Abstract
‘[V]irtually all public and private enterprises – including most successful corporations - are becoming dominantly repositories and coordinators of intellect’ (Quinn, 1992: 241). University based management schools play a role in harnessing this intellect by supporting the development of leaders with the capacity to think critically, to make choice and to facilitate implementation. As centers working with a higher proportion of mature executives, management schools are forced to address the complex resource issues surrounding knowledge accumulation and knowledge dissemination. Enhancing the capacity of our future leaders to contribute to society requires gifted academics – academics that expand the desire for inquiry in their students and thereby develop their capacities for self-driven lifelong learning. Are such academics teachers, researchers or hybrids?‘[We, researchers, should] not fall into the trap of answering questions of increasing irrelevance with increasing precision’ (John Gardner – cited in Davenport & Prusak, 2003: 87).
Highlights
Ever since the first management education programmes emerged, the hunting season has been open on management education curricula in general and MBA programmes in particular
We argue that by seeing these as over-simplistic dichotomies, management academics risk losing the best of what is essential to promoting and integrating lifelong learning and contemporary relevance
On the one hand, we propose that placing lifelong learning at the center of MBA programme debates requires a significant investment in inquiry
Summary
Ever since the first management education programmes emerged, the hunting season has been open on management education curricula in general and MBA programmes in particular. Mast (2006) gives a fairly comprehensive overview of such critiques and focuses on the issues that have dominated the recently escalating critique from ‘insiders’, such as business school deans, programme directors and faculty. This provides them with the capacity to use their discipline to both transmit knowledge about the field – that is often considered a skill requirement by the learner – and to stimulate an enthusiasm for the process that developed our current understanding of the discipline It is this enthusiasm for the process that is the bedrock of lifelong learning and that can sow the seed of lifelong critical reasoning. The process of developing a more systemic approach to decision making in executives does not require that each and every management course be offered in an integrating cross-functional way It requires skilled educators who are open to the introduction of other discipline based perspectives into the debate, and who actively encourage this as part of the development of critical excitement that embeds broader relevance into the core material of any course. MBA curricula need to retain the capacity to teach and explore some subjects in critical depth, as well as, foster a more integrative metaperspective to deal with the dynamic complexity of living management issues
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