This article critically evaluates the concept of the `learning community' and its implications for the engagement of critical management studies with management practitioners through teaching. The article critiques what is argued to be a widespread enthusiasm for the learning community in critical management pedagogy by considering some problematic aspects of solidarity, suggested by the work of Durkheim and Rorty, and the debates between communitarians and individualists in political theory. This theoretical framework is used in an attempt to make sense of the experiences of management students, and myself as teacher, in the critical classroom. The article concludes by suggesting ways in which the learning community might still be a useful utopian ideal for critical management educators but only if its micro-political aspirations can be linked to a wider macro-political project, requiring more extended forms of solidarity and an awareness of the complexities and pitfalls that lie concealed behind the rhetorical allure of community discourse.
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