Journal of Management Education

In this article, Camus’s reading of the myth of Sisyphus provides an “entrepreneurial” perspective on management education. Traditionally management has been constrained by the conceptually limiting horizon of management knowledge and practice, with an emphasis on control and efficiency. As such, learning processes have come to reproduce a manipulable homo oeconomicus. Sisyphus’s desire to create, the “absurdity” of his dignified revolt, in short, his “entrepreneurship,” exemplify a transformative and playful force central to learning processes. Embracing the opening toward a metaphorical style, this article introduces Sisyphean “entrepreneurship” as a novel way of thinking about and organizing learning processes in management education.

This article explores the metaphor of music in the analysis of teaching team-based courses. The metaphorical lens suggests creative ways of sensing the character and flow of learning by guiding inquiry into such musical attributes as melody, harmony, dynamics, tempo, and rhythm. Viewing teachers and students as “players in the band” and “naming that tune” enhances the instructor’s awareness and crystallizes the broader meaning of the situation. This novel way of analyzing these data can lead to interventions that may not occur to the teacher using more literal analysis.

The metaphors we use can influence our behavior. This article proposes a new metaphor to help guide online instructors to more effective practices. The metaphor, gardening in cyberspace, is about creating an environment that fosters learning and personal growth. The practices of good gardening—positioning, conditioning soil, watering, and controlling weeds and pests—all serve as useful analogues to good online pedagogical practices, including addressing individual differences, motivating the student, providing feedback, and avoiding information overload. Examples of instructional design and course management techniques are included to illustrate what online instructors might do differently if they took the gardening perspective seriously. The authors also extend the metaphor to explore administration’s role as gardening store proprietors.

This article draws on poststructural Experiential Learning Theory to conceptualize management development as a series of concurrent reflective conversations. The developmental change process is illustrated through the experiences of Lewis Carroll’s character Alice in the books Through the Looking Glass and Alice and Her Adventures in Wonderland. Furthering the distinction between personal and social knowledge, the article suggests that development, and by extension learning, is not a direct reflection of individual self but rather a process of looking “awry” at individual experience. Implications for the efficacy of various pedagogies—such as lecture, simulations and experiential exercises, critical facilitation, and problem solving—are explored for each conversation.

Are management textbooks propaganda? Do textbook authors write to advance the interests of a particular group or groups (such as employees, organizations, and/or society)? Do they write to present the theory and research of the academic discipline? Do they write primarily to produce a product that consumers (faculty and students) will buy in sufficient numbers and at a price that will yield financial profit? This article explores these and related questions by asking four well-established management textbook authors—Kim Cameron, Duane Ireland, Bob Lussier, and Steve Robbins—to react to the metaphor of “management textbooks as propaganda or ideology.” Their responses provide insights into the role of textbook authors in shaping the direction of management education.

Whether or not the management textbook qualifies as ideology and as propaganda has important implications for where the study of management can be located in an undergraduate college curriculum. This article contains a sketch of one way to use the concept of management practice as the focal point for an undergraduate course about pluralism in American society. In such a course, the study of management practice is not an end in itself but rather becomes a means to an end in each student’s quest to find an intellectual voice. This kind of critical study of management practice is enhanced by the way that Cameron, Ireland, Lussier, New, and Robbins sidestep the question of management textbooks as propaganda.

Mainstream management texts seek to legitimize a social order in which certain power relationships are naturalized and seen as the logical end of a historical development. Also, the ideological basis of managerialism determines the nature of the managerial discourse in which some interests are privileged whereas others are marginalized. Because they promote a managerial ideology in which sectional interests are passed off as universal, management texts can be seen, at least partly, as instruments of propaganda.