PurposeTo offer a coherent critique of the concept of managerial frameworks of competence through the exploration of the problems of generalizability and abstraction and the “scientific” assumptions of management.Design/methodology/approachEmploys the ecological metaphor of intellectual landscape and extends it to examining the development of the field of management, its early contours which traversed a diversity of conceptualisations such as management as an art, or an expression of personality, or as a vocation, the search for coordinates and a scientific image, and finally, a comparison of agri‐business and market gardening. The argument is illustrated by reference to particular management development programmes.FindingsThe argument is made that frameworks of competence impose conceptual limitations – “monocultures of the mind” – that are destructive. Justifying coordinates in an activity that is always particular, contextual and socially constructed faces the problem of finding stable evidence in a turbulent ecology and “frameworks of competence” are beset with problems of definition. However, with an understanding of power and discourse, and the application of the landscape metaphor such frameworks can be productively illuminated. What seems to be required is a wholesale shift in values and a re‐evaluation of the meaning and purpose of work.Practical implicationsUseful to curriculum designers and programme developers to analyse their work.Originality/valueProvides a detailed coherent account of the emergence of the concept of competency, and subjects the concept to wide‐ranging critical review.
This article responds to the recent calls for rethinking management education, particularly to those that emphasize space, affect and atmosphere, and makes the case for the practice of dérive as a way of infusing management education with experiential, experimental and reflexive learning processes. The authors draw on ideas and practices of the art movement Situationist International who proposed the dérive, informed by the concept of psychogeography as a way of exploring and reimagining the atmospheres of everyday life. The paper is illustrated by the authors’ teaching experiences in this area (or space as one might say). The authors argue that the dérive in management education may foster future managers’ imaginative skills and inspire an imaginative self-reflection of the business school and its spatial organization. The paper concludes that in re-enacting their experience of educational space, participants may learn about, reflect on, and develop their affective capacities for becoming part of organizational processes, both as students of the business school and as future managers.
This paper takes its cue from Hatch et al. and their metaphor of leader as priest. This metaphor is extended in order to critically assess the importation of the discourse of spirituality into the arena of corporate leadership. In exploring this extended metaphor it becomes apparent that the concept of a spiritually informed corporate leadership is flawed. We may expect individuals to behave ethically and morally, but we should not confuse this with good or bad corporate leadership and link such leadership to corporate action. By pushing the limits of the leader-priest metaphor, we do not claim to vitiate the value of the metaphor, but we provide different perspectives on some standard questions and show that the problem of reprehensible corporate action might be more productively addressed as an issue of poor quality social and legal design rather than a spiritual or moral deficit.
The author's experience of three common academic activities – the production of a portfolio, the preparation of a CV and the submission of a research assessment report – are related respectively to authorship, authenticity and authority. A comparison is made of how the 'being of' an academic is expressed in these three textual enactments of academic life. The author analyses how his experience illustrates 'the terrors of performativity' (Ball 2003) and he concludes that this illuminates how personal violation parallels our barbarous treatment of the environment and many of the peoples in it; as our education becomes more systematised, more managed, more 'effective' in economic terms, it offers less and less of a barrier to social barbarity.
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