De-disciplining humanity: the humanities’ case for Critical Management Literacy

Abstract

From the point of view of the humanities, it is a very promising development that management studies have recently turned to the humanities in the quest for competences which are perceived by both managers and the public to be sadly lacking in management education. From the point of view of management studies, however, humanities’ scholars usually fall equally sadly short of teaching those competences to management students in a manner designed to convey what, exactly, those competences are and why they should need them. Our article seeks to negotiate the gap between the two disciplinary domains by introducing a concept of Critical Management Literacy which is designed to communicate the humanities’ specific contribution to management studies. Applying this concept to the humanities, we argue that the humanities are uniquely suited to help overcome the disciplinary segregation of knowledge by teaching that humanity is not an ontologically pre-stabilised entity that can be owned by any discipline; rather, it is an epistemological construct which varies according to the contexts it is developed and used in. The type of knowledge the humanities offer makes this conceptual dimension visible, which we claim is intrinsically important to management education. To offer access to this knowledge to management studies, however, the humanities will definitively have to revise their understanding of their disciplinary identity to some extent.