The (re)negotiation of the critical warrant in critical management education: a research agenda

Abstract

Since the introduction of tuition fees for undergraduate programmes in the UK universities, there has been a great deal of attention paid to the impact of the changes on higher education. But the lack of coverage given to the effects of the growing consumerist discourse that was influencing teaching methods and assessment approaches was puzzling [Naidoo, R., and I. Jamieson. 2005. “Empowering Participants or Corroding Learning? Towards a Research Agenda on the Impact of Student Consumerism in Higher Education.” Journal of Education Policy 20 (3): 267–281]. There has been a similar silence within the critical management education (CME) literature despite the anecdotal accounts of the progressive erosion of the educational space for criticality. The changes to the educational environment present an opportunity to take stock of how critical approaches are able to respond – or if they are able to respond – to a more consumerist environment where different generational priorities and expectations of education are being expressed. This paper seeks to open up the debate and outline a research agenda to examine CME in the new higher education in the context of marketization, generational change and internationalization.

Keywords:

• critical management
• education
• change
• research

Notes

1. The concept of a critical warrant references Wray-Bliss (2004; Collins and Wray-Bliss 2005; Brewis and Wray-Bliss 2008), who has used the term previously in relation to critical research and its ethical and epistemological sense of purpose and responsibility. The concept has also been applied to academic work in general (e.g. Özkazanç-Pan 2012; McLaughlin 1998), but with the focus on the critical warrant claimed in relation to writing and research rather than teaching.

2. It is the move to charging for undergraduate tuition that has marked the transition point for most commentators from a model whereby the state allocates funding directly to the university on a per student basis to one where the state underwrites loans taken out by the students to pay the university for tuition. Postgraduate numbers have always been smaller; hence, in most UK universities, the institutional culture and systems reflect the numerical bias towards undergraduate provision.

3. The more common term used in the UK is ‘Generation Y’, although recently the media has started using ‘millennials’ (e.g. Fleurry 2013) interchangeably with ‘Generation Y’ or, occasionally more pejoratively, ‘Generation Why?’.