Threshold Concepts in Theory And Practice

Abstract

This special issue on “Threshold Concepts in Management Education” invites readers to engage with a distinctive category of concepts that, when learned, result in students “seeing things in a new way” and thereby making transformative leaps in understanding (Meyer & Land, 2003, p. 1). Threshold concepts have garnered much attention and enthusiasm in the broader education literature over the past decade (e.g., Meyer & Land, 2005; Meyer, Land, & Baillie, 2010: Timmerman, Feldon, Maher, Strickland, & Gilmore, 2013; Wimshurst, 2011) but have been underdeveloped in the management education literature. Thus, our initial premise in proposing this special issue was that applying threshold concepts to the pedagogy and practice of management education was important and had the potential to open up valuable advances for students, educators, and managers. In their seminal development of threshold concepts, Meyer and Land (2003, 2005, 2006) identified five characteristics. First, threshold concepts mark the boundaries of particular disciplines (Meyer & Land, 2006). That is, they signify particular understandings that are distinctive to a particular disciplinary discourse. Second, threshold concepts involve forms of “troublesome knowledge” or notions that appear illogical, unfamiliar, or alien (Cousins, 2006; McCormick, 2008; Perkins, 1999). For some threshold concepts, troublesomeness arises because of the way core concepts are bound together in “an underlying game” to create a “disciplinary way of knowing” that may be imperceptible to novice students (Perkins, 2006, p. 42). Third, threshold concepts are integrative. Crossing the threshold brings new connections and