Preface to the Special Issue: Bringing the Humanities and Liberal Learning to the Study of Business
- PDF / 249,277 Bytes
- 6 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 32 Downloads / 189 Views
Preface to the Special Issue: Bringing the Humanities and Liberal Learning to the Study of Business Anne M. Greenhalgh 1 & Douglas E. Allen 2 & Jeffrey Nesteruk 3 Received: 22 October 2020 / Published online: 4 December 2020 # The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG part of Springer Nature 2020
This special issue joins an on-going conversation about humanistic management education. In 2011, Amann, Pirson, Dierksmeier, Von Kimakowitz, & Spitzeck published Business schools under fire: Humanistic management education as the way forward. Treating the phenomenon of management education as a case study or narrative worthy of our time and attention, the authors make a persuasive argument for “how business schools can get out of the line of fire” by identifying problems, analyzing root causes, proposing solutions, and ultimately reflecting on “the implications of this next generation management education model for the administration of business schools as well as their core tasks of research and teaching” (p. 472). One conversational thread in the discussion – the importance of narrative – emerges as the focus of the second issue of the Humanistic Management Journal. In the opening editorial, “Better Stories Needed: How Meaningful Narratives can Transform the World,” Pirson (2017) writes: The stories we tell each other matter. They allow us to engage with what we consider legitimate and relevant. What is it that we recognize and value in our stories of our shared cultural narratives? It is important that [sic] examine with rigor the stories we tell about ourselves as human beings and our connection with each other and nature at large. At this point of time, we need to understand which stories frame our endeavors better. Given that humanity’s survival as a species is at risk we must unpack misguided frames about who we are and what we organize for. (p. 3) In its recent BELL (Business, Entrepreneurship, and Liberal Learning) study, The Carnegie Foundation (2011) identifies one paradigm and narrative that informs much of business education; namely, that of the “efficient market”: Typically, students are asked to learn and apply standard business concepts without their origins and broader significance. When concepts are taught in this way, students tend to * Anne M. Greenhalgh [email protected]
1
The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA
2
Freeman College of Management, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA, USA
3
Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster, PA, USA
154
Humanistic Management Journal (2020) 5:153–158
see them as corresponding to some objective reality instead of tools created by human beings. This problem is exacerbated when individuals remain embedded in a single conceptual frame over an extended period of time (as the dominance of the efficient market model in business almost ensures), coming to treat the model as real even if they are aware at some level that it is not (p.75). Such a blinkered approach to the study of business deprives st
Data Loading...
