perceived as an accurate depiction of reality, while in fact they depict management scholars’ ingrained resistance to question their comfortably worn assumptions about the nature of management.

The crisis the humanities find themselves in today situates them at the opposite end of the spectrum of academic epistemologies. From Humboldt’s founding of the first modern university in Berlin in 1810 on, they were used to see themselves as the core disciplines of an academic institution designed to improve on society by binding science to reason (‘Vernunft’). As Braidotti (2013) points out, the image of humanity at this time was that ‘of Man as a rational animal endowed with language’ (p. 1), an image which established logocentric reasoning as the defining mode of what proved Man human. The hegemonial power of this notion was such that even the natural sciences at first were part of the faculty of philosophy, on the premises that reasoning – and not experimental or empirical research – was the driving power behind any kind of knowledge production.

When the natural sciences began to first complement and then subtly change this mode of reasoning into the norm of unbiased ratiocination which then, in turn, became the model for management studies, the humanities began to lose ground. Trained – and teaching – to recognise in the cultural artifacts they were studying volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, as the famous Harvard acronym VUCA has summed up the cognitive and intellectual challenges of modern humanity, their knowledge did and does not lend itself easily to interacting with the so-called hard sciences’ concept of rationality. Instead of applying their ability for critical reflection to themselves, realising the imminent threat to their existence and working on it towards guarding their claim to benefit society, however, they pretty much opted out of trying to communicate.

If there is a point in time to be identified which marks the humanities’ fall from grace in the history of science, it is in the aftermath of the famous debate between the two philosophers Dilthey and Windelband which towards the end of the 19th century postulated a fundamental incompatibility between the humanities being about understanding (‘verstehen’) and the natural sciences being about explaining (‘erklären’). Instead of trying to broker channels of cooperation, the humanities pulled back into their proverbial ivory tower (see Shapin, 2012), first in the mistaken conviction that their real worth for society did not need any explanations and then, as it became clear that neither the other academic disciplines nor the public shared this conviction anymore, in the ‘sorry mixture of entitlement and penury’ (Miller, 2012: 11) described by Miller for the US humanities. In consequence, they are in danger of losing ever more ground with the fast-changing knowledge economies of 21st century:

By retreating to the ‚essential‘ academic disciplines of the humanities, the human sciences further preclude themselves from participating in and contributing to collaborative efforts in those fields that currently represent in scope the vast majority of university-based activity – and which, on top of that, represent a wide and diverse landscape of scientific activity, which, in varying degrees and with varying agendas, actually recognizes the relevance and the value of the human element in scientific practice. (Raffnsøe, 2013: 97)

The symptoms of crisis in both management studies and the humanities, however different in their respective manifestations, are linked by the common cause of the disciplinary segregation of knowledge set up by Humboldt as the central element of the modern university’s organisation. Management studies’ tendency to simplification and instrumental rationality is a structural effect of their struggle for a disciplinary profile which would be recognised as scientific by academia while at the same time offering streamlined formulas for practitioners. The humanities’ tendency to insist on their right to research and teach complexity on exclusively their own terms equally is an effect of their desperately trying to keep recognisable disciplinary identities for their fields of study in the face of mounting criticism and disdain, defiantly privileging abstract in-depth analyses over offering practical solutions to present problems. Especially in the humanities, disciplinary segregation has thus meant the development of a vicious circle: Increasingly suspected of being a mere luxury in the field of academic studies, they have in their quest for scientific credibility turned to an overspecialisation which enforces precisely this suspicion. In consequence, the humanities’ mechanism for coping with their marginalisation grew into an isolationism which by now seriously threatens their existence.

That disciplinary segregation should have proved to become a trap for academic knowledge production in this manner is not the fault of the modern university’s organisation as such. The core problem lies with disciplinary segregation having been defined by hierarchical power relations between different types of knowledge from the start. When medieval universities established the liberal arts – from which later the humanities evolved – as a basis of general education to be acquired by students before they could specialise in either theology, the law or medicine, they placed them in a position of ambiguity: On the one hand, the liberal arts could be seen to be the most important set of disciplines in university education, as they provided knowledge necessary to all academic professions; on the other hand, however, the knowledge they taught could be seen as merely ancillary and thus inferior to the types of knowledge required for specialisation.

When the modern university as represented by the prototype founded by Humboldt began to emerge from the remnants of its medieval predecessors, this ambiguity became a battlefield. Shortly before Humboldt’s endeavours began to take shape, Kant, whose belief in the vital importance of epistemological doubt in rational reflection later was to crucially influence those endeavours, had sketched out the impending lines of conflict in his treatise Der Streit der Fakultäten (‘The Quarrel of the Faculties’, 1798). The claim which a new university must lay to absolute academic freedom in teaching and research, he argued, could only rest on the search for truth through a use of reason which was unhampered by any considerations of political or economic utility. Therefore, in his eyes the disciplines later becoming the humanities – philosophy, history and the philologies – were superior to theology, the law and medicine, as they, unlike the latter, were not restricted by prescriptive normative frameworks and the realm of sensual experience and thus morally more sound in their findings.

It was along those lines Humboldt set up the organisational structures for the university he founded in Berlin in 1810 on the orders of the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm III. Partly emulating the medieval model of the four traditional faculties, partly grouping together fields of study which had similar subject matters to connect them, he created an organisational design the disciplinary constituents of which were, he believed, being held together by a common standard of rational reasoning set by the humanities. That this design for him was mainly an instrument of governance and as such a necessity of running what he perceived as a complex, but nevertheless basically homogeneous community of scholars, however, quickly faded from the academia’s collective memory. As the number of academic disciplines grew and each of them strove to enhance their respective profiles by specialisation, the organisational segregation led to an increasing essentialisation of disciplinary knowledge. Slowly but surely scholars began to believe that their domains were ontologically given entities of objects and methodologies which belonged exclusively to them and consequently could only be dealt with by them. The competition for funding, both within universities and for third party-funding, additionally hardened the frontiers, since successful applications still today depend on recognisable disciplinary brands.

Seen in this light, the crisis seems to be that of an academic system which still relies on disciplinary segregation without reflecting the organisation’s structures’ impact on the content taught and researched by its scholars, an impact which induced the essentialisation of disciplinary types of knowledge to the extent that the epistemological nature of this segregation got lost in transition. Since it was the humanities who were originally supposed to set the standard of academic reasoning by means of their epistemological expertise, it seems inevitable that they were hit hardest by this crisis, as it robbed their disciplinary identity of its original raison d’être and thus effectively of much of its social legitimacy. Today, as Mittelstrass (2006) put it, ‘society, once keen on culture . . ., seems not to need them anymore; for the driving forces of society, for the market they drop out’ (p. 9; translation by authors). ‘Fatally’, Mittelstrass (2006) goes on, ‘the humanities themselves . . . strengthen this impression. They are mostly occupied with themselves – putting the questions as to why which drive progress preferably to themselves’ (p. 9; translation by authors). Believing themselves to be innocent victims of a crisis for which they refuse to take responsibility, they shut themselves off from their academic as well as from their social surroundings, blithely ignoring the destruction threatening their disciplinary domain, let alone the institution of the University or even the world, just like the man in deckchair depicted on the cover of the Crisis? What Crisis? album.

To find a way out of the crisis, the integration of the humanities into management education is a promising option, as it exposes both sides to a reframing process which may well prove to become a model for interdisciplinary knowledge transfer as such. Over the last decades, the call for actively realising this option has become insistent, as evidenced in, among others (see e.g. Harney and Thomas, 2013; Starkey and Tempest, 2006, 2008; Thomas et al., 2014), the book on Management and the Humanities edited by Pasquale Gagliardi and Barbara Czarniawska in 2006 and of course the aforementioned Carnegie report of 2011. However, practical insights into how this should be done are still few and far between. There are a few notable exceptions to this (see e. g. Czarniawska and Guillet de Monthoux, 1994; Leal Filho et al., 2015; Steyaert et al., 2016), but even those, however enlightening and inspiring, convey little information which might be used towards creating anything like a generalisable methodology for conveying the humanities’ type of knowledge to management studies. Similarly, the recent empirical study of business schools working with the humanities (Landfester and Metelmann, 2019) presents an overwhelming richness of individual ideas and techniques, but mainly leaves its readers realising that not only the problems faced by those schools were mostly the same ones, but that in terms of sustainably solving them they all feel methodologically helplessness. In short, as Czarniawska (2006) has stated, discussing the contribution of the humanities to management education still is ‘posing more questions than answers, and groping for half-answers in the dark’ (p. 12).

Towards transformation: the Critical Management Literacy framework

The Critical Management Literacy framework (CML) we have developed in response to this situation is informed by both practical and strategic considerations. Our goals were (1) to create a matrix for the contribution of the humanities to management education showcasing the core competences the humanities bring to the table in a manner which makes sense to management students; (2) to link those competences to new pedagogical approaches as demanded by the impact of digitalisation on knowledge distribution on the one hand and the shift from instrumental to transformative teaching on the other; (3) to devise criteria and a procedure for the evaluation of students’ learning progress which is both adequate to the course content and compatible with established formats of quality assurance up to and including the demands of ranking and accreditation agencies; and finally (4) to design it in a way that it can easily be applied and managed even by faculty from the humanities who have little or no experience in teaching at a business school.

The CML framework is based on the paper’s conceptual understanding of literacy being the ability to gauge the function and meaning of social interaction through cultural artifacts. Such artifacts include literature and other artwork, but equally, for instance, textbooks on management, historical treatises of strategy building, political memoranda or companies’ branding narratives as well as the use of cultural codes like food or fashion. Literacy means being able to analyse them as to four major paradigms: (I) textuality, (II) rhetoricity, (III) historicity and (IV) fictionality. (I) Any artifact, material or immaterial, is textual in nature. This means that it is built along lines of a logic that can be read in the widest sense of the term, designed to carry a message which is intrinsically bound to the contexts it exists in. (II) Any artifact uses rhetorical devices to manipulate its recipient according to the norms and frameworks of value underlying its construction; to understand those norms and values therefore means to be able to access any hidden agenda it may carry. (III) Any cultural artifact derives its meaning from both the historical context it was created in and the historical context it is used in. To recognise this historical situatedness makes it possible to acknowledge our production and use of contemporary artifacts as being similarly historically situated, which helps prevent ideologically motivated essentialisation. (IV) Communication through artifacts relies on fictional elements. At its most basic, grammatical and orthographical conventions may have little or nothing to do with the subjects the description of which they are used for, but they inevitably colour the perspective in which the subject is presented. On a more complex level, the use of rhetorical devices like, for example, metaphors, has a similar colouring effect. To recognise those elements is crucial for any critical assessment of the interpretative dimension of cultural artifacts.

The shift to a more transformative educational philosophy has already tentatively replaced the concept of instrumental skills with the broader concept of competences (see Eberle and Metelmann, 2016), the main argument being that skills are certainly part of competent behaviour but not its sole enabling factors (Erpenbeck and von Rosenstiel, 2007: XII). To replace the focus on competence with that of literacy is taking this argument one step further: If competences can be defined as ‘dispositions for self-organisation of complex, adaptive systems (in particular human individuals) to reflexive and creative problem-solving’ (Erpenbeck and von Rosenstiel, 2007: XI), the concept of literacy includes the additional dimension of the transformative potential of reflexive knowledge acquisition, which potential is currently being advocated in the discourse on transformation in society in general (Schneidewind, 2018: 37ff.; see also Scholz, 2011; Parkin et al., 2004).

Jack Mezirow, who developed the concept of transformative learning (Mezirow and associates, 2000), in 2006 gave a clear-cut definition of it: ‘This rational process of learning within awareness is a metacognitive application of critical thinking that transforms an acquired frame of reference – a mind-set or world-view of orienting assumptions and expectations involving values, beliefs, and concepts – by assessing its epistemic assumptions.’ (Cranton, 2006: 124). Students, Mezirow argued, must be made aware of the fact that the frames of reference they bring to their studies, far from mirroring unshakeable truths about reality, in fact are concepts constructed on social and cultural norms. The potential for transformation mobilised by the process of learning lies in the students being brought to realise this. On that basis, they learn to analyze the agenda which comes with those norms and consequently experience what Mezirow (1981) called ‘perspective transformation’ (p. 3). In this context, Mezirow explicitly pointed to the humanities and social sciences, drawing on Habermas’ (1971) classifying human knowledge according to the three categories of instrumental, communicative and emancipatory knowledge. Mezirow (1981) acknowledged that instrumental knowledge was necessary to enable students to meet the technical demands of the labour market, yet argued that the growing complexity of reality also demanded imparting communicative and emancipatory knowledge through the hermeneutical approach applied by the humanities and social sciences: ‘The historical-hermeneutic disciplines differ from the empirical-analytic sciences in the ‘content’ studied, methods of inquiry and criteria for assessing alternative interpretations. They include descriptive social science, history, aesthetics, legal, ethnographic, literary and other studies interpreting the meaning of communicative experience’, thus laying the foundations for the acquisition of emancipatory knowledge through critical thinking and ultimately critical self-reflection (p. 5).

Implementing this in teaching practice, however, is difficult for several reasons, one of those being the power of established habits of teaching and learning. In 2010 Russ Vince published a paper in which he describes a way of teaching where students are actively encouraged to face up to the anxieties they experience when they are confronted with knowledge that irritates their preestablished frames of reference (Vince, 2010). In his introduction, Vince raises an important point about the relationship between teacher and student in traditional management education: ‘Mainstream approaches offer a dependent model of learning. The danger in this for managers is that it helps to reinforce a dependent approach to leading, managing and being managed’ (Vince, 2010: 26) instead of honing their intellectual and emotional capacities for judgement and independent thinking.

This type of ex cathedra-teaching, where the teacher speaks and the students listen, dates back to the time when students had to depend on the knowledge conveyed by their teachers through lectures. In an age where access to digitalised information is pretty much ubiquitous, that type of teaching is becoming obsolete. Education now calls for a division of labour where information is acquired by students outside the classroom, while the classroom is a platform where teachers help them to sort through and evaluate it. Part of the teacher’s job also is to help students reflect on the educational setting in which they are taught and the impact it has on the way they are dealing with content, ‘questioning modes of domination in the classroom in order to reveal power relations that are part of managing/management education; focusing on values rather than techniques’ (Vince, 2010: 37). This requires a major shift in both students’ and teachers’ attitude towards teaching, as both sides have to commit to open discussions, the ability to freely voice their opinions and concerns and the self-awareness to reflect on themselves critically and honestly – and that comes with a price, since it shakes up the comfortable emotional safety of the traditional hierarchical structures of interaction between teachers and students for both sides.

To achieve this, we build on the suggestions presented in Namaste’s (2017) recent paper on ‘Designing and Evaluating Students’ Transformative Learning’. Namaste came up with a rubric that evaluates the achievement of four learning goals – knowledge, skills, habits of mind and action – according to five processual steps: the initial status quo or baseline, the minimal understanding of the issue or benchmark, the first milestone of acceptance, the second milestone of adaptation and, finally, proficiency in working with the results of the former steps (Namaste, 2017: 18–19). From this starting point we developed a structure which we call the CML assessment cube (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

CML Assessment Cube with four literacies, three learning modes and process dimensions (Landfester and Metelmann, 2019: 132).

The cube stipulates four general learning goals or types of literacy: Conceptual Management Literacy, Cultural Literacy, Social Literacy and Interactional Literacy. Conceptual Management Literacy requires the student to reflect on management as a concept, that is, as something which is created in certain institutional and societal contexts and is invested with underlying agendas whose relationship to contemporary reality needs to be examined. For example, the myth of Homo sapiens as Economic Man which generations of management students have identified with represents a framework of values which firmly puts utility first, relegating morality, responsibility and sustainability to the sidelines. At the time it was established, first explicitly encoded by John Kells Ingram in 1888 in his History of Political Economy, this myth served a distinct historical purpose, as it helped propel national economies to as yet unknown prosperity. Today, though, challenges like climate change and the globalisation and digitalisation of the labour market, to name but a few, may well demand different priorities for management students to identify with. To acknowledge the artificial and as such arbitrary nature of such concepts is the first step of a transformation process which forces students to let go of the comfortable security of seemingly self-evident choices based on unquestioned priorisations, and to reframe their perception of reality by engaging with their own assumptions and presuppositions about it.

Cultural Literacy pertains to the way in which those concepts are built, what mechanisms they rely on, what devices they use to influence their user and what agendas they are tailored to. The material it works with are the manifestations of such concepts in all kinds of media. It focuses on the interpretative dimension of those manifestations, on the devices they use to manipulate their recipients into either complying with or refusing them, and their relationship to the cultural contexts of use they are designed for. Cultural Management Literacy is based on the assumption that culture is intrinsic to management. In other words, management is one among other technologies mankind has developed to adjust its living environment to its needs and as such is fraught with cultural meaning far beyond the situative influence many of its inventions exert on this environment. Management, in short, is basically a cultural practice of interpreting and in consequence shaping reality as such needs to be taken seriously in its own right as well as in it being inextricably interwoven with other cultural practices.

Social Literacy is the ability to comprehend the way in which management is connected to society, that is, the way in which it influences society and in turn is influenced by it. Teaching it is based on two main observations. One the one hand students usually are embedded in collectives from birth, which makes this embeddedness so familiar that their responses to it appear to be motivated by natural instincts rather than by the social conditioning they undergo simply by being part of a family, a nation, an institution or any other type of collective. Judgements based on such seemingly instinctual responses thus often automatically reproduce social norms in a manner which results in biased patterns of reflection. On the other hand, contemporary business models often call for collaboration in what might be termed swarm intelligence decision processes instead of the top-down approach to governance most traditional businesses exhibit. Both those observations call for educating students towards a relational rather than a hierarchical social vision which considers the impact of the social setting they find themselves in on them as well as their own impact on it.

Last not least, Interactional Literacy is the ability to engage in teamwork with a view to intercultural and interdisciplinary knowledge transfer and the (re-)calibrating of individual perspective necessary for its success. More specific than Social Literacy, Interactional Literacy is designed to prepare the ground for self-organised life-long learning through constructive engagement with others (Hoidn, 2007). On the level of classroom-work, this means contributing actively to the learning partnership between teacher and student as well as to student teamwork which is practised in various formats throughout the course. At least as importantly, the learning goals for Interactional Literacy include the reframing of interpersonal relations in business and education from the perspective on the technical devices involved in conducting them today, most notably on the pervasive influence of digital media (Chun, 2016; Schulz, 2019). To understand, shape and live with the changes those media bring to interpersonal relationships, reflective competences need to be built which require a conscious transformation of communication practices.

These learning goals are to be pursued in three steps or modes which, based on the three models of curriculum evaluation outlined by Miller and Seller (1985), we call the transmission mode, the transaction mode and the transformation mode. The transmission mode is the part of the course where students take in the course materials relevant to the topic under discussion, the transaction mode is the part in which students co-operate on assignments and present them in the classroom, and the transformation mode is the part where students interlink the topics covered in the course sessions. This latter activity we call content mapping, a procedure which is practiced during the last 3 weeks of the term. For this, students are called on to connect the topics which have been discussed in class graphically, linking them by identifying similarities and differences. In the process, they become aware not only of a network of relations between different media formats, historical development stages and types of knowledge, but they also recognise the multiplicity of perspectives characteristic for contemporary notions of reality. Their progress is monitored by having students send in a short essay on what they expect from the course, based on its description, from the point of view of their respective majors, during the week before the course starts, parts of which essay are then discussed in the first kick-off session; by having them deliver a group paper based on their group presentation, at half-term; and, finally, by setting them an exam in which they are asked to compare several parts of the course material along the logics of the content mapping sessions.

To conclude our exposition of the Critical Management Literacy framework, it must be understood that on its conceptual level the most important factor for students to engage with is encapsulated in the term ‘Critical’. Students often react to this term with a certain amount of suspicion at first which, when challenged, offers an example for exactly the type of critical reflection we aim at. Usually, students take the term as deriving from criticism, thus believing that the framework’s overarching learning goal is to criticise management studies for their supposed moral shortcomings. In fact, the way in which we use the term derives from the French noun ‘critique’, which simply describes the process of reflective reasoning we teach them to apply to their perception of reality, the term going back to the Greek ‘krinein’ meaning ‘distinguishing’, ‘separating’, ‘deciding’ and ‘judging’. More often than not, initial discussions about the term ‘Critical’ lead students to realise that in associating it with ‘criticism’ they are influenced by the deep-set prejudice that the humanities are on principle antagonistic to management studies and as such are bound to approach them with moral criticism, while what the framework is really trying to do is to teach them to reflect the manner in which they are influenced by prejudices. It is critique and not criticism which constitutes the core of the framework. Along the same lines, its goal is not any kind of normative morality but the ability for reasoned interpretative choices in dealing with reality. On these grounds, the juxtaposition of explicitly artificial texts like short stories, plays or movies with implicitly artificial texts like strategy memoranda or corporate vision statements is designed as an exercise which makes the fabric visible students’ perception of reality is made up from, teaching them first to acknowledge that their perception is woven from interpretative choices and then to understand how and why they choose as they do.

This may not seem very pertinent to managerial practice at first glance; indeed, one of our students once indignantly complained that, though she had always known that management was about dealing with human beings, she had never yet realised that this meant to deal with humanity’s endless propensity for interpretation – and would we, as the teachers, please just tell her what, exactly, this propensity did in fact mean for management practice in terms of the statistical calculability of risk and profit? We would not. What we did do, however, was to initiate a discussion about the relationship between statistical calculability and reflected reasoning, and the question why and how it made sense to choose one over the other in approaching managerial practice – which led to yet another bunch of questions: What was more useful for management practice, statistics or hermeneutics? What were the criteria for rating both higher and lower? What was the difference between the two in terms of interpreting data? And, most important, what exactly did managerial practice have to do with humanity?

Humanity revisited: the case for the humanities

One factor which has affected the humanities aversely possibly more than any other set of academic disciplines is the influence the term ‘humanities’ exerted on the image which has landed them in their current crisis. As recent research has shown (e.g. Arenas, 2006; Braidotti, 2013; Knorr-Cetina, 2006), the connection of the subject matter ‘humanity’ and the development of the humanities into what they are now is rooted in a historical tradition going back to Greek and Roman antiquity. Revived by the Renaissance era, the concept of humanitas which shaped the core of what were to become the humanities at the beginning of the 19th century was fraught with normative implications, among them Eurocentrism as well as anthropocentrism (Braidotti, 2013). This concept engendered a kind of countertransference between the methods created by the humanities to study their subject matter and this subject matter itself: Since the subject matter was normatively defined, the methods were designed to affirm it; since the methods were meant to be affirmative, the knowledge they brought forth fed back into the understanding of the subject matter. The result was an essentialised notion of humanity which in turn affected the self-understanding of the humanities to the point where they lost sight of this notion’s conceptual and thus artificial nature.

Whether this can be remedied by their turning into ‘Posthuman Humanities’ (Braidotti, 2013) seems doubtful, though, since this term carries its own normative implications about humanity as well as about the humanities. The demand that the latter should leave the ideal of the white Caucasian male endowed with an intrinsically moral rationality behind them is just, but at the same time it unjustly reduces humanity and thus the humanities’ subject matter to the contours of precisely this ideal. To use the terms ‘human’ and ‘humanist’ synonymously (see also Knorr-Cetina, 2006) is to obscure a crucial difference between them: While the term ‘humanist’ indeed refers to an outdated notion of humanity, the term ‘human’ describes a phenomenon which needs to be understood as being subject to continuous historical changes in the process of its discursive construction. Thus, it can and must be expected to adapt even to the downfall of anthropocentrism towards a ‘post-identitarian, non-unitary and transversal subjectivity based on relations with human and non-human others’ (Braidotti, 2013: 15).

Traces of the humanist concept of humanity are still evident in the expectations management studies are launching at the humanities, since the latter are most often linked to ethical and moral concerns about the development of management students as, for instance, in the Carnegie report of 2011 (Colby et al., 2011), the humanities being looked to for enhancing ‘moral and civic understanding’ as well as ‘the motivation to do the right thing’ (Colby et al., 2003: 99). Since, as Arenas (2006) phrased it, in antiquity being human ‘implied both civic commitment and a striving for personal virtue or excellence’, the humanities, having originated from this pursuit of virtue, are assumed to be ‘based on a love of the human condition’ (p. 115f). This implies not only that this love is the driving force behind the humanities’ research, but also that other disciplines do not a priori share this love, the latter point, as Hendry has it, being illustrated by the contemporary understanding of management:

In amongst all their other responsibilities, managers are now held explicitly responsible for upholding traditional moral standards in the business, for what is usually called ‘business ethics’. But the disciplinary forces identified by critical sociologists of management and bureaucracy are still present and in a society in which moral encouragement is getting progressively more difficult, in a business culture in which self-interest is ardently promoted, and in jobs in which the immediate, instrumental demands are manifold and all absorbing, finding space for the traditionally moral can be incredibly difficult. (Hendry, 2006: 30)

For that reason, Hendry argues, what is needed in management education is ‘explicitly non-scientific knowledge, . . . the knowledge associated with the humanities’ (Hendry, 2006: 36). At first glance, this latter statement would justly provoke howls of indignation from any humanities’ scholar reading it for the assumption that his or her life’s work could be considered ‘non-scientific’. At the second glance, however, it bears out the argument Ghoshal (2005) put forth, namely, that the concept of science Hendry evokes here is the one represented by the natural sciences on which management studies have modelled their methodology to the exclusion of the skills and competences produced from the concept of science represented by the humanities. Hendry therefore argues for recognising the humanities’ concept of science as being different from that of management studies – which of course begs the question as to what this concept is and, at least as important, on what concept of humanity it rests.

Applying our CML matrix to the humanities, we claim that the conceptual core of the humanities is their epistemological expertise. The type of knowledge the humanities produce is basically meta-knowledge, that is, knowledge about the ways and means human society creates, encodes and distributes knowledge. Turned back on humanity and the humanities, this means that the humanities research humanity not as an ontologically fixed entity but as a concept which is subject to changes depending on the ways and means knowledge about it is created, encoded and distributed. Thus, we stipulate that any concept of humanity is a cultural artifact which varies according to the needs it serves in different historical contexts. This stipulation carries no pejorative connotation, since we hold that artificiality is an unavoidable effect of any conceptualisation, and that, moreover, conceptualisation is the precondition of any kind of reflection, especially reflection on an issue as materially unsubstantial and at the same time omnipresent as the human condition. For the concept of humanity informing this conceptual core of the humanities, this means that we define humanity as the capacity for epistemological doubt, that is, the capacity to reflect on the factors which influence conceptual constructions, to recognise the assumptions they are based on as such and to question the frameworks of values which engender such assumptions as to their relationship with reality.

In terms of cultural literacy and its usefulness for managers, management studies have certainly ‘come to realise that understanding the functioning of organisations and societies depends also on understanding their cultural, symbolic and emotional elements’ (Arenas, 2006: 117). However, the humanities are not about ‘cultural elements’ to be picked out of their organisational context and explained, though this of course can be part of their work; rather, it is about understanding management as a fundamentally cultural practice connected to multiple other cultural practices outside of management which in turn can shed light on those performed by managers. The very term ‘culture’ conveys a historical link between management studies and the humanities, since it derives from the Latin verb ‘colere’, to farm, to make arable, to foster, and was first used in the 17th century to describe the agricultural production of goods. The term ‘culture’ therefore describes the common ground which both the humanities and the management studies grew from, the former focusing on the history and meaning of the cultural artifacts humanity brought forth by working on nature to sustain itself, the latter concentrating on the mechanisms of improving on and exchanging those artifacts to the maximisation of their usefulness. Making the intrinsic culturality of management visible therefore means to examine the concepts with which management works as such artifacts. To understand their textuality, rhetoricity, historicity and fictionality is not only important for assessing their viability. In an increasingly globalised labour market for managers, it is even more essential to gauge the relationship of interdependence which binds a concept to its non-managerial context by fibres often constituted by semantically volatile operations that work on the principles of metaphor or metonymy rather than on those of causality.

There is another dimension to the humanities’ cultural literacy, again deriving from their conceptual awareness. The humanities view the production, acquisition and distribution of knowledge as a cultural practice in and of itself, not only in institutional contexts but as well in the realm of personal experience, that is, in the combination of emotional, aesthetic and intellectual judgement shaping the impact of reality on individual perception. As Starkey and Tempest (2006) have pointed out, ‘one area in which business schools have been judged deficient is in the lack of an orientation to knowledge as culture’ (p. 106). Knowing, as in accumulating, assessing, sorting and archiving and finally acting on information, is an active process of cultivation, said information being constantly tested against the demands of everyday life, modified and added to. The humanities’ understanding of knowing as a cultural practice therefore helps business schools ‘working towards the integration of knowledge as science and knowledge as culture’ (Starkey and Tempest, 2006: 110) on an institutional as well as on the level of teaching future managers.

The humanities’ social literacy angle is based on the awareness of the fact that what shapes a manager’s working persona is not confined either to the classroom or later to his or her working place, but is contributed to by past personal experience as well as by his actions and experiences in the times and places when and where he or she does not work. Due to the teleological impetus of traditional instrumentalist management education, students tend to separate their studies in their minds from what many of them call ‘real life’ outside the classroom to the extent that they do not realise how much their approach to management is influenced by said ‘real life’ – and, of course, vice versa. Similarly, this attitude often has them passively evade or even actively shy away from realising – and challenging – the influence the institutional setting of their studies has on their reception of the content taught in this setting. Along those lines, management at the same time must be considered as a mode of interaction. Management techniques constitute a code with its very own grammar and semantics which students not only have to learn like any other language, but which they also need to recognise as such, exploring, for instance, what happens to the content it is used to convey when it is translated into other codes and what meanings emerge from it when it is used in other contexts than that of management practice. Basically, interactional management literacy therefore means the capacity to recognise that management practice is embedded in a web of relationships with human as well as non-human objects which impacts on professional as well as personal transformation processes.

To sum up, the literacies which the humanities can contribute to management education provide students with orientational knowledge on, first, the fact that they make interpretative choices in their engagement with reality which are not preordained by reality itself, and, second, how they make those choices, what experiences, assumptions and contextual settings affect them and how those factors relate to reality. The emphasis we put on the metaphor of reading by calling the skills we teach ‘literacies’ underscores the importance we ascribe to analysing those factors not after, but rather during the process of interpretation. Encouraging, so to speak, a close reading of this process instead of the kind of result-oriented harvesting of information students usually practice when they prepare for exams, we train their capacity to make informed judgements instead of jumping to conclusions on the grounds of preformed consensus. The practice of business not only encounters its being interweaved with conceptual, cultural, social and interactional issues at each turn, but is conceptual, cultural, social and interactional by its very nature. It is certainly true that thinking innovatively is thinking out of the box, but to do this it is necessary to know what this box is, what it is made from, what size it has and why it was installed in the first place.

One such box is the standardisation of academic reasoning by the University’s general quest for measurable output indicators. The use of reason as devised by Humboldt and his contemporaries constituting the University’s identity had a concrete purpose, as it established the University as a public space for creating orientational knowledge. Rational reflection was understood to be a liberating force, sustaining and reinforcing the human being’s autonomy against the pressures exerted by political, moral or economic teleologies. Today, the institution of the University has largely lost sight of this purpose, progressively conforming to equalised criteria of excellence and thus ultimately succumbing to precisely those teleologies, which in turn impact heavily on its scholarly output. The explorative curiosity of mind which characterised Humboldt’s vision of scholarly endeavours has become a liability instead of an asset, thus heavily curtailing its creative scope.

The – in our sense – literate manager is able to explore this scope through considering – and using – the knowledge acquired at an academic business school as orientational rather than as prescriptive, free of the boundedness of utility-driven rationality and able to form judgement on the basis of open-ended reflection rather than on the basis of pre-patterned cause-and-effect conventions. For literate managers, taking decisions becomes a participative instead of a monological process which is enriched by taking into account not only the cultural, social and interactional embeddedness of their practices, but also the transformative impact of their personal growth and with it the personal growth of others. Thus, the foundations of their decision-taking are broadened to encompass a creative potential which remains untapped by more traditional, for example, instrumental, types of managerial knowledge. Questioning one’s own assumptions about reality ultimately means a higher degree of capability to shape it, as the habit of epistemological doubt hones the ability to make far-reaching interpretative choices by factoring in the basic artificiality and thus structural flexibility of concepts like leadership or strategy as well as their dependence on society as such.

In adhering to an instrumental understanding of knowledge academic business schools are widening the much-quoted gap between theory and practice. As we’ve argued, this gap is a product of interpretative choices which are habitualised to an extent that they seem an accurate depiction of reality, while in fact they depict management scholars’ ingrained resistance to question their comfortably worn assumptions about the nature of management. It is this ingrained resistance that needs to be exorcised from management education just as urgently as from the humanities’ teaching and research in order to return the institution of the University to a space where literacy is not simply the ability to take in pre-processed information but the ability to use critical reflection publicly. Literate managers need to be able to explore business cultures in response to their contextual embeddedness, acknowledging that the collective – whether it is defined as the stakeholders of a corporation or as the global community of mankind striving for survival – and its conceptual, cultural, social and interactional conventions are the roots their very raison d’être grows from.

The Two Of Us: conclusion

The Two Of Us is the last song of the Supertramp album Crisis? What Crisis? we mentioned at the start of our paper’s first part. In a way, this song answers the question raised by the album’s title: Its narrator describes himself as ‘building dreams in a stranger’s land’, finally countering the album title’s question with another one: ‘Tell me, where do we go from here?’ Applied to the humanities in the context of management education, it could certainly be said that our CML-framework is about ‘building dreams in a stranger’s land’, and equally certainly, after our having outlined the nature of the crisis both the humanities and management studies are in, the question remains as to where The Two Of Us go from here.

Looking back at the first part of our article, it needs to be stressed again that the crisis the humanities find themselves in today is in large parts one of their own making, or at least one which they have as yet seldom shown themselves willing to tackle, many of them still clinging to what their subdisciplines respectively believe to be ‘their’ field, ‘their’ canonical texts and ‘their’ methodologies with the death grip of a desperation born from a corrosive loss of identity. The consequences of this stubborn essentialism threaten to diminish this identity even further, since they seem too much mired in the memories of past glory to hold promise for the future, as Arenas (2006) pointed out: ‘If the humanities are unable to offer something to society, they are destined to be considered only as a relic from the past, which can be studied by a few specialists as one studies museum pieces’ (p. 114).

It does, however, not help to rant at them for being either arrogant or lazy, as if the humanities were a collective subject that had made a conscious choice to be obstructive. If anything, they can be accused of failing to read the writing on the wall and acting on it, which is bad enough. But it must be kept in mind that to take on disciplinary habits is still part of any academic education, especially in a highly competitive environment which rewards this. The academia has as a whole signally failed to counteract or even become conscious of the dysfunctional effects produced by leaving academics pretty much to their own devices when it comes to rearing their young. Since overspecialisation and disciplinary inbreeding have been allowed to run on unchecked, it is not surprising that the system produced scholars who have never seen the need to question the implicit assumptions about ‘their’ domain handed down from generation to generation without further inspection. The humanities are not alone in having fallen into the systemic trap posed by the Humboldtian university’s organisational design. They, however, have of all disciplines the least excuse for remaining trapped in their ‘lack of a tradition of epistemological self-reflexivity’ (Braidotti, 2013: 11), since their epistemological expertise it the one type of knowledge which can show up disciplinary segregation for what it is, that is, a cultural artifact characterised by textuality, rhetoricity, historicity and fictionality.

To cultivate such epistemological self-reflexivity with a view to enhancing interdisciplinary knowledge transfer is not just a matter of survival for the humanities; rather, it is a matter of survival for the academia as a whole. The freedom of teaching and research Humboldt and before him Kant claimed as the defining privilege of the academia depends on sustaining the social legitimacy of the institution of the University. All disciplines thus bear responsibility for guarding this freedom by accounting for the added value they create for society. This applies especially to the humanities, as their type of knowledge is the one which is most pressingly needed at a time where the existential importance of meeting global challenges increasingly renders disciplinary essentialism dangerous, not least because it threatens the existence of the institution as such, which Readings (1996) has claimed already lies ‘in ruins’. The University’s mandate to society today can only be fulfilled through interdisciplinary knowledge transfer. This is where the contribution of the humanities is most direly needed, since it is them who can provide for the hermeneutic skills to navigate and thus bridge different cultures of knowledge production which are crucial for the survival of all. The humanities, as Mittelstrass (2006) pointed out, represent ‘the theoretical side of culture’; they are ‘the systematically privileged space where the modern world, the modern society, gather knowledge about themselves . . . in the shape of academic scholarship’ (p. 6; translation by authors). Without such knowledge, ‘the modern world loses orientation, does not know itself and is all too easily lured into accepting what it is told to be’ (Mittelstrass, 2006: 6; translation by authors). It is the orientational knowledge provided by the humanities which is their key contribution to rethinking both management education and the humanities themselves.

In the context of management education, providing such orientational knowledge across disciplinary boundaries challenges the humanities mainly on two counts. The first is their insistence on a mode of transmitting the knowledge they produce in a manner the complexity of which is supposed to mirror faithfully the complexity of the transmitted content. The humanities tend to see explanations of their societal added value as corrupting the purity of their scholarship through oversimplification. This habit is based on the notion that volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, to refer back to the VUCA-acronym, cannot be conveyed in simple terms without deleting the indeterminacy of meaning which characterises art or literature. To put it bluntly, this notion is wrong. Complexity of content does not prescribe complexity of delivery, especially in view that teaching management students is not about training philologists or art historians in the first place, but about honing their responses to precisely this indeterminacy.

The second count is the humanities’ fastidious reluctance to engage with activities designed to yield material gain. For many humanities’ scholars, transmitting their knowledge in a manner which students find accessible is tantamount to selling out on complexity for money, if not for themselves, then certainly for the students to use it for this purpose. When the dreaded spectre of such utility-driven scholarship seems to rise its ugly head, the humanities all too often react by styling it the antithesis of the academic freedom of teaching and research, refusing demands for communication, let alone cooperation, on the grounds that their disciplinary standards of integrity forbid them to accede to political or economic considerations of any kind. This attitude is the product of a fateful misinterpretation of the reasons Kant and Humboldt had to claim said freedom for the University, because it proceeds from incorrect assumptions about present-day reality. For one thing, it projects the image of the humanities scholar’s standards of professional integrity being superior to others, especially, of course, to management studies scholars, as the latter cannot but be professionally deformed by their subject matter, that is, the making of money. In its axiomatic generality, this is not only patently absurd but even hypocritical, since humanities scholars in our experience are certainly as much interested in material gain as the next person, and certainly where this translates into the long-term safety of academic tenure.

For another thing, that attitude proceeds from the assumption that any scholarship driven by utility is a priori aimed at material gain. It is quite right for Nussbaum (2012) to pronounce that the humanities are ‘Not For Profit’, since she uses the term as a synonym for financial gain. Apart from the fact that is has been used in this manner since the late 18th century, however, there is no reason not to revise its meaning to a certain extent. If we translate it into usefulness, as the original Latin term suggests, it can apply to any type of benefit reaped from purposeful activity, even to having students trained to sustain and contribute to democracy, as Nussbaum defines the societal mandate of the humanities. Moreover, it is not a crime, not even a misdemeanour, to strive for financial gain or any other goal. Nor is it in any way high treason against however lofty academic ideals to encode complex knowledge in a manner which makes sense to people outside one’s own discipline. To believe otherwise means to subscribe to precisely the kind of essentialisation of epistemologically generated content which has landed the humanities in the middle of the crisis disciplinary segregation has produced in the first place. While scholars in management studies in all truth sometimes have too much of what it takes to pursue utility, the humanities, again in all truth, have far too little of it.

We unreservedly second Braidotti’s (2013) conviction ‘that the Humanities can and will survive their present crises and even prosper, to the extent that they will show the ability and willingness to undergo a major process of transformation’ (p. 1). That such a process of transformation is necessary is unquestionable – a process, moreover, that does not require to change the type of knowledge the humanities produce itself, but rather their attitude towards it. What they need to do is to use their epistemological expertise on themselves, radically questioning their implicit assumptions and presuppositions about reality, reframing their perspective on it in order to reinvent and thus reposition their identity in the network of academic disciplines. In other words, they must stop feeling sorry for themselves, relinquish the idea that the value they bring to society is self-evident and leave their ivory tower to bring their goods in circulation with a will. Then, and only then, they will be recognised for what they indeed are: a resource of knowledge which society can’t afford to lose.

To conclude, we go back to the song we quoted above: this reinvention process cannot be the responsibility of the humanities alone where their integration into management education is concerned, as there are The Two Of Us. Complementing the humanities’ transformation it is, as Starkey and Tempest (2006) have requested, necessary ‘to consider how the business school might engage with the liberal arts in a more open, embracing and mutually sustaining way.’ (p. 108). To be embraced, the humanities must reframe themselves, but to embrace them, management studies will to some extent have to do the same – and this may well be a similarly painful process as the ones the humanities face, as it necessitates questioning the manner in which they take responsibility for their interpretation of reality. The CML framework we have introduced before is a way of teaching management students to do just that; other formats will hopefully develop over time; but for them to become effective for enhancing the social legitimacy of academic teaching and research both sides must acknowledge that they are bound together – and indeed to any other academic disciplines – by the fact that their subject matter is not an ontologically given entity but a cluster of cultural artifacts designed to meet specific societal needs an specific times.

Those needs have changed massively over the last centuries. In view of the fact that academic business schools today have to educate students for an increasingly globalised world the habit of treating other disciplines as, in the words of the song, ‘a stranger’s land’, is anachronistic and counterproductive. The order of the day must be to create shared content between The Two Of Us, in our case between the humanities and management studies. This certainly cannot mean that all disciplines could or even should share the same amount and type of knowledge; indeed, when Humboldt founded the Berlin university, the notion of such shared content was already based on acknowledging that no single individual and not even any single discipline could lay claim to know everything, as the uomo universale of the Renaissance had once aspired to do. What needs to be shared is qualitative in nature, that is, the basic acceptance that the axiomatic certainties exuded by utility-driven rationality need to be replaced with the ability to tackle uncertainties through reasoned reflection in the manner of ‘critique’ as outlined above. To achieve this, it is not enough to define uncertainty management as a crucial managerial competence like Knight (2009) did. Rather, it is vitally important to realise that while uncertainty is unquestionably one of the core characteristics of reality, it is at the same time also intrinsic to our perception of what is real, since this perception is fabricated by interpretative choices and as such is just as volatile, complex and ambiguous as its object.

This conceptual clarity is the main pillar of the orientational knowledge which management education so patently lacks and the humanities equally patently have forgotten they are mandated to facilitate by their epistemological expertise. To commit to conceptual clarity and take both the theoretical and the practical consequences of conscious interpretative choices certainly means to find oneself in an ongoing series of micro-crises, as questioning one’s assumptions and readjusting them constantly is a challenge to both the humanities and the management studies. Confronting prejudice, habit and ignorance, though, is a small price to pay for a way out of the macro-crisis our paper started out with, again for both the humanities and management studies. To research and teach about humanity in a broad sense of the term – a sense which for us clearly includes the shift towards what Knorr-Cetina (2006) and Braidotti call ‘posthuman’ – is not the exclusive privilege of one set of disciplines. If there is anything privileged about the humanities, it is that they are uniquely capable of opening other disciplines’ collective eyes towards the manner in which those other disciplines deal with reality, how they construct and conceptualise it, cultivate it, socialise it and interact with it and about it. If both management studies and the humanities realise this capability as the latter’s key contribution to management education, they might find that, regardless of the organisational restraints of disciplinary knowledge segregation, in terms of their subject matter they are in fact on the same side, that is, on the side of today’s humanity.