Recent criticisms of management education have raised the need for a critical pedagogy in management studies but have rarely evaluated the possible implications for management learning and practice. Drawing from critical and social constructionist perspectives, I propose we need to ground critique by incorporating reflexive dialogical practice in management learning as a way of developing more critical and responsive practitioners. Specifically, I reconstruct learning as reflective/reflexive dialogue in which participants connect tacit knowing and explicit knowledge. From this perspective, both educators and learners need to take a critical view of their dialogical practices and what may constitute `good' learning conversations. I include examples from my attempts to incorporate this approach in my own teaching practices.

Critically reflexive practice embraces subjective understandings of reality as a basis for thinking more critically about the impact of our assumptions, values, and actions on others. Such practice is important to management education, because it helps us understand how we constitute our realities and identities in relational ways and how we can develop more collaborative and responsive ways of managing organizations. This article offers three ways of stimulating critically reflexive practice: (a) an exercise to help students think about the socially constructed nature of reality, (b) a map to help situate reflective and reflexive practice, and (c) an outline and examples of critically reflexive journaling.

This article aims to extend contemporary work on relational leadership theory by conceptualizing leadership as embedded in the everyday relationally-responsive dialogical practices of leaders. Relational leadership requires a way of engaging with the world in which the leader holds herself/himself as always in relation with, and therefore morally accountable to others; recognizes the inherently polyphonic and heteroglossic nature of life; and engages in relational dialogue. This way of theorizing leadership also has practical implications in helping sensitize leaders to the importance of their relationships and to features of conversations and everyday mundane occurrences that can reveal new possibilities for morally-responsible leadership. We develop and illustrate the notion of relational leadership by drawing on the work of Bakhtin and Ricoeur, and on an empirical study of Federal Security Directors.

Over the last 20 years, social science scholars have challenged conventional conceptions of social reality, knowledge, and the validity of our methods of inquiry. Many have criticized the aim of mainstream social science to provide an absolute, objective view of the world and have called for a reflexive stance in which we recognize all social activity, including research itself, as an ongoing endogenous accomplishment. Three main themes have emerged: a crisis of representation, an emphasis on the constitutive nature of language, and a call for reflexive approaches to research. Contemporary organizational theorists have found themselves drawn into the debate and struggling with a number of questions around how to carry out reflexive research. I examine those questions and explore the implications for organizational research. In doing so, I attempt to enact reflexivity through one layer of narrative circularity.

This article aims to make a contribution to the literature by addressing an undertheorized aspect of sensemaking: its embodied narrative nature. We do so by integrating a hermeneutic phenomenological perspective of narrative and storytelling with a documentary case taken from a filmed tour of a sports team to illustrate the process of sensemaking around a specific event. We argue that we make our lives, ourselves and our experience 'sensible' in embodied interpretations and interactions with others. We suggest this occurs within contested, embedded, narrative performances in which we try to construct sensible and plausible accounts that are responsive to the moment and to retrospective and anticipatory narratives.

Abstract

In this conceptual paper we argue that, to date, principles of responsible management have not impacted practice as anticipated because of a disconnect between knowledge and practice. This disconnect means that an awareness of ethical concerns, by itself, does not help students take personal responsibility for their actions. We suggest that an abstract knowledge of principles has to be supplemented by an engaged understanding of the responsibility of managers and leaders to actively challenge irresponsible practices. We argue that a form of moral reflexive practice drawing on an understanding of threshold concepts is central to responsible management, and provides a gateway to transformative learning. Our conceptual argument leads to implications for management and professional education.

This article maps the various interests and orientations of social constructionism as a basis for: (1) situating work in the field, (2) understanding differences in its interests and scope, (3) making deliberate choices about our own approach to social constructionist research and (4) thinking about how these choices might play through our teaching. The article suggests that these orientations are based on various underlying assumptions about the nature of social reality, which influence how we conceptualize and study organizations and management. It offers an example of one such orientation—relationally responsive social constructionism—and explores its implications for knowledge and learning.