Challenging the hidden curriculum: Building a lived process for responsibility in responsible management education

Abstract

This essay argues that conceptualisations of responsibility in the responsible management education literature are generally superficial or unstated. We propose that this leads to practical understandings of responsibility being drawn from the hidden curriculum of socialised learning in the background of formal educational contexts. To disrupt this and enable critical thought and action, we argue for the integration of three perspectives that can be combined in a dynamic, lived process. First, we suggest that evidence-based management challenges us to seek out evidence to inform responsible management practice in ways that are thoughtful, critical and reflexive. Second, we argue that an interpretive approach employing philosophical hermeneutics connects responsibility to situated judgement about how we should interpret evidence available to us in the context of lived human experience in dialogue with others. Third, deconstruction reveals (aspects of) the ways in which the hidden curriculum constructs responsibility in the context of responsible management education texts and talk – and helps us to remain open to other possibilities. We integrate these three perspectives to arrive at a definition of responsibility as a lived process with implications for students, educators and the institutions they inhabit.

ChatGPT Undermines Human Reflexivity, Scientific Responsibility and Responsible Management Research

“…Responsibility is a complex concept, of course. In relation to management education, Hibbert and Wright (2023, p. 418) identify several dimensions that are useful for more closely scrutinizing ChatGPT in this regard. For example, they link responsibility to ‘situated judgement about how we should interpret evidence available to us in the context of lived human experience in dialogue with others’.…”

“…Indeed, how could we, as management educators and researchers, ever act responsibly if we condone the 'privatisation of speech technology' (Bajohr, 2023). Hibbert and Wright (2023) furthermore frame responsibility as a process of demasking hidden textual assumptions in dominant and taken-for-granted discourses via reflexive criticality. ChatGPT cannot do this either and indeed is premised on the very opposite.…”

In Praise of Shadows: Exploring the hidden (responsibility) curriculum

“…And finally, in Paul Hibbert and April Wright’s provocative essay (2023), note the lack of engagement with the meaning of responsibility in responsible management learning scholarship and propose that we actively teach students three connected perspectives on responsibility to facilitate their ethical reflection in the shadows cast by neoliberalism instead of relying on the assumed benefits of a static hidden curriculum. They claim, first, that a perspective based on evidence-based management is important to argue the need for acting responsibly in particular situations and to identify the best courses of action.…”

Perception of the School Interior from the Students’ and Teachers’ Perspective

“…In the scientific and professional literature, and in layman's terms, besides the concept of the hidden curriculum, we also find the following expressions: informal, incidental, collateral curriculum (Glatthorn, 2000;Tylor, 2000), in German heimliche Lehrplan (Zinnecker, 1975). The concept of the hidden curriculum is a new and active area of research (Kentli, 2009;Hibbert, Wright, 2022).…”