Imagine being asked to evaluate your CEO …: Using the constructive controversy approach to teach gender and management in times of economic crisis

Abstract

This article addresses the relationship between gender and management as intertwined discursive practices. Following a constructive controversial approach, we proposed to the students to complete a short story in which they have to give a feedback either to a fictitious female or to a male boss. The article has a dual aim since it offers a reflection on a teaching methodology suited to foster critical thinking in the classroom and analyzes the narratives so produced in search of what constitutes the students' idea of "good management." In positioning men/women CEO within a narrative, students enact a moral order that evaluates management in society. Their narratives reveal how the economic crisis has undermined the positive image of the male manager, while femaleness is emphasized for its anti-managerial imaginary. Moreover, the idea of what constitutes "good management" is constructed around an idea of care for both male and female CEOs.

Introduction

“…Guided in their endeavor by Meyer and Land's (2005) work on threshold concepts, which represents an innovative and transformed way for management education practitioners to understand and interpret gender as an integral aspect of responsible management education, the authors design an engaging course intervention taking a combined interpretivist, reflective, and practice learning approach. The authors share their approach as to how they instrumentally and carefully integrated gender in their curriculum, a process still seen as problematic, whether the audience consists of students or managers, as it demonstrates the problematic nature of the dominant status quo (Kelan, 2013;Gherardi and Murgia, 2015), which maintains management theory and practice as gender neutral. In the process, Williams et al (Chapter 13) identify two forms of embodied practice: those of the emotional and the physical.…”