Abstract:The growing crisis of confidence in the integrity of managerial decision making is partly attributed to the prescriptive character of educational programs favored by Western business schools. This character includes an overly instrumental preoccupation, preventing practitioner students from developing skill sets to address the varied issues that organizations face. We argue for more challenging pedagogical programs to help managers increase their understanding of contemporary managerial requirements. We docume… Show more
“…With publications still very much central to academic progression, business school research outputs are closely governed by external journal ratings, most notably CABS Journal Guide and FT 50 despite recent interest in the proclamations against using citations or journal status as a proxy for research quality contained in the DORA -Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA, 2023). Governance by metrics, then, is omnipresent in UK business schools to an extent that the wider university is still to experience (McCarthy & Dragouni, 2021), and it is surprising that there is only limited empirical work on collegiality done in this context (Bissett & Saunders, 2015;Miles et al, 2015).…”
Section: Collegiality and Managerialism In Uk Business Schoolsmentioning
The increasing push towards centralisation and bureaucratisation in higher education, further exacerbated by the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, calls for a better understanding of the nature of collegiality in contemporary universities. We address this issue by looking into the necessary conditions and barriers to sustaining a collegiate environment. The empirical focus is on academics, academic leaders and professional support staff at Anonymous Business School (ABS), a department in a large civic UK university. We interviewed 32 participants across the school, ranging from early-career academics to experienced professors and members of department leadership teams. The findings suggest multiple emerging perspectives on collegiality, with features of horizontal collegiality perceived as key to successful academic responses to the crisis. The findings also indicate how sustaining a collegiate environment within the department requires both choice and effort from leadership and from staff, particularly when decision-making is primarily
“…With publications still very much central to academic progression, business school research outputs are closely governed by external journal ratings, most notably CABS Journal Guide and FT 50 despite recent interest in the proclamations against using citations or journal status as a proxy for research quality contained in the DORA -Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA, 2023). Governance by metrics, then, is omnipresent in UK business schools to an extent that the wider university is still to experience (McCarthy & Dragouni, 2021), and it is surprising that there is only limited empirical work on collegiality done in this context (Bissett & Saunders, 2015;Miles et al, 2015).…”
Section: Collegiality and Managerialism In Uk Business Schoolsmentioning
The increasing push towards centralisation and bureaucratisation in higher education, further exacerbated by the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, calls for a better understanding of the nature of collegiality in contemporary universities. We address this issue by looking into the necessary conditions and barriers to sustaining a collegiate environment. The empirical focus is on academics, academic leaders and professional support staff at Anonymous Business School (ABS), a department in a large civic UK university. We interviewed 32 participants across the school, ranging from early-career academics to experienced professors and members of department leadership teams. The findings suggest multiple emerging perspectives on collegiality, with features of horizontal collegiality perceived as key to successful academic responses to the crisis. The findings also indicate how sustaining a collegiate environment within the department requires both choice and effort from leadership and from staff, particularly when decision-making is primarily
“…Organizations could be said to fit Cixous and Clément's structural depiction in terms of the overwhelming dominance of reductionist logocentric discursive representations; however, like other critical management studies scholars, N has been working with relational feminist ideas for a number of years now in her educational practice and found they can have a powerful impact on the lives of the mature practicing managers she works with—along with herself (Bissett & Saunders, 2015). In interrogating the gap between traditional leadership representations and the reality of daily enactments, for example, the disruptive processes that the French feminists advocate can be particularly illuminative for practitioners in helping to surface, unveil, and articulate the influences both “entitative” and “relationally” informed performativity can have on the lives of people in everyday organizations; with the former reinforcing the static power structure, whilst the latter provides strategies to undermine it in subtle but effective ways.J: The more I was exposed to new ways of seeing my experiences, the insights of advisors and the literature, the better I understood how much of a linear and entitative perspective I had taken for granted.…”
This collaborative paper explores ways in which a "haptic" mode of representation can challenge restrictive academic logocentric forms of representation, by imagining an "affective wisdom" related, mode of embodied writing. The first author draws on three French feminist scholars to depict this as an affinities based, ethical framework, which reflects the depth of expression that marks our organizational lives. The second author illustrates this philosophically grounded representational esthetic, by advancing a series of craftwork culturalist interpretations, which enhance our appreciation of leadership practice as a relationally embedded phenomenon.
K E Y W O R D Saffective wisdom, French feminism, haptic aesthetic
| INTRODUCTIONWhat would become of logocentrism, of the great philosophical systems, of world order in general if the rock upon which they founded the Church were to crumble? If it were to come out in a new day that the logocentric project had always been, undeniably, to found (fund) phallocentrism, to insure for masculine order a rationale equal to history itself? Then, all the stories would have to be told differently, the future would be incalculable, the historical forces would, will, change hands/bodies; another thinking as yet not thinkable will transform the functioning of all society (Cixous cited in Marks & de Courtivron, 1981, p. 92-93).Responding to Cixous' reflections, in this paper, the main author (name abbreviation N) briefly outlines the historical context in which similar challenges to restrictive academic modes of representation began in the 1980s, in order to set the scene for an in-depth contemporary feminist interrogation of what a substantive "Haptic" (Withers, 2012) reimagining of an "affective wisdom" writing approach might look like. This entails one of the
“…This concern for relevance becomes actualized when students, removed from their work experience, are immersed in educational systems that privilege abstract, discipline-based knowledge “while replicating the relentless pace, task focus, and reflective deprivation of work environments” (Petriglieri et al, 2011: 433, see also Gosling and Mintzberg, 2006; Hill et al, 2010). The current MBA model, for example, has been criticized for promising to promote general management skills, thereby suggesting that they are generic and de-contextual (Bissett and Saunders, 2015; Fairhurst, 2009; Korpiaho et al, 2007). Similarly, Berggren and Soderlund (2011) mention that management education comes under persistent fire for being largely remote from practice and implementation.…”
Section: A Call For Everyday Leadership Developmentmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…They demonstrate how leadership development is based on a knowledge of practice, itself drawn from situated activities, thus calling for innovative approaches to this “situated curriculum” (Gherardi et al, 1998) to be further explored. Finally, Bissett and Saunders (2015) claim that the prescriptive, instrumental character of programs offered by Western business schools should be replaced with more troublesome––that is, critical knowledge, relational understandings, and reflexivity.…”
Section: A Call For Everyday Leadership Developmentmentioning
Where does leadership development turn if its heroic ideals are no longer tenable? This study takes leadership practice, not the classroom, as its point of departure. Leadership studies have demonstrated the romance in leadership theory of an individual, stable, and coherent leadership figure, even if this figure does not connect to actual practices. In other streams of research, practice increasingly appears to be a resource for less presumptuous theorizing about leadership. These more situationally sensitive approaches call for equivalent leadership development practices, and extant literature in particular has escaped the confines of the executive management classroom to only a limited extent. While experiential learning has proved an efficient means of instigating and harvesting in-classroom experiences for subsequent reflection and learning, translating these experiences into (later) leadership practice has proved problematic. The mundanity of practice rarely corresponds to the theoretical exposés emanating from classrooms. Using a leadership development program (LDP) as our case, we explore accounts from managers carrying out in-practice experiments and analyze these processes in light of Dewey’s notion of experimentalism. Identifying a series of attributes associated with the experimental intervention, we illuminate some future avenues for situated leadership development as well as offer considerations for leadership development practice.
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