Philosophical Explorations

Recent scholarship has acknowledged the importance of materiality, body senses and sensible knowledge in understanding knowing in practice, although humans and their practices are still privileged. In response, we examine how vital materiality, or the capacity of things, constitutes the practice of knowing, including in relation to and with the body and bodily senses. This focus is relevant for management education and learning, sharpening our view of what practices and knowing matter most. Drawing on a study of 20 studio potters, involving observation, interviews, and participation in a pottery course, we reveal the agentic power of the material in constituting the practice of knowing, in the resistance of the material, the accidental and unpredictable encounters between material, and the loss of self in, and a subversion from, the material. We show what constitutes “embodied learning” for knowing in practice is the generation of a specific materialized sensitivity of—attunement, sensitivity to risk, and subversion—through the vitality of matter. Offering a stimulus to rethinking subjectivity and positionality in our pedagogy, we propose that to truly unsettle the human-centric practices of teaching and learning, we need to develop a specific “materialized sensitivity” in our pedagogic activities and entanglements.

The term ambition and its derivatives, such as ambitions, ambitious, and unambitious, constitute a commonly used set of signifiers in business practitioner-oriented discourse. Despite this wide currency, researchers have yet to interrogate the concept of ambition and explore the various ways that it figures in business discourse. In this article, we take an interpretive, grounded theory approach to bring to light the intricate meanings and workings of ambition in three top-ranked practitioner-oriented business journals from 2010 to 2019. Our findings reveal that ambition is positioned within four different constellations of meaning. We identify and outline the salient features of these four constellations to show how ambition is understood in different communicative contexts and connected with varying regimes of managerial prescription. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings for management learning in particular and management and organization studies in general.

There are atmospheres that happen in a more or less recurrent way within an organization even if they take a different form at any new occurrence. One example is the affective atmosphere called The Sunset Syndrome that takes place in a nursing home dedicated to people with Alzheimer’s disease. In similar settings, care practices are intertwined with the use of coercion, and the use of coercion affects both the receivers of it and those who exerts it. Containment of the anxieties becomes a force inside an affective atmosphere understood as a field of forces. The article offers an affective ethnography of the multiple forms that the atmosphere takes according to how people, materials, discourses, and knowledges enter into a choreographic movement according to specific orientation. The Sunset Syndrome’s shape varies according to how care, coercion, and containment become entangled in care practices. The contribution that an affective ethnography offers to the study of atmospheres is focused on their affective, material, and organizational dimensions, often misrecognized in organization studies.

Writing differently exemplifies the best of Management Learning and the creative, innovative, and provocative research that calls this journal home. We look at the special role the journal has played in fostering a place where writing differently can flourish, and the unique contributions it has made to the broader writing differently movement in management and organisation studies. We tell the story of writing differently in Management Learning in two oscillating narratives. These narratives can be read separately or together, as they tell a similar story but in unique ways. The first is a more academic exploration. The second is a series of personal reflections on our assorted experiences (as an author or co-author, an editor, a doctoral student, an early career researcher, and a professor), in the processes of writing differently with Management Learning. Ultimately, we hope this overview will inspire you to see where the words can take you.

This article explores the role of history in management learning. Our starting point is the notion of historical reflexivity, which promotes a non-linear analysis of what becomes taken-for-granted, acknowledging that past, present and future are bound up with the historical development of management and organization. Our analysis recalibrates historical reflexivity to emphasize its multi-temporal character, examining how multi-temporal reflexivity impacts on the practice, performance and future-directed vision of individual managers. We approach this from the perspective of three practising managers: entrepreneurs based in Northeast England, who built up a business which they later sold, before turning to philanthropy. All three had experienced in their personal history lingering painful episodes that exerted ongoing influence in the present and future. We show that multi-temporal reflexivity is intrinsically multi-level, as reflexive learning gleaned from formative personal experience is redirected towards the organization, community and society, harnessed to build positive social futures for others.

In this short paper, we reflect on ‘algorithmic management learning’ – a phenomenon that dates back to the early twentieth century but has gained fresh impetus in the dawning age of artificial intelligence. In particular, we suggest that management learning has today become a human-machine hybrid. This form of management learning is not only increasingly non-reflexive, it is also impeding the human capacity to be reflexive and to learn reflexively. We conclude by outlining the consequences of algorithmic management learning for the future of this journal.

In this editorial, we close the 55th anniversary issue of Management Learning. We outline our rationale for this anniversary issue and reflect on the substantial contributions made by the journal over the course of its history. We focus particularly on how the journal has fostered intellectual space to enrich extant critical and reflexive knowledge on management learning and education. This editorial not only celebrates all that has been collectively accomplished by the Management Learning community, but also stakes some reference points as to the promise and the opportunities Management Learning holds in the discipline of management and organization studies going forward.

Introduction to the 55th Anniversary SI.

This article investigates the integration of critical pedagogical frameworks into management education, focusing on how these frameworks can improve students’ critical consciousness and agency while acknowledging the shortcomings of management knowledge. Accepting the political nature of knowledge invites a political pedagogy and opens space for topics and people who were left out of the dominant Western-centric paradigms. Dialogical learning and critical suspicion against the canon can encourage participation and critical reflection among students. This approach enables students to analyze received structures and assumptions within which conventional management theories are framed. This practice could foster a welcoming learning environment open to new inputs from varied perspectives. The article discusses how incorporating the idea that all knowledge is situated allows for developing contextually informed managerial knowledge. Finally, it suggests how challenging the idea of universalistic approaches toward management may open up space for investigations that, by embracing their contextualized conditions, are also better suited for a complex and changing world.

In the summer of 2020, I led a guest editorial for a special issue on the ‘Performative University’, within the context of the Covid pandemic. The articles reflected on the state of our universities, which we framed as ‘Targets’ and ‘Terror’. The emergent response from academics at the time was more around indignation, along with a large dose of complicit resignation and some micro resistance. It certainly did not represent a form of individual and collective agency, which impacted on institutional and structural contestation of the performative practice of universities. This article will follow up on the special issue in a post-pandemic world, to explore what has happened to this academic response. Ensuing articles have illustrated a particular collective, caring form of critical scholarship, paving a path for ‘taking freedom back’. Moreover, what has emerged is the significance of pre-public processual and spatial turn of building a connected, political capital across institutions, disciplines, career stages and nations to then ‘take freedom forward’ in engaging other more intractable, non-academic actors within a public space. This offers some tempered hope in actively changing institutional practice, presenting us with a fundamental challenge to the bounded, managed and measured Performative University?

Most management and organization theories focus on the full existence and finitude of things. They deal with fullness and the full happening of things. Both organizing and managing mean fully producing something, doing something, or giving value to something. A good manager should follow what is happening and, even better, make things fully happen. But in everyday life, our managerial capitalism makes the world more and more impatient, problematic and incomplete, full of more and more holes, interruptions and voids that permeate experience. This is true emotionally (as frustration), narratively (as cliffhangers and suspense) and materially (as creative destruction scars our earth). In this essay for ML’s 55th anniversary, I argue for a process-oriented perspective on managerial emptiness and incompleteness based on three core interwoven negative processes–representation, narration and materialization. I explain how each of these processes contributes to a nexus of incompleting events at the heart of managerial processes. Paradoxically, I also suggest that different kinds of emptiness and incompleteness might be part of a more resonant experience of the world. Embracing patience, waiting, deep letting go, and the nuanced exploration of non-events within events could foster what Whitehead called a ‘culture of possibilities’. This perspective on possibilities – considering what might have been and what might yet be – could lead to a more harmonious relationship with nature. Finally, I encourage business schools and the corporate world to (un)learn nothingness and non-events in the context of the negative ontology discussed here.

What if the most important route for scholarly impact was not what we write, but instead who we are and what we do? And what if our being and doing are both shaped by our learning and formation as researchers? In this article, I explore how critical researchers, committed to reflexive practice in their work, can have significant scope for personal impact through three routes. The first route is through the work of education, which impacts directly on current and future practitioners. The second route goes by way a transformational approach to the work of reviewing and editing, which has widespread impact on the field. The third route is connected to taking on leadership roles, which allows reflexive researchers to show how their practice can inform and shape leader work in positive ways. Going further, I propose that personally relevant reflexive research provides the best formation for such routes to impact and highlight potential directions for such projects.

What is the role of management education amid ruination on a planetary scale? Quite significant, given that dominant forms of management learning fuel capitalism’s imperialist tendencies, with disproportionate consequences in the Global South. How, then, may we reflect on our positionality as educators at management institutions in India? We review how contemporary management education is infused with a desire for globally ranked excellence, even as it seeks “Indianness” as a form of recognition on the world stage. We focus on how this ranking fetish leaves academic debris in the form of predatory research practices, mimetic imperialist knowledge, socio-political irrelevance, and academic precarities. We consider the possibilities of being epistemically irreverent and indisciplined.

This article outlines the different threads in the dialogic perceptions on learning, principally published in Management Learning journal, and identifies common assumptions underpinning them. It proceeds to contextualize them methodologically and conceptually to problematize dialogic lenses on learning – rather than to critique them. It claims that shunning the instances of non-dialogic learning or overlooking the research contexts in which dialogic inquiry is not expedient risks favouring certain societal and organizational discourses at the expense of others, as well as missing out on lessons which otherwise could have been learned. It concludes with an outline of a non-dialogic perspective on management learning built on existing contributions, with a view to galvanize the conversation ongoing in this journal on positionality of any pre-configured research lenses on learning. Finally, it considers the potential risks and consequences of failing to adjust one’s research accessory in accordance with one’s object of study.

In an essay published for the 40th anniversary issue of Management Learning, Reynolds reflected on the impact of, and reactions to, experiential learning to teach management. Fifteen years later, in honor of the journal’s 55th anniversary, we delve into the research published since that point to explore how experiential learning is invoked in Management Learning. To this end, we reviewed and coded 45 articles published between 2010 and 2024. This process pushed us to reflect on three different (often interconnected) ways in which experiential learning is examined in the journal, with articles that explore the experiential learning process, center on one or more specific dimensions of experiential learning, and attend to contextual elements that facilitate or hinder experiential learning. We also situate the methods and activities discussed across the sample within the clusters of experiential learning identified by Grain, allowing us to identify areas in which research in Management Learning overlaps with and extends the model. To close, we relate our findings to contemporary debates about experiential learning and education, both within the journal and the field, and propose future research directions.