Verandah Discourses: Critical Management Education in Organizations

Abstract

The small but thriving Critical Management Studies community has so far confined its interest in education to that delivered in university settings. This paper identifies a framework for recognizing and understanding critical education as it is enacted within organizational settings. It analyses a portion of the data collected for a research study into alternative identities within organizational management education in order to suggest that critical management education (CME) fails to take account of the individualistic conventions that shape critical practice in organizations. The organizational version of CME works through a disruption of the ability of the manager to sustain managerialist narratives of the self. Two types of alternative practice are used to illustrate the ways in which this operates and are compared to an ‘orthodox’ performance of management education.