Academy of Management Learning & Education

British interwar management (1918–1939) has been criticized as overly conservative, comprising a core of progressive firms amid a mass of conservatively run, family-dominated businesses. According to the dominant narrative, British firms exhibited little interest in new managerial approaches. Our study of the Rowntree business lectures and British interwar management movement challenges this view, suggesting British managers displayed greater openness to innovation than is commonly recognized. We uncover and analyze a network of British firms engaged in management education through organized peer-to-peer communication, facilitated by lectures and management research groups initiated by Seebohm Rowntree. Our primary contribution to the literature is to offer a more nuanced perspective on the evolution of British management learning in the interwar years. This reveals dynamic knowledge networks reflexively engaged in advancing and codifying practice-based learning to promote the diffusion of effective solutions to shared problems: building communities of practice, codifying management knowledge, and drawing on an ethos of “business as service.” By undertaking archival research to create a coherent body of documentary material, and making this available to others, we also make a methodological contribution, creating a new “space” for future researchers to explore, from which they can write new management histories of their own.

Scholarship on U.S. philanthropic foundations and the Americanization of management education has hitherto focused on specific nations or regions or on particular historical moments. We build on this scholarly corpus to present—for the first time—a meta-history of the 20th century role of U.S. philanthropy in shaping management education around the world. Having outlined the meaning and purpose of “periodization,” we propose three periods. First, within the US from the 1920s post-Progressive Era up to the 1960s, where philanthropic foundations used management education to address U.S. internal social problems and establish its economic preeminence worldwide. Second, Europe post-WWII to the 1980s, where management education was intended to enable Western European reconstruction and fight communism, and later to integrate the Soviet Bloc into the west. Third, the Third World from the post-1945 development era up until the onset of neoliberal globalization, where U.S. foundations’ management education interventions sought the technocratic modernization of former subject nations. In each of these, we conclude, the U.S. foundations’ programs for management education worked to preserve U.S. international interests, and promote U.S. “soft power,” in ways unique to each time/place as well as in ways common across them.

We develop a critical exploration of the global field of business schools. We suggest that the postcolonial condition (; ; ; ; ; ; ; ) is one of the key enablers of the internationalization of this hierarchy, as the identity struggle on which postcolonial subjects historically dwell, enables a disposition to comply with foreign norms that are imposed on them. Regarding this, we focus specifically on the role of local, native intermediaries, who enable foreign domination by promoting the interests of the Western autonomous, dominant pole within their postcolonial business schools. We call these intermediaries local, native doxosophers (or malinchistas), and suggest that any effort to set postcolonial business schools free, requires first the awakening of doxosophers. Thus, we ask, how may local, native doxosophers in postcolonial business schools wake up from their doxa-aligned roles and start enabling heteronomous poles to defend who they are? We explore this question using autoethnographic research done in México.

Marketization of higher education has emerged as a global trend in many countries, and in the UK, students are now paying among the highest tuition fees globally. Marketization is synonymous with performative management practices that require universities to report on an expanding range of metrics designed to demonstrate value to students and the general public. It is also changing the way educational provision is delivered and managed, including the way in which teaching practice is managed to meet the challenges of marketization, managerialism, and student demand. We use the concept of Organization Climate (OC) to examine the challenges facing U.K. business school academics particularly in their teaching role, focusing on the factors shaping the climate for teaching across different institutions. Using focus groups, we identify the determinants of OC for teaching practice to explore how academics perceive their role and the effect of marketization and performative systems on the changing conceptions of teaching in higher education. Our work has wide-ranging implications for business schools globally in understanding how marketization affects teaching practice, where managerialism and metric outputs are already impacting other key agendas facing the delivery of academic subjects with a strong business orientation.

Many students show little improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and written communication while in undergraduate school, but the data are especially unfavorable for business majors. Some writers attribute the current state of undergraduate education to a “perfect storm” caused by an improbable convergence of forces. My purpose here is to argue that climate change should replace the perfect storm framework for understanding the undergraduate business education crisis. First, I explain how metaphors guide our thinking and actions. Second, I examine a perfect storm as a dominant metaphor for disasters and introduce climate change as an alternative. Although both meteorological metaphors entail a crisis caused by a convergence of forces, they differ in terms of probability, duration, and responses. Third, I describe the crisis and several of its causes. Finally, informed by climate change literature, I suggest that because a perfect storm is a brief unlikely event, climate change is more apt. The state of undergraduate business education reflects a “new normal” that requires sweeping top-down change. However, in the face of institutional inertia (), I pragmatically suggest small but meaningful bottom-up tactics that should appeal to many stakeholders without provoking “solution aversion” ().

More management scholars than ever are expressing concern about the state of our field. Complaints include the suggestion that many publications are written purely to further our careers rather than to advance knowledge. Our discipline is in crisis. We neglect really important issues in favor of bite-sized chunks of research that are more likely to find quick publication in leading journals. Given that such journals insist on the primacy of theory development, we also increasingly resort to pretentious and long-winded prose to at least create the illusion of “theory development.” The result is writing that can only be understood by those already on the inside of the debates it references. As opposed to “imposter syndrome,” in which qualified people doubt their suitability for a given job, I suggest that many of us have become “genuine imposters” in that we pretend to be doing more important work, and more competently, than we really are. Finally, I propose changes in our mind-sets and journal practices to restore some sense of deeper purpose to what we do.

An Interview with GE's Rachana PandaAOM Video Player6152964480001An Interview with GE's Rachana Panda