The Troubadours of Knowledge: Passion and Invention in Management Education

Abstract

This paper argues that current management education works primarily with an instrumental, reified and fragmented conception of knowledge that ignores the connection between knowing and passion. To propose a learning process that is less dispassionate and disembodied and that conceives of knowledge as invention, we first exemplify the current crises of (management) education and reflect on its implied concepts of knowledge and learning along Lyotard's principle of `performativity'. We further probe the relationship between passion and knowledge through Derrida's idea of the `unconditional university' and illustrate its merit for both critical reflection and affirmative invention. Instead of a nostalgic re-evocation of ancient pedagogies, we reflect critically upon the possibilities of a deconstruction-based pedagogy in contemporary management education and propose Serres' figure of the `troubadour of knowledge' as a conceptual persona that can guide us in developing learning practices that incorporate and combine the value of critique and invention.