Management Learning

In this piece, embracing ‘imperfectionism’ is offered as an idea for members of the Management Learning community to consider. As academics are subjected to growing professional demands – and as institutional pressures push them towards becoming the ‘ideal academic’ – imperfectionism presents an alternative (and more constructive) path to a sustainable career.

Business schools are not neutral purveyors of teaching and research about how to organise. More often than not, they sell a very particular form of knowledge and act as outlets for a form of life in which a cooperative economy is ignored. Using international evidence, our article shows that cooperatives lack adequate intellectual presence in academia in research or education. We explore the disconnect between academia and the cooperative economy in a search for explanations and justifications. Our analysis suggests that this state of affairs denies the cooperative sector an opportunity to both address its skill shortages and acquire the organisational capabilities needed to boost the impact of cooperative enterprises. Equally important, this normalises the situation where business schools can continue to ignore alternative business models. We conclude by suggesting that there would be societal and scholarly gains from accepting the cooperative sector as a legitimate and valuable constituent of any modern economy, and that this should be reflected in the teaching and research of business schools.

This article seeks to bear witness to the spectres of uncertainty and anxiety experienced through workplace isolations as university teaching occupied solely digital environments during the early weeks of the pandemic. We reflect on the ways lecturers experienced uncanny and fearful moments as orders of organisational time and its expected realities were abruptly abandoned, exploring working life and its unsettling, ghostly insights during this singular moment of social pause. Using Derrida’s hauntology as a theoretical framework, this study fuses reflections from previous research using three-level image and content analysis to trace the covert realms temporarily inhabited during the liminal episode of lockdown. Alternative and hitherto unnoticed understandings residing in real-time narratives and curated images enable a recognition of lost and stifled futures alongside a tracing of working histories during a moment of crisis. The spectral lens provides an understanding of how a temporary disjuncture in organisational time, coupled with disembodied work in the digital sphere, sees individuals questioning self and role and struggling with reincorporation. The article also reflects on possible implications of professional and personal isolation, relating how pandemic discomforts haunt subsequent trajectories and working relationships in university life.

Digitalization is causing organizations and their members to reflect and rethink their knowledge bases and needs, as well as organizational forms and means for staying competitive. For professional service firms (PSFs), this is especially challenging as they rely on—and offer their clients—professional expertise that builds on a well-defined domain of knowledge and professional jurisdiction. In this article, we explore how two classic, elite PSFs organize to learn about digital technologies residing outside their organizational and professional boundaries. Building on the literature on ambidextrous learning, we find that they do so by adapting to learn, that is, starting innovation labs aimed at explorative learning. This also enables them to learn to adapt, meaning that they develop abilities to dynamically adapt to contextual changes. Based on our analysis we develop three propositions for what aspects influence how PSFs organize for structural and/or contextual ambidexterity. We contribute to the theorizing of how PSFs can organize to encourage ambidextrous learning and digital innovation while at the same time protecting the professional core and organizational culture and reputation.

Academics are increasingly being affected by work pressure with a direct impact on their mental health and well-being. This malaise in academic work can be explained by the context of the neo-liberal, performative and managerialist business school that espouses a quantophrenic, accelerated work environment. In this article, we suggest that one remedy is to create the space for academics to slow down the academic pace and dedicate time to turn the gaze upon themselves to enact academic reflexivity via dialogue with peers. We employ a relationally reflexive autoethnographic method informed by social poetics to illustrate how we worked with our own academic reflexivity. By inviting an epistemological perspective of self, field and scholastic position analysis, not commonly researched in management learning, into an ontological understanding of reflexivity, the article makes two valuable contributions. First, it illustrates how dialogues among peers can potentiate reflexive processes. Second, it provides a structured framework that support academics in inviting reflexivity into the classroom.

How we think about the use of artificial intelligence to achieve business goals has become normalized as a “working together” symbiosis metaphor. Yet public discourse and popular fiction oppose such a view with alternative critical and dystopian positions. We advocate that in order to negotiate their own positions around artificial intelligence, management learners can engage with such contradictory views through the sociotechnical imaginaries captured by science fiction. We interpret 15 movies featuring artificial intelligence to reveal multiple human-artificial intelligence imaginaries and the metaphors that structure them. We find metaphors of: competitive symbiosis, where humans and artificial intelligence compete for work, symbiotic mutualism, where humans and artificial intelligence benefit each other, symbiotic parasitism, where either humans or artificial intelligence feed off the other, and we also uncover the degree to which these relations are facultative (optional) or obligate (inescapable). We show how movies can be used to support learning by inviting sensitivity to the unreflective reproduction of dominant sociotechnical imaginaries and their structuring metaphors.

Learning in projects is frequently emphasized in practice and the literature for knowledge creation, yet there is limited research on how project practitioners articulate learning particularly in complex projects. This study applies the Systemic Lessons Learned Knowledge model to investigate how project practitioners conceptualize learning in complex projects. The research method consisted of narrative inquiry which is considered insightful and useful in acquiring data through storytelling. The research establishes how beyond the alignment of the people and system elements (learning, culture, social, technology, process, and infrastructure), an awareness of complex project attributes can positively influence project practitioners’ learning capability. This study also identifies and discusses the enablers and challenges of transferring lessons learned into knowledge.

The things that make us human are often excluded from our research accounts. Our emotions. Our bodies. The unexpected and sometimes uncomfortable events in the research process that can bring these elements to the fore. They do not fit with neat, rational procedures of learning and are often neglected to ensure validity and rigour in our final learning accounts. We argue, however, that these events are constitutive rather than detrimental to learning and signal the breakdown of categories and classifications that often limit how we learn. Consequently, they can open possibilities for new ways of knowing that traditional methods of enquiry might otherwise miss. We provide an account of an unintended fieldwork experience where interactions between such elements disrupted the intended learning process, leading to new connections and understanding between ‘researcher’ and ‘researched’. We show how this understanding can be amplified and elaborated through reflexive conversations with research participants and co-authors and the act of writing differently. In doing so, we demonstrate how the learning potential of these often-nebulous events can be foregrounded and developed rather than compartmentalised or dismissed as aberrations in the research process.

Look within. Look around. Reflect upon your connections with others who shape, and share, the spaces and places of your lived experience. For so many of us, when we look deeply and openly into our academic environments, we see and feel disconnection. In this provocation essay, we vulnerably share about our own disconnected experiences as we simultaneously invite others to critically reflect upon the conscious and unconscious ways in which we reinforce the ‘normalization of disconnection’ in our lives. Our hope is to inspire radical and intentional shifts into spaces and places within which we stand together, as a community grounded in care and solidarity, dropping stones of hope to create ripple effects of (re)connection and repair.