Social justice interrupted? Values, pedagogy, and purpose of business school academics

Abstract

This commentary results from a 2-day Critical Management Studies workshop at the Academy of Management that we organized in the summer of 2010, entitled “Whose business? Business, ethics, and society in critical management studies”. It summarizes ideas presented by a variety of scholars who were actively grappling with questions and challenges of contemporary management education, specifically with its role in bringing about social change while introducing Madeline Toubiana’s article, “Business pedagogy for social justice?” by way of example. Extending from the insights emerging from in this article, we briefly discuss the importance of reflecting on the values of social justice that we hold as business school academics, in order to begin to imagine the possibilities of the classroom as an arena in which we can inspire social change. We argue that academics ought to be reflexive about the values of social justice that they espouse, and that they ought to vigorously and substantively integrate these values into management education, such as through their infusion into curricula. Returning to Paulo Friere’s (1970) idea of “conscientization,” we propose that business school academics should use the classroom as a forum in which to develop what Friere calls “critical understanding.” In sum, these two points present discursive sources of agency to move toward redressing the systems of institutional constraints, which are currently thwarting business school academics engagement with social justice as identified in Toubiana’s article.