Transformations in Management Education

Abstract

In a preexperience management training program at the State University of Groningen (the Netherlands), theoretical knowledge is supplemented by learning from personal experience. Training is conceived as a special form of cooperative human inquiry. Students learn to be co-researchers in their self-analysis and their study of social behavior. The major themes of the training program are mostly presented in paradoxes—for example, communication: information and deformation, anxiety and excitement, control and letting go, dancing lessons for managers. This approach invites the student to explore his or her paradigms, to accept paradoxes and to make shifts to second-order learning. The problem of integrating the training program in a university faculty is discussed in terms of a collision of two learning cultures.