The Routledge Companion to Reinventing Management Education

Chris Steyaert, Timon Beyes, Martin Parker, Chris Steyaert, Timon Beyes, Martin Parker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317918677
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Formación empresarial

The position and role of the business school and its educational programmes have become increasingly prominent, yet also questioned and contested. What management education entails, and how it is enacted, has become a matter of profound concern in the field of higher education and, more generally, for the development of the organized world.

Drawing upon the humanities and social sciences, The Routledge Companion to Reinventing Management Education imagines a different and better education offered to students of management, entrepreneurship and organization studies. It is an intervention into the debates on what is taught and how learning takes place, demonstrating both the potential and the limits of what the humanities and social sciences can do for management education. Divided into six sections, the book traces the history and theory of management education, reimagining central educational principles and outlining an emerging practice-based approach.

With an international cast of authors, The Routledge Companion to Reinventing Management Education has been written for contemporary and future educators and for students and scholars who seek to make a difference through their practice.

1
Introduction

Why does management education need reinventing?

Timon Beyes, Martin Parker and Chris Steyaert

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At a time when a pervasive performative culture encourages scholars who work at higher ranked business schools to invest their energies in their research profiles, that is to say, publication outputs and external funding, why bother to focus on teaching, learning and education? And why in particular on ‘The humanities and social sciences in management education’, to quote the rather clunky working title that guided us during the creation of this Companion? Why are we trying to conjoin the management school with subjects like philosophy, art, sociology, cultural theory and history? Why does business and management education, characterized by healthy enrolments and a buoyant labour market for academics, need reinventing anyway? Apart from the lazy or cynical response that editing and writing for such a book also yields an entry on the CVs of all the academics involved, we believe there are a number of important reasons to care about the arguments and ideas expressed in this book.

First, for most scholars employed at business school departments or business universities, a significant part of their time is spent on preparing teaching and interacting with students. We hope that this book will work as a handbook that a teacher could turn to and be inspired to integrate the humanities and social sciences into their course design and classroom practice. It provides a reservoir of ideas and concepts, examples and theories, histories and imaginings that might help to reinvent management education, perhaps encouraging us to think of ‘management’ less as a discipline and more as a topic of inquiry. Indeed as educators, we should all be inquirers into our own practices, narrating and sharing experiences with our colleagues as co-practitioners, altering our own approaches or inspiring those of others.

Second, we presume that for those who, like us, engage with theories, approaches and methods based on the humanities and the social sciences within or connected to the business school curricula, there is a motivation to do so that goes beyond professional research interests. We think, as do others (Gagliardi and Czarniawska 2006), that there is ‘something’, some particular sensibilities or styles, that the humanities and social sciences can provide for management education and its teachers and students, and we believe that such sensibilities and styles are both worthwhile and relevant. Much of this book is concerned with exploring the nature of this ‘something’ because we think that it is important to share and spread concepts, thoughts and experiences that can make these contributions more concrete and applicable.

Third, the sheer prominence that the business school and management education have acquired in the recent decades lends this undertaking some urgency. It suffices to point to the last and global financial crisis in order to start reflecting on what kinds of theories and sensibilities might be found wanting in contemporary management education. As the Wall Street Journal recently reported in language that radiated astonishment, some business schools now ask their students to read Marx and Kant in courses like ‘Why capitalism?’ (Korn 2014). Indeed, the movement of critical voices that goes under the name of critical management studies now seems to be spreading far from its northwest European heartlands (Grey et al. 2016). Elsewhere on campus, a global network of students of economics has taken matters into its own hands and demanded a curriculum that takes different kinds of knowledge as well as theoretical and methodological pluralism seriously in order to be able to reflect on economics’ predicaments (International Student Initiative for Pluralism in Economics (ISIPE) 2014). In other words, it is high time to explore how the humanities and social sciences can intervene in management education precisely because the latter is often understood to be in crisis since it appears so insulated from the everyday concerns of global politics and civil society.

Fourth, we should write ‘can again intervene in’ because all of this is far from new (see French and Grey 1996; Parker and Jary 1995), and yet it is in need of reinvention. In fact, the humanities and social sciences have shaped management education from the get-go. Thinking historically, as several chapters early in this volume do, it seems that management education has been in crisis for quite a while; and the call for a more humanities- and social sciences-based curriculum (Zald 1996), or a return to the liberal arts tradition, is a quite well-rehearsed one. So we need to revisit these prior debates and remember neglected thinkers to think about what we might do anew, or do differently, in terms of reflecting on and practising teaching and learning at the business school.

Fifth, in our experience an interest in the relationship between the humanities, social sciences and management education is clearly growing. Perhaps this is simply because the ever-growing number and size of business schools has ushered in plenty of migrant scholars with different disciplinary backgrounds from what are usually called the ‘core’ subjects of management education. This may well be one of the causes of this reconsideration and reform of what the study of management should entail because ‘outsiders’ to the business school bring new ideas and have not yet adopted the common sense that isolates business from other disciplines (Parker 2015). That is why we feel that a more sustained discussion in the form of this Companion is needed to bring these voices, reflections and practices together to make them resound and circulate more widely.

Such is the rationale of this book. We seek to stage an intervention into the debates on what is taught at the business school and how learning takes place, and we aim to squarely position the humanities and social sciences within this discourse – where they belong. Thanks to the generous, thoughtful and eloquent contributions this book demonstrates both the manifold potential and the limits of what the humanities and social sciences can do to and with management education. Before the remainder of the introduction is given over to introducing the respective sections and chapters, we briefly outline the Companion’s institutional and discursive contexts and how it originated and took shape.

The rise and rise of management education

In the field of higher education, the position and role of the business school and its educational programmes have become increasingly prominent, and yet also increasingly questioned and contested. Although management education became a component in European and North American higher education more than a century ago, the past few decades have seen a massive increase in student intake and, correspondingly, in teaching programmes as well as in the organizational forms of business school departments at universities and specialized business universities all over the world. For instance, the field of management and business studies is now the single largest area of research and education in the UK higher education system (Pettigrew et al. 2014). To some degree, the business school has become the institutional home to scholars and teachers with all sorts of disciplinary backgrounds, many of them from comparably more beleaguered departments of the humanities and other social sciences rather than from economics or business studies itself – a fact that is reflected in the professional trajectories of many of the contributors to this book.

The sheer number of students who opt for management programmes corresponds to the managerialization – and, more recently, entrepreneurialization – of all spheres of society. A degree in management is now often sold globally as a prerequisite for a professional career, whether it is sought in the cultural, public and social sector or, of course, the business world itself. What management education entails and how it is enacted has therefore become a matter of profound concern in the field of higher education and, more generally, for the development of the organized world (Pritchard 2012). Fed by successive financial crises, ethical scandals and ecological disasters but also by such evolutions as cognitive capitalism and digital labour (Peters and Bulut 2011), this concern is closely entangled with big questions concerning what kind of knowledge, practices, sensibilities and worldviews are conveyed and on offer in the university sector in general and in its business schools in particular. The scope and direction of management education then becomes a subject matter of great importance because it connects the future of the business school and university to the shaping of tomorrow’s society and organizations. This Companion seeks to intervene in these debates and to interrogate if, what and how the humanities and social sciences can contribute to reinventing the education of what, in business school contexts, are routinely addressed as future managers, entrepreneurs or decision-makers.

Problematizing management education

The business school’s rise to prominence and power is accompanied by periodic outbursts of critical scrutiny, self-reflexivity and soul-searching. In recent times, there seems to be at least one so-called ‘crisis’ per decennium that calls provocatively for ‘a debate’ (Willmott 1994), that points to ‘the end of business schools’ (Pfeffer and Fong 2002), that proposes ‘a hard look’ at management education (Mintzberg 2004), or suggests that business schools have ‘lost their way’ (Bennis and O’Toole 2005) or sees them ‘in ruins’ (Starkey and Tempest 2006), followed by calls for rethinking management education (French and Grey 1996), for linking to the social sciences and humanities (Zald 1996), for coupling academic rigour with external relevance (Starkey and Madan 2001), or for developing new agendas (Clegg et al. 2011). Against this background of critical attention and sustained insecurity, there is a growing number of works on the historical conditions and development of the business school and management education (Augier and March 2011; Colby et al. 2011; Khurana 2007; O’Connor 2012; Pettigrew et al. 2014; Starkey and Tiratsoo 2007).

Some of these studies also provide the current debate with new routes to consider as they call for an intensified reliance on what is called liberal arts education in the North American context, giving new prominence to the humanities and social sciences. One of the main ideas concerning the direction and outlook of the educational philosophy, programmes and practices that ground the future of management education is to find solutions for the tension between offering a general, academic education in the tradition of the liberal arts that orients learning towards ethical and political responsibility within a broader sociocultural framework, and the desire for a specialist and practice-oriented learning profile that can draw upon technical skills and practical wisdom. This ‘broad’ versus ‘narrow’ metaphor runs through many of the chapters in this book, questioning as it does the epistemological divisions and institutional compartments that produce ‘management education’.

We believe that the refreshed focus on the humanities and social sciences and what they might do to reinvent management education is not a secondary or supplementary exercise to the ‘real’ business of business school teaching and learning. It seems commonplace (and perhaps all too comfortable) to bring in the humanities and social sciences as an add-on and perhaps ‘corrective’ to what are usually presented as core areas of management education (perhaps echoing the ‘compensation thesis’ of the philosopher Odo Marquard (1986), according to which the humanities’ role is to counterbalance and perhaps atone for the damages wrought by technological–scientific progress). However, one should note that the concerns of the humanities and social sciences have informed and shaped the study and teaching of management education from the start (see Rhodes; and Parker, this volume). The subject of business and management was itself produced as a pot-pourri of ideas from pre-existing disciplines because it could not produce itself from nothing. Simply put, the study of management and organization would look entirely different were it not for the thoughts and categories of, for example, Marx, Durkheim and Weber, or the forms of thought generated in disciplinary categories such as political economy, anthropology and philosophy. Using an insight from the philosopher Michel Serres, we might say that ‘management’ emerged and developed as a parasite, intercepting and extracting value (in the form of theories, concepts, methods) from humanities-based and social-theoretical thinking, perhaps taking without giving (see Brown, this volume).

The humanities and social sciences have thus infused and shaped what is being taught at business schools, even if contemporary versions of management and organization studies often prefer watered-down and more instrumental accounts of what it means to make sense of organizational life. Attempting to reinvigorate the role of the humanities and social sciences in management education is not a fringe exercise dabbling with exotic concepts and approaches on the margins of the real stuff – it is the real stuff and it has the potential to influence and transform what is taught and learned at business schools and how learning and teaching takes place. This Companion is situated in and seeks to revitalize this tradition of inventing and shaping management education. (For a while, we thought about simply calling this endeavour the ‘Companion to Management Education’, and let the chapters speak for themselves.)

Although based on a rich heritage of problematizing and reimagining management education, the Companion responds to a climate and debates that are very much of the moment. As noted earlier, there has been an increasing interest in rethinking the theory and practice of management education by encouraging interdisciplinary inquiry with knowledge and practices from the humanities and social sciences. In this sense, this book has profited from a number of conversations and experiments that we wish to foreground in the form of two trajectories. The first is the recent Carnegie II Report on ‘The future of business education’ (Colby et al. 2011), which presents the integration of liberal learning into undergraduate (and graduate) business education as one of the central challenges for business schools and business universities. Notably, the report calls upon the humanities so that business students can better learn to deal with the complexities of a globalized world market and societies under transition, which would require various essential competencies: analytical skills, multi-perspectivism and personal growth and mastery. These are related through integrative practical skills, which will be needed supposedly by a future employee or entrepreneur thrown into the cultural and technical dynamics of worldwide capitalism (see Sullivan, Ehrlich and Colby, this volume).

Following the Carnegie Report, a series of conversations in the North American and European context have turned this most recent call to reconsider the humanities ‘for’ management education into a broader movement and towards a research agenda that this Companion picks up and unfolds. This began with a Roundtable in 2011 at the Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, and was followed by the Aspen Institute Conference in the US as well as the Professional Development Workshop on ‘Integrating liberal learning and business education: putting the Carnegie Report into practice’ at the Academy of Management in Boston in 2012. A series of workshops followed: ‘Practicing humanities and social sciences in management education’ at the University of St Gallen, Switzerland, in 2012, and then events in Copenhagen (2013), at the University of Essex, UK (2014) and at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, Italy (2015).

These four workshops were the outcome of a second and parallel trajectory that emerged from a cooperation between the University of St Gallen and the German Haniel Foundation. Dedicated to the nexus of entrepreneurial practice and social transformation, one of the foundation’s main concerns is the support of both students and universities that seek to in...