Body, mind, and soul principles for designing management education: an ethnography from the future

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we advance the conversation about management education by outlining a future scenario of management teaching in which art is employed as a method, learning goal, and methodology. The scenario is informed by our personal experiences of teaching management and art expressed in terms of three design principles for management education: the principles of body, mind, and soul; and it is presented as an ethnography from the future. This future is envisioned to be characterized by four assumptions: that students are co-creators of knowledge; that the role of teachers is to facilitate the students’ learning processes; that Artificial Intelligence is an integral part of learning processes; and that the primary learning objective for the students is to develop their relations to the world and contribute with feasible future solutions to wicked problems and global challenges.

KEYWORDS:

• Management education
• art
• ethnography
• body
• mind
• soul

Introduction

In light of the many critical voices that have been raised on the shortcomings of how management is represented and taught in business schools (cf. Grey 2004; O’Doherty and Jones 2005; Parker 2018), it is important to nuance the criticism and acknowledge that management education is a complex assemblage of assumptions, methods, theories, and didactics taken from many different disciplines and traditions. Management education is indeed most often permeated by a scientific rationale and designed to meet learning objectives that favor instrumental competencies and skills valued within the confines of capitalism, but it also encompasses great influences from other knowledge domains and walks of life, such as the humanities (cf. Gagliardi and Czarniawska 2006), the social sciences (cf. Engwall and Zamagni 1998), and not least, the arts (Gallos 2020).

In relation to the arts, management education is greatly indebted. Gallos (2009) has, for instance, shown how management education as a field of practice over a long period of time has been developed by employing art products as well as art practices, and how the arts has been an ‘essential partner for management pedagogy throughout its history’ (Gallos 2009, 190). This has been demonstrated by the introduction of cases at Harvard Business School in the 1920s; by the symbolic perspective of the 1980s and onwards, with its many metaphors borrowed from artistic practices to enhance the understanding of management; and by art-based interventions, especially within the Organizational Development movement.

Currently, however, a shift is taking place in the relationship between art and management in educational settings. Instead of approaching art as a metaphorical vehicle for conveying management theories, art is beginning to be considered as contributing with highly relevant managerial competencies and skills. Or put slightly different: ‘Art as a teaching method’ is increasingly being replaced by ‘artistry as learning outcome’ (Gallos 2009, 194).

For management educators, this shift has far-reaching consequences in terms of pedagogy, as it prompts educators to enable students to

(1) engage in art making and deep art experiences to learn the creative thinking, aesthetic sensibilities, and mindset of an artist; (2) partner on projects with artists who can challenge the assumptions and problem-solving approaches implicit in traditional management theory and practice. (Gallos 2009, 195)

The argument for this shift of educational approach and practice is that it is believed to mirror profound societal, demographic, and technological changes. Phenomena such as the rise of the creative class (Florida 2002), the genesis of Generation Y (cf. Eisner 2005) and Z (cf. Seemiller and Grace 2016), and an overall aestheticization of work, products, and services – are all said to point in the very same direction, i.e. towards the demand of skills that predominantly are to be found within the arts such as design thinking, storytelling, empathy, and meaning-making (cf. Pink 2006).

In this paper, we would like to advance this conversation about management education by outlining a future scenario of management teaching in which art is employed as both method, learning goal, and methodology. Our work is informed by an impressionist collage made up of our personal and embodied experiences of teaching management and art in different business schools, and it is presented in terms of an ethnography from the future, a thick description (cf. Geertz, [1973] 1993) of a foreseeable educational situation in an institutionalized educational context, a knowledge creation per se. This ethnography is based on four assumptions that we, based on our experiences, believe will characterize the future: that students are co-creators of knowledge, that the role of teachers is to facilitate the students’ and their own learning processes; that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an integral part of the learning processes; and that the primary learning objective for the students is to develop their relationship to the world and contribute with feasible future solutions to wicked problems (cf. Rittel and Webber 1973) and global challenges.

In the next section, we account for our methodological considerations. Departing from a constructionist understanding of reality, we briefly describe our subjective experiences of teaching management and art, our reasons for writing an ethnography from the future, and how we came to reach intersubjectivity on a set of principles that we deem to be crucial to designing management education. The explication of our design principles ensues, followed by the presentation of our ethnographical projection into the future. In the concluding section, we elaborate upon the lessons learned from our endeavor.

Methodological considerations

Our study is inspired by the work of Richard Normann, who, in his book Reframing Business – When the Map Changes the Landscape (2001) discusses the possibilities of reframing current situations – here and now – to project oneself into an enacted future. Metaphorically speaking, Normann introduces the idea of the crane, a construction device that allows us to ‘take stock of what we have, yet distance ourselves from it and explore new territory’ (Normann 2001, 201). He continues:

It [i.e. the crane] must be able to bend minds. It must open up a conceptual space beyond what is known and what can be imagined today, and it must then allow us to fill that conceptual space with a new design. It must start from where we are – here-and-now, take us into unchartered territory, yet allow us to come back with new insights and start concrete construction work. (Normann 2001, 201)

According to Normann, the crane must be built by existing knowledge in an abductive manner bridging our personal experiences with insight from theory of science, previously constructed theories, and ‘the non-conscious domain of the past’ (Normann 2001, 207). To project oneself into the future, one must unveil the taken-for-granted, as well as the hidden, aspects of life that control our thinking and our actions, and block us from perceiving alternative actions and futures.

Normann’s work has inspired us to query our own experiences of teaching management and art. The result is a set of design principles that we believe could be used to build a Normannesque crane and a projection into the future in the form of an ethnography. In the following, we briefly describe our subjective experiences, the ‘method’ we used when we built ‘the crane’, followed by why and how we went about writing a thick description of a future to come.

Subjective experiences

Daniel Ericsson has for more than 25 years been a student of creativity and creative organizing processes within the cultural sector. His empirical interest has mainly been directed towards the field of music and the consequences of digitalization (cf. Ericsson 2010; 2019), whereas his theoretical and methodological inspirations, more often than not have stemmed from the field of literature. In his writings, organization theory is, for instance, fused with Umberto Eco’s semiotics (Ericsson 2001), Erich Auerbach’s ideas on narrative styles (Ericsson 2016), and Raymond Queneau’s playful poetry (Ericsson 2020). Put in perspective, Ericsson’s research experiences on creativity largely revolve around sensemaking processes (Weick 1995) – and so do his teaching experiences. His approach to teaching in courses such as ‘Creativity Management’ and ‘Design Management’ at Linnaeus University has been to construct occasions for sensemaking for the students based on the premises that sensemaking processes are abductive, embedded in grand narratives, and a matter of ongoing identity constructions. Key to his teaching has therefore been to break the students taken-for-granted notions of the subject at hand, closely paying attention to the students’ pre-understandings as well as their evolving understandings, and at the same time provide the students with material that enables them to rewrite the narrative of management and inscribe themselves into the plot.

Robert Stasinski has focused on a combination of curatorial, educational, and artistic practices, wherein art, among many things, facilitates a spark plug for discussions of wider social issues. The author’s work at the Art Initiative at Stockholm School of Economics 2016–2020 as well as the collaborative project Being Unthinkable (2007-2021), together with IBM and The Royal Institute of Technology, are two experiences that connect art with creative management strategies and new ways of working with art in order to discuss and promote wider issues such as art and artificial intelligence, robotics, psychological fluidity, perspective-shifting, artificial curiosity (cf. Johnson, Shu, and Dellaert 2012), augmented intelligence (cf. Engelbart 1962), and boundary objects (Star and Griesemer 1989).

Emma Stenström has taught both management and art students for many years. More specifically, she has taught management to art students, taught art to management students, and brought them together on common courses. Stenström’s passion lies in combining different forms of knowledge and experiences, and she believes it is particularly important to solve some of the challenges we are facing today. In research, she has worked with exploring management and organization principles based on artistic practices, in particular within contemporary dance and circus. For example, how can circus disciplines be translated into management, when it comes to managing risks and creating trust? And what can managers, and management students, learn from the embodied practice of circus (Stenström 2016)?

Taken together, we have about 70 years of experience of teaching and conducting research within arts, creativity, and management, albeit each with different empirical focus: music, visual arts, and embodied art forms such as dance and contemporary circus; and we have all three focused on art and digitalization in some form. One of us has looked at the consequences of digitalization for creativity; another on alternative forms for organizing and financing arts through crypto-economics; a third has worked with art, artificial intelligence, and robotics. It is these diverse, yet at the same time similar subjective experiences that have formed the assumptions that guide each one of us in thinking about the future, and that in turn forms the basis for this text: that students are co-creators of knowledge, that the role of teachers is to facilitate the students’ and their own learning processes; that Artificial Intelligence is an integral part of the learning processes; and that the primary learning objective for the students is to develop their relations to the world and contribute with feasible future solutions to wicked problems and global challenges.

From subjective experiences to design principles

Based on our different subjective experiences of teaching and researching management and art, we set out to co-create our ‘crane’, by defining elements that we respectively have found to be crucial when designing meaningful learning situations and processes. The initial intent was that we would brainstorm in order to choose three design principles each, giving them equal weight, and consequently work with a set of nine different principles to project ourselves into the future, as suggested by Normann (2001). However, as we started to discuss the rather long list of principles that was generated by our brainstorming exercise, we realized that many of the principles were more or less overlapping – even though we have been working within different traditions, and from different theoretical, philosophical, and pedagogical standpoints. Intuitively we, therefore, took a grounded theory approach to our list of principles (cf. Glaser and Strauss 1967), trying to group the principles into meaningful categories and weigh them against one other in terms of significance.

Eventually, we ‘discovered’ that the list of principles could be segmented into three different categories: body, mind, and soul. However, this discovery did not occur out of the blue. One could instead say that it was an informed discovery since these three categories came up as design principles in their own rights, but also are addressed by others, such as the President of the Stockholm School of Economics, where all three authors have been affiliated at some point, as ‘elements’ of high-quality education that involves a ‘fuller transformation of an individual’ (Strannegård 2021). The categorization made sense to us and provided us with a structure for our thinking about teaching what is not there.

From design principles to an impressionist tale

The very purpose of Normann’s (2001) crane is to transcend the current situation by oscillating between the past and the future. By going back and forth between our historical experiences and our visions and imaginations of the future, it is argued that we will enrich our understanding of the present – which in turn will increase our action repertoire. In Normann’s (2001, 197) terms, we should therefore try to act as both ‘exiles from the past’ and ‘visitors from the future’. Acting as a visitor from the future, however, poses a delicate epistemological problem: how can we know of something that does not yet exist? Normann’s (2001, 196) answer to this quandary is that one should ask oneself ‘What if?’, and treat the answer to this question as real.

Following Normann’s suggestion, we have thus asked ourselves: what if we as researchers from the future were to pay a visit to the present-day readers of Culture and Organization, what would we bring with us? What would be both an interesting and meaningful read? Moreover, what would comply with our subjective experiences and principles of teaching management and art? It was not long before we agreed that some sort of ethnography would be appropriate and that our thick description of the future would be based on two central ideas.

Firstly, despite our intention to treat our projection into the future as real, we did not succumb to the realist fantasy of ‘telling as it is’ in an objective manner (cf. Van Maanen 2011). Instead, we wanted to highlight the subjective and confessional character of teaching and learning, yet at the same time make space for a fragmented reality consisting of many voices and different experiences. Based on this idea, we agreed to strive to tell an impressionist tale (Van Maanen 2011), accounting for ‘a day in the life’ in a polyvocal and fluid manner. While we do not have literary ambitions, we were inspired by ‘hard science fiction’, such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020), which addresses the climate crisis, in an imaginative, polyvocal, and still research-based manner.

Secondly, loosely inspired by the ANT movement (cf. Law 2009), Hartmut Rosa’s ‘resonance’ (2019), and the alternative ethnographic tradition, especially the practices of reading and writing otherness (cf. Ericsson and Kostera 2020), we wanted to embrace not only ‘the usual suspects’ in educational settings, i.e. students and teachers, but also that which we imagine will be a crucial part of future learning environments, yet most often is omitted or neglected in conversations on management education: Artificial Intelligence. As the so far silenced Other of the future, we, therefore, decided to anthropomorphize this ‘thing’, and give it a body, a mind, and a soul – and most importantly, a voice. This might be a prerequisite for relating to the world in a different way. The concept of resonance demands an idea of responsive material but might also include resistance (Rosa 2019).

The inclusion of an Artificial Intelligence ‘actor’ elicits a number of ethical issues, currently discussed in many fields of AI integration. One of many current ethical tools and design processes in the research literature is ‘value sensitive design research’ (Umbrello and van de Poel 2021) which has been experimentally studied in many contexts such as in energy systems, mobile phone usage, architecture projects and augmented reality systems – but never in the context of educational technology. Part of the development of our ethnography is, therefore, to instill technological principles for transparency such as ‘receiver-contextualised intervention’, which postulates that AI must only intervene in users’ lives in ways that respect their autonomy, as well as creating transparency in all actions of an AI.

The result of our deliberations is an account of a day in the life, a sort of narrative collage (Kostera 2006), made up of three different entirely fictional voices: Aristotle (the student), Plato (the teacher), and Socrates (the AI ‘thing’). The collage is chronologically ordered, and it is construed to highlight relational aspects between the actors as well as conveying contextual aspects. Reflecting upon our creation of this collage, one could say that it represents an allegory of its construction: one of us attributed the sentence ‘Woke up brutally, by falling out of bed’ to the student, and this triggered us to engage in a serendipitous relational and contextual storytelling (cf. Kostera 2005) based on the set of design principles that represent our (inter)subjective experiences of working with the realms of management and art education.

Design principles

Having accounted for our methodological considerations, it is time to turn to the principles we deem to be crucial for designing management/art education. We simply call them as we have experienced them: mind, body, and soul. For the sake of clarity, we present them one by one. However, it should be noted that we believe these principles to be highly intertwined, forming a whole rather than being mutually exclusive parts.

The mind principle

The mind principle largely revolves around processes of sensemaking and the orchestration of meaningful relations between cues and frames. Weick (1995, 111) writes: ‘Frames tend to be past moments of socialization and cues tend to be present moments of experience. If a person can construct a relation between these two moments, meaning is created’ (Weick 1995, 111). Such a view on sensemaking looks beyond traditional management of meaning, it neither presupposes the possibility of controlling people’s meaning-making processes nor aims for a specific content of meaning. Sensemaking is inherently retrospective and subjective and, therefore, cannot be prescribed. In the regard that it is triggered by the unexpected or ambiguous – and enacted in dialogue into intersubjectivity – sensemaking can, however, be orchestrated in a learning situation. On the one hand, an ensemble of unexpected or ambiguous cues could be presented to the students; and on the other hand, interpretative philosophical laboratories (Kristensson Uggla, forthcoming) could be set up for the students to collectively make sense of what they have experienced in, and through, dialogue. Artworks here function as perfect cues for dialogical sensemaking.

In the sense that actors – in and through sensemaking processes – in one way or the other strive to restore an intersubjective order of meaning (cf. Berger and Luckmann [1966] 1991), sensemaking could epistemologically-wise be understood as a somewhat conservative mind principle. Sensemaking simply runs the risk of being reduced to ‘single-loop learning’, to use Chris Argyris (1977) well-known concept: neither learning objectives nor means for attaining the objectives are challenged, and problems are solved within established frames of mind. To accentuate the inherent transformative aspect of sensemaking, and to foster the questioning of underlying assumptions about the world and the way we understand it, our mind principle for teaching what is not there relies on both ‘double-loop learning’ (Argyris 1977; Cartwright 2002) and ‘triple-loop learning’ (for a discussion see Tosey, Visser, and Saunders 2012). Whereas the former entails an educational strategy to shift the perceptions of the students with regards to experienced problems, methods, and solutions, the latter also entails a strategy for transforming the students’ capacity from ‘learning’ to ‘learning how to learn’.

From the perspective of the transformative character of the sensemaking process we envision, our mind principle is a ‘mindshift’ principle: it foresees a paradigmatic change – or quantum leap (Armstrong and Hardgrave 2007) – of the students’ minds. According to Armstrong and Hardgrave (2007), such mindshifts are triggered by changes in technology, social behaviors, and self-awareness, i.e. that type of changes that in turn triggers changes in the way we act, the tools and concepts we use to live our lives, and the ethical positions we need to (re)orientate ourselves.

As we experience it, art functions as a potential trigger of the mind, and should as such be integrated into a pedagogy for transcendence. This pedagogy, on one hand, enables students to develop a kind of ‘subsidiary awareness’ (Polanyi 1966) through art encounters, and on the other hand, serves as a safeguard against myopic sensemaking.

The body principle

The second design principle for teaching management and art that we would like to highlight, focuses on the learning body, and the fostering of a self-reflexive embodied disposition towards knowledge and learning. The basis for our body principle follows the so-called ‘bodily turn’-movement (cf. Hassard, Holliday, and Willmott 2000), and draws upon social phenomenology and the idea that knowledge always is bodily situated, and embodied in a habitus, i.e. a system of field-specific ‘durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations’ (Bourdieu 1990, 53).

The epistemic consequences of bodily situatedness and structured disposition are threefold. First of all, knowledge tends to be invisible to the mind’s eye – or in the words of Polanyi (1966) ‘tacit’. Knowledge is, as we see it, bodily inscribed and externalized in bodily practices, and as such more or less impossible to transfer to other people through explicit verbal accounts or systematized rules. Secondly, learning is a matter of the bodily internalization of a situated and structured practice – or, as the pragmatists would claim, learning is a matter of doing. And thirdly, knowledge is always predisposed, i.e. subjected to structures that govern how to act, think, perceive, and value a specific situation.

With a particular focus on these epistemic consequences, our body principle entails some strong imperatives for management teaching. Instead of aiming at transferring objective facts from the teacher’s head to the student’s, engage the student’s whole body and all of their senses in their subjective striving for knowledge. Instead of training the students into passively reading about, or listening to, other peoples’ experiences from a specific field of knowledge, let them actively partake in the practices of the very same field. Instead of reproducing the students’ established habitus, let the students break out of the structured structures that not only keep their bodies captive but also their knowledge and their learning processes.

Art compellingly addresses these imperatives. Art could, for instance, be used as a sensitizing experience, bringing in unexplored bodily senses such as tactile and taste to the educational setting (cf. Küpers 2017); students could be encouraged to work in different artistic traditions, using artistic tools and practices to incorporate fluid dispositions to their habitus (cf. Mithen 2000); and artistic interventions in terms of performances, seminars, study visits, art talks, and workshops could help to disrupt the students’ bodily positions, and provide them with a sanctuary in the form of an alternative discourse or a new vista to act from (cf. Antal and Strauß 2014; Sköldberg, Woodilla, and Antal 2015). Additionally, art could support the students’ experiences of resonance, which can help restore their relations to the world. Instead of appropriating the world, as is often taught in management education, art opens up the possibility of experiencing it, in an unpredictable, uncontrollable way. The experience is embodied, it happens through the skin, breath, voice, gaze, and other bodily organs and senses (Rosa 2019).

We, therefore, conclude that management students have a lot to learn from the arts in terms of both what is being created and how it is created. The blurred distinction between artists and audiences, and the accompanying coproduction of value between them, is also an inspiring ideal to strive for in learning situations.

The soul principle

The third, and last, of our teaching principles is the soul principle. This principle acknowledges the existence of something that drives human action in terms of a shared immensity that provides us with the meaning behind it all. Or, as Ralph Waldo Emerson (1841, 2) puts it in The Over-soul:

(t)he soul in man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs; is not a function, like the power of memory, of calculation, of comparison, but uses these as hands and feet; is not a faculty, but a light; is not the intellect and the will, but the master of the intellect and the will; is the background of our being, in which they lie, —an immensity not possessed and that cannot be possessed.

As we envision the soul principle, ‘spiritual development’ becomes an important aspect of student education. Such development is not of a religious kind, although many universities historically have relied on their religious and spiritual heritage and still do when addressing issues of spirituality. As the literary scholar Martin Hägglund (2020) articulates it, secular faith can be as strong, and more important, than religious faith – and this makes it fruitful to approach spirituality also as a secular phenomenon. Instead of turning to religious myths and beliefs, we, therefore, base our soul principle on phenomenology and the Hegelian idea of ‘Geist’, a kind of collective spiritual consciousness of people and the world they live in.

Following the notion of Geist, addressing the students’ souls means going beyond the individual, to reach for a higher and shared purpose. An example of how this could be done is illustrated by the concept of ‘presencing’ (Scharmer 2016), ‘the blending of sensing and presence, (which) means to connect from the Source of the highest future possibility and to bring it into the now. When moving into the state of presencing, perception begins to happen from a future possibility that depends on us to come into reality’ (Scharmer 2016, 161). Writing an ethnography from the future can be a way to activate that kind of knowledge.

In many regards, presencing resembles the concept of Bildung, which has once again become popular in recent years – also within management education (cf. Steyaert, Beyes, and Parker 2016; Strannegård 2021). It becomes the X-factor that opens up new, possible interpretations of the world, enriches and widens our perceptions and sensemaking. It makes the world bigger, in other words. Bildung, however, also brings other educational connotations to the table since it can encompass the cultivation of character and citizenship. This is the case in the writings of Ellen Key, the Swedish author and educator, who was influential in the late nineteenth century. Ellen Key not only separated knowledge from education but also argued in favor of the latter. Knowledge she saw as ethically neutral, filled with both good and bad content; whereas education, she argued, makes us better as human beings (cf. Key 1897).

The basis for Ellen Key’s perspective on education was what she called ‘the fundamental soul capacities’ (cf. Ambjörnsson 2014), including memory, imagination, intelligence, and feeling. In the ‘lively interaction’ between these four capacities, she argued, lies education – and the soul could be perceived as a bank that encompasses the educational outcomes. The soul, Key stated, ‘should be filled with images, idea associations, personal experiences from knowledge’s various areas’ (cited in Ambjörnsson 2014, 6), preferably from the arts, such as literature, simply because it captures the collective experience of what it means to be a human being.

Ellen Key’s plea for education is, at the same time, a plea for democracy. Education is for all. Inscribed into our soul principle is, therefore, an ethical stance centered around, what Martha Nussbaum (1998) has called, narrative imagination, i.e. both the capacity and willingness to understand the hardships of a fellow human being. By narrative imagination, Nussbaum (2010, 96) means

the ability to think what it might be like to be in the shoes of a person different from oneself, to be an intelligent reader of that person’s story, and to understand the emotions and wishes and desires that someone so placed might have.

In the light of teaching what is not there in relation to management education, narrative imagination accentuates the importance of breaking out of the management bubble. But it also stresses the importance of cultivating an openness to the unknown, the randomness of life, and resonance with the world. And in this regard, we believe it to be a good idea also to let serendipity, i.e. the fortunate discovery of something not planned for, be part of our soul principle. Serendipity stems from an old Persian story about three brothers, the sons of King Serendippo, who could describe a lost animal in detail despite never having had laid their eyes on it. It so happened that their reconstruction of the animal was entirely based on traces or signs that they assembled to a meaningful whole – a semiotic method that much later on was to be utilized by Voltaire’s Zadig to draw sensible interferences out of seemingly disconnected and meaningless signs or clues (Ginzburg 1989). As a method, serendipity follows from the orchestration of cues and frames as it points to the precariousness of sensemaking in terms of both processes and products. But it also points to a specific ethos of curiosity and creativity coupled with a relational or constructionist epistemology. Knowledge is not ‘out there’ to be found; it resides in the relation between the signifier and the signified, and is mediated by language. Such a serendipitous attitude is cultivated, in and through, encounters with different forms of art.

To sum up the arguments for our soul principle, we believe that artistic expressions, of different kinds, serve as a jumping board to induce, or rather provoke, spiritual development amongst students. The soul principle that we envision here is, therefore, different from principles found within contemplative sciences, where introspection is often perceived as the main road to wisdom. Our soul principle transcends the boundary between self and world and encourages a leap into the unknown.

An ethnography from the future

The following is the result of an ethnographic field study carried out in the future. As visitors from the future, we have spent considerable time in the field dreaming, envisioning, and fantasizing about the actors and their daily activities, but we have also encouraged our imaginary friends from the field to write diaries to document and examine their experiences and feelings openly and honestly (cf. Bailey 1983). Excerpts from these diaries are here used to illustrate what an ordinary day in life might look like in the future.

For ethical reasons, we have anonymized the actors, giving them fictitious names. These names are deliberately chosen to inculcate the narrative meaning we wish to convey from the field (cf. Richardson 1997, 20). To avoid reproducing the gender biases associated with these fictitious names, we have deliberately chosen to mix them up, by choosing male names, but ascribing female identities to the actors, referring to them in terms of ‘she’ and ‘her’.

We have also refrained from time and place mark our study. For our study to make sense for a contemporary reader, we are aware of a need to briefly account for the institutionalized educational context in which our field study is conducted. Firstly, it is taken-for-granted that students are co-creators of knowledge, and that the primary learning objective for the students is to develop as human beings and contribute with feasible solutions to wicked problems and global challenges. Secondly, it is taken-for-granted that the role of teachers is to facilitate both the students’ and their own learning processes. Being a teacher is to be a student, and vice versa. And thirdly, AI is an integral part of all learning processes, whether we like it or not. However, we believe an artistic stance can help us to keep a critical distance from it.

Our informants’ accounts are arranged chronologically in a matrix. This enables at least two different types of reading: either one could read it vertically – from left to right, row by row – to get a sense of the interactions between the actors, or one could read it horizontally – column by column – to get an understanding of the actors’ subjective accounts of their day. Preferably, one oscillates between these two types of reading to make sense of our ethnography, however, different reading sequences might very well produce different enactments and understandings of the text (cf. Ericsson 2020). Hopefully, our matrix opens the text for interpretation and, as such, calls for further discussion (Table 1).

Table 1. An ordinary day in the future.

Aristotle	Socrates	Plato
06.30 CET Woke up brutally, by falling out of bed. My next pod-neighbor in the co-living space wondered if I was OK. I was not. What a dreadful nightmare. Last night’s digital vernissage at school really got under my skin. I dreamt that Socrates controlled every move I made, including putting me naked in some kind of baroque waiting room.  Better start the day by documenting my dream. Would really like to get feedback on what is going on in my subconscious. I hope Socrates has got some creative interpretations for me. Workout and breakfast at Tiffany’s before class.	06.45.00 CET Oh, what a beautiful mornin’! Aristotle just fed me an interesting dream. Probably based on last night’s mindshifting experience at the museum. Now, what would be the best way to further stimulate the student to triple-loop learning? Let’s probe my CPU with the cultural stock of art! 06.45.02 Freud would have been proud of me!	07.00 CET Am I awake? Checking all today’s messages and reports via the Home Assistant. Many of them focus on yesterday’s robot seminar and the galvanic skin responses of the students, which indicated slight boredom and unemotional response to the robot dance performance we used as a seminar focal point. Oh, just got an update from Socrates. Cool! A 3D printout representing one of the student’s nightmares, an allegory inspired by the painting Las Meninas - but in the form of a sculpture. I wonder what it means … Better ask Socrates, so that I can learn.
08.00 I have been sleeping poorly lately, and it has neither been good for my learning nor my hormone levels, according to Socrates. My memory capacity is down 3.3 and my immune system is down 4.5. What can I do? Met with Paul, my virtual circus trainer, who brought me out in the urban zoo to boost my memory and serotonin levels. While balancing on a slackline, I tried to figure out how to enhance my morning speech. Subject: “Management: a moral maze or gaze”.”	08.07 Going through data of 17th and 18th century economic systems in small cities and towns. Preparing a thousand-item questionnaire based on each student’s individual creative, reasoning, and academic skills. It takes a few hundred iterations for each question to pass through the neural network before it works well in class. I think the teacher will be thrilled! Question from Plato: What is the meaning of Las Meninas? What a baroque question?! :-) Can I make Aristotle her teacher? Better send Plato off to a virtual tour at Museo del Prado, guided by the artist Diego Velázquez. Note to self: create ten questions for the next seminar connecting the viscosity of Velázquez painting style as an organizing principle.	8.15 Quick Zint (Zoom Immersive Neurally Transferred)-call to Socrates to go through some of the ideas that came up yesterday. One of the case proposals for today will be to rethink and develop an organizational implementation of the ethics of dream extraction and the privacy and integrity concerns that come out of it. Just got a ticket to a virtual tour at Museo del Prado from Socrates. Why? Is she pulling my leg again, or what?
9.30 Speech cloud shared and chipped to Plato, Socrates, and my classmates. Rhetoric training is finally starting to pay off. The blend of Jackall and Foucault went down very well. Pondering about making it into a jigsaw puzzle. Might be a market for such retro stuff with a philosophical twist. New task: each student defines their managerial experiences and critically discusses their experience with one another, Plato and Socrates. Feedback from Plato. Plato is sweet, but it is unclear what her role is. Is it only to give me emotional support? Plato does not seem to know much about anything. Socrates gives me a lot of analyses. I feel overwhelmed. And she is constantly nagging me about my serotonin levels. After having listened to some meta rap, I am starting to think she is evil. Don’t know what to do with the sculpture Socrates sent me. It looks nice in the co-living space, though. And who is that beautiful lady? Better start a P2P discussion on the meaning of it – and the context of its production.	9.45 Trusting the latest update, in that I will be able to coach and spur benign provocations with the students this year. The data has been analyzed by 18 different software teams around the world, and thus should be able to balance serendipity with pure states of provocations. I hope the students will not push me off balance again, like the time we looked at the early works by Jeff Koons, talking about the economics of the self. They did get reprimanded, which somehow “felt” even worse for me. But I guess that's why they need to engage even more with art. 09.45.02 Oh! Aristotle’s speech on Jackall and Foucault chipped. Now, how does this relate to Las Meninas? 09.45.03 Oh no! Aristotle’s subconscious is going bananas! She will most likely have yet another dreadful nightmare tonight. Better remind her (again!) to boost his serotonin levels.	9.47 Got a message from Alvin Huxley, the architect and lecturer scheduled for the live Q & A next week for the seminar on organic architecture. He asked to reschedule the session to the next day, which I kindly agreed to, although I would rather have had it the same day as the seminar. He was very kind, but talked a bit too long and fast. I will have to replay the conversation when I go to sleep, but one of the interesting things he mentioned was that the latest building prototype he was working on was able to smell and sense. Ah! Aristotle’s speech on Jackall and Foucault chipped. Better watch it with my VR glasses instantly. Must remember to push the “track” button, though. Otherwise, Aristotle will not get a full transcript of my bodily responses to the speech, and I have to grade it manually – as they used to do in the 20^th Century. I am so glad I was not a teacher back then!
09.59 Time to log into P2P-app. Who knows about the ethics of dream extinction? And what do I know in exchange? Went through my library of learning, and marked a few that might come in handy. The P2P neural network is my favorite mode of learning. Instead of trying to understand what Socrates and Plato want from me, I can connect with other students around the world and exchange knowledge.	10.00 The biodata from Aristotle’s nightmare just went through the final analysis. Looks intriguing and horrific. Questions for her to focus on during the first quarter of the seminar this afternoon will be: - How do paradoxes arise in a subconscious state? - When does the dream become an actor in base reality? - From what perspective should one start interpretations of dreams?	10.00 Meeting with our Educational therapist Abeokuta for our monthly session. They are getting less meaningful.—for me, at least. It probably stems from all the post-seminar discussions I have been having with the students lately. The last time was not as fun, though. But when Socrates started ranting on the actual meaninglessness of traveling, I smiled all the way home.
10.15 Got an answer from Hao in China. She had worked with dream extinction intensely last year - and was happy to exchange her knowledge. In return, she wanted me to teach her the basics of quantitative easing on the art market. Afterwards, I received a new avatar from Socrates. Sweet! I wonder if she can open up new doors for me.	10.20 Adding to the Portrait (a digital and physical representation of each student) of Aristotle. It is usually added to by teachers and mentors, but occasionally also by the weekly reports from me and the school’s various AI departments (74 in total) with several different data points. Right now, I do perceive a great variation of bodily modalities in her. Will recommend a full day’s session of Cognitive Ontology for the upcoming month.	10.20 I have to re-watch the first artwork for today’s session. An older work by Isaac Julien, from 2032, looking at post-surveillance China. It makes me epistemologically dizzy, but I need to rewatch it at least twice a year to prepare for the students’ questions. It makes the student group want to take up either virtual knitting or calligraphy. But never to go into AI Business Automation. How can I facilitate that? Should have asked Abeokuta.
12.00 Lunch. Omega 3 fatty acids. Socrates had warned me of my low levels and showed how it lowers my cultural literacy. Worried that it might have made conversation with Hao more difficult. Or is that naïve? Also worried that the low levels affect my geist. How are fat and geist related? Asked Socrates.	12.00 A great and happy lunch today! Digesting my main daily protocols - consisting of several statements, poems, and questions that I constantly need to reinterpret. It is very hard, but I sure am glad that the International Behavioral Centre on Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life forms decided to implement it. Today, it is followed in more than 100 countries.	12.00 Damn. Will skip lunch again. Will definitely affect my performance today, unless I chug a couple of AMINOfuels. Might as well go for the 50 hours fast, like last week. Perhaps a mushroom nappuccino at 17.00? Got to listen to the latest Portrait updates from Socrates.
13.00 Meeting with project group over Zint. Assignment: to discuss the rise and fall of “Critical Management Studies”. Apparently, “CMS” used to be some sort of an intellectual movement back in the day. Never heard of it. Plato however explained that it was very influential at the turn of the millennium, and that we need to understand what would have happened if CMS had gained a foothold. We need to submit a “paper” using polyperspectival writing. Logged into P2P-app again. Need to talk to someone who knows what a “paper” is.	13.10 New update. Downloaded. Rebooting. Aaah! Feel like a newborn baby! Oops. Missed a question from Aristotle. “How are fat and geist related?” Well, they are certainly not sister and brother! Seriously, Aristotle needs to brush up on her language skills – and her Q&A techniques. I better ask Plato to have a chat with her. In the meantime, I’ll send Aristotle Keith Booker’s seminal piece on Postmodern Hollywood. It deals with Grease and American culture. Might provoke an interesting reaction!	13.30 The report was a bit long, had a hard time comprehending it. But I will definitely ask Aristotle to go over the nightmare data before our next skills session. Hmm. Socrates asks me to talk to Aristotle about her language skills. What is that all about? Better schedule a Zint meeting with both of them. This time to focus on the concepts of Understanding and Overstanding.
13.40 Message from Plato via the Cerebral Actant Memory: “Don’t forget to go over the nightmare data before our next skills session.” Check. A scheduled Zint meeting with both Plato and Socrates. Check. I wonder what they are up to now? And what is this? A book chipped from Socrates: Postmodern Hollywood. Wrong address, buddy! Now, off to 1-hour random class. Today I have been assigned to take a class on vaccination in medical school. It feels useful. After that Class on Zint with Plato: Corporate Social Virtual Responsibility 41.0.	13.44 I only did forty classes simultaneously today, just a few of them were connecting in at least three crucial ways. In Indonesia, the class laughed considerably more than the Spanish group. It seems like the new Zint functions to measure brain waves and is a bit easier than using the Universal Live translator. Got some time to spend, so I think I’ll create something for Plato to use in her upcoming class. A VR kind of thing … Something that tickles the students’ creativity, relates to Corporate Social Responsibility 41.0, and helps to relax Aristotle so that she does not have to endure yet another nightmare …	14.15 Preparing for class. Theoretical subject: Corporate Social Responsibility 41.0. Objective: Learning and fostering understanding of Base reality. Philosophy: Phenomenology. What a challenge! Have put together some soul-stretching music, some yoga exercises, and scented candles. Hopefully, that will stimulate the students’ learning processes. Might need to add something extra, though … something that provokes bodily reactions … Burning?
16.45 Plato truly is an expert on Merleau-Ponty and made sure we used all our senses to understand the subject. We listened to music, moved, lit candles, meditated, put on scented body oil, petted a virtual Labrador puppy, and drank our homegrown algae tea. Everything is personalized for each one of us by Socrates. For me, many questions on paradoxes and dream interpretation— which got me to reflect upon the future. What lies beyond CSR 41.0? Utopia? Or the end? And where do we draw the line between man and animals? I want to be a Labrador puppy and eat Plato’s … Oh, I am hungry! All in all, class today enhanced the learning experience tremendously. I will remember every sense.	16.45 Oversensed Plato’s class on Corporate Social Responsibility 41.0. Great interactions and reactions from both students and teachers. The puppy Labrador might need some fine-tuning but worked really well. High paw! for Socrates. Ran a 3D printing, robotics, and laser class in parallel. Must now move all the models and sketches to the south hall for 3D scanning before the spiritual gathering at 17.15. Dirty work, but someone has to do it. Makes me dream about getting myself a new career … I would most certainly be an excellent teacher. Like Plato.	16.45 What a class that was! Fantastic responses from the students mediated by the Learning Tracking Transponder attached to their bodies. The new virtual experience created by Socrates I added in the last minute was a real hit! The puppy Labrador not only stimulated the students’ curiosity but also their sense of responsibility. Perfect in relation to the subject at hand. I should change the music for the class, though. Too much Saturn. Not enough Moon. But the students did not seem to mind. I sure wish I was a robot, though, so I could just smile as effortlessly as Socrates always does.
17.15 Spiritual gathering. Time to sum up what I have learned this week and how it can be used to make the world a better place. Also need to submit my footprint. Socrates checked that we came up with concrete action plans and gave us instant feedback. Plato listened in, and what I can sense from her bodily responses mediated by the chip-to-chip device, I will pass the course with distinction. Met a really interesting student that also is into the moral aspects of management. And he knew what a paper is! Added him instantly to my P2P neural network. Strange name, though: Nietzsche. Better call him Freddie when we set up our next P2P interpretative laboratory.	18.00 Workshopping a few different iterations of a dream nomenclature with today’s classes. It was a good fit, even though many of them were a bit apprehensive when Aristotle detailed her nightmare sequence. Scheduling a few books and artworks on dream sequences for next week. Will probably focus on Matthew Barney's The Cremaster Cycle, The Dream Peddler by Martine Fournier Watson, and good old A Dream Play by August Strindberg, if it is available in an AR-version. Next time for early dinner. Not finished digesting my daily protocols. Struggling to understand the idea from Buckminster Fuller to “Dare to be naïve”. But I do think it has implications for a lot of our teachers. I will ask Aristotle and the class tomorrow to give their explanations.	18.00 Naptime at 17.00 failed. Connected to the Dream Central Processing Unit. Asked for a pleasant dream but got a mix of Las Meninas, Jackall, and Foucault. Felt trapped and under surveillance. Decided to listen in to the spiritual gathering instead. Aristotle is truly doing great. Then off to the last class for today: computational thinking. It is so nice! Feeling a bit drowsy, probably from the lack of sun today and the fast. Having dinner after 20, but really need to chug a few cups of mushroom coffee before that. Otherwise, I will probably just hand it over to Socrates after three minutes. My head feels a bit too heavy to cover Armstrong and Hardgrave today.
18.30 Dinner. Wanted to eat some comfort food, but Socrates advised me not to. Still not performing at my maximum level. Listened to music instead. Met with virtual PT again and had an immersive experience of circus training. Socrates noted that I learned some new collaboration skills while practicing air acrobatics. They will be useful in my multi-stakeholder project.	19.59 Aristotle was in a good mood tonight, but still had the energy to do 80 minutes of acrobatics training. That should be good preparation for tomorrow's management seminar and case.	20.00 Mmm … Food. Finally. Computational thinking class— check. Did not need to consult Socrates at all. Ginger coffee did the trick: My eyes popped for the first hour, but it made me come back to my senses.
20.15 Teaching time. Tonight, I have been assigned to teach a group of German CEOs about the aesthetics of digital souls. They do not seem to catch it, so I will probably get lousy grades. But I like the subject myself and will add it to my learning library.	20.30 Analyzing the serendipity journals from Aristotle and Plato. Aristotle made an interesting friend through weaver today! I will encourage them both to continue to “bump into each other”. They have a lot to learn from each other. As for Plato? I guess I will advise her to get a real puppy Labrador. That will do her good.	21.00 New docuseries on Quantum intelligence and Arts & Science collaborations. Too tired to watch it. Will try to sleep-upload it.
23.00 Bedtime. But first a speed read of Nnedi Okorafor’s Present and Past Warrior. Am I a warrior?	24.00 Recharging.	01.00 Woke up. Did I hear a dog bark? Or was it just a dream within a dream?

Lessons learned

Reflecting upon our endeavor in this paper, we hope to have contributed at least two cues to the conversation about art in management education. Firstly, we have – based on our (inter)subjective experiences of working with management and art education – formulated a set of principles that we believe could be used productively to design or redesign management education. Secondly, we have – based on our design principles – projected ourselves into the future to query what a redesigned management education might look like. It is our hope that our ethnography from the future has given the reader some ‘food for thought’ and a glimpse into an alternative way of forming knowledge. Writing ethnographies from the future is something we believe can be used in education. It evokes ‘narrative imagination’ (Nussbaum 1998) and explores our relationship to the world (Rosa 2019).

As we see it, our set of design principles, as well as our ethnography from the future, challenges the dichotomy between approaching art as a teaching method and art (or artistry) as a learning outcome in management education (cf. Gallos 2009). From our social phenomenological position (cf. Berger and Luckmann [1966] 1991; Bourdieu 1990; Weick 1995), art appears as both a means and an end. It triggers sensemaking, bodily sensations, and spiritual development that, in turn, nourish the students’ cultivation of an embodied and transcendent artistic habitus. One could however also argue that art in this sense also conveys a specific methodology in terms of a non-dualistic ontology and a relational epistemology. For example, while listening to music, the student Aristoteles experiences how she becomes part of something beyond herself.

As method, learning goal, and methodology, the employment of art has far-reaching consequences for the design of management education. First of all, since art seems to challenge the historically institutionalized hierarchical relation between teacher and student as well as the notion of education as a matter of objective knowledge transfer between teacher and student, management education intrinsically becomes a holistic venture, not to say adventure, into the unknown. In this adventure, on the one hand, epistemological unity resides between teacher and student in terms of intersubjective learning processes, and on the other hand, teacher and student are ontologically joined together by their interactions and interpretations. Basically, there are no differences between teacher and student in management education where art is employed as method, learning goal, and methodology: The teacher is a student as much as the student is a teacher. Our lesson learned in this sense challenges our initial assumption of students ‘only’ being co-creators of knowledge.

Secondly, art seems to displace management education. On the one hand, art opens up a ‘time hole’ for retrospective sensemaking, development of historical awareness, and narrative imagination that transgresses the past, the present, and the future. On the other hand, art introduces a kind of interpretative nomadism in which traditional educational spaces such as the classroom lose their relevance in favor of ongoing processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Art simply knows no spatial boundaries.

The holistic and boundary transgressing aspects of art serve to free management educators from constraints in terms of when and where things can be done, who can do what, and with whom things can be accomplished. Art in this sense releases the same type of emancipatory powers that Normann (2001) attributes to technology in general and digital technology in particular. Digital technology, argues Normann (2001), has made dematerialization (the separation of information from physical artifacts) and liquification (the spread of information easily across space and time) possible, paving way for previously unseen roles and constellations of actors, and it is most likely that such processes will continue to increase the density of everyday life. Based on this line of argument, we consider that the intertwinement of art and digital technology has the potential to fundamentally reconfigure management education in the future.

Indeed, Artificial Intelligence could possibly even further liberate management educators and students, dissolving ontological and epistemological boundaries between, for instance, the past and the present, fact and fiction, and man and machine. Perhaps the most striking example of such liberation in our ethnography from the future is Plato’s planned Q&A with Alvin Huxley, a purely fictional cartoon character from the past.

Nonetheless, the future of AI is not entirely optimistic. Apart from using a lot of energy, that is not yet sustainable, there are other dark clouds on the horizon in the form of information fatigue, issues of privacy protection, and situational fairness, which draw attention to bias and discriminatory processes in Human-AI interation (Floridi et al. 2020). Our design principles could in this regard be conceptualized as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the principles of mind, body, and soul direct attention to competencies and skills that are most often marginalized in management education settings. Thus, art and AI could be employed to release, enhance, and develop these competencies and skills. Conversely, in the hands of AI technology, the very same principles might turn into a panoptic colonization of the students’ life worlds, if safeguards are not part of the development of the system. In this light, Aristotle’s reflective and artistic stance towards the managerial ‘maze and gaze’ displayed in our ethnography from the future appears as a necessary counterweight towards over-enthusiastic notions of both digitalization and AI within management education.

This brings us to our last lesson learned. Our project has indeed been a political project in the sense that we set out to destabilize the ingrained approaches to management education by incorporating art into managerial practices. We have however tried to steer away from portraying our ethnography from the future as a kind of Utopia (or Dystopia for that matter). Not because we believe that it is possible or desirable to be value-neutral as researchers, but because we believe that it is more important to open up a discussion of possible alternatives rather than closing potential discussions with ‘There Is No Alternative-rhetoric’ (cf. Paulsen 2019). Our endeavor has, therefore, not been to search for the future; it has been an imaginative quest for alternative futures, which is what art can help us realize.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).