Immanent Critique in Management Learning and Education: Organizational Contradictions, Emancipatory Possibilities, and Institutional Transformation

Éditeurs invités

• Torkild Thanem, Stockholm University
• Shoaib Ul Haq, University of Greenwich
• Sara Zaeemdar, Newcastle University
• Iain Munro, Newcastle University
• Alice Wickström, Aalto University
• Farooq Mughal, University of Bath

Synthèse

This special issue addresses an underexplored concern in Management Learning and Education (MLE): the contradictions between the emancipatory ideals espoused by business schools and the institutional, ideological and economic logics they reproduce. Critics have charged MLE with neoliberal, colonial, racist, and sexist practices, which reproduce the harms and injustices of capitalism. However important such work is, these critiques have largely been mounted from a position external to the institutions they target. Less examined is how transformation may be pursued from inside MLE itself, by holding business schools accountable to the very ideals they profess.

Extrait. Lire l'appel complet sur le site de l'éditeur.

Thèmes proposés

• Theoretical contributions developing immanent critique for MLE contexts
• Scholarship examining how management education's contradictions relate to broader transformations in capitalism, knowledge production, and subjectivity formation
• Efforts to rework immanent critique through decolonial, indigenous, and/or feminist epistemologies to address its Western/male-dominated philosophical origins
• Efforts to develop conceptual frameworks for understanding emancipatory learning within constrained institutional contexts
• Analyses of how business school commitments to sustainability, EDI, or social responsibility play out in curricular design, pedagogical practice, and institutional governance
• Ethnographic investigations of alternative management education programs that attempt to embody different values while operating within conventional accreditation and funding structures
• Studies of alternative institutional forms of management learning, such as cooperatives, free universities, worker-owned schools, platform-cooperative training programs, indigenous-led and faith-based business education
• Critical investigations of the effects of the rise of far-right political leaders on progressive initiatives in education, such as EDI initiatives, equal pay and promotions, sustainability and ESG measures, and campus protests
• Participatory research approaches that engage educators and learners as co-researchers in identifying and addressing educational contradictions
• Arts-based methods for surfacing and representing the affective dimensions of educational contradictions and their role in reproducing or challenging institutional norms
• Digital ethnographies examining online management education platforms and their claims versus experiences
• Studies of the pedagogy of growth taught alongside curricula on planetary boundaries, ecological economics, and post-growth alternatives
• Analyses of sustainability and ESG modules as moments of managerial absorption rather than ecological reckoning
• Engagements with climate-justice movements as sources of immanent normative reconstruction inside the business school