Management Learning

Over the past decades there have been persistent radical critiques of management. Previously the goal was to apply forms of Marxian analysis to the world of management and organizations, usually seeing it as a sphere of false consciousness, distorted and unreflective practices, and three-dimensional power or hegemony. Surprisingly, even after the Marxist scaffoldings that supported such claims have been deconstructed—both practically and theoretically—there are still current contributions to management thought that seek to resuscitate the same critiques, often under the rubric of Critical Management Studies. These representations seem increasingly bizarre, given the theoretical currents emanating from post-structuralist and postmodern thought that have been emergent in recent years, associated ideas such as polyphony, difference, deconstruction and translation. In this article we draw on these sources to produce a different representation of management—one that we would argue acts as an effective counter-factual to that which provides support to some of the central tendencies manifest in critical approaches to management. Rather than seeing modern management as necessarily a totalitarian practice, one that should necessarily be subject to a negative critique, we would argue that, at its best, it enables polyphony rather than tyranny, and the possibility to be both critical and for management.

Within the context of the ongoing debate on the relevance of the teaching approach to effective learning, the quality of teaching should be better understood. To help in this, the article presents a two-dimensional model of roles, based on three streams of knowledge—education, behavioural sciences and drama. It is a generic model, which proposes a conceptual framework for analysing, comparing and contrasting metaphorical masks that lecturers ² may utilize in their teaching, with particular relevance for management education and learning. It clarifies what these roles are, and how they can be practised to improve the effectiveness of teaching and enhance learning. A number of cases demonstrate the descriptive and analytical power of the model.

This article explores the trade-offs and tensions between knowledge management initiatives and expertise development practices. While studies of knowledge management and expertise development are abundant, there is no research that has addressed the inter-relationships between these two organizational practices. This article, therefore, addresses the following question: How does the introduction and implementation of a knowledge management initiative affect the development of engineer’s expertise within a firm? An in-depth case study of a company introducing new practices to promote knowledge transfer between projects in a fast-changing project environment is analysed. Based on the findings, we conclude that the introduced knowledge transfer initiative has upset the past harmony between expertise development and knowledge management practices.

The literature on organization learning does not fully recognize the difference between learning that is primarily mediated by written documents and protocols and learning that occurs on the basis of verbal and symbolic interaction. This article presents a study of construction project workers and emphasizes that learning is emerging in work-life situations wherein individuals are sharing know-how and experiences through embodied interactions and the practical use of tools and machinery. Co-workers in construction projects thus make use of verbal and symbolic forms of communication in their processes of learning, rather than various forms of decoded and written forms and computer-mediated learning. The article suggests that the learning organization literature should pay more attention to communities of practice that rely on verbal interaction rather than written documentation.

Today’s rapidly changing business environment makes organizations pay special attention to the functioning of their internal processes. Among other things, the processes of management development (MD) are expected to reflect better the new competitive reality, which is characterized by dynamism, connectivity, non-linearity and emergent properties. This article studies MD in the light of complex adaptive systems (CAS), and presents key ideas of a systems approach to MD. The article elaborates a framework that combines MD’s situational context, developmental guidelines derived from the CAS theory, and examples of relevant MD practices. The framework offers MD professionals a practical means to assess and strengthen MD’s role in business. Furthermore, directions for future research on systems-based MD are brought up.