Management Learning

The Role of Management Learning in Globalization

This is a broad theme that captures many of the recent developments in ML, not least in terms of the way ML has been affected by globalization, and it is also a significant means through which globalization has occurred. Thus, on the one hand, the globalization of trade and of corporations has carried with it, like seeds in the wind, the provision and practice of ML. It has also necessitated and facilitated the migration of students and organizational members and has required ML to be attentive to the requirements and effects of globalized capital and globalized corporate reach. The global distribution of a management ideas, concepts, and techniques, whether through education and training or through other means, is one of the things that makes the global distribution of goods and services possible, if only through the provision of a structure of shared understandings and vocabularies. Indeed, the very growth of concepts and practices of, for example, organizational learning is itself a part of the basis upon which management learning, generally, globalizes.

Thus the globalization of ML is both a condition and a consequence of globalization more generally. This observation points to a series of other trends in ML. One such trend is the homogenization of ML in the way in which management ideas and practices have been developed within the West, and in particular North America, and transported or translated into other contexts. The agents of this process have in many cases been management developers and trainers, business schools, consultancies, and other parts of the institutional apparatus of ML. Following David Richards, globalization produces a need for new kinds of managerial capacities that can be learned by, among other things, business schools. Globalization, then, emerges as having conflicting or even paradoxical effects upon management education that cannot be captured simply through an image of [Page 856]homogeneity. China and India are perhaps particularly interesting sites given the very rapid transformations that are taking place in these countries and the extent to which these transformations are informed by Western management ideas. The transfer of western management ideas to China and India has been spearheaded by the influence of western multinationals and their joint ventures with Chinese and Indian partners.

Other contexts, and Eastern Europe is a good example, are rather different because, among other things, these countries' experiences of a rapid loss of existing political structures, as Monika Kostera discusses. These countries and their entry to the European Union are a reflection of what some would describe as the colonization of management-speak and management technique as a route to economic and political emancipation. Globalization and ML, therefore, sensitize us to the process of commercialization and marketization of ideas and pose several key questions about the implications of this for the governing pedagogical values that underpin a range of ML initiatives, the most dominant of which is the MBA product.

...