Abstract
As two early career researchers who have recently started lectureships and tenure-track roles in business schools in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, it has been a perfect time for us to immerse ourselves in this collected volume discussing the importance of reinvigorating management education. It was only after having read this volume that we met for the first time, wondering how challenging it would be to write a joint review. However, we immediately agreed that this volume not only addresses the main challenges that we both have found ourselves faced with but also, and more importantly, succeeds in providing insightful and inspiring ideas that have instilled in us a greater sense of ownership over our teaching in a world where institutional pressures can make management education feel all too instrumental.
Fresh from defending our doctoral dissertations and entering the next phase of our academic careers, we have both received advice from numerous senior scholars encouraging us to teach as little as possible, in as limited a number of topics as possible, and to not focus on doing anything overly innovative with our teaching activities until after tenure/probation decisions are made. This bias toward research and the pursuit of publications as the sole role of the academic requiring attention is lamented in this volume. The contributors repeatedly cite their frustration with the current state of academia and the need (and challenge) to go against the grain of metrics, journal lists and research excellence frameworks. Hjorth and Holt’s (Chapter 8) provocative quote sums up the situation many management scholars find themselves in, a situation we both hope to avoid: What then for us, who are schooled in business and management studies and educated into the deadening, managed pools of money-makers, administrators and scholars? Evidently, the occupants have become tired of willing and opt instead for a kind of ‘hibernation’ in the safety of comforts. For this to happen, averages, protocols and definitions have taken over the work of struggling with truth, and this inertness is concealed by the busyness and haste with which comforts are pursued. This is, in fact, management. Can it, should it, be overcome? (p. 112)
This volume explores what the humanities and the social sciences can bring to management education. In particular, the contributors explore how philosophy, art, sociology, cultural theory and history can inspire novel approaches within (and outside) the classroom and across programs. This focus is framed as a ‘re’-turn to the humanities and social sciences, a return to the liberal arts tradition in University education. Returning these ‘alternative’ perspectives to management education is not viewed simply as an add on to current curricula, rather it is viewed as core to what and how we teach and aims to challenge our understanding of how learning happens. In fact, Perriton and Singh (Chapter 6) warn us that we must employ rigorous critical reflexivity when deciding which resources from the humanities to incorporate into our teaching so that the liberal arts approach has meaning and does not end up being mere cosmetics. In doing so, the volume is concerned with ensuring management education makes an impact on the student, rather than falling into the trap of blindly following the corporate world’s demands for graduate attributes and employability. The editors note the rise of management programs in the broader context of managerialization, and more recently entrepreneurialization, of society, across all spheres and sectors (p. 3), yet we feel the presence of students with interests and experience across multiple sectors provides a great opportunity to explore cross-disciplinary perspectives.
Despite these grand aims, the authors appreciate the context we as management scholars find ourselves in, caught up within a broader system that does not encourage, promote, recognize or reward passionate educators. The book provides hope and practical advice for educators frustrated with the broader system, who feel as though teaching innovations go unnoticed, rendered into an average score out of 10 at the end of semester, and at best triggering a pro-forma thank you email from the Dean. Mulling over the diverse chapters in this book over the past few months provided multiple creative insights into how to reinvent our own teaching. Absorbing ourselves within the chapters has inspired us to engage with teaching in the same way as our research activities, alerting us to how we might further engage our students in the lifeworlds of practitioners, and how we might bring fresh philosophical insights to our in-class conversations.
The authors provoke us by asking why, in this context of rankings, should we focus on education? Simply through raising this question the book provides refreshing advice for young researchers, advice that is not preoccupied with instrumental considerations of career progression, journal rankings, time management, productivity and spending time only on things that ‘count’, but rather focuses on inspiring creativity in educators and imagination in students, encouraging us to explore how we can reveal new worlds and concepts in our classrooms. The contributors imagine us as more holistic scholars, scholars who are ‘inquirers into our own practices, narrating and sharing experiences with our colleagues as co-practitioners, altering our own approaches and inspiring those of others’. (p. 1). Here, we are continuously reminded that we do not have to, and indeed should not, deal with our challenges on our own. Gherardi (Chapter 19) in particular emphasizes ‘the value of talking, reading and engaging with other co-practitioners’ (p. 270) so that we can share positive experiences of intervening in teaching and come up with solutions that work locally.
While this volume begins by presenting different aspects of the history of management education more broadly so that we can learn from the past – and to inform us early career researchers that ‘the idea that management education is in crisis is not a new one’ (pp. 5–6) – and while later chapters consider the role of business school curricula, programs and classrooms, great emphasis is placed on the individual educator. This individual educator emerges as an empowered actor who, despite various institutional pressures, can make a difference. Rhodes (Chapter 26), for example, assures us as management educators that we can ‘take permission’ to incorporate critical and unsettling perspectives, thinkers and texts from the humanities into our teaching: Education is far too important for all of the decisions to be handed over to an increasingly bloated managerial class within universities, especially when it concerns decisions regarding what is taught and how it is taught. As individual academics, we can retain hope that we are employed to teach based on our experience and expertise in our fields and also as educators. To not take charge of or take responsibility for the classroom is a retreat from professionalism that shifts accountability for education and learning from the academic specialist to the managerial generalist. This is nothing less than an affront to that profession. (pp. 371–372)
The difference to be made then, of course, is to equip our students with the tools they will need in their future lives, both as professionals and citizens. Looking at the debates in academia regarding the performativity of management knowledge, the increased focus on research impact and more broadly at the treatment that ‘experts’ have received in the United Kingdom following the Brexit referendum, the question, ‘what can we offer our students?’ appears to be a pertinent one. Furthermore, as Perriton and Singh (Chapter 6) argue, increased marketization and the growing tendency of university education to be perceived as a vocational credentialism has narrowed the scope for overt critical approaches. One of the core aims of this volume then is to outline an emerging practice-based approach to management education. To this end, several contributors present ‘guiding concepts’ that refer to important social-theoretical approaches, including experimentalism, wisdom, critique, imagination, sociomateriality and practice, that can direct a practice-based approach.
In developing this practice-based approach, the contributors encourage a focus on the importance of lived experience and how we can expose students to the complexity of tensions that emerge in our everyday engagement in the ‘real’ world of management, engaging with situations and problems that do not have a clear solution: … what is taught can only ever be puzzles, quandaries and enticements, which, in drawing one in, reveal and conceal at one and the same time without the presumption of there being a right way of doing things or a securing end-point at which to arrive. (Hjorth and Holt, Chapter 8, p. 116)
The doing of management is core to how we can reinvent management education and bridge the gaps between theory, philosophy and practice. The contributors encourage us to explore how we can engage students in lifeworlds of others (Barinaga, Chapter 22; Brandi and Elkjaer, Chapter 14). Through attending to lived experience, we can reimagine management education as an activity focused on generating empirical sensitivity, engaging playfully in the world, and developing our capacity to use knowledge creatively – what Chia and Nayak (Chapter 9) call relevation and revelation. This posturing prepares management students to … draw sensitively from their lived experiences and to imaginatively link their knowledge and understanding in fresh and novel ways to meet the real challenges and surprises of a fast-changing and globalised business environment. (Chia and Nayak, Chapter 9: 121)
Both Brandi and Elkjaer (Chapter 14) and Statler and Salovaara (Chapter 15) draw on the work of the educational philosopher and pragmatist John Dewey to develop the guiding concepts of experimentalism and wisdom, respectively. Brandi and Elkjaer use Dewey’s work to emphasize ‘teachers’ responsibility in guiding students to be better at dealing with problems in order to navigate (in) their lives and work’ (pp. 193–194). Their literature review in the field of management education and learning shows how Dewey’s pragmatism has inspired educators to employ an experiential approach to teaching where reflection becomes a way to turn experiences into knowledge and they conclude that ‘a pragmatist perspective on management education should include experimental playfulness’ (p. 203).
Following on from this, Statler and Salovaara (Chapter 15) employ Dewey’s philosophy of knowledge to consider how practical wisdom can be developed among business students through educational practices that involve learning through experience and they present a case from their own experience where students were asked to engage in strategic consulting projects with nonprofit organizations as their clients. De Cock (Chapter 17) is inspired by the work of the social and philosophical thinker Cornelius Castoriadis and presents the guiding concept of imagination. De Cock too gives us an insight into his own practice of teaching creativity seminars and also outlines a group project where students are asked to work on an organizational problem, often that of an invited organization.
By placing such a great emphasis on experiential learning as part of the practice-based approach to management education, these authors, as well as the other contributors, manage to provide solutions to the paradox explored by Baecker (Chapter 7) of needing to teach students about something that needs to be experienced to be understood. Furthermore, the practice-based approach presented in this volume does not so much equip students with a set of tools, as much as give them the ability to find, assess and develop their own toolkits to put them in the best possible position to deal with the complexities of the management world. As Gherardi concludes: ‘From a practice-based approach, management knowledge is “always in the making” […]’. (Chapter 19: 269). As educators, we must resist the temptation to conform to the mainstream ideas and traditional textbooks, rather we should explore something radical and aligned with our values. Learmonth et al (Chapter 13) call this an embrace of complexity and suggest we should employ more improvisation in the classroom to shift ways of thinking and challenge taken for granted assumptions about management.
Building on this attention to practice, everyday experience and complexity, many contributions concentrate on how to assist students in developing a critical lens. Various chapters offer rich descriptions of novel approaches to education that assist in developing critical thinking in practice-oriented students. The authors offer numerous insights on how specific approaches such as ethnography, fieldwork, arts education, film studies and music can assist in tackling complex issues for managers around climate change, inequalities and gender equality. Reading the rich descriptions, justifications and cases of these different approaches brought in from the humanities and social sciences got our creative juices flowing, allowing insights to emerge for your own courses. Bringing novel approaches to the complex issues provides an opportunity to develop critical thinking as it forces both scholars and students to ask bigger questions and challenge assumptions about broader economic systems and the role of business in nature and society.
Thankfully, the solutions offered for reinventing management education are not purely driven by placing content online through blended learning, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), and the flipped classroom. As noted by Bachmann and Shah (Chapter 21: 288), despite their promise, some of these approaches have done little more than replace face-to-face lectures with video lectures, rather than truly reimagining the way we engage with content or our students. The role of education technologies is not ignored in this volume, but instead of offering well-rehearsed ideas, the authors offer fresh insights on how understanding the way we all engage with technology may help reshape our courses. Once again we are reminded that if our teaching ‘innovations’ are no more than cosmetic changes, they are a waste of time.
Overall, the volume serves as a timely reminder of the importance of our roles as educators and the countless opportunities ahead of us to reinvent our teaching in a way that compliments rather than compromises our push toward tenure and promotion. Most importantly, by presenting fundamental philosophical concepts behind and important social-theoretical approaches to management teaching, rather than a list of tips and tricks to manage teaching, and by furthermore illustrating how these concepts and approaches can be applied in the classroom through numerous interesting and insightful examples and cases, the contributors not only reinvent management education but also reinvigorate the individual management educator. While we might often feel like our academic identity is being torn apart by the ‘researcher’ and the ‘educator’ working against each other, the contributors give us hope that if we are brave enough to take ownership of and responsibility for our teaching and worry less about the institutional structures, strategies and pressures, we will not only do our students a greater service but also succeed in forging an academic identity where ‘researcher’ and ‘educator’ have joint forces. This volume offers inspiration to go forth, appreciating that university life should be an ‘adventure of ideas shared by both young minds and experienced researchers’ (Chia and Nayak, Chapter 9: 125).