A Pedagogy for Critical Management Studies

Abstract

In this essay, we explore the underlying processes of identity work in teaching from a critical management studies (CMS) and critical management education (CME) perspective. Identity is a concern for both teachers and students and especially where it is routinely challenged as in a CME and CMS learning environment. In bucking the trend of offering a staple diet of managerial solutions to organizational problems, our pedagogy is inherently troubling. We reveal this through auto-ethnographic accounts of our experience of teaching critically and seeking to engage ourselves and our students in self reflexively problematising identity and the world which it reflects and reproduces. A distinctive part of our contribution is to consider the way that identity is so often taken for granted as a laudatory accomplishment and, as a consequence, CMS and CME often fail to recognise how our attachment to it can be an obstacle for management learning. To conclude, we speculate on the implications of our pedagogy for inculcating more critical forms of identity work, through which we might free ourselves to think differently.