A Pedagogy for Critical Management Studies
Author: David Knights; Oxford Brookes U.
Author: Guy Huber; Oxford Brookes U.
Author: Richard Longman; U. of the West of England
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.
Moments of Discomfort: Poststructuralist Reflexivity and Researcher Subjectivity
Author: Melissa Louise Carr; Bournemouth U.
This article presents poststructural reflexivity as a way to both deconstruct the performativity of one’s own research practice and consider how researcher subjectivity is constituted within the research process. I present two vignettes as moments of discomfort conducting research ‘in the field’ which we argue create a sense of unease when shifting subjectivities and regimes of power become more visible. I draw upon Foucauldian Discourse Analysis as a tool of poststructural reflexivity to illustrate discursive regimes through which we become gendered subjects. The article illustrates the usefulness of poststructural reflexivity as a way to consider the performative effect of research and regimes of power which impact our ways of seeing and being in the world.
Entrepreneurship curricula through teachers' practice in Madagascar
Best Critical Management Learning and Education Paper is sponsored by the journal Management Learning
Author: Joseph Tixier; EMLYON Business School
In this paper, I propose to peek inside a classroom by studying how teachers in a third world country practice entrepreneurship education, when they are given a curriculum designed by an international organization based in Europe. As part of a one year long ethnographic study, I specifically examine how this curriculum is used by teachers in three vocational higher secondary schools in Madagascar. My findings suggest that teachers will anchor their decisions to adapt the curriculum according to three constraints: their own experience and, learners’ characteristics such as their level and the social contexts they are embedded into, and the schools situation, organization and logistical constraints. I use the didactic transposition as a theoretical lens to understand how teachers strategically select and adapt the teaching material they are provided with. I expand it to include elements on which teachers can perform this transposition independently, grouped into content, method, and timing.