Management Learning

This article shows how the MBA plays a role in some students’ lives that goes beyond conscious cost–benefit analyses and instrumental value and engages the personal and intimate. It presents a thematic analysis of essays written by MBA students exploring what their MBA was for. The analysis revealed that the MBA functioned as an element or character in a life story and how, in some instances, doing the MBA was not about the MBA as such. The article advances our understanding of the MBA as an element in a life story, as a rite of passage, and as part of the intersection of boundaryless careers and changeable life patterns. Enhancing the awareness of this on the part of students may improve their understanding of what they are doing by embarking on an MBA and could enhance the ability of faculty and business schools to address the sometimes less explicit interests of their students. The article also confirms the value of a qualitative ‘storied’ approach to the study of the MBA.

In this article, we examine the construct of ‘leadership’ through an analysis of the social practices that underpinned the Australian Broadcasting Corporation television production entitled The Code. Positioning the production within the neo-bureaucratic organisational form currently adopted by the global television industry, we explore new conceptualisations of the leadership phenomenon emerging within this industry in response to the increasingly complex, uncertain and interdependent nature of creative work within it. We show how the polyarchic governance regime characteristic of the neo-bureaucratic organisational form ensures broadcaster control and coordination through ‘hard power’ mechanisms embedded in the commissioning process and through ‘soft power’ relational practices that allow creative licence to those employed in the production. Furthermore, we show how both sets of practices (commissioning and creative practices) leverage and regenerate the relational resources – such as trust, commitment and resilience – gained from rich stakeholder experience of working together in the creative industries over a significant period of time. Referencing the leadership-as-practice perspective, we highlight the contingent and improvisational nature of these practices and metaphorically describe the leadership manifesting in this production as a form of ‘interstitial glue’ that binds and shapes stakeholder interests and collective agency.

Entrepreneurs develop activities that aim to challenge the status quo, break rules and subvert systems. How can such a thing be taught/learnt in a business school? This article contributes to current debates within entrepreneurship studies that seek to address the subversive nature of entrepreneurial activity. It presents an ethnographic case study of an entrepreneurship course that attempts to re-define the teaching and learning boundaries of subversive activities in a leading European business school. Drawing on the theory of Bakhtin, which has thus far been overlooked in entrepreneurship studies, we unpick the potentiality of art practices in the learning and experiencing of the subversive dimension of entrepreneurship. We employ the concept of ‘dialogical pedagogy’ in order to address calls for more ‘relationally experienced’ approaches to management learning that foreground the conflicts, emotional strains and uncertainties that are embedded in the fabric of entrepreneurial practice. We show how ‘subversive dialogues’ are enacted between students and teachers as they engage in the learning process, and we discuss implications for critical entrepreneurship teaching in an increasingly commoditized education environment.

In recent years, there has been a growing concern around the connection between theory and practice, rigour and relevance, theoretical consistency and impact. This Special Issue links with the literature on the co-production of knowledge and aims to extend the debate to the concept and practice of social value and social relevance, and their impact on different ways of knowing, researching and learning in organizations and in complex contexts and systems.

The question of the social relevance and social impact of knowledge has gained prominence. However, the debate appears to have been restricted to academia in North America and the United Kingdom, which possess their idiosyncrasies. This study presents and analyses the dual research system of a Brazilian business school that has both applied and scientific research centres and concludes that (a) the development of the applied research centres had its roots in resistance to the introduction of a scientific business school model, (b) scientific research and applied research generate tensions when they coexist alongside one another, (c) the search for social relevance does not require scientific sophistication, and (d) the objective of generating social impact goes beyond achieving social relevance and requires specific competences that are not related to research activity. This study advocates for a critical and moral perspective with regard to the dominant model of scientific production.

Formative interventions and the specific method of the Change Laboratory (CL) are presented as examples of intervention research that generates actionable and societally impactful knowledge. In contrast with stabilization knowledge that fixates phenomena into static categories, actionable knowledge is understood here as collaborative and generative possibility knowledge intertwined with transformative action. The article asks what can be learned from the different ways the epistemological principles behind formative interventions are implemented in different CLs. Three CL interventions are analyzed. The analysis is summarized with the help of a grid covering the key characteristics of formative interventions: contradictions, conflicts of motives, double stimulation, zone of proximal development, germ cells and emerging concepts. Comparison of the three cases shows that understanding the specific historical stage of the development of contradictions in a given organization is of foundational importance. In transformations induced by CLs, contradiction and conflict may be seen as acute push and the future-oriented concept as gradually emerging pull, with the change actions of the local practitioners in the middle. Constructing a germ cell and eventually an expanded concrete concept based on it are the most demanding challenges for CL interventions.

Management concepts are both products and instruments of abstractive thinking. This conceptual article discusses the relationship between different forms of abstraction and the practical relevance of management concepts. It focuses on the difference between empirical and theoretical abstraction. The former serves to categorize while the latter serves to explain and construct. We argue that this distinction can partly explain the difficulties managers face when using the management concepts that researchers have introduced. To substantiate our claim, we analyse the creation and use of the concept of a corporation’s core competence. The analysis shows how, in this case, a theoretical abstraction of a novel strategic principle turned into an empirical abstraction, which in practice has triggered unproductive attempts to categorize existing competencies rather than create new ones.