This article outlines a proposal for developing a critical pedagogy in management which also overcomes four specific problems associated with critical approaches. They are: superior moralizing; abstraction/irrelevance; difficulties in surfacing and questioning the `taken-for-granted' that pervades management practice; and availability of appropriate curriculum content for doing so. It is suggested that the crucial first step is to undertake research in a way that preserves the complex interpersonal weaving of the taken-for-granted social/moral, political and economic threads of organizational members' lived experiences. This necessitates undertaking organizational ethnographies which are extended here to include audio recordings of the naturally occurring talk-based interactive routines of managers over a period of time. The subsequent generation of empirical materials in the form of detailed transcribed interactive routines, when allied with the interpretive resource of `validity claims' drawn from Habermas's critical theory of communicative action, allows for a fine-grained analysis of the everyday taken-for-granted construction of social order. One short extract is reproduced to illustrate the level and scope of analysis and the possibilities for critical reflection.
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