A performative critical management studies: Developing a critical management pedagogy as intellectual activism praxis

Abstract

In this paper, I take Contu’s call for a performative turn in critical management studies into my teaching as a form of intellectual activism praxis. I problematise management learning and education in regard to perpetuating inequalities, and offer a critical management pedagogy as a form of intellectual activism praxis to help infuse management education with a critical and socially conscience awareness. This paper is a reflexive account of the development of my critical management pedagogy and an analytical discussion weaving together the practice of a critical management education with intellectual activism. I argue that business schools need to question the relationship between neoliberal capitalism and our global epoch of crisis and uncertainty, and that as management educators we must consider how we might inform this relationship. In our teaching, we are often complicit in practices and institutions that reproduce economic and environmental exploitation, white supremacy, heteronormativity and colonial and patriarchal relations. Inspired by Freire’s critical pedagogy, I developed a critical management module to try engage students’ critical and social conscience by providing them with a space to think critically about the social, political and economic phenomena that shape individuals and societies, and the tools to engage in new ways of thinking to challenge systematic inequalities. This paper contributes insight into the context and praxis of developing and delivering this module.

Keywords

Critical management education critical management studies critical pedagogy intellectual activism management learning and education neoliberal business school

Introduction

This paper answers Contu’s (2020: 738) call for management scholars to embrace and work towards intellectual activism in business schools, whereby she invites her readers ‘to add your “two cents” by working in ways that participate in building a more progressive, equitable, freer, justice-centred world’. Contu’s (2018, 2020) contributions to intellectual activism encouraged me to reflect on my role as a management educator whose research and socially conscious values are positioned in the critical management studies (CMS) field. Like many CMS academics, my identity is divided in two; one where I engage in decolonial feminist research and the other where I perpetuate the neoliberal status quo by teaching strategic management. Encouraged by my work in decolonial feminism and a desire to shift from CMS research to performativity, I asked myself the question posed by Zanoni et al. (2023), for the recent 30-year celebration of this journal, ‘What difference can we make and how do we best make it?’. This essay is a reflexive account of the development of my critical management pedagogy and an analytical discussion weaving together the practice of a critical management education with intellectual activism. I problematise management learning and education in regard to perpetuating inequalities and offer a critical management pedagogy as a form of intellectual activism praxis to help infuse management learning and education with a critical and socially conscious awareness.

Bristow et al. (2017) and Rhodes et al. (2018) argue that academia has become characterised by the neoliberal manifestations of managerialism with modes of governance based on the belief in the unrivalled supremacy of markets as mechanisms for optimising performance and productivity, and ensuring that academic work maintains the neoliberal status quo by actually having no real political impact. Thus, the neoliberal audit culture in academia clashes with the older values of academic freedom and vocation, resulting in limited scholarly work that disrupts political consensus in the name of equality. This is simply put by McGregor and Knox (2017: 510), ‘capitalist rhythms compromise Higher Education as a site of emancipatory knowledge’. Fotaki and Prasad’s (2015) work finds that management educators rely on economic orthodoxy, and we often omit critiques of neoliberal capitalism and the corresponding effects of structural inequality from our teaching. This is not to say management and organisation research has not explored inequalities. Critical management scholars have produced seminal work analysing the dark side of managing/organising and exploring the complex ways in which power works to subjugate and exploit individuals and communities, particularly in the context of gender, identity, race and ethnicity (Contu, 2018). However, as further noted by Contu (2020), there is a need to move beyond theorising about critical management to the doing of critical management performativity. The topic of CMS performativity is much debated, with the question regarding how CMS research might make a difference, in practice, for the better, explored by many seminal CMS scholars (see, e.g. Alvesson, 2021; Fleming and Banerjee, 2016; King and Learmonth, 2015; Spicer et al., 2009). In this paper, however, I focus specifically on how a performative CMS can impact student learning.

I take Contu’s (2018, 2020) call for a performative turn in CMS into my teaching as a form of intellectual activism praxis. Inspired by Freire’s (1968, 1973) critical pedagogy, I developed a critical management module to be embedded in undergraduate and postgraduate management programmes in my university that is rooted in the everydayness of students’ lived experiences in our epoch of global crises and uncertainty. My critical pedagogy understands management education to be political, ethical, humanistic and even radical, and invites students to take seriously the history of exploitation and oppression reproduced by different forms of political economy, including capitalism, white heteropatriarchy, colonialism and imperialism, and the progressive struggles for freedom and equality (Contu, 2018). But first, before explaining the development of my critical management pedagogy and how it can be considered a form of intellectual activism, I outline why this is important by briefly providing insight into the neoliberal shift in the higher education environment.

Neoliberalism of/in management education

Neoliberal tenets of instrumental rationality, self-interest, the free market economy, limited government and incessant growth dominate management and economic thinking (Biebricher, 2018; Monbiot, 2016; Piketty, 2014). Monbiot (2016) argues that neoliberalism has become so pervasive that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. Playing a major role in delivering us to this global epoch of crises and uncertainty: climate crisis and collapse of ecosystems; recessions and financial meltdowns; epidemics and pandemics; the offshoring of wealth; massive wealth gaps; the slow collapse of public services including health and education; the rise of hard-right populist politics; and the exacerbation of inequalities. Indeed, neoliberalism recasts inequality as virtuous: a reward for utility and generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. The limited attention given to the ideology of neoliberalism in management education is noteworthy as higher education institutes are considered important sites of social mobility and crucial in developing critical thinking skills.

It is important to note that the application of the ideas of neoliberalism through time and across regions is highly varied, and the complexity of neoliberalism should be understood as an unfolding process, not a unified global programme (Finnegan, 2019). Irish society has embraced neoliberal economic policies enthusiastically since the 1980s, and they have pulled us out of centuries of national migration and mass poverty. In the 1990s Ireland embraced deregulation, entrepreneurial freedoms and free-market principles and aggressively courted high-value-added export-orientated foreign direct investment (FDI) (O’Riain, 2004). This embrace of neoliberalism was widely heralded as a beacon of what the deep liberalisation of a small open economy might deliver (Kitchin et al., 2012), and an extraordinarily low corporate tax rate to attract FDI resulted in a business climate for economic development (Connolly, 2013). Seducing enough people to bring us to what has become known as the Celtic Tiger, which is now immortalised by the indebtedness of ordinary citizens caused by unregulated financial markets which funded a particularly Irish version of an economic boom (Connolly, 2013). Neoliberal policies introduced market competition into many aspects of Irish economy and society, as well as privatisation, public spending cuts and the commodification of natural and public resources (Hearne, 2016). The Celtic Tiger was built on belief in the private market and in complete integration with globalised markets, and this has continued after the crash. Ireland is thus still being built on a foundation of crises and inequality. This can be supported by the IMF report, Neoliberalism Oversold, the first time the institution officially names neoliberalism as its coherent set of economic policy objectives, and concludes that fiscal consolidation (austerity) as a consequence of neoliberal policies has resulted in increased economic and social inequalities (Ostry et al., 2016).

The Irish environment is following international trends in the neoliberal shift of higher education. Education in post Celtic Tiger Ireland has led to diminished resourcing and enhanced focus on quantitative performative metrics that focus on ‘valuing what can be readily measured rather than measuring what should be valued’ (Holland et al., 2016: 1041). While there has been limited privatisation of higher education in Ireland, neoliberal ideas nonetheless inform policy and management culture, while decreasing funding, reintroducing student fees and encouraging the outsourcing of on-campus services (Finnegan, 2019; Mercille and Murphy, 2017). At an individual institutional level, many higher education institutions have undergone re-branding exercises with private consultancy firms, seeking to position themselves in relation to national and international competitors and attract high-fee-paying international students, and are being reformed by the market logic of cost–benefit analysis and the application of performativity measures in all parts of the institution (Finnegan, 2019; Lynch et al., 2015). Following this trajectory, Bristow et al. (2017) explain that being a ‘successful academic’ is increasingly linked to discourses of narrowly and managerially defined ‘academic excellence’, which are conditional on continuing achievement of the latest, often highly demanding, targets. Indeed, through this neoliberal shift there has been a marked intensification of academic labour, manifested in higher workloads, longer hours, precarious contracts, more invasive management control via academic targets and an instrumental approach to minimising costs (Butler et al., 2017; Jones et al., 2020).

Neoliberal policies that align education with the economy can be detrimental to education as a social good. Rhodes and Pullen’s (2023) analysis of Organization’s sustained critique of the neoliberal business school finds the central tenet of these criticisms is that business schools are destroying the traditional idea of the university, are directed by ruthless managerialists (Parker, 2014; van Houtum and van Uden, 2022), are representatives of white western masculine colonialism (Jammulamadaka et al., 2021; Lund and Tienari, 2019; Murphy and Zhu, 2012) and have reduced academic work to ranking-based competition (Butler and Spoelstra, 2012; Rhodes et al., 2018; Willmott, 2011). The application of neoliberal ideas in a state-funded system has impacted the criticality of management teaching and learning, and has arguably led to unethical management practice. Zulfiqar and Prasad (2021) draw on Adler (2016) to question the value-free proposition of management education, and Fotaki and Prasad (2015) ask us to question who benefits from our current form of management education. They argue that the absence of answerability exacerbates inequalities in the differential outcomes of wealth and opportunity that neoliberalism produces, and that it lacks any sense of social embeddedness and connectedness with the individuals, communities and environments who are affected by business activities. Nearly 20 years ago, Ghoshal (2005) argued that bad management theories are destroying good management practice, and called for management educators to own up to our own role in creating a culture that breeds individualism, competitiveness and wealth maximisation. And Khurana’s (2007) seminal work argues that we should not be surprised at the rise of management practice malfeasance as business schools have become purveyors of a product, managerialism, where moral ideals have been eroded. More recently, Breen (2017) notes that the problems afflicting management education are still so deep and widespread that there is a cultural shift in the belief that business schools are harmful to society. Calling for reform, in their critique of instrumental rationality embedded in business schools, Kitchener and Delbridge (2020) offer an alternative approach for business schools, one which is orientated around the public value of social science. But Parker (2018a, 2018b) offers a more radical suggestion: to shut down the business school, arguing that business schools are intellectually fraudulent places producing unreflective managers and fostering a culture of short-termism and greed. Neoliberalism is taught as a science, not an ideology, the only way in which human life could be arranged, and the assumed economic model that trumps all others.

Business schools need to start questioning the relationship between neoliberalism and our global epoch of crisis and uncertainty, and as management educators we must consider how we might inform this relationship. In what follows, I try to address this and answer Contu’s (2018, 2020) call by, first, analysing critical management education as a form of intellectual activism praxis, and second, providing insight into my performative CMS and the development of my critical management pedagogy.

Critical management education as intellectual activism

Kellner and Kim (2010) draw on Foucault’s (1980) interconnectedness of power and knowledge to argue that higher education is a quasi-monopoly control; the dissemination of knowledge by established powers is a form of cultural and ideological domination which controls knowledge to strengthen the interests of the dominant class. The institutionalisation of education in the neoliberal university has played a major role in strengthening conservative heteronormative, colonial and patriarchal hegemony that eradicates critical consciousness (Contu, 2018; Moosavi, 2023), while making the business school a crucial site for indoctrination into established managerialist values and practices (Rhodes and Pullen, 2023). However, a cultural shift has created growing pressure on management education to address unethical management practice and engage in sustainability initiatives. Fotaki and Prasad (2015) note that the earnest expansion of corporate social responsibility and business ethics subjects, and the large number of business schools becoming signatories of the UN Principles of Responsible Management Education and linking their programmes to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), while necessary and important, are all voluntary and do not address the complicity of business schools in propagating inequalities. Parker (2018a) argues that business ethics and corporate social responsibility subjects are used as greenwashing in the marketing of the business school, and these subjects seldom systematically address the problem that they are made necessary because of current social and economic relations. For the most part, while these subjects encourage student reflection, they lack any real engagement with critically questioning the status quo, and therefore cannot be considered a critical pedagogy. This leads us to our current space where CMS scholars call for activism within, and the reimagining of, business schools as questioning spaces (Contu, 2020; Dar et al., 2021; Zulfiqar and Prasad, 2021).

Martin (2017) explores how the ever increasing demands on academics in the neoliberal university make our intellectual activism output difficult to translate into practice; however, he notes that one way to achieve this is through our teaching. Viewed politically and strategically, teaching provides both the resources and impetus for the intellectual activism project. Contu (2018) sees education as political engagement and emancipation that can serve as one of the bases for intellectual activism. Following a Freirean pedagogical ideology, education can be a democratising force and can promote social transformation (Freire, 1968, 1973). Teaching is an output of intellectual activism because it addresses our academic praxis in service to social, economic and epistemic justice, asking us to be accountable for our teaching and students’ learning. Intellectual activism does not just focus on our research and knowledge production, but includes our teaching and work with students to re-orientate them towards critical reflexivity and combat inequality as we deliver a justice-orientated educational practice.

I argue that embedding a critical management education into a neoliberal business school curriculum is a form of intellectual activism because it exposes students to questions of neoliberalism and inequality that govern our social and economic paradigms (Fotaki and Prasad, 2015), and thereby challenges inequality rather than socialising students into the status quo. Cunliffe and Linstead (2009) and Rowlinson and Hassard (2011) note that CME focuses on identifying structural and economic inequalities, systems of power relations and modes of domination, with a view to offering more democratic, humanistic and emancipatory forms of managing organisations. In challenging issues of power and inequality in the neoliberal status quo, CME also reveals the way we engage in the world based on assumptions that sustain dominant forms of knowledge and practices that marginalise particular groups of people (Cunliffe and Linstead, 2009; Jammulamadaka et al., 2021). CME can provide the space to unpack the colonial history of management knowledge. Banerjee (2022) argues that decolonising starts with identifying colonial histories that inform our curriculum and our pedagogical practices. Using the Coloniality of Power (see Quijano, 2000, 2007) as a lens to expose inequality in management knowledge enables us to unpack how epistemic colonisation enforces a globally standardised white western male managerial knowledge, discourse and practice, dictating a colonial tradition of managerial thinking that defines what should be studied and practiced (Ibarra-Colado, 2006; Imas and Weston, 2012; Manning, 2021).

Critical management education is built on the Freirean pedagogical ideology of empowering the critical and reflexive dimension of learning. Dal Magro et al. (2020) argue that as a transformational learning pedagogy, a critical management education emphasises the need for us to challenge ourselves and our students by stepping outside our comfort zones and challenging dominant beliefs. This pedagogical approach facilitates affective transformation of students by developing important affects such as empathy (Zembylas, 2018). In Zembylas’ (2018) work on decolonising pedagogy, drawing on Hemmings (2012), he finds that empathetic experiences of the feelings, thoughts and situations of others are important ingredients of the process of self and social transformation that interrogates hierarchies of power. Empathy in a critical management pedagogy inspires modes of affective perspective-taking and practice that calls teachers and students to account for their own complicity in perpetuating inequalities. Fotaki and Prasad (2015) urge critical management educators to involve students in constant and critical reflection of their own experiences in relation to the topics being examined. This not only has the potential to enable the process of deep learning (Huber and Knights, 2022), but also allows students to question their own social values and their complicity in reproducing the structures of inequality (Zulfiqar and Prasad, 2021). Zulfiqar and Prasad (2021) and McCarthy and Grosser (2023) work on consciousness-raising in management education finds that this approach of building empathy in students allows them to understand their place in their socio-economic system and inspires them to challenge that system. Providing a space for students to question their assumptions and to understand inequalities can be understood as a form of intellectual activism because it shows the courage to try something radically different (Hill Collins, 2012). Hill Collins (2012: 38) argues that ‘because ideas and politics are everywhere, the potential for intellectual activism is also everywhere’, and this requires talking, reasoning, honesty, courage and care with our students.

A critical management education can vary in pedagogical approaches and content being taught (Dehler, 2009); however, critical management scholars all share within their perspectives a resistance to the status quo of power and inequality (Dehler, 2009; Knights et al., 2022), challenge the politics of traditional management education and seek to raise the critical consciousness of students (Perriton, 2007), and experiment with pedagogy and the process of teaching and learning with their students (Breen, 2017; Perriton, 2007). This builds on a Freirean pedagogical ideology of trying to create a dialogical relationship between students and teacher, and a learning environment that helps students develop their capacities through ‘participating in the pursuit of liberation’ of themselves and society (Freire, 1970: 169), or as put by Dehler (2009: 45) ‘plant[ing] the seed for challenging injustice’. Zulfiqar and Prasad (2021), drawing on Freire (1970), argue that the crux of CME is in the idea that ‘objective social reality exists not by chance, but as the product of human actions, so it is not transformed by chance’. The intellectual activists’ pursuits by critical management educators provides the impetus for such transformation to materialise.

A performative CMS: an initial draft of my critical management pedagogy

The context

My performative turn in CMS brings my intellectual activism to the management classroom, and I find inspiration in Hooks (1994: 12) who argues that ‘the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy’. Contu (2018) notes that intellectual activists address social change by starting from where we are situated geographically, institutionally, socially and so on, in whatever way we can and on the issues that are most salient in the conditions where we live. This is linked to a Freirean pedagogical ideology which is based on engaging with problems deriving from features of the everyday lived experiences of our students and connecting knowledge to these experiences. The situatedness of my critical management pedagogy is an Irish university that has historically positioned itself as a non-elitist higher educational institute, targeting the local city population with programme offerings ranging from apprenticeships to PhDs. While this positioning has evolved to make the university more competitive in the higher education market and to attract more international students, much of the ethos of small classroom sizes, teaching-focussed academics and close engagement between students and staff have remained.

My critical management pedagogy takes place in an Irish social, cultural and economic landscape that has vastly changed over the past three decades. Our short-lived economic boom, the Celtic Tiger, not only brought with it economic prosperity and then austerity, but shifted our sociocultural profile from a country of migrants to a country in receipt of immigration. And the Catholic Church’s control over healthcare and education is very slowly beginning to wane. Shifting from a homogenous parochial nation, the most recent census figures for Ireland show that 23% of the population identify as non-white Irish and 12% of the population are non-Irish citizens living in Ireland. The proportion of the population identifying as Catholic has declined from 91% to 69% in the past three decades, with 14% declaring no religion (Central Statistics Office [CSO], 2022). These changes can be seen in our evolving sociocultural landscape where, within the last decade, we have made two fundamental constitutional changes by referendum. First, changing the 34th amendment to permit marriage between two persons without a distinction to their sex, effectively legalising, by popular vote, same sex marriage. Second, by repealing the 8th amendment to allow women’s bodily autonomy and the right to an abortion. Both referendums were propelled by massive grassroots social movement campaigns resulting in progressive social change, and a significant contributor to this was the mobilisation of student activists. Together with this, Ireland has been part of the global mobilisation around the climate crisis and against austerity policies, racial and gender inequalities and the struggles of the everyday in our current cost of living and housing crisis (Graham and Papadopoulos, 2023; Power, 2018).

Within my critical management pedagogy, I try to create a participatory learning environment that validates personal experiences, critical thinking and peer-led dialogue, and situate learning in this current socioeconomic climate. My critical management pedagogy shifts from the traditional idea of critical management education ‘liberating’ students from their misguided faith in mainstream management education (Perriton and Reynolds, 2018), towards dialogical classroom pedagogical approaches that work with issues of difference and inequality, and engage with otherness in an educational setting to unpack the ways in which people are seen, or see themselves, as other. This is no easy task. I am only at the early stages of rolling out my critical management module. I anticipate that I will make mistakes. This is an ongoing learning process. As noted by Contu (2018), making mistakes and learning from them is part of the process of being an intellectual activist. Currently, to navigate tensions that may arise, it is necessary to continually review content and class activities, and check the ‘temperature’ of the class and classroom dynamics. This is easier to manage with small class sizes, and the changing student profile in my classroom makes this both more interesting and more challenging. The understanding of positionality is central to both CMS and CME, and I use this to help navigate the complexity and challenge of creating a dialogical classroom and engaging with otherness. Knights et al.’s (2022) exploration of identity in critical management education highlights how attachments to identities might prevent us from thinking and teaching differently, and this helped me cultivate the ‘courage’ to ‘embrace discomfort’ (Knights et al., 2022, citing Foucault, 1997: 137). Speaking honestly with students and bringing forward my privileged positionality as a highly educated, white, straight, able-bodied Irish woman from a middle-class socioeconomic background in a position of power (teacher), is important not only for building relationships with students and trying to create a dialogical classroom, but especially in a learning environment where assumptions on which identity and experiences are challenged (Knights et al., 2022). A critical management education encourages a re-examination of the familiar (Dehler, 2009), and reflexively integrating my positionality into the learning environment encourages students to more honestly reflect on their identities and social values, and to understand their own positionalities and modes of affective perspective-taking that calls them (and me) into account for our own complicity in perpetuating inequalities. The work of Zulfiqar and Prasad (2021) supports this, whereby they find that their critical reflexive pedagogical approach disrupts the prevailing status quo by compelling students to become witnesses of their own privileges and to question it; this questioning moves students towards subverting oppressive hierarchies that maintain social and economic inequalities. Zembylas (2018) finds that foregrounding ourselves as well as the privileges and inequalities experienced by us and others builds empathy. These classroom conversations provide students with opportunities to learn about the dynamics of power, difference and inequalities which develop within and between societies and in organisational contexts.

The rollout of my critical management module is in its very early stages, and I anticipate the delivery and topics will evolve with more student feedback and as my competency and confidence as a critical management educator develops. Currently, I teach this module in a block delivery workshop format with small class sizes to final year undergraduate and postgraduate students studying on a small number of my faculty’s management-related programmes. In this module, students examine power-relations around which social and organisational lives are intertwined, and are provided with the tools, built on a foundation of critical thinking, to be able to understand the impact of diverse worldviews and social unrest on their personal and work lives and to help them in navigating uncertainty. What follows are some very brief insights into how I try to achieve this.

My praxis

I start with an explicit discussion of critical thinking and provide students with insight into how to build their own toolkit of critical thinking skills to use in this module, but also take with them in their personal and professional lives. We then move onto a discussion of neoliberalism. Students are explicitly introduced to the political, social and economic philosophy of neoliberalism and invited to unpack how it influences different aspects of their personal and professional lives. In one learning activity, I randomly group students together and auction the highest grade to the highest bidding group. Using only the funds immediately available to them, the groups have to compete against each other and silently bid for their final grade of the module. I do not read out the bids, but award the highest classification of grades to the highest bidding group descending to the lowest awarding grade based on bids received. The output of this makes it very clear that in only being able to use money easily accessible illustrates the differential capacities of people to benefit from a neoliberal system, in that our starting positions determine, largely speaking, where we end up. And in terms of the value of learning, it emphasises that in buying their grades and turning everything into a market, transactions end up destroying the very thing they want: the intrinsic value of knowing they earned their grade. Starting with the topics of critical thinking and neoliberalism provides students with the ‘set-up’ to the module and these topics are used as the foundations to understand and unpack the subsequent topics covered in the module.

We move on to examine critical theories in/of management. Drawing on work primarily published in this journal, I introduce the theories of, for example, intersectionality, decolonial theory and racial capitalism. I use these critical theories to enable students to unpack how management studies is dominated by implicitly male/masculine, white/western, neoliberal/managerial knowledge and practices. It is in the learning of, and engagement with, these critical theories that the classroom conversations regarding positionality become vital. I try not to just present this as an analysis of theories, but to reflexively position myself in this learning, and encourage the students to do the same, when unpacking critical theories. This learning also addresses the geopolitics of knowledge production, where students are encouraged to question how colonisation and coloniality perpetuates the dynamics of power and difference in valuing western male management knowledge over that produced by others. A simple yet affective activity for this is having students review and research the top authors on the reading list of a select number of their modules. A parallel learning activity that helps students understand inequality in how societies and organisations are structured, and thereby how knowledge is produced and disseminated, is enacting John Rawls’s ‘veil of ignorance’ (see Davies, 2019). In the learning activity, without any explanation, students are assigned into groups and sent on an ‘expedition to Mars’ (see Malan, n/d). With just a letter informing them they have to establish a colony on Mars and the specific roles they will be assigned once they reach their destination, they first have to agree some rules of engagement (the social contract). Without knowing what role they will be assigned, although they are given full details of each of the roles and responsibilities on the new Mars colony, ranging from construction labourer to colonial administrator, they have to determine where each of the community members (based on their roles) will live and the salary they will receive in advance of their departure. They are given a varying range of options to choose living conditions and salary, within a set budget of the expedition. Each group comes up with their own options and then collectively the class has to vote on the preferred societal structure. Only once this has been collectively agreed are their roles revealed to each student. Students then meet in groups defined by their roles and discuss the fairness of the allocation. The idea is not to enter into debate about actual changes to the original social contract, but simply to experience the difference between discussing something when you do not know your role, and then to discuss the same issues once you know what your role will be. Information about oneself is hidden from you behind the ‘veil of Ignorance’. As explained by Davies (2019), you do not know your gender, race, wealth, religion, etc., or facts about your personal strengths and weaknesses, such as your intelligence or physical prowess. Rawls thought these facts are morally arbitrary: individuals do not earn or deserve these features, but simply have them by luck. As such, they do not deserve any benefits or harms that come from them. So, by removing knowledge of the natural inequalities that give people unfair advantages, it becomes irrational to choose principles and live in a society that discriminates against any particular group. This ‘veil of ignorance’ activity is a thought experiment and has no lived consequences for the students, but it does help reinforce empathy building and provides a space for them to reflect on their place in their socio-economic system and, perhaps, inspires them to challenge that system.

The module transitions to the next topic, where we examine the impact of social movements on individuals, societies and organisations. Social movements are a dominant paradigm that shape our society (Cox, 2018), and students, in the Irish higher education context, are becoming more socially engaged. From civil society organisations to grassroots initiatives, progressive social movements offer a range of emancipatory alternatives for organising economy and society (Della Porta, 2020). These alternative forms of activist organising provide students with imaginative alternatives for social transformation. Activist organising is explored through grassroots initiatives that emerge in everyday practices and are driven by relational and embodied ethical interactions (Daskalaki, 2018). McKimmons and Caffrey (2021) analyse how contemporary social movements are rooted in wider social and cultural change in Ireland, and with an increasingly diverse student population living through a cost of living and housing emergency in a time of crisis and uncertainty, there is an appetite for change among young people and the student population in Ireland. Exploring activist organising through social movements provides a framework for their learning to drive positive social change. I bring together the concept of alternative organising with social movement theory. Our classroom discussions explore how social movements, and social, economic and environmental changes are altering the way we live and work. One active learning task requires the students to bring in an artefact from a social movement, usually a picture but it could be a poster, flyer, etc., and present in class why it is important to them and what social change the picture represents. Exploring social movements plays a vital role in opening up reflective space for students to challenge the hegemonic neoliberal status quo and provides them with the tools to rethink the various ways and perspectives involved in building alternative organisations. I try to draw on diverse global examples, from the fábricas recuperadas in Argentina that emerged after the economic collapse in 2000 that became a symbol of resistance and alternative organising to the neoliberal economic system, where workers who lost their jobs reclaimed the businesses that were abandoned by the owners and management (see Imas and Weston, 2012; Weston et al., 2014), to the Black Lives Matter movement which works to dismantle systematic institutional racism through sustained and explicit efforts to combat white supremacy and the political economy within which capitalism redistributes wealth on a racial basis (Dar et al., 2021; McCluney et al., 2020). As well as drawing on Ireland’s rich history of social movements, ranging from establishing our independence to more contemporary Repeal the 8th and Marriage Equality movements. One active learning task during this discussion requires students to work in groups to undertake a frame and counter-frame analysis of a contemporary social movement. For example, looking at the Black Lives Matter movement based on different media outlets with different expected political reporting bias and the hashtags #BLM (Black Lives Matter) and #ALM (All Lives Matter). Exploring how different frames of the Black Lives Matter movement influence the ways in which people perceive this social movement provides students with insight into how different lenses shape how we see and act in our world. This learning activity enables students to understand how our perspectives of the world are shaped by both our assumptions and lived experiences which are being increasingly influenced by biased media and social media.

Finally, I draw on the earlier discussions and students’ learning to explore alternative organising more widely: the working and organising practices of those who are often marginalised in mainstream discourse, for example, indigenous groups, community cooperatives and activist groups, among others, which provides students with insights into alternative ways of working and organising that challenge the neoliberal status quo that has led us to the global instability that defines our current epoch of crisis and uncertainty. Understanding how societies, communities, activist groups and organisations can organise for positive social, economic and environmental change by fostering diverse values beyond neoliberal ones, such as well-being, equality, democracy, sustainability, etc., provides space for students to unpack and embrace the societal importance of alternative organising. Alternative organising enables us to redefine our social, economic, political and environmental situations, helping students contribute to societal transformation by prefiguring autonomous, non-hierarchical and emancipatory organisation practices built on the capacity to empathise, and fostering diverse values (Gibson-Graham, 2006; Zanoni et al., 2017). The learning activity for this part of the module is a graded assessment that requires students to identify and analyse one organisation that embodies the values of alternative organising. There are two other assessment requirements for students to pass this module. Throughout the module attendance and participation is graded and students have to engage with an ongoing reflective learning report.

As previously mentioned, this module has only been recently developed and is in its early stages of rollout on a limited number of management programmes, but it is the fruition of years of informal conversations and more formal proposals with institutional powers. I have received widespread support from within the faculty and even been awarded two university bursaries to buy out teaching hours to make time to develop the pedagogical resources for this module. To many critical management scholars, this institutional support will raise valid queries, even concerns, and they may question why a neoliberal business school would embrace an area of study that fundamentally challenges its legitimacy. My efforts here may be considered a form of subtle activism (Kjærgaard et al., 2024) rather than overt activism, whereby I worked with the culture of my Technological University, which is quite different from that of traditional mainstream universities, and I ‘pitched’ my critical management pedagogy to institutional restructuring around sustainability and the integration of the SDG’s into all programmes in the faculty. As with institutional acceptance, student feedback has been positive, although limited to the few who provided it when requested upon completion of the module. As the rollout continues I hope to receive more insights into the student experience, but so far, there has been no negativity or hostility within the classroom environment or in the anonymised feedback received. From my classroom observations, two areas of importance need to be highlighted here. First, in the cultural context of Ireland, a former colonial nation with a long history of oppression, poverty and inequality, the Irish students in my critical management classroom have tended to enjoy conversations regarding critical thinking, inequality and coloniality that challenge traditional power structures. Equally, the non-white Irish and international students embrace the space to share their perspectives and hear the experiences of otherness become centred in classroom conversations. Second, all of this takes place in a small class size and block teaching and learning format, meaning that we spend full days together early in the semester, allowing time to create a more immersive learning environment. As opposed to meeting for just an hour or two each week across the semester, a block delivery means that students are more focussed on the content and it gives them time to become comfortable with the subject and familiar with each other. This supports the critical pedagogical approach that works towards creating a more participatory learning environment.

My critical management pedagogy is an approach to teaching and learning that embodies the values of a critical management education with a Freirean critical pedagogy, all set within a particular Irish sociocultural context. Bringing together Freire’s pedagogy with CME, my critical management pedagogy understands the teaching and learning process as creating a dialogue in the classroom that is emotionally engaging and moves beyond a single worldview of theory to invite students to take seriously the inequality rooted in management knowledge production, dissemination and practice, and relates this to my students’ cotidianidade (everydayness) of living in contemporary Irish society (Barros et al., 2022; Freire, 1973). This is a form of intellectual activism that works to make a difference within the existing structure of a neoliberal business school. Rather than working towards a profound systematic change, I have worked with opportunities afforded to me in a teaching-centred institution to foster change, with the hope that it opens up possibilities within my students for new ways of thinking, which can help spark new modes of existence and build imaginative alternatives for social transformation. This is an engaged scholarship that is my tool of resistance against the politics of knowledge production and distribution in mainstream management that is dominated by white, western, heteropatriarchal, neoliberal values, and a contribution to the development of critical praxis (Bell et al., 2019; Contu, 2020; Parker and Parker, 2017; Reedy and King, 2019) that goes beyond intellectual debates or rhetorical performativity in critical management studies (Zanoni et al., 2017).

Concluding remarks

The development of my critical management pedagogy is a form of intellectual activism that helps students engage in new ways of thinking to challenge systematic inequalities. This is a performative act of resistance by management educators (Jones et al., 2020), and a transformative learning pedagogy that provides students with a deeper epistemic experience, enabling them to develop the toolkit to critically question how they perceive and act in the world (Dal Magro et al., 2020), and a space to think critically about the social, political and economic phenomena that shape individuals and societies (Barros et al., 2022). Our current epoch of crisis and uncertainty sees immense social, economic, political and environmental turmoil across our planet. My critical management pedagogy is a process of encouraging students to critically question and reflect on their actions and beliefs, and raise their consciousness. This works towards building their capacity to empathise with the lived experiences of others leading to fundamental changes in how they see and act in the world so that pathways to create social change are laid.

As management educators, while many of us may struggle with the neoliberal policies embedded in our universities and controlling our academic labour, we must also reflect on how complicit we are, through our teaching, in the practices and institutions that reproduce inequality through economic and environmental exploitation, white supremacy, heteronormativity and colonial and patriarchal relations (Contu, 2018). Recognising my role in the reproduction of neoliberal values in the students I teach, and seeing/living the consequences of our epoch of crisis and uncertainty heightened my responsibility to develop a critical management pedagogy and engage in a personal form of intellectual activism. In an era of polarising worldviews, I created this critical management pedagogy to provide students with the critical thinking skills necessary to help them to understand their own thought processes as well as different lived experiences, but it is up to them to take this with them outside of the classroom and to embrace new ways of thinking and value differences and different perspectives, so bold actions for change can be made. I developed this module for my students, but also myself. Our work as academics and educators is not value-free. Understanding our own values, positionalities and biases involves stepping outside of our comfort zones and acknowledging our complicity, directly or indirectly, in systems which perpetuate oppressions and inequalities. Framing my work through the lens of a performative critical management pedagogy has enabled me to see ways in which seemingly marginal, even mundane, activities can be an opportunity for change. Indeed, it has been in the reframing of many of the small things I do that has helped me recapture meaning in academia.

I opened this paper by answering Contu’s (2020) call for management scholars to embrace and work towards intellectual activism in business schools. And now, in the spirit of Acting Up, I close this paper by asking the reader to question how you can engage in your own form of intellectual activism praxis. How can you embody the values of CMS in different aspects of your academic life? Can any of my critical management pedagogy be integrated into your practice, for example, problematising neoliberalism; creating dialogue, empathy and reflection with students; providing space for alternate voices, theories and perspectives; or reflecting on the situatedness of your teaching practice and students’ learning experience? This is not a revolutionary agenda (Prichard and Benschop, 2018), and intellectual activism comes in many different guises (Contu, 2018). The value of this Acting Up can only be understood in each of our specific, situated conditions where we question what it means to us and how we can create change through our praxis.

Footnotes

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Jennifer Manning

Author biography

Jennifer Manning is a lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Critical Management and Strategic Management in the Faculty of Business, TU Dublin. She employs a critical pedagogy to stimulate students’ critical thinking skills and engage their critical and social consciousness. Much of her teaching is informed by her research area of expertise. Her research, which stems from her multi-award winning PhD, employs a decolonial feminist lens to explore colonialism, hetero-patriarchy and capitalism in management and organisation studies.

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