Educators sit within scholarly fields, many marked by strong disciplinary boundaries or paradigms of thought. Yet, not all fields share cohesion. Fields with low paradigms have a plurality of frameworks and less consensus, which can complicate the task of course design. When low-paradigm fields confront rapid growth and are in flux, field boundaries weaken and educational mandates broaden or come into question. These conditions can generate dilemmas: opposing alternatives with distinct advantages or disadvantages but no clear path to resolution. While the lens of dilemmas has informed theories of student learning, little research has examined the pedagogical dilemmas educators face when designing courses or how they address them. We examine this question in the low paradigm, high growth field of entrepreneurship. We interviewed 27 entrepreneurship educators at a range of institutions and analyzed 86 syllabi from 84 U.S. universities (74 at business schools). We identify three pedagogical dilemmas related to learning outcomes, topic breadth, and delivery modalities. We show how educators cultivate a repertoire of strategies to navigate these dilemmas and unpack the rationales underpinning each (i.e., amplifying, retrenching, or stretching). Overall, we contribute by linking field conditions to dilemmas that emerge for educational practice, with consequences for students, educators, and the field.
This study investigates how generative AI (GenAI) access impacts student performance in ill-defined, time-pressured business school exams. Through an embedded mixed-methods design combining an experimental study with qualitative interviews, we identify an equalizing effect: low performers improve while high performers decline, resulting in performance convergence. Our qualitative analysis reveals the mechanism driving this convergence- GenAI-induced cognitive load inversion. Low performers experience cognitive load relief by copying chatbot output, thus bypassing the analytical work the task requires. High performers experience cognitive load amplification, struggling to process voluminous output under time pressure, disrupting their analytical processes. We argue that task structure shapes GenAI's effects in time-constrained situations: the ill-defined nature of our task elicits different cognitive challenges compared to well-defined tasks of prior research, helping reconcile mixed findings on GenAI's democratizing effects. Furthermore, the findings reveal how traditional assessments fail when GenAI masks performance differences.
Despite substantial investment in leadership development, organizations often struggle to implement relevant programs effectively. This reflects the fact that the success of program implementation is contingent on identity dynamics. Building on the Social Identity Model of Leadership, the ASPIRe model, and evidence-based programs such as 5R that apply these principles, we argue that, to be effective, implementation needs to ensure that the approach makes sense for “us”, aligns with who “we” are, and fits with “our” leadership. To guide this process, we present a Social Identity Model of Leadership Development Implementation (SIMoLDI) which specifies four phases of effective implementation: (1) identity activation, (2) identity alignment, (3) identity actualization, and (4) identity anchoring. Each phase draws on distinct identity leadership components: prototypicality, entrepreneurship, advancement, and impresarioship. The principles we outline have general relevance in providing a practical, theory- informed framework for translating leadership development initiatives into sustainable practice, while being particularly applicable when leadership development is focused on building collective capability.
Our primary objective in this essay is to constructively challenge the dominant formats and templates of publishing academic articles. We argue that predominant writing conventions not only restrict epistemic inclusivity but also maintain a traditional hierarchy between the written word and visual imagery, thereby undermining the potential of combining them in composing and learning from academic articles. By emphasizing an integration of words and visual imagery that goes beyond juxtaposition and illustration, we suggest eschewing mostly taken-for-granted dichotomies-abstract-particularistic, objective-subjective, and linear-spatial-prevalent in management journals. More specifically, we explore the transformative potential of integrating written text and visual elements in management learning and education through graphic articles. Thereby, we aim to enhance the relevance, inclusivity, and engagement of theoretical and empirical research for learning. Our call for action suggests a foundational change in conceiving of knowledge dissemination and consumption that unlocks the potential of appreciating a simultaneity of detail and abstraction, an entanglement of subjective and objective perspectives, and a departure from linear thinking. Contending that genuinely multimodal formats facilitate more holistic and active learning experiences, we advocate for an expanded toolkit that enriches the learning environment and empowers scholars and learners alike.
In this paper, we offer an in-depth longitudinal study of a business school relocation. Focusing on the relationship between spatial practices and resistance over time, we show how faculty appropriated, reappropriated, and disappropriated their business school space, and how this "spacing" built, modified, and diluted resistance to the managerially driven relocation. Our contribution is threefold. First, we theorize resistance to managerialism in business schools as processually enacted in and through faculty's spatial practices. Second, we theorize the contested character of organizational space as it emerges through intertwined spatial practices. Third, we elucidate how combining ethnographic inquiry with collaborative autoethnography offers a meaningful new methodological approach to exploring the business of business schools. Overall, the paper offers insights into how the potentiality of business school spaces as spaces of resistance can be realized, understood, and empirically studied.
Neoliberal changes have led to the troubling dehumanization of business school academics. In this paper, we suggest that this dehumanization may be resisted by a renewal of Freire's humanization lens which views learning as a universal project of becoming more fully human. Specifically, we propose that engagement with the distinctly human condition of doubt provides one significant route to realize this learning. Drawing on 31 semi-structured interviews with business academics around the globe, we explore educators' experiences of doubt and its possibilities for humanization. We offer two contributions. First, we elucidate doubt's multifaceted, heavy, and socially produced nature to illustrate it as a condition ripe with possibilities for raising awareness of educators' dehumanization. Second, we explicate how doubt currently functions to both enable and constrain educators' humanization, and identify the underlying conditions which facilitate and limit doubt's humanizing potential. Reflecting on these conditions, our implications consider how we might support educators to better work with their doubt to facilitate their ongoing efforts to become more fully human, and in so doing, resist their current dehumanization.
The vast majority of colleges and universities in the United States are beset by existential challenges in the form of falling enrollments, rising costs, pressure to keep tuition affordable, and politicians who question the very value of higher education. Well-meaning administrators have tended to confront these challenges with various forms of managerialism: metrics-driven and short-term interventions that seek to maintain the viability of institutions (for now). Recently, several authors in the Academy of Management Learning and Education (AMLE) have, in various ways, called for faculty to assume personal risk in confronting these managerialist interventions, with no discernible impact. In this disciplined provocation, we provide a theoretical explanation for why faculty-in particular, business management faculty-have failed to rise to the challenge: Typical U.S. business faculty members do not hold an identity that allows them to see the challenges facing higher education as their challenges. Moreover, business faculty have tended to be architects and proponents of the managerialism we claim to reject. Before responding to the threats of managerialism, then, business management faculty must first adopt a different set of identities that would enable and ignite the courageous action we need.
In this essay, we argue that lack of attention to circadian health is undermining learning and well-being in business schools. We draw on research in chronobiology to explain how the normalization of sleep deprivation and misaligned circadian rhythms negatively affect not only students' health and well-being but also their learning capacity and work performance. In our call to action, we urge business schools to challenge the institutionalization of poor circadian health as an acceptable aspect of management education and management careers. To this end, we discuss how educating students about circadian principles of management and leadership can help them improve their own well-being and productivity and better lead others through knowledge of how biological rhythms interact with workplace practices. We also critically analyze how current approaches to teaching and learning in business schools can be better aligned with students' circadian predispositions and natural rhythms of learning, working, and living. In doing so, we make a contribution by demonstrating how a circadian perspective can help business schools cultivate healthier and more productive cultures within their institutions and empower students to foster similar environments in their future industries and professions.
Many organizations use gender-based leadership development for women as a primary strategy to address gender inequity in the workplace. However, gender inequity persists in organizations because it depends just as much on men's leadership as on women's. I reconceptualize gender-based leadership development to include men and introduce a conceptual framework for designing men's leadership development to advance gender equity. The framework consists of three key elements: reflexive identity development, which reframes self-awareness as understanding one's leader identity as shaped by power, privilege, and gendered difference; intersectional relationality, which shifts leadership development from individual skill building to relationship building that is responsive to power dynamics across race, gender, nationality, age, sexuality, ability, and other social categories; and organizational accountability, which moves leadership development beyond stand-alone programming and integrates gender equity as part of organizational structures. I argue that these elements are essential for expanding gender-based leadership development to include men and for embedding gender equity as a core aspect of leadership development and organizational transformation.
