Management learning and the unsettled humanities: Introduction to the special issue

Unsettled world

Life in the modern world has long been understood to entail continuous unsettling. Marx’s famous claim that industrial capitalism makes “all that is solid melt into air” has lost its metaphoric abstraction, as the materialization, dissolution, and resettlement of the world continues in the name of “progress.” Business management makes progress and successfully expands its reach precisely to the extent that it enables participants in an increasingly marketized society to navigate the constant revolution of the conditions of life. It is happening to us right now, as we write this editors’ introduction from within the context of an ongoing global pandemic. No longer cocooned in culture apart from nature, but finding ourselves again anew, in and of a living world that extends perhaps even beyond this planet, we feel a need for “enlivenment. . .[which] means getting things, people, and oneself to live again—to be more full of life, to become more alive” (Weber, 2019: 25). The jostling between the natural sciences and the humanities, between biological life and existential life, currently feels intensified, and it appears to offer up novel entanglements as well as future scars.

It is not hard to appreciate how the sudden explosion of pandemic disease has introduced a whole new and unexpected source of unsettling into business practice and management thinking. This only heightens the escalating difficulties caused by the ever more intrusive awareness that irreversible climate destabilization has arrived ahead of the scientific schedule and, hence, management. This unassailable “truth” means management education yet again has been tasked to provide the new generations of entrants into the still quite “modern” business world with advanced and alternative conceptual tools, so they successfully can navigate the relentless unsettling they linguistically and experientially take for granted. To work and survive through the modern, postmodern, and posthuman unsettling, seems to demand the rejection of certainty, progress, and perhaps even prosperity.

We must concede that rapid technological change within an increasingly competitive global market has historically determined the turbulent context for business management, its organization and its strategy. This dynamic has produced an all-consuming pressure to settle into new, more lucrative positions, a strategic practice which in turn has threatened to constrict horizons just as new threats soon appeared. In that context, the instrumental and rational manager has been asked to understand better the natural scientific and technological forces behind these disorienting developments, with emphasis on current complexities and the uncertainty ahead. Simultaneously, however, business and management education has also been asked to expand the human capacity to make sense of the confusing complexity, via the humanities.

This to-and-fro between the so-called hard and soft sciences to make sense of various forms of “unsettling” has underwritten a more general critique of management and organization studies (MOS) for lacking humanity and for purporting the idea of the human being as a rational, morally neutral and interest maximizing actor, engaged in management as a technical, quantifiable and quasi-scientific activity (Hendry, 2006; Marturano et al., 2013). Thus the field of management learning has in this respect become one battleground in the “science wars” (Flyvbjerg, 2001), with approaches firmly rooted in the positive social sciences on one side and approaches inspired by the humanities and liberal arts on the other.

Now, however, such simple polarization is over. As our world becomes increasingly unsettled—ecologically, epidemiologically, politically—we must develop new ways in which to interrogate both the familiar and the emerging shibboleths of management learning.

Unsettled humanities

The intellectual disciplines most directly concerned with such questioning and the sense-making it entails are the humanities. The humanities have no monopoly on these issues. Still, they are intellectual and academic efforts to make meaning out of experience so as to guide action and investigation. These very efforts, however, have been undergoing an unsettling concerning their aims, their methods, and especially their relationship to learning. Already in the 1800s, Schopenhauer faced death, meaninglessness and the negation of the will, and responded with pessimism and self-denial. In response, Nietzsche affirmed pain and evil, and called for a playful childlike joy in the face of suffering. More recently, Derrida (1978) argued that we might pass “beyond man and humanism”, and Foucault famously proclaimed the “death of Man” in The Order of Things (1970).

Since then, a more gender diverse number of voices criticizing the classical humanist ideal as “the measure of all things” has steadily increased across a variety of disciplines. The humanities have been facing a complex crisis involving not only their impact on and role within society, but also their promise to produce and promote advanced forms of knowledge (Martinelli, 2016). Some would even claim that the humanities have already “shipwrecked with all hands aboard” (Serres, 2006: 228) or exploded (Braidotti, 2013). This skepticism derives not only from the general collapse of the notion of an objective natural moral order, but also to the gradual dethroning of “Man” as the subject at the center of world history (Haraway, 2015).

For some, the best way to counter this crisis has been to turn back to focus on the formative elements of the humanities with roots in Antiquity, and to plead the case for reviving and cultivating their noble ideals in contemporary education and research (Nussbaum, 2010). Others, however, have argued that the unsettling of the humanities as a field with privileged access to studying the “especially human” should instead give rise to an exploration of “what might be involved in the reinventions of notions of the human in today’s world and more especially in the critical practice of the humanities” (Braidotti and Gilroy, 2016: 1). It is an unsettling that has spurred critical inquiry and fast-growing theoretical issues around the edges of the classical humanities and across disciplines, for example within the “digital humanities” (Hayles, 2012) and “environmental humanities” (Rose et al., 2012; Sörlin, 2012). Including early efforts to engage with the political problems intrinsic to digitization (Parisi and Terranova, 2001), extended to recent critiques of posthumanism and its proliferation (Chandler and Reid, 2016). These theoretical developments have increasingly permeated and unsettled management learning.

Unsettled management learning

A very traditional form of humanism has been hiding in plain sight in the business school, where regular people enter and then some time later exit having been transformed into “managers” with “knowledge” of “principles” and capable of “action” in “the business world.” The call to reinvent management education (Colby et al., 2011; Statler & Guillet de Monthoux, 2015; Steyaert et al., 2016) has brought this technocratic and instrumental humanism out into the open, called its assumptions and effects into question, re-framed it alongside other modes of knowing and doing drawn from other academic disciplines including the humanities, interpretative social sciences, and the arts. Of course, it would nevertheless be too naive to hope that business schools could stave off future crises by sprinkling a little Shakespeare into their syllabi.

Hence, influential scholars have sought to integrate properly the humanities and liberal arts with management learning and education (Colby et al., 2011; Gagliardi and Czarniawska, 2006). Over the years, Management Learning has emphasized a “license to think freely” (Grey, 2009) that embraces management learning outside conventional management education. Examples of such work include forages into arts-based methods (Mack, 2013), theatre (Beirne and Knight, 2007), history (Gearty et al., 2015), literature (McAulay and Sims, 2009), philosophy (Zundel, 2012), and critical pedagogy (Śliwa and Cairns, 2009). Further, this also connects to the exhortation to embrace “a freer, and at times iconoclastic, kind of writing” (Cunliffe and Sadler-Smith, 2010: 3). While for example the contribution of literature and storytelling has proven fruitful for the understanding of management and organization (Czarniawska-Joerges, 1994), the meaning of the unsettling of the humanities to such a contribution has received limited attention. Can literature be that which embraces the open-ended force of words and even brings forth the fragmentation of subjectivity and narrative as ruinous potential (De Cock and O’Doherty, 2017; De Cock et al. 2020)? Opening up management learning to such perspectives may help to cut across the parallelism between philosophy, science, and the arts (Braidotti, 2013) and work against the idea of the humanities as a harmonious whole preordained by rational thought. It could even afford us with new understandings of what it might mean to speak of something like an “emancipatory humanism, that is a working humanism, a daily humanism, a changing humanism” (Karavanta and Morgan, 2008: 4) in management learning. Rather than just prescribing the value of the humanities to ameliorate the ills of management education, these questions and approaches illustrate that the humanities also need to be enriched, nuanced, and critiqued through the lenses of the ideas and perspectives of organizational research.

Unsettled special issue

How can the experiences of an unsettled world, and particularly the unsettling of the humanities, be made productive for management learning as a whole? This question animates this special issue. To answer this question we called for visionary papers, and also stressed the need to scrutinize the past and current affairs of the humanities within the business school. With contributions and authors who work closely with “unsettling,” this special issue advances the notion itself as a critical concept, a human tool with which to think in variegated ways. This approach of digging into “unsettling” takes the humanities one step further in management learning by articulating a “thicker” notion of humanity. It challenges reductionist accounts of humans as self-contained, rational, decision-making subjects, while at the same time rejecting the role of the classical humanities as a kind of moral super-ego working to promote a predetermined set of social responsibility charters.

In other words, the authors represented in the special issue diversely show how new forms of humanism are emerging in organization and management, and explore what ideas are materialized about “the human,” ”posthuman,” and “transhuman” within the business school in the 2020s. The contributions mobilize different humanities in management and organization in order to enrich both research and teaching. They draw attention to the diversity of perspectives, activities, and values that may have been marginalized or latent in certain institutional contexts over the past several decades. Overall, they invite the reader to rethink the unsettled world and its humanities, and make new sense of “management” as well as “the human,” by introducing ignored perspectives, repositioned philosophies, and novel vocabularies.

Metelmann and Landfester trace and challenge what they view as the “stubborn essentialism” of the humanities to cultivate instead within them epistemological self-reflexivity and recognition of their reciprocal need for interdisciplinarity. While the humanities should assume an essential role in transforming management students into responsible actors and human beings, these disciplines have effectively entrenched themselves in outdated traditions from which they lead a battle for recognition for the value and purpose of their inherent purposelessness. To help alleviate this situation Metelmann and Landfester offer the Critical Management Literacy framework, which they argue can help to highlight the core competences of the humanities to management students and link those competences to new pedagogical approaches. With this, they contend that while management studies may in truth often have too much of what it takes to pursue utility, the humanities surely has far too little.

Kogut et al. read Jacques Rancière against the grain to argue that his notion of intellectual emancipation rests and thrives on a minimal humanism connecting it to the traditional humanistic preoccupation with reason and universality. The general reception of Rancière in management and organization studies has tended toward placing him in the anti-humanist tradition of his mentor Louis Althusser. However, Kogut et al. show that Rancière’s approach to intellectual emancipation also firmly expresses the humanist intention to facilitate a commitment to reason between equals. This allows them to raise the fundamental question of emancipation through learning from inside a tradition where the meaning of the human has become irrevocably unsettled and at the same time articulate what they term an “unsettled humanist approach” to what management learning and education could aspire to in the future.

Michaelson approaches business ethics as one of the “unsettled humanities” in the management curriculum to address the inherent tension it purports between philosophy’s “moral persons” and moral managers. Rather than subscribing to the classical ideal of collapsing the two, by teaching students to follow a set of fixed and universal moral rules, he adopts a musical practice designed to help his students recollect—rather than memorize—the essential sentiments they experienced upon their early intellectual encounters with the tension between them. With this pedagogy of resonance, Michaelson helpfully insists on diversifying the role of the humanities in management learning and education by focusing on the contribution of music to business ethics learning.

Painter et al. focus on the capacity of the human circulation of affect and its potential to unsettle how stakeholder theory is taught. Despite being one of the most commonly cited contemporary management theories, little research has gone into how stakeholder theory conceives of and mobilizes “the human” (see however Gersel and Johnsen, 2020). Introducing the affective perspective of Michel Henry, Painter et al. adopt a phenomenological approach to explore how reinvigorating the notion of the human may offer a meaningful anthropological approach in teaching stakeholder theory, while at the same time taking seriously the challenges to the unitary humanist subject offered by anti-humanism. This approach allows them to draw on the crisis in the humanities to illustrate that the ethical potential of stakeholder theory lies affective, embodied level of human experience.

Steyaert and Beyes focus on physical movement in urban spaces to develop what they conceive of as a “pedagogy of affect” in which embodied participation is at the heart of the learning process. Drawing on their experience with an ethnography-based course unfolding in the streets of Berlin, they offer up the potential of such a pedagogy to challenge management learning through a more-than-representational lens (or better perhaps: meandering), which practices unsettling, rather than merely conceiving of it. In other words, they suggest a way to break away from the docility of bodies in the classroom and the logic of knowledge transmission, and to focus instead as a learning opportunity on the relation of bodies to the socio-material assemblages of everyday practices. Their vision of a pedagogy of affect not only resonates with the reconceptualizations of the human underway in the post-human humanities, it also inspires us to think these reconceptualizations as revitalizations and possible futures, rather than as crises.

Greedharry focuses on the humanist assumption of a liberating potential in the study and reading of literature. In her essay, she eloquently presents the concern that by adopting this hope, literary management studies may unwittingly be replaying the colonial aspirations of literary studies. As an alternative, she suggests, one of the most interesting possibilities for literary studies in the management classroom lies in examining and exploring literary texts as an apparatus for management, rather than a liberation from management. In this manner, her essay balances concern and hope associated with the current ideological horizon that appears to make space for literary education at the business school, while at the same time threatening departments of literature with cuts and closures.

To complement the articles and the essay, two book reviews introduce the unsettling accomplished by posthumanism and transhumanism. First, Lisa Conrad brings Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s book The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibilities of Life in Capitalist Ruins with her on a walk through Gleisdreieck Park in Berlin. The grounds of this recently recovered park were historically used as shunting yard and depot, to then be neglected and overgrown after World War II. By walking us through the shifting entanglements of culture/nature, as well as present/history, in a recovery of various disturbances that have occurred on this ground, Conrad demonstrates how multispecies heterogeneity unsettles the human and its bent for culture and consumption. Inspired by Tsing’s methodological focus on the mushroom, Matsutake, which grows in similarly disturbed landscapes, Conrad suggests researchers should focus on posthuman ecologies, rather than on solipsistic human politics. Evidently, the mushroom is much more than an object with agency, it is a “living thing” put in center to dethrone modern Man [sic] and unsettle the history of “anthro” in anthropology. By affirming the mushroom as a means to unsettle and understand processes of unsettling, Tsing clearly unsettles conventional methods and explains disturbance itself as something unsettled, undeterminable from a human (ad)vantage point. Conrad emphasizes how disturbance can be explored as relative, and like previous postmodern theoretical trends that have deployed relativism productively, this disturbance unsettles the human possibilities for knowing and learning. It demands that we become feral.

In an uncertain world with thoughts and things that unsettle, Tsing’s ethnographic tracking of assemblages via feral fieldwork nevertheless seeks an anchor point in critical feminism and critique of capitalism. There is something to hold on to, Conrad clarifies, within the expansive unsettling, which Tsing’s decentering of the human accomplishes. Indeed, by acknowledging disturbance as a release of the human into the unsettling Anthropocene, we can enrich the mapping and apprehension of co-dependence, particularly between non-capitalist and capitalist forms. This insight is arguably also of relevance for those scholars who have tried to decenter managers by blowing life into the rational foundations of management through the humanities. If the humanities previously were used, and utilized, to enliven management, posthumanist philosophy has taken this enlivening to the next level—the more-than-human. The affirmation of complex assemblages, interspecies entanglements, and excessive relational potentials, encompasses a revised managerial sensitivity based on the realization that whether we want it or not, we are all in this “together,” inseparable and without control, defeated yet eco-ethically enlightened. The moral high ground claimed traditionally by the humanities is repositioned or replaced by a posthumanism that no longer transcends the Earth but instead craves a continuous unsettling.

The second book review complements the first with a shift in focus to transhumanism and human-machine relations. Inspired by her reading of Jennifer Rhee’s The Robotic Imaginary. The Human & The Price of Dehumanized Labor (2018), Nada Endrissat explores the unsettled human(ities) through robotic imaginaries and their effects. Orienting toward popular culture, the book investigates how processes of anthropomorphization inevitably lead to dehumanization, that is, an unsettling of the privileged category of the “civilized” (human), offered by alluring robotic imaginaries. In contrast to a decentering of the human, Endrissat continues to clarify how “the human” can be brought back into center stage. The human is after all able to take part as a subject with its own imaginations, worthy of study and analysis, perhaps especially because these imaginations can turn back on the human itself and dehumanize. The pressing question asked throughout Rhee’s book is how robotic imaginaries in science and technology have so smoothly succeeded in erasing notions of “the human,” and systematically dehumanizing specific groups based on their race, gender, or disability. Settling in with feminist theories, Rhee deconstructs the male silo within the field of robotics. Stereotypically incapable of attending to those relational potentialities that proponents of posthumanism now find so crucial for the survival of everything, this silo has over time and as remedy given birth to a number of supposedly “female” robots and imaginaries thereof. From the AI therapist Eliza born in 1966, to the Stepford Wives perfected in 1972, to Helen in Galatea 2.2 launched 1995, all the way to contemporary carers such as the 2013 nurturing operating system Samantha in the film Her, to Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, ending with the eerily sexy humanoid Ava who in 2014 strikes back at (hu)Man in Ex Machina. In the job of these hybrids to humanize the rational robot created in the image of (managerial) man, the effects of unsettling are exposed in a very effective way. The book thus contributes to an understanding of unsettling that is different from what we expected when writing the special issue call for papers.

Unsettled concluding thoughts

Thus the contributions to this special issue reflect on, and perpetuate the unsettling of the humanities as well as the unsettling of management learning. As we write, these theoretical and practical pedagogical matters appear cast in the shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic itself appears within the looming, darker shadow of climate change, tragically and irreversibly caused by economic and technological forces that had been previously thought to produce prosperity. What place will humans have in the future world? What kinds of beings must we be in order to survive beyond these unwelcome but ongoing events? How should scholars in the humanities fields engage with questions such as these? Generally speaking, how can this engagement lead toward better management learning? And more specifically, what have we learned from the contributions to this issue?

Surely one strength of the humanities disciplines is their emphasis on the many ways in which experience can be interpreted. Thanks to the natural and social sciences, it has become ever clearer that the distinctive human evolutionary trait has been socio-cultural learning. This development, often referred to as unique among animal species, includes a disposition toward communication, cooperation, and production that the acquisition of language and symbolic expression has greatly augmented. Moreover, language and symbol are the stock-in-trade of the humanities disciplines, as symbolic articulation is of the arts. Interpretation, in other words, is a basic, even constitutive human activity.

We believe that the contributions to this special issue show how metaphor frames perception and understanding, and how narrative provides orientation to experience and direction to activity. Therefore, learning to engage reflectively with these essential processes is critical for the ways in which the human will enable and foster creative and imaginative responses to changing situations. However unsettled, the humanities thus remain equally critical for making sense of the reciprocities between imagination, information, and human crafting of meaningful knowledge. In that sense, imagination is integral to human survival, much less flourishing. The unsettled world and unsettled humanities thus call for imagination, for new theories and frameworks within management learning.

Such call for imagination unsettles the orientation toward the world that has long been presumed by managerial education. It requires a more skeptical approach to our inherited narratives of economic growth and social progress, and of the place of business within these. It is management learning in the most powerful sense. The revised understanding, which today’s managers need stems from an intensified jostling between the natural sciences and the humanities, not least the recent advancement of the digital and environmental humanities. The novel entanglements and scars to come, may be infused by how new generations of becoming managers’ are exposed to academic debates about the Anthropocene and posthumanism. Here, the unsettling of the humanities, if it prompts greater critical awareness, has significant contributions to make. Practitioners of humanistic disciplines are invited to join with other disciplines in disrupting today’s business horizon and exploring new and more realistic, if less settled, approaches to management learning. By highlighting the myths, metaphorical and narrative lenses that are often deeply, if unconsciously, embedded in business disciplines and schools of management, the humanities can become more integral partners in rethinking management learning for a less certain and more unsettled future for management, within business schools and beyond.

In closing, we recall that when John Maynard Keynes was criticized for having shifted his policy views during the deeply unsettled era between the two world wars, he retorted: “When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?” (Samuelson, 1983: 19). In this spirit, we invite readers of this special issue as well as scholars inspired by the work presented here, to join us by embracing the possibilities that open up for critical thought, imagination, and action when our ideas and practices unsettle, that is, when we change our minds about management learning.