M. Ann Welsh

Product Development Tensions: Exploring Contrasting Styles of Project Management

Successful product development requires managing tensions—coping with fluctuating contingencies to foster innovation and efficiency. To investigate this challenge, we explored the nature, dynamics,...

Spirituality and Organizational Transformation

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 depictin...

Critical Pedagogy in the `New Paradigm'

This article argues for the adoption of critical pedagogy by management educators. This change not only recognizes the Profound shifts in competitiveness that have already occurred in the business environment, but would also equip students as independent learners. Students become capable of a complicated understanding of the historical, social, political, and philosophical traditions underlying contemporary conceptions of organizations and management. Truly critical pedagogy necessitates changes in educational roles, curricular content, and classroom practices to create a learning space that supports and encourages students to engage in critical commentary. This space emerges when power in the classroom is de-centered, disciplinary borders become permeable, and issues are problematized. Two examples of implementing critical pedagogy in content (text selection) and process (paradoxical thinking) are presented to illustrate the potential for the transformation of organizational arrangements. Critical pedagogy in management education possesses the capacity for developing students with a greater sensitivity to the emancipatory and transformational possibilities in the future.

Advocacy, Performance, and Threshold Influences on Decisions to Terminate New Product Development

Termination of new product development projects was examined as an advocacy process influenced by performance judgments and unobserved performance thresholds, and contextual factors related to the ...

The Ecollaborative: Teaching Sustainability Through Critical Pedagogy:

The Ecollaborative is an interdisciplinary course where teams of students from business, industrial design, and environmental studies create or redesign a product for a corporate client using principles of sustainable design and development. Three aspects of this course make it valuable to students: the use of critical pedagogy, a collaborative approach to innovation management (across disciplines and organizations), and a real-world context. The resulting learning experience empowers students to move beyond discipline-specific models of new product development and to use principles of sustainability to drive innovation.

Combining Critical Reflection and Design Thinking to Develop Integrative Learners.

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.

Whither the MBA? Or the Withering of MBAs?

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.

Political Legacy of Administrative Succession

The article examines the influence of political activity during executive succession on post-succession outcomes. A discussion is presented about the influence of an organizations resource environ...

Discovering the Keys: Spirit in Teaching and the Journey of Learning

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.

Against Spoon-Feeding. For Learning. Reflections on Students’ Claims to Knowledge

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.