The Arena Thesis: Management Development as a Pluralistic Meeting Point

The Arena Thesis: Management Development as a Pluralistic Meeting Point

Many conventional explanations of learning activities within organizations assume a unitarist perspective. That is, they assume that at a theoretical or practical level, any particular learning activity can or should be tied to a specific purpose. However, as is discussed in Chapter 1 by Stephen Fox and Chapter 6 by Ian Cunningham and Graham Dawes, management learning is a considerably more complex, uncertain and multi-faceted process. While the predominately unitary perspective has enabled researchers and practitioners to make some progress in advancing management learning, for example the articulation of learning theories shaping interventions (Burgoyne and Stuart, 1977), it has ultimately limited our efforts to make a real and full contribution to management theory and practice for several related reasons.

First, a unitary perspective oversimplifies the process of management learning and excludes critical elements in that process. Consequently, organizations have become overly preoccupied with the behavioural aspects of management, devoting considerable energy to develop rigorous competency measures while important cognitive and symbolic elements are left ignored. Secondly, with this incomplete conception, the unitarist perspective has proven to be ultimately impractical. Too many management development initiatives have foundered because they have addressed the wrong issues based on some idealized rational analysis of what ‘should’ be going on, rather than the complexities affecting the people involved. Thirdly, unitarism ignores the political dimension of organizations. If individuals are genuinely concerned with making management learning central to the organization's ongoing success, they need to better understand its political dynamics and with that understanding, incorporate political dynamics into the implementation of organized management learning initiatives. The ‘arena thesis’ presents an alternative pluralist conception of management learning designed to expose the weaknesses of the prevailing unitarist paradigm as well as present a viable alternative which can guide both theory and practice in the field.

This chapter is organized into five sections. In the opening section, we [Page 55]draw on the work of institutional theorists to describe how management learning has become a progressively institutionalized field that is dominated by a unitarist perspective. The second section provides the context for the arena thesis by looking briefly at the origins of the pluralist perspective from which the thesis has been developed. The pluralist perspective will be compared to two other competing perspectives within organizational theory — the traditional unitary perspective and the considerably less mainstream radical perspective. In the third section we describe the arena thesis, outlining the principal terms and concepts and indicating how the thesis may help our understanding and practice of management learning. The fourth section elaborates upon some specific processes and techniques for opening up and revitalizing the arena of management learning within particular organizations. In the final section we consider the implications that the arena thesis has for theory and practice. We will lay out an agenda for further research that will take the arena thesis from its current embryonic state to a more fully realized, and ultimately, more useful and insightful form.

...