Finding meaningful careers within the neoliberal academy can be a challenge. When we – a group of nine academics – reflected on our careers, we struggled to comprehend meaningful alternatives in academia. We found ourselves caught within a web defined by competition, performance metrics, and notions of the enterprising academic, as well as by neoliberal logics that shaped our career paths and ideas of success. Still, we were determined to reimagine otherwise. This article explores how we collectively learn to reimagine meaningful academic careers within the neoliberal academy, focusing on how temporality, place, and values shape this meaning. Drawing on yarning, an Indigenous conversational practice of communal and explorational learning from Australia, alongside collaborative autoethnography, we carved a window for “epistemic rupture” – a term we use to describe our efforts to (temporarily) disentangle from dominant neoliberal ways of knowing. Through this process, we created space to critically reflect on how neoliberal career logics constrain and compel us, while opening up possibilities for alternative academic careers. In doing so, we reconceptualise meaningful academic careers as relational, situated, and values-based, challenging individualised and performative career logics.
This research explores the roles of theory, reflections, experience and discussion in post-experience leadership development programmes. It offers a unique perspective on the doing of leadership learning – rather than talk about leadership learning – via ‘live’ data from participants’ co-constructed coaching conversations. The result is a dynamic conceptualization of the relationships between these four components as they contribute to the post-experience learning process, as the basis for extending Kolb’s experiential learning cycle into this context. This theorization bridges the gap between Kolb’s individual conception of experiential learning and more social conceptions to explicitly incorporate the teaching of theory and the facilitation of reflection and discussion. In this way, it highlights the importance of reflective discussion with peers, based on the telling, retelling and recalling of past experience, as the basis for new, co-constructed insights and understandings that can then find practical application back in the workplace. The more nuanced presentation of Kolb’s cycle offers a useful tool for management educators in the design of leadership and other management learning interventions, at the same time as emphasizing the need for educators to adopt multiple roles in developing an effective and enriching learning experience for post-graduate programme participants.
We introduce a new section to the journal: The Special Section. Special Section is designed to provide a platform to publish on topics that are timely and urgent, and which would be of interest to the readership of the journal.
Adopting the lens of Alfred Schütz, this article examines the case of a French-Italian organisation responsible for constructing a railway line. It investigates how knowledge is questioned and reworked when members of the two national cultures interact. Data was collected through 50 semi-structured interviews with managers. Results show that employees found the binational context challenging. Two individual postures were identified – ‘reflexive’ and ‘resistant’ – based on employees’ willingness to adjust their knowledge. At the organisational level, after analysing the construction of four binational artefacts, two types were identified, ‘shared’ and ‘contested’, interpreted as the outcomes of a cooperative and a conflictual experience, finally embedded in the ‘organisational stock of knowledge’.
This article reports on a 3-year pedagogical experiment exploring the integration of humanities into management education at a UK business school. Seeking to de-instrumentalize management learning, the experiment focused on teaching the humanities intrinsically, as valuable in themselves rather than as tools for re-producing economically “useful” management knowledge. The research investigates the lived experiences of students who participated in the module, drawing on interviews, reflective essays, and correspondence. Our analysis reveals four key phenomenological modes of being and becoming management learners via the humanities: defamiliarization, intersubjectivity, abductive action, and self-liberation. Our findings surprised us. Expecting to instill ethical awareness and enhance students’ empathy for others, we discovered a more nuanced mode of learning, in which students explored their own emotions and sense of self. We explain this unexpected outcome and contribute to theory in management learning by reconsidering the work of Robert Coles on moral imagination alongside recent debates on the nature of empathy. We argue for a shift in our theoretical understanding of why the humanities belong in management learning. Rather than “using” the humanities to make managers more ethical or empathetic, the humanities are most “useful” when they allow students to learn about themselves in ways that inculcate their innate empathic capabilities. We further reflect, however, on the challenges of integrating such a non-instrumentalist approach in an institutional context that prioritizes the acquisition of management knowledge over the experience of management learning.
Organisations in polycrisis no longer face isolated shocks but overlapping disruptions that unsettle professional identities and everyday work. This study examines how staff in UK universities learn, unlearn, and resist when institutional change accelerates beyond their capacity to adapt. Through a textual-visual thematic analysis of 41 participants' narratives and self-selected photographs, we specify how hysteresis operates as a learning condition under sustained polycrisis. We identify three patterned responses under conditions of hysteresis: adaptive (pragmatic recalibration), ambivalent (emotional suspension), and resistive (ethical defiance). These reveal how affect, time, and institutional complexity shape divergent ways of making sense and sustaining integrity in turbulent contexts. The study advances management learning theory by showing how professionals learn morally and emotionally amid uncertainty, demonstrates the value of multimodal inquiry for tracing affective dynamics, and offers insight into how leaders might recognise and support varied trajectories of becoming during sustained disruption.
This article examines how universities in the United Kingdom and the United States learn to govern antiracism through managerial processes of containment and control. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of governmentality and Ahmed’s analysis of institutional affect, the study conceptualizes learning not as progressive adaptation but as a political and emotional technology of governance. Based on an online survey of 138 staff working in equity, diversity and inclusion roles across 88 universities, the analysis identifies three interrelated mechanisms through which institutions absorb racial critique: procedural containment, where bureaucratic expansion substitutes for structural change; reputational governance, where risk management and moral branding secure legitimacy; and affective regulation, where emotional norms such as civility, optimism and composure sustain moral comfort and inhibit dissent. Together, these mechanisms show how universities translate racial critique into governable routines that preserve legitimacy while limiting structural change. By reframing institutional learning as governance, the article contributes to critical debates in Management Learning on the politics of reflexivity, affect and organizational change. It concludes that for universities to learn otherwise, they must unlearn the satisfactions of virtue that make moral progress feel good while leaving structural injustice intact.
In this piece, embracing ‘imperfectionism’ is offered as an idea for members of the Management Learning community to consider. As academics are subjected to growing professional demands – and as institutional pressures push them towards becoming the ‘ideal academic’ – imperfectionism presents an alternative (and more constructive) path to a sustainable career.
This qualitative study examines how institutional actions in a business school influence student disability disclosure and shape student construals of its risks and benefits. Our findings indicate that while students experienced inclusion initiatives and accommodations as distant and abstract, they perceived sanctions for unexcused absences as immediate and tangible, which significantly increased disclosure rates. Drawing on longitudinal data collected over 3 years through surveys, semistructured interviews, and participant observations, we analyzed the lived experiences of students with disabilities (SWDs) alongside faculty and staff. Thematic analysis identified two types of organizational actions—Facilitator Prods and Enforcer Jolts, which produced divergent perceptions and outcomes. Despite extensive institutional advocacy efforts (Facilitator Prods), students were more likely to disclose only after a compliance-driven attendance policy (Enforcer Jolts) was implemented. Using Construal Level Theory (CLT), we explore how organizational actions shape students’ construals of disclosure costs and benefits and their decisions to conceal or reveal a disability. This study advances management education scholarship by illustrating how business schools, as arenas that actively socialize and professionalize future managers, can inadvertently reproduce ableist assumptions through the very inclusion initiatives designed to disrupt them and how enforcement-driven mechanisms may paradoxically engender more durable cultural transformation.
This introduction argues that the margins of management and organization research are not simply spaces beyond which knowledge has failed to reach, but the constitutive outside through which the centre produces and reproduces itself. (Un)learning from the margins requires attending to the structural mechanisms through which certain ways of knowing become normalized while others are rendered unintelligible or excluded. Rather than calling for redistributive inclusion of absent voices into an unchanged epistemological architecture, this section advances the claim that genuine transformation requires unsettling the very criteria by which knowledge, evidence, and scholarly voice are authorized within management learning. The two articles gathered here illuminate distinct but resonant dimensions of this project. The first traces Indigenous students’ experiences navigating uneven and partial institutional commitments to decolonization and Indigenization in Canadian post-secondary education, developing the concepts of liminal decolonization and responsive Indigenization. The second reflects on storytelling as an ethical, imaginative, and politically engaged practice capable of surfacing marginal voices in management research and academic writing. Together, the contributions suggest that (un)learning from the margins is temporal, relational, and irreducibly situated, demanding accountability to those whose lives and experiences it engages and a willingness to remain open to not knowing.
Past studies of leadership development programmes (LDPs) largely focus on how specific leadership knowledge outcomes can be secured, often treating leadership learning as a linear and environment-independent process. They overlook the longitudinal and situated nature of leadership knowledge construction as participants move through changing organisational, programme, and relational environments. This gap is particularly significant for Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) leaders in higher education institutions (HEIs), whose leadership learning is shaped by how they interpret-and are interpreted by-their environments over time. With a collective autoethnography, this study examines how five BME women working in UK HEIs construct leadership knowledge before, during, and after participating in a BME-specific LDP. Integrating situated learning theory with research on organisational texts, we conceptualise leadership development as an environmentally endogenous, textually mediated process rather than a linear transfer of skills. The analysis reveals a non-linear, U-shaped trajectory of leadership knowledge construction across three environment-individual nexuses: organisational constraints, LDP dissonance, and peer learning; transitions between nexuses are triggered by embedded agency and belonging paradoxes. The study shows how peer learning enables BME leaders to reframe these paradoxes as dilemmas, supporting exploration and exploitation of leadership knowledge and informing the design of inclusive, BME-specific LDPs.
This study explores embodied leadership struggles and the ongoing negotiation of leaderful practices in a university context. The empirical material is based on autoethnographic diary notes of two authors of this study. Through our collaborative analysis, we identify two themes of embodied leadership struggles as we attempted to create leaderful practices in the university setting: (1) moving between heroic and collective leadership expectations through bodily spaces and (2) while attempting to navigate our vulnerability in relation to our leadership expectations about the quest to find leaderful practices. Our study makes three contributions. First, our study contributes to the discussion of leadership-as-practice (L-A-P) by articulating the embodied struggles managers face when attempting to enact and promote leaderful practices. Second, the study contributes to the understanding of how these struggles can become a source of leadership learning through vulnerability. Rather than treating vulnerability as an inherently empowering personal condition, we show that vulnerability is a context-dependent, relationally shaped, and negotiated phenomenon. Finally, our study offers a methodological contribution by advancing collaborative autoethnography as a means for enacting leadership learning.
