Education philosopher Wilfred Carr points to the importance of engagement in the debates on the central issues in education, but not about education, rather for education. In this essay, we extend this position into the realm of management education by critiquing the disappointing outcomes of traditional approaches to teaching and learning, that is, spoon-feeding. We build on the imperative of enhancing student development through scholarly teaching that focuses on what we ask students to do. Our reflections derive from the disappointing results of an assignment asking students to articulate their learning by making claims to knowledge. Our interpretation argues for the need for reflexive practice by faculty as well as a systemic focus on developing students as more sophisticated “knowers,” especially in the management classroom.

In this article, we argue for advancing grounded curricula, which explicitly link theory and pedagogy, and executing them in authentic and multidisciplinary settings as a means to facilitate student growth into integrative learners. We describe the development of a student-centered learning experience that combines elements of critical management education, situated learning, and design thinking. The commonalities between a critically based pedagogy and design thinking create a context for collaboration that enables students to acquire attributes consistent with integrative learners: critical reflection, multiliteracy, the ability to negotiate identity, engage in constructive critique, become skilled in knowledge transformation, and create tangible and implementable outcomes. Drawing from 13 years of pedagogical experimentation, this article contributes to the domain of management education by providing greater specification to the concept of integrative learning, as well as articulating a novel and effective pedagogy based in design thinking. We present our story in three acts, showing how our methodology can enable transformative student learning and offer faculty invigorating teaching experiences.

In this article we describe a form of critical pedagogy introduced in an environmental economics course that engaged students in critical action. Critical action takes students beyond critical thinking, teaching them to think critically in analyzing classroom material and to frame action critically with the intention of fostering social change. In this application, students critically analyzed the neo-classical rational actor model of market failure, and then designed a project to simultaneously test this model and undertake a socially beneficial activity. Students’ reactions to the project are presented and analyzed.

This chapter distinguishes between good teaching, scholarly teaching, and teaching as scholarship to advance two related positions. First, the standard of "good teaching" is not. sufficient to meet today's student needs. Rather, management educators must raise their instruction to the level of "scholarly teaching", which shifts the focus from the teacher to student learning. Second, meeting this challenge is imperative for the scholarly domain of management education and learning to achieve legitimacy in the academic community. Legitimizing the scholarship of teaching and learning is attainable only if management instruction moves beyond "teaching-as-technique" to the realm of "scholarly practice," which is the required antecedent for those engaged in the domain of "teaching as scholarship." When teaching is viewed narrowly as technique, practice is commoditized and cannot achieve the credibility required to be a legitimate scholarly domain within organization and management studies.

The critical management studies project has generated considerable controversy in the scholarly community in terms of its place in the management and organization domain. Its educational counterpart, critical management education (CME), similarly has aroused debate among those in the management education and learning arena. Typically operationalized as critical pedagogy, CME raises a number of issues concerning the delivery of management curricula in institutional and organizational settings around the world. This article addresses these issues in terms of Barnett's (Higher Education: A Critical Business, 1997) conception of students as critical beings, that is, students capable of thinking critically, reflecting critically, and engaging in critical action. An American undergraduate course, focusing especially on critical action as a mechanism for social change, offers the opportunity to explore the prospects and possibilities of CME in a university curriculum. Students adopted a questioning stance, undertook individual and collaborative critical action projects, and reflected critically on the process. The insights derived from this critical pedagogy endeavor to advance the dialogue on CME beyond previous accounts centered largely on critical reflection into the realm of social change.

Abstract This course was a unique opportunity to participate in a project with a group of individuals with different backgrounds and who would hopefully give me a different perspective on how to approach a problem.

This article employs a critical realist perspective to contextualize management education, including the MBA, and facilitate debate on the Prospects for its reinvention. Two decades of substantive management education critique has not resulted in any fundamental change in models of content and process used to educate managers. We argue this is a matter of ontology and discuss the advantages of critical realist ontology for addressing this issue. A critical realist analysis identifies the generative mechanisms at work that both necessitate and constrain reinvention. We argue that one generative mechanism in particular, a legitimation crisis, could ultimately lead to the transformation of management education. This is explored systemically at the institutional, programmatic and pedagogical levels.

A long-standing challenge for management educators concerns developing pedagogies that confront the complexities associated with the process of managing. Faculty need to simultaneously acknowledge the practicality of content as well as the salience of students’ experience. This article proposes action research to raise pedagogy above methodology to surface epistemological and ontological aspects—distinguishing between descriptive, interpretive, and critical theoretic approaches to knowledge. Starting with an actual organizational problem, students invoke descriptive, interpretive, and critical theoretic approaches through observation, explanation and sensemaking, and critical reflection. As action research is grounded in democratic principles, student commentary illuminates the pedagogy as it unfolds.

This paper presents a critical assessment of organizational change initiatives. We argue that the limited success of most organizational change programs reflects the stability of the core problematic of control underlying both the old and the new workplace. Further, we describe the tensions and contradictions associated with various change initiatives and the patterns of resistance they engender. We define and relate three forms of individual resistance – those of the heretic, the tempered radical, and the constructive deviant – to organizational control. Yet we also argue that the process of control is inherently generative. Using the “new workplace” as an example, we illustrate how the negotiation of control has the potential to threaten the existing problematic by engendering meaningful resistance, creating a set of conditions that enable transformation. That is, control creates conditions in which the fundamental transformation of organizations becomes increasingly possible. The capacity for critical theory to exert an influence is conditional upon itswillingness to engage with mainstream ideas and practitioners in ways that are understandable and hopefully appealing to others (Alvesson & Willmott, 1996: 167).

Product development is a challenging process, marked by simultaneous demands for innovation and efficiency. While previous research suggests the importance of project management, existing conceptualizations are highly varied and ambiguous, prescribing divergent approaches to such critical managerial activities as control, boundary spanning, monitoring, and communication. We agree with Dougherty (1996) that these conflicts reflect tensions underlying product development. In an effort to clarify the nature and impact of project management, we identify two styles of project management extant in the literature--experiential and planned. We then develop a conceptual framework that contrasts the assumptions and managerial activities promoted by each style. Measures based on this framework are tested within an extensive, six-year study of product development. Results support our measurement scheme and suggest that the two managerial styles demonstrate distinct and sometimes paradoxical relationships to four aspects of project performance: achieving technical and commercial objectives, on-time performance, and efficient use of resources.

This paper argues for changes in management education that not only recognize the profound shifts in competitiveness that have already occurred but also equips students as independent learners, capable of a complicated understanding of the historical, social, political, and philosophical traditions underlying contemporary conceptions of organizations and management. To that end, we argue for the adoption of critical pedagogy [Barnett, 1997; Giroux, 1997; Reynolds, 1997] by management educators. Critical pedagogy necessitates changes in educational roles, curricular content and classroom practices so that a learning space is created which supports and encourages students to engage in critical commentary. This space emerges when power in the classroom is decentered, disciplinary borders become permeable and issues are problematized. Two examples of how to implement critical pedagogy in content and process are presented. The choice and use of text material can contribute to a critical pedagogy if students participate in selection [for the widest possible set of voices] and when dialogue explicitly considers the various perspectives in terms of the power interests they reflect and reproduce. Paradoxical thinking is a method that promotes critical dialogue and self-reflection and illustrates the potential for the transformation of organizational arrangements. This is the promise of critical pedagogy in management education: developing students with a greater sensitivity to the emancipatory and transformation possibilities today and in the future. The winds of reform in education generally and management education more specifically gained velocity throughout the 1990s. But attempts to transcend the strong currents of management orthodoxy and its analogous educational precepts emit only occasional and sporadic gusts. Paradoxically, just as the development and importance of management as a domain of professional study has grown in the decades since World War II, so too has its misconception and oversimplification. Grey and French [1996, pp. 9-10] have argued

This article explores teaching as an artful endeavor not unlike composing music, painting pictures, choreographing dance, or writing poetry. This art metaphor illustrates the creativity, discipline, and emotional and spiritual energy central to a learning paradigm where the reward for teaching is in the doing. The article focuses on the importance of bringing passion to and deriving meaning from teaching, the emergent nature of the learning journey, and the need to foster student self-sufficiency for life-long learning.

Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead long ago warned educators of the danger in teaching "inert ideas"—propositional knowledge that students can express but not use. In the context of management education, this article elaborates differences between the traditional model of instruction, which is teacher-centered and focuses on content knowledge, and the more contemporary model, which is meaning-centered and focuses on merging knowledge, thinking, and learning to enhance students' problem-solving skills. This article discusses an approach to teaching that fosters intentional learning, using knowledge as the means rather than the end, which helps students build their own knowledge structures. Finally, writing assignments that are explicitly knowledge transforming rather than knowledge telling illustrate ways of advancing intentional learning skills.

Although restructuring may represent an appropriate managerial response to global competitive pressures of the 1990s, initial research indicates that reorganizing efforts such as downsizing and re‐engineering are not improving organizational performance. The thesis is that structural approaches to change represent only part of the solution to a complex dilemma. Management also needs to address the role of emotion, and spirituality in particular, in the change process. Develops the concept of spirituality as a kind of positive emotion that serves as a thread connecting the non‐rational dimensions of human behaviour that are so integral to implementing change. The Porras and Silvers (1991) model, which distinguishes organizational transformation from organizational development as intervention strategies, is extended by incorporating the emotional aspects of critical variables into the organizational transformation approach. Variables include vision, transformational leadership, intrinsic motivation depicting work as play, and organizational alignment. Discusses implications for managing spirituality.