From Managerialism to Mutuality: The World café as Structured Dialogic Peer Learning in MBA Sustainability Education

Peer learning and dialogic pedagogy are well established in Higher Education research but remain underutilized in MBA education, where transmissive and expert-centered formats continue to dominate. This article examines the World Café method as a structured dialogic peer-learning architecture within an MBA sustainability and responsible leadership module at a UK business school. Adopting a qualitative case-study design and inductive thematic analysis, the study investigates the World Café through methodological symmetry: the dialogic architecture under examination was redeployed as a structured research World Café to generate empirical data. Additional sources included artifact analysis, student eflections, surveys, and observational field notes. Rather than evaluating pedagogical effectiveness, the study analyzes how conversational architecture organizes participation, meaning-making, affective engagement, and the distribution of epistemic authority, and how these processes are shaped by institutional conditions. Findings indicate that the World Café supported affective safety, broad participation, cumulative co-construction of meaning, and redistribution of epistemic authority, while remaining constrained by spatial, organizational, and curricular norms. The article contributes an empirically grounded account of structured dialogic peer learning as pedagogical infrastructure in professional postgraduate education, foregrounding its relational, material, and institutional dimensions.