Reinventing Business Schools: The Contribution of Critical Management Education

This article proposes a solution to the problems facing management education. The solution proposed is a body of thought called critical management education (CME). CME is that body of educational practice arising from a research tradition known as critical management studies (CMS). One barrier to the consideration of CME is that CME has mostly arisen and been most widely discussed and practiced not in the United States but in Europe, possibly because that is where a large number of new business schools have been founded in recent decades. Yet it is in the U.S. that the bulk of business schools, and the bulk of prestigious schools as well, are to be found. CME does require that one accepts the core claim of CMS of the unavoidable presence of values. It does not require that we all agree with CMS on what those values are. In view of implications for management education, they suggest that management needs always be taught in ways that explicitly acknowledge the political, ethical, and philosophical nature of its practice.