How Do We Know What We Know . . . and How Do We Show It?

Abstract

Our most common approach to selecting a topic for editorial comment is to draw on some recent event or conversation that we view as having broader applicability than just our own personal engagement. Then, as we begin to develop our chosen topic, we ask ourselves some questions: Where have we been? Where are we now? Where should we be going? We see this process as a means of inviting our readers to join us in an ongoing and reflexive conversation about management education practice. In this, our last editorial for Volume 38 (2014), we want to take up the topic of evidence, a theme much discussed in both the management and SoTL literatures, and the subject of a session we facilitated at the 2014 Teaching and Learning Conference (TLC) of the Academy of Management. We came away from that session with a keen appreciation for the many different possible answers to the question, “What is evidence?” and sensitized to the unspoken assumptions that each answer invokes about management education scholarship. In particular, we noted as salient what Morgan and Smircich (1980) warn about theorizing in organization studies—that such discussions may become “a choice about method, which then obscures differences between perspectives and orientations to research” (Cunliffe, 2010, p. 648). The current interest in evidence and evidence-based practice in management education is the result of a number of disparate environmental forces.