Linda Perriton

Critical management education:from pedagogy of possibility to pedagogy of refusal

In this article we use the frame of the debate between Ellsworth and the Freirean education movement over a decade ago to examine the current state of critical management education (CME). We question why an equivalent debate has not taken place within the field of critical management education, which also positions itself as a critical pedagogy. Our argument is that CME theory and practice need repositioning, much in the same way that Ellsworth’s challenge to critical pedagogy attempted to do for that field. We conclude that to define CME using ‘traditional’ emancipatory aims is to misread its possibilities and position as pedagogy. Instead we use the concept of ‘colonizers that refuse’, borrowed from Memmi to illuminate some of the dilemmas critical management educators face and to think through the implications of our ‘Pedagogy of Refusal’.

We Don't Want Complaining Women! A Critical Analysis of the Business Case for Diversity

The author explores how the corporate discourse of “the business case” works to frame, restrict, and depoliticize the discussion of gender in the workplace. In turn, bemused and surprised by the ease with which women have been persuaded it is not “businesslike” to complain, the author explores how women’s linguistic choices shape their corporate lives. By examining the didactic and embedded “gender work” of a women’s leadership event and reflecting on her own, occasional, weakness for the discourse, the author contributes to the understanding of how a seemingly positive and popular communication strategy reproduces unequal gendered relationships in the workplace. The author rejects the claim that using a business case discourse is an effective strategy in improving the recognition, promotion, and rewarding of women in organizations.

The Political Economy of Networked Learning Communities in Higher Education

This article uses the example of the recent (ill‐fated) experiment in the creation of a global education product—the UKeU—to explore how the concept of community in learning changes in this context. It uses a framework borrowed from the literature on changes in the welfare state to explain how the new economies of on line education distort the traditional ideas of learning communities. The article argues that ignoring the underpinning structural and economic institutions in the global economy (or assuming that they will somehow be overcome) is naïve, and runs the risks of allowing the more extreme forms of the ‘new’ economic model of networked learning to colonise discourses of democracy and student‐centredness.

Positioning theory and practice question(s) within the field of management learning

In this paper we argue that management learning, as a field of study, has different choices to make than mainstream management research in its conceptualization and treatment of theory/practice. We believe that management learning as a field of practice – and as a journal – has both the opportunity, and a special responsibility, to consider theory and practice in ways that do not reduce the debate to disembodied actors and their assumed different occupational needs. Recent theoretical shifts in management learning have emphasized the relational, site and context specific conception of knowledge and practice and engaged with individuals (whatever their role) in exploring how they come to experience and develop new ways of being and acting in the world. We argue that management learning, when it looks at its existing practice through the epistemic practice perspective, will appreciate the contribution it is already making to advancing theory/practice understanding in management without needing to develop additional collaborative research strategies.

Forgotten feminists: The Federation of British Professional and Business Women, 1933-1969

Using archive documents of the British Federation of Business and Professional Women (BFBPW) this article explores the role of this early business organisation in campaigning for feminist issues in the post‐war period. It argues that the BFBPW is indicative of the complexities of the women’s movement in the post‐suffrage era when it fragmented into interconnecting campaigning organisations around a multitude of women’s issues. The article suggests that businesswomen in this period acted in ways that anticipated modern ‘femocratic’ practice in the way they sought to use business networks to gain access to parliamentary policy networks.

The Education of Women for Citizenship: The National Federation of Women's Institutes and the British Federation of Business and Professional Women 1930-1959.

This article focuses on how citizenship education was built into the organisational practices as well as the formal instructional programmes of women’s organisations in Britain in the pre‐ and post‐Second World War period. It compares the efforts of two such organisations, the National Federation of Women’s Institutes (NFWI) and the British Federation of Business and Professional Women (BFBPW), to train women in the skills of citizenship. Despite their differences in constituency and structure, these two organisations had remarkably similar views on citizenship education and shared similar educational approaches until the end of the 1950s. This article argues that the NFWI and BFBPW’s understanding of political engagement and their efforts to educate the woman citizen are important historical examples of how women have negotiated issues of involved versus informed citizenry. The educational model they used is relevant today given the renewed interest in the strengthening of civic society as a key mechanism for political engagement.

‘Here Be Dragons’: Approaching Difficult Group Issues in Networked Learning

Participative designs for learning are commonly advocated in networked learning whether generally as ‘collaborative’ approaches to learning or more specifically in the form of models such as the ‘learning community’. Such designs are likely to involve students and teachers in any of the complexities associated with collective endeavour: whether interpersonal, social, cultural or political. In non-virtual education, there is a long tradition of theoretical frameworks but there appears to have been less work of this kind specifically in relation to group work within VLEs. It is as if the tradition of participative pedagogy has found a home within the domain of networked learning but ideas that could be necessary in understanding the dynamics generated within such pedagogies have been left behind. In this chapter we move away from an exclusively virtual framework through which to examine social dynamics in order to mine a richer seam of material for making sense of group dynamics. We use a variation on Potter’s (1979) idea of the ‘dilemmas’ likely to be experienced by members of learning groups, to construct a framework through which diverse interpretations can be accommodated in making sense of online dynamics.

The (re)negotiation of the critical warrant in critical management education: a research agenda

Since the introduction of tuition fees for undergraduate programmes in the UK universities, there has been a great deal of attention paid to the impact of the changes on higher education. But the lack of coverage given to the effects of the growing consumerist discourse that was influencing teaching methods and assessment approaches was puzzling [Naidoo, R., and I. Jamieson. 2005. “Empowering Participants or Corroding Learning? Towards a Research Agenda on the Impact of Student Consumerism in Higher Education.” Journal of Education Policy 20 (3): 267–281]. There has been a similar silence within the critical management education (CME) literature despite the anecdotal accounts of the progressive erosion of the educational space for criticality. The changes to the educational environment present an opportunity to take stock of how critical approaches are able to respond – or if they are able to respond – to a more consumerist environment where different generational priorities and expectations of education are being expressed. This paper seeks to open up the debate and outline a research agenda to examine CME in the new higher education in the context of marketization, generational change and internationalization.

A Reflection on the Significance of Numbers

This article reflects on what the author considers a curious absence of curiosity about, and research looking at the practices of, management development practitioners. Whilst appreciative of the breadth and depth of qualitative research presented in this journal over the course of the last 40 years the article suggests that we are far from having the measure of management learning as a practice and that it would now be helpful—perhaps even essential if the field is to be meaningful to academics, practitioners and policy makers—to establish the boundaries of the field with the help of quantitative data about the business of management learning.

The parochial realm, social enterprise and gender: the work of Catharine Cappe and Faith Gray and others in York, 1780–1820

Abstract Catharine Cappe and Faith Gray, and a wider group of women to whom they had strong network ties, founded a number of philanthropic enterprises in York, England, in the 1780s. Their activities were largely focused on the provision of sickness benefits to single and married women and the management of schools for girls that had a substantial occupational training element. The social enterprises they formed or operated were long-lasting – in the case of the York Female Friendly Society (YFFS) operating well into the twentieth century. The article considers the role of parochial networks in creating and sustaining social enterprises in the late Georgian period and the ways in which the women’s activities were both shaped by gender, and in turn, shaped gender relations.