In Search of Diversity in Management Education

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to contribute to our understanding of the future of critical management education both in theory and practice in the context of diversity. Our focus is related to conceptualization of the field and the dynamics of implementation, which all too often remains implicit within extant studies on the future of critical management education. While diversity in higher education has achieved the status of shibboleth, a social good, a source of richness, a resource to be welcomed, worked with and managed, contrary to such rhetoric, management education seems to have largely ignored differences that surface in the classroom, or contributed to its suppression. This chapter addresses this gap identifying and articulating new implications for critical management education and in particular its application to diversity practice by first, illuminating how a synthesis of critical management education and critical action learning sheds new light on the complex and nuanced experience of working with diversity in the classroom. Second, the chapter elucidates how critical management education in the future will need to grasp the nettle to address the challenges of implementing pedagogical practices, which decolonize and diversify curriculum in terms of design, content, and process.