Learning from self-help books: an experiential account of management teachers

ABSTRACT

This empirical paper provides an experiential account of learning from self-help books by the teachers of the management stream from the Indian context. The current environment is posing new and unprecedented challenges to academicians, management teachers being one of them. Self-help books have for centuries helped readers to deal with such challenges. Hence, this exploratory study, using the narration method, has inquired through qualitative interviews with management teachers about their personal experiences of reading self-help books. The findings provided a broad understanding of how they learn, get inspiration, get the guidance, get healed and thus cope with the challenges in their life as a result of reading self-help books which may be extended to Poetry Therapy or unstructured Bibliotherapy in some ways.

KEYWORDS:

• Self-help books
• management teachers
• learning
• self-control
• reading
• bibliotherapy
• poetry therapy
• narrative inquiry

Ethical approval

Principles of research ethics were followed while doing this study. No separate approval was taken from the Institute research committee since at the time of study no such requirement existed. All the participating teachers were highly experienced and mature management teachers who orally agreed to participate and share their experiences of learning from self-help books in general.

Acknowledgements

This paper is written in furtherance to the doctoral research done by this author. The doctoral work was done under the guidance of Dr. Anil Mehta, from Banasthali Vidyapith, India and draws qualitative data, learning and inspiration from the same and due permission was taken from the appropriate authority from Banasthali Vidyapith for using the same. The author would also like to acknowledge the contribution of the participating management teachers from institutes of repute in India.

Disclosure statement

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