Essential Readings in Management Learning

Volume 19, Number 1 Article by Pradeep Banerjee March, 2007

Essential Readings in Management Learning : Edited by Christopher Grey and Elena Antonacopoulou, 2004, London: Sage Publications, pp 429, Price: £29.99 (Paper).:

This book brings together a collection of papers from the journal Management Learning, and would be of interest to students interested in the pedagogy and practice of management learning. In their overview, the editors refer to an explosion in writing concerned with management learning, which is often naïve, and rarely explores the basic assumptions and limits of this discourse. This volume however offers the best of the writings. Grey and Antonacopoulou also touch on the contemporary fashion to denigrate academic work for being self-indulgent and disengaged from reality. However, there are ‘more positive images of academic work: careful, thoughtful, reflective and illuminating of reality’, which they have tried to exemplify in their choice of essays.

The editors define management learning as potentially encompassing almost all human activity, especially within managerial and organisational contexts, entailing processes of formal and informal learning and knowledge, whether conceived of as entity, process, relation, resource or socialisation. Such a definition enables one to relate what is happening in the domain of management learning to that which is happening in society at large. Distinct changes in the politico-economic environment are transforming societies into ‘learning societies’ on the path to becoming ‘knowledge-intensive’ societies. In such a situation, organisations cannot be far behind. The twenty essays that make up this text address such a concept of management learning, and fall into six themes: Organisation Learning and Learning Organisation; Individual Learning; Critical Approaches to Management Education and Learning; Pedagogical Practice, Globalisation and Management Learning; and Beyond Management Learning.

While organisational learning and individual learning are terms familiar to educators, students and practitioners of management, the remaining themes cover less trodden ground. Management education has been a part of formal education for a long time now. In the United States, business studies date back to the 1880s. An important part of the demand for business education has been the growing corporate sector the world over that employs management graduates for the skill sets that they acquire at management schools. However, as Christopher Grey and Nathalie Mitev point out in the essay ‘Management Education – a Polemic’, there is ‘a premium upon learning techniques, whose practical relevance should be demonstrable, and these techniques should be backed up by constant reference to real-world examples or case studies’. There is a case, then, for introducing critical pedagogy and ‘to overcome the hegemony of simplification’, as Dehler et al point out in their essay ‘Critical Pedagogy in the "New Paradigm"’. Conventional formats of pedagogy refer to the central role of the teacher; the learner is a listener, and not much beyond that. The teacher ’knows’, and the listener is a recipient of such ‘knowledge’. There are a few things in this arrangement, however, that do not quite benefit either the teacher or the learner. It leads to unsatisfactory pedagogy and inadequate learning in both cases. Tony Watson deals with this in his essay ‘Motivation: That’s Maslow, Isn’t It?’. Naomi Raab in her essay entitled ‘Becoming an Expert in Not Knowing – Reframing Teacher as Consultant’, also calls for developing expertise that confronts the ‘contract of cynicism’ referred to in Watson’s essay.

In their introduction to the three essays on Globalization and Management Learning, the editors point out that management learning is both affected by globalisation and a significant means through which globalisation has occurred. A lot of research and tools of management learning draw upon experiences in North America and Europe, especially the former. While one of the essays elaborates the experience of implementing management domain knowledge in Chinese state owned enterprises, that is, at work sites, a second evaluates the experience of doing so in business schools in France, that is, at learning sites. In both instances, a smooth amalgamation of existing local practices and ‘global’ practices seems to be beset with difficulties. In the French case this is ascribed to cultural reasons, while the clash between existing political structures and those brought in by globalisation is seen as the reason why changes in the Chinese scenario have been superficial. In countries where political practices do not present a distinct line or are in turmoil, the absorption of management learning works in an unhindered and unopposed manner. Monika Kostera’s essay on ‘The Modern Crusade – The Missionaries of Management Come to Eastern Europe’ is an assessment of what transpired in the region during the post-cold war transition. That the process of ‘the capitalist west transmitting its managerial religion to the eastern ‘heathens’ is counterproductive in the long run, is probably the inescapable conclusion.

Essays grouped under the last theme, Beyond Management Learning, take a look at future trends as well as areas that have received inadequate attention in the domain. The essay on ‘Aesthetics of Management Storytelling – A Key to Organizational Learning’ deals with the way ‘storytelling is used to socially construct meaning in an organization’ and the role of aesthetics in the process. The essay on ‘Learning through Complexity’ takes up the case of postmodernism and what that means to the practising manager who has to handle his learning to be able to operate in an environment that is at once chaotic and more demanding. A way forward through the labyrinthine maze of tomorrow’s world could be that managers faced with complex situations try to seek out solutions based on their own experience while participating in research work. ‘Managers and Research – The Pros and Cons of Qualitative Research’ offers a glimpse of the future of management learning – the development of the manager as researcher.

In conclusion, Grey and Antonacopoulou have achieved their objective of providing ‘a valuable resource for those studying, researching, working in or thinking about management learning.’ Some essays that the reviewer found of particular interest, both in terms of the area researched and the manner of presentation, were Amanda Sinclair’s essay on ‘Teaching Managers about Masculinities: Are you Kidding’ and the essays of Naomi Raab and Monika Kostera. All in all, this is an interesting and useful text, and is recommended to the serious reader.

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