Past, Present and Future Perspectives of Management Learning, Education and Development

Introduction and Theoretical Overview

The scholarship of management teaching and learning is increasingly being recognized as a field in its own right. Postgraduate courses in management learning are being offered in some of the most prestigious business schools around the world. The Journal of Management Education, founded in 1976 to serve as a forum for the improvement of management education in both classroom and corporate settings, continues to prosper, as does Management Learning, founded in 1978 to provide a forum for the understanding of learning in management and organizations. The US Academy of Management, regarded by many as the premier scholarly society in the discipline of management, has a division (Management Education and Development) devoted to the field. Its membership, drawn from more than 40 nations, has increased by more than 75 per cent over the past ten years. The journal Academy of Management Learning and Education (AMLE) was launched in 2002 to sit alongside the Academy's other prestigious journals to address the scholarship of teaching and learning.

The time is now right to present an account of the ‘state of the art’ in management learning, education and development (MLED), to map out where the discipline is going, and to identify what are the key debates and issues that concern management educators. This Handbook of Management Learning, Education and Development (MLED) has therefore joined the series of Sage Handbooks that are recognised as benchmark volumes in their field in order to fulfil these important requirements. The book consists of original [Page 2]chapters by leading international scholars in the field from around the globe. A key dynamic of the handbook is a retrospective and prospective overview of the discipline, a critical assessment of past and present theory that also looks to the future. The handbook emphasizes the theoretical diversity within MLED by examining the integrity and intellectual coherence of the discipline, while also looking at resonances within and between its key components.

The focus of the handbook is on the education and development of managers, which will necessarily embrace theoretical aspects of individual and collective learning, the delivery of formal management education, and the facilitation of management development in educational and non-educational contexts. The interdisciplinary nature of the field is reflected in the contributions whose aims are to analyse, promote and critique the role of MLED to management understanding.

Each chapter offers a comprehensive, critical overview of aspects of the field, a discussion of key debates and research and a review of the emerging agendas in the topic area. Topics include the application of learning theories, theoretical advances about effective instructional and evaluation methods, innovations in the use of technology, both in the classroom and in virtual learning environments, and ways of developing practising managers in the context of lifelong learning.

Management is a practice that has to blend a good deal of experience with a certain amount of insight and some analysis (Mintzberg, 2004). It is not too difficult to imagine how analytical skills can be formally taught. It is difficult to imagine, however, how insight or the outcomes of management experience can be formally taught; and it is easier to imagine how they can derive from a developmental process. Herein lies the need for the use of two terms – ‘management education’ and ‘management development’ – and it is important to differentiate between these processes. Within this perspective, ‘management education’ is taken to imply formal learning which takes place under the auspices of academic institutions within credit-bearing courses to enhance managers’ analytic and critical skills. This type of learning is usually provided in organized, time-bounded and structured programmes. Such programmes sometimes emphasize the scientific aspects of management, but they are often criticized for spoon-feeding analysis and technique, and for being rather static in nature, emphasizing memory and repetition and being somewhat divorced from managerial reality. In contrast, informal learning, which is more closely associated with ‘management development’, is believed by some to offer a more effective approach by emphasizing on-the-job learning that occurs experientially in culturally embedded ways, situated in communities of practice within work-based organizations. Such learning is believed to result in the acquisition of tacit or procedural knowledge contributing to the art and craft of management, whereas formal education is believed to result in the acquisition of explicit or declarative knowledge. The former is believed to be more closely associated with successful managers.

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