Summary
Contents
Subject index
Management Learning introduces the context and history of management learning and offers a critical framework within which the key debates can be understood. The book also provides an incisive discussion of the values and purpose inherent in the practice and theory of management learning, and charts the diverse external factors influencing and directing the processes of learning. The volume concludes with a look forward towards the future reconstruction of the field.
From Management Education and Development to the Study of Management Learning
From Management Education and Development to the Study of Management Learning
The world in which we live is an emergent world, it is humankind on the move …. Humanity is in a great collective learning process…. The difficulties people seem to have when they are asked to perceive the world, and thus also human society — and, not least, themselves — as processes in the making, are possibly connected with the difficulty of seeing themselves as precursors of an unknown and, in part, completely inconceivable future.
Two contrasting approaches to management education and development have emerged since the 1960s. On the one hand, there is management education, a subset of higher education (HE), largely provided by university business and management schools and subject to the critical rigours of the wider academic and research community. On the other hand, there is management development, a subset of human resource development (HRD), which is largely provided by the private sector in the form of in-house management development, training and development, and/or HRD departments of organizations assisted by numerous freelance consultants, small and large training businesses, as well as a few charitable foundations. Management education tends to be more theoretical, emphasizing a body of knowedge, whereas management development tends to be more practical, emphasizing a repertoire of skills — in Quinn's (1992) terms: ‘know-what’ and ‘know-why’ in contrast to ‘know-how’.
In the first section of this chapter, I will discuss the emergence of the study of management learning. This section will argue that despite their historic differences, management education and management development are increasingly overlapping professions. It will suggest that whether or not they finally become one professional field of practice, both share some common features which privilege theory over practice and the individual over the social. In the second section, I will outline what is at stake in this privilege, paying attention to the ‘situated learning’ approach (Lave and Wenger, 1991) as an illustrative example which highlights the practical and the social. Lave and Wenger's work is taken from recent turns in the direction of learning theory and the social psychology of cognition which represent a challenge to orthodoxy in these fields. The third section discusses the situated learning approach as applied to the study of management learning and the consequences for management education and development.
The Emergence of Management Learning
Management learning began as a subject area by seeking to bridge the gap between the theory and practice of management education and development, the MA in Management Learning at Lancaster University (launched in 1981) being the first masters programme in the subject area. Since the late 1980s several programmes have been established in other UK universities, some using ‘management learning’ as the title, others preferring ‘training and development’, ‘HRD’ or ‘change consultancy’. Management learning began by applying learning theory, psychology, educational research and sociology to the processes by which managers learned in action or in training-rooms and business school classrooms, contributing to these ‘root’ disciplines but also to management and organization theory.
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