Critical Management Education Research Articles

Unveiling systemic oppression in business education: Freire’s contribution to our quest for social change

Management scholarship faces a challenge in maintaining relevance, as it struggles to influence and shape practices that address pressing societal problems such as social inequalities and environmental degradation. While critical management education has surfaced as a promising avenue for reshaping management practices, it has yet to realize its potential. This article aims to address this relevance crisis by examining the limits of critical management education, particularly through the lens of Freire’s contributions. By recognizing coloniality as a crucial institutional constraint that underlies various forms of oppression, we gain insights into the barriers hindering our relevance. Overseeing this constraint is troubling within business schools, often viewed as colonial endeavors. Consequently, these insights shed light on our circumstances and limitations in producing social change. In response, we suggest reframing critical management education as a form of critical performativity informed by Freire’s insights. In this light, knowledge serves as a catalyst for change, empowered by its relational, responsible, and provocative validity. By embracing Freire’s principles of thematic investigation, thematization, and problematization, we provide a comprehensive framework for understanding and addressing academic oppressions as a fundamental step in the quest for social change, offering valuable insights for future research and interventions in critical management education and beyond.

CE: Suicide Prevention: Protecting the Future of Nurses.

Nurse suicide is an alarming issue that remains largely underexplored and underaddressed. Moreover, rates of suicide among nurses, which are higher than those in the general population, may increase due to additional stressors caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. There is a decided lack of data regarding nurse suicide or the efficacy of evidence-based prevention programs. This article examines the state of nurse suicide and explores the latest statistics on nurse suicide rates; contributing factors to nurse suicide; and current suicide prevention programs, such as the Critical Incident Stress Management and Healer Education Assessment and Referral programs.

Metodologia otra: Challenging modern/colonial matrix with Paulo Freire and decolonial thinking

An increasing number of academic scholars have been espousing a decolonial stance, seeking to address the so-called coloniality of power/knowledge. Yet, this path is far from cleared in critical management research and education, where we find a substantial number of studies bringing post-colonial arguments to the debate, but very few engaging with decolonial thinking. In this essay, we highlight the contribution of Paulo Freire to the decolonial debate through the concept of metodologia otra, a notion that questions the hegemony of Western-based methodologies and challenges the modern/colonial matrix by carving out spaces for those who have suffered a long history of oppression and marginalization to communicate from their own frames of reference. We argue that more than being critical, reflexive, or dialogical, a concrete engagement with decoloniality means mobilizing radical principles such as learning to unlearn, escrevivência, interculturality, and corazonar/sentipensar. Although Freire’s contribution to the construction of metodologia otra was original and pivotal, this contribution is poorly known. By salvaging Freire’s contribution in this special issue, we move decolonial concepts and values from the margins to the center of postcolonial debates within critical management studies and critical management education communities.

Learning with Foucault: Toward Immanent Thinking in Critical Management Education

Learning with Foucault: Toward Immanent Thinking in Critical Management Education

Is it all just melancholic pedagogy? Accelerationism and the future of critical management education

This essay is a personal reflection on the double-bind that we as critical management studies academics feel we face in our pedagogic practice. We want to bring about more ethical and responsible management through teaching our students critiques of the excesses of capitalism, but we are all too aware of capitalism’s extraordinary resilience as a mode of social, political and economic organization. We know how its tendencies readily co-opt even the most ardent criticism into its own ever-mutating paradigm. We thus feel torn between wanting our students to think and act critically, and the fear that critique is simply a part of the process itself. Rather than calling for raising awareness, relationality and the creation of difference, we present an accelerationist provocation. We invite critical management studies educators to struggle with us through upsetting considerations – that perhaps the most effective tactics for resistance might be to encourage and exacerbate capitalism’s excesses. We conclude with a note on melancholy pedagogy and the powers of hopelessness.

Flipping the normative: Developing and delivering a critical pedagogy for executive education in a UK business school

This article explores tensions when flipping the normative by developing and facilitating a programme-long critical pedagogy for executive education in a UK business school. Through a small-scale qualitative study with academics, we explore a critical pedagogy underpinning two executive MSc programmes and informing an Executive MBA. We demonstrate how the approach flips the normative by deviating from norms, doing the unexpected and disrupting ‘how things are understood and done around here’. Critical pedagogy is unusual, in opposition to traditional business school education. Programme-long critical approaches are rare. We explore tensions when flipping the normative through the following themes: power, control and trusting the process; vulnerability as strength and emotional risk; and academic privilege, precariousness and Othering. We make four contributions. First, we articulate a programme-long critical pedagogy in executive education, illustrating how this flips the normative. Second, we outline tensions and learning when facilitating a critical pedagogy. Third, through collective reflexivity, we reveal academics’ personal perspectives of facilitating critical pedagogy and its impact. Fourth, we theorize how recognizing vulnerability as strength is a pedagogical process that facilitates critical management and leadership education. We offer learning for future critical executive education and implications for practitioners, academics, business schools and universities to consider.

Creative and critical management education

Creative and critical management education

Addressing Privilege in Teamwork: Design Tools for Critical Management Education

In this article, we argue that a key diversity issue to be tackled in the classroom is disparity: Some students are more privileged than others, and their inputs are more valued than others’. Therefore, as educators, we need to devise new ways to rebalance benefits and deficits in our classrooms. Complementing critical work on privilege in business schools that has exposed and theorized the problem, we take a practical, By design approach to addressing privilege while avoiding diversity education dilemmas. We propose that such a proactive rather than reactive approach can help mitigate the negative consequences that the exercise of privilege may have on our students’ learning. Specifically, we propose that we can learn from designers how to use tools that help create collaborative, positive-sum environments when conducting team-based activities in the classroom. We present a selection of simple yet powerful design devices: Speaking rules, Problem framing, and Iteration. We discuss how these devices may help address privilege in the classroom with illustrative examples and reflections on the outcomes and limitations of these devices. We thus enrich the underdeveloped conversation on how design methods can be translated and applied to management education.

Jazzing up the classroom: Reflections on developing a critical pedagogy in M level teaching

The intended focus of this research was to explore the relationship between the teaching approach of a postgraduate module and the development of critical management education pedagogy. We utilise a combined action learning and group work approach adopting principles of action learning and reflection. The paper reports on the views of three academics reflecting on the development of a new module, two years into the delivery and explores the impact of using an alternative delivery model to generate a transformational learning environment while developing students’ approach to scholarship, research, and writing.The paper draws on literature on the Jazz metaphor and the relevance of a Jazz approach, with an emphasis on collaboration, trust, improvisation, and creativity, to developing critical research in management education. Key findings point to the ‘notion of pedagogical shock’ for both students and staff. Students found the change in teaching techniques to be a challenge. However, the anecdotal evidence seemed to suggest improved engagement culminating in improved results. The article therefore offers an opportunity for fellow academics to consider their approach to teaching and learning and whether such an adaptation would work for them, in their setting.

Can critical management education found a school? An experiment of the Equality Method in a University school of management

Can critical management education found a school? An experiment of the Equality Method in a University school of management

Critical management education: Selected auto-ethnographic vignettes on how attachment to identity may disrupt learning

In this essay, we explore the underlying processes of identity work in teaching from a critical management education (CME) perspective. Identity is a concern for both teachers and students and especially where the assumptions and routines on which it is grounded are challenged as in a CME learning environment. Through auto-ethnographic accounts of our teaching experience, we focus on the problems that result from being attached to an identity and how this might be explored through reflexive participative learning. Identity work describes the pursuit of these attachments without challenging the pursuit itself. A distinctive part of o2ur contribution is to consider how in taking identity for granted as a laudatory accomplishment, CME scholars often fail to recognise how our attachment to it can be an obstacle for management learning. To conclude, we speculate on the implications of our pedagogy for inculcating more critical forms of identity work, through which we might free ourselves to think and engage with the world differently.

A Pedagogy for Critical Management Studies

In this essay, we explore the underlying processes of identity work in teaching from a critical management studies (CMS) and critical management education (CME) perspective. Identity is a concern for both teachers and students and especially where it is routinely challenged as in a CME and CMS learning environment. In bucking the trend of offering a staple diet of managerial solutions to organizational problems, our pedagogy is inherently troubling. We reveal this through auto-ethnographic accounts of our experience of teaching critically and seeking to engage ourselves and our students in self reflexively problematising identity and the world which it reflects and reproduces. A distinctive part of our contribution is to consider the way that identity is so often taken for granted as a laudatory accomplishment and, as a consequence, CMS and CME often fail to recognise how our attachment to it can be an obstacle for management learning. To conclude, we speculate on the implications of our pedagogy for inculcating more critical forms of identity work, through which we might free ourselves to think differently.

Identity Work and Pedagogy: Revisiting George Herbert Mead as a Vehicle for Critical Management Education and Learning

Although identity has become an excessive preoccupation of people in everyday life, its centrality to critical management learning and education has sometimes been ignored. In this essay, we explor...

Moving critical management education to praxis: integrating professional services within the critical classroom

PurposeThis paper details how we adapted a critically informed third-year career management and development course to address an identified gap in our Human Resource Management students learning at both practical and theoretical levels. In order to address this gap, we explored and challenged the aims of our critically informed pedagogy, and alongside our campus career development services, collaboratively redesigned the course to enhance theoretical and practical learning outcomes of students.Design/methodology/approachWe detail changes made through three stages of curriculum redesign and provide an exploratory analysis of 106 student reflections on the third iterative redesign. This exploratory analysis focuses on student learning outcomes resulting from their engagement with the career practitioner and the revised course content.FindingsStudents found the course theoretically challenging and practically relevant and were readily able to incorporate career theory into descriptions of their own careers. However, more significantly, students were also able to situate themselves within a wider critique of the context of careers, demonstrating the development of critical reasoning skills and moving towards practical and critical action, demonstrating praxis.Originality/valueOur experience provides an example of bridging the seeming paradox of critical pedagogy and practice. Specific details of curriculum design may be of interest to those looking to improve both theoretical and practice engagement.

How to use Lego Serious Play as a Gamification Teaching and Learning Framework? A Responsible Management Approach

This paper conceptualises a Lego Serious Play Wheel framework as a gamification teaching and learning method. It aims to offer a detailed approach from Design and Preparation to Delivery, to engage a broad section of continuing learners and students, which can be easily applied throughout different educational and training contexts. The LSP Wheel refers to the concept of a circular learning journey and draws on a combined autoethnography responsible management research approach. A prominent part of the responsible management literature has hitherto focused on examining whether responsible management modules are inherently considered non-crucial elements of curriculum design. However, there is a paucity of research into applying novel teaching approaches to engage students and promote responsible management education endeavours. This paper therefore contributes to broader pedagogical application and critical responsible management education discourse, by providing educators with an academic gamification framework to support student engagement and co-creation of knowledge, by fostering exploratory learning environments and enriching the practices of active learning communities.

Challenging Social Inequality in the Global South: Class, Privilege, and Consciousness-Raising Through Critical Management Education

In this article, we study the nexus between class privilege and social inequality through management education. To do so, we conducted exercises with management students at an elite private busines...

Introducing the French Psychodynamics of Work Perspective to Critical Management Education: Why Do the Work Task and the Organization of Work Matter?

We call on critical management education to focus on the organization of work and the nature of work tasks. Although critical action learning and both reflexive and psychodynamic approaches to management education situate learning in actual work experiences, they do not explicitly encourage reflection on work tasks and the organization of work. Our aim is to draw on the French psychodynamics of work perspective to argue that reflection on concrete experiences and processes of work is important because work has significant implications for workers’ health and for society. We also use two vignettes to discuss the implications of French psychodynamics of work for the practice of critical management education.

Pedagogical invention in entrepreneurship education

PurposeFollowing the example of the critical management education tradition, the purpose of this paper is to argue whether we should keep EE vital by disturbing it, in particular by interrogating that which has seemingly become “untouchable” from interrogation.Design/methodology/approachThis paper takes inspiration from Paolo Freire’s work by proposing a pedagogical approach to entrepreneurship education which builds on an iterative and interactive process, oscillating between deconstructing and reconstructing entrepreneurship, creating space for invention in the classroom. The paper provides exemplary contributions in developing suggestions as to ways forward.FindingsThe ways forward being proposed in this paper include entrepreneurship educators engaging students as co-learners, and evoking their curiosity to pose new questions about the phenomenon; “grounding” students in their own creativity and supporting them to build the confidence needed to develop alternative understandings of how entrepreneurship can function – for themselves, in their future organizations and for society as a whole; and challenging our own teaching positions, and adopting a pedagogical process of invention, stimulating curiosity, co-creation, thought-provoking questions and entrepreneurial action.Originality/valueThis paper provides ways forward in keeping EE “fresh”, by sketching how we need to teach about entrepreneurship, adopting the critical insights emerging in the field. The paper argues how we do not only need other models and approaches to understand entrepreneurship, but also to understand learning and education.

The History Boys: Critical reflections on our contributions toManagement Learningand their ongoing implications

In this reflective essay, written for the 50th anniversary of Management Learning, we look at the history of the journal from a unique vantage point, our interconnected, academic lived experience of publishing in the journal. Our aim is to undertake an historical review of our publications in Management Learning in order to identify the key themes of our work, to make connections with broader academic and social events of the time and to assert the continuing relevance of these themes for future scholarship. We review 27 papers that we have published in Management Learning since Volume 1 (1971) and identify four main themes from our papers. These are set in the context of the development of critical management education. We highlight the broader dimensions to our themes and suggest two areas with implications for future scholarship in Management Learning. In our conclusion, we use our findings and reflections to identify what we have learned about management learning, as well as making a call for action in relation to what we are labelling historical reflexivity.

In whose interest? Exploring care ethics within transformative learning

This article brings attention to a seemingly pervasive and underlying assumption in critical management education that transformative learning is a good thing. We explore this assumption through a ...