Teaching what is not there

When we started talking about the idea of a special issue on teaching and what might be missing in business school education, we were not sure how much resonance we would receive in an academic environment that was obsessed with the metrics of research activities manifested in paper writing and third-party funding applications. Yet, we found that this overemphasis on publishing and funding applications did more than render unacknowledged the importance of teaching as part of academics’ service to the public. Making a business case out of education by standardizing knowledge that can be mass-delivered to student-customers devalues students and teachers in equal measure. We found that, in conversations with colleagues, teaching tended to be framed as a space of suffering or a necessary evil of an academic’s existence. In such an environment it is difficult to maintain a sense of care for students, who cease being students and become customers demanding ‘value for money’ service. It is even more difficult to care for the subject one is teaching, as it turns into a standard product that has to be ‘delivered’ in a standardized way. And above all it is easy to lose sight of the political potential of teaching that empowers upcoming generations to participate in shaping the future. We felt that, due to the predominance of metrics and the alignment to the demands of employability, management education was turned into a means of maintaining a status quo instead of enabling students to shape their and all our future.

We felt that something essential was missing in teaching regarding content and that reducing education to delivering knowledge was entirely missing the point of teaching. In a world that is marked by increasingly unstable conditions,social and environmental, teaching reductive thinking and abstract principles of control that are based on the assumption that the future is an extrapolation of the past is not only meaningless but also dangerous. And we were not alone in this opinion. We have to admit that we had not expected such a surge of personal, careful and considerate contributions from authors and reviewers engaging in intellectual labour on the question of how to co- or re-create with students an educational home. Since the first round of reviews, however, all of us have been overtaken by the events – and their social repercussions of the last two years: global lock-downs, precarious existences, pending planetary crisis. These events pushed teaching out into the flatness of the virtual space. And now it seems like this special issue contributes not just to something essential but rather vital of academic work.

In their bestselling book How much is enough? Robert and Edward Skidelsky (2012) call for a return to the idea of the good life and drop the current relentless focus on growth in politics, the economy and management. We seem to have collectively run into a fateful wall by the obsession with ‘progress’. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (2012) says that humanity has arrived at a point where the pursuit of economic growth has led to a particularly bleak moment: thinkers, decision-makers and ordinary citizens increasingly realize that something is wrong with the world, but no solutions are forthcoming. He uses the metaphor ‘interregnum’ to describe this time between functional systems, when social institutions and structures cease to work, but the production of waste, pollution and toxicity still continues. Humanity seems to have brought on itself and the entire planet a crisis of monumental proportions whose dynamics point to much worse consequences than we are dealing with now, including the extinction of life on Earth. Add to this the current COVID-19 pandemic: prolonged dreariness, the dynamics of slow normalization of the abhorrent, protracted suspension of life, seemingly without hope. Despite the profound and recurrent crises there still seems to be no viable alternative in sight to a system that is at the root of all these problems.

According to Mark Fisher (2009), the phrase it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism, attributed to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Zizek, encompasses the essence of capitalist realism: the conviction that there is no alternative and that one cannot imagine anything else seriously. To Fisher, capitalist realism is a pervasive atmosphere that suffuses everything, from education, to economic organizations, to culture and common sense. One of the most widespread shades of this atmosphere is the relentless commitment to the idea of growth. The economy needs to grow constantly, or else it is a sign of dangerous failure; organizations and their assets are expected to grow non-stop; even we, humans, are under pressure to ‘grow personally‘ all the time. This dedication: certainly ideology, perhaps theology, is increasingly often regarded as erroneous and harmful for almost everything of importance: nature, culture, the quality of life. Given the dire signs of warning all around us, such as climate change and human suffering caused by an unjust economic system and a psychologically debilitating work culture – why is this dynamic still proceeding?

Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky blame economics:

Economics is not just academic discipline. It is the theology of our age, the language that all interests, high and low, must speak if they are to win a respectful hearing in the courts of power. Economics owes its special position in part to the failure of other disciplines to impress their stamp on political debate. Philosophy was a powerful force in the public life until the early twentieth century, when it retreated into linguistic hair-splitting. Sociology made a bid for influence under Weber and Talcott Parsons, but was never able to develop a systematic body of theory to rival economics. History succumbed to the worship of power. Poets and critics once boasted of being ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’, an ambition briefly rekindled by T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis but now quietly abandoned. Economics has been left in the sole possession of the field. (2012, 92)

Martin Parker (2018) goes a step further by describing society being possessed by a mindset that he ascribes to the business school: an institution that persists in acting as loudspeaker for neoliberal capitalism in times of ever pervasive crises. It not only casts a blind eye to all the injustices and planetary consequences of neoliberalism but also propagates them as natural, reasonable and, indeed, desirable. Jerzy Kociatkiewicz, Monika Kostera and Anna Zueva (2021) point out that business schools, above all, teach students to take capitalism for granted. It is a ghostly presence in the curriculum, usually left unspoken yet creating a powerful paradigmatic foundation that prevents the business school from offering a curriculum that serves more than the aims of its own propagation.

However, the devastating effects of these reductive capacities become increasingly apparent, while efforts to counter the developments often become more of the same. This undeniable ‘big disconnect’ (Dyllick and Muff 2016) makes it pertinent to the question of how can it be stopped? While we and so many other organization theorists today believe in the necessity of systemic change, we are convinced that a necessary condition for stopping one also has to get a sense of what might come instead. Hence beyond the question of how to stop, we keep asking ourselves the possibly more pertinent question of how to start? Martin Parker (2018) proposes to shut down the business school and to create in their stead an alternative educational institution: the ‘School for Organising’. It would teach about alternatives and let the students use their sensitivities and sensibilities to discuss and deal with the seriousness of the situation. He (2017) argues that the knowledge of alternatives is helpful for practical reasons. Small businesses are more environmentally sustainable and more resilient nationally and locally and also have the potential to develop more economic democracy. They are good at sharing resources and cooperation, which supports lasting innovation. Big corporations should cease to act as a measure for the economy’s health, as it is a minority type of organization, employ fewer people than small businesses, and are much less beneficial for the building of a just society. With more knowledge about alternative organizations, the economy could be re-designed to work for the common good. The attention of policy-makers should be directed to the latter and away from the former. The research should offer broad ideas, propositions of how to embed alternative organizations in a socio-economic context that would speak to the imagination of important stakeholders. As much as we support this view, we have another idea, which we seem to share with at least the authors of the articles published in this special issue, and also maybe some of its readers. Yet another possibility of an alternative: organization-arts-based teaching in business and management schools.¹

Against straightforward solutions

We believe it is important to discuss such an alternative because the world undergoes a profound transformation and faces the challenge of engaging with what is yet to come. In the space between the not anymore and the not yet (Bloch 1954/1995) we feel we need such a different mode. We need the openness of a poetic mode to grasp and convey current social complexities and imagine an otherwise – a mode that is rarely considered legitimate in business school teaching.

Bauman and Skidelsky and Skidelsky believe that the current hopelessness that seems to have infected whole societies is due to a major crisis of imagination. And it is first and foremost a moral question and, as such, has huge importance for the whole education project. Zygmunt Bauman (2011) argues that the current moral deficit is also due to a deficiency of imagination. Without it, the human being can only look for technical solutions; there is no place for crossing one’s world and opening up for the consequences that the solutions may have for others. Without imagination there is no empathy, and without empathy ethics is just another set of oppressive rules. This lies at the heart of the normalization of dreariness and Fisher’s capitalist realism. For what is a good life if we lack the moral – and we would add – aesthetic principles to grasp goodness and, indeed, life itself?

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (2007) says:

The North Pole is not where it used to be.

Manifest Destiny is no longer manifest.

Civilization self-destructs.

Nemesis is knocking at the door.

… and asks:

What are poets for, in such an age?

What is the use of poetry?

Then he calls out:

The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.

The title of this poem is Poetry as insurgent art. It suggests that there is no straightforward recipe of salvation but that the much-needed transformation requires (radically) opening up to question and negotiate what we know about the world.

This special issue is rooted in a deep suspicion against the truthfulness and relevance of straightforward solutions. The need of leaving what Bruno Latour (2008) calls an ‘aesthetics of matters of fact’, is nowhere more apparent than in sustainability-related curricula. Sustainability education in management and organization studies – despite its rather self-critical beginnings – has long been dominated by functionalist and techno-centred approaches that reduce sustainability issues to resource-based problems or strategic questions of gaining competitive advantage. While models of corporate greening (Phillips 2015) become ever-more refined, exacerbating environmental destruction demonstrates the profound disconnect between the reductive modes of addressing sustainability issues and the wicked problems at hand. Seray Ergene, Marta Calàs, and Linda Smircich (2018) thus propose that the only way to do justice to the pressing challenges at hand is to delve into the openness of an ‘aesthetics of concern’. But how to engage with these issues?

Heather Höpfl’s sublime article ‘Learning by heart’, published in 1994, asks the fundamental question: how do we learn to perform our social and organizational roles? It does not set out to examine management education as such, but, rather, the parallels between learning and personal experience. She makes a case for poetics against the prevalent rhetorical mode of learning and enacting social roles.

In ancient times, poetry was the language of the gods and epic poems and stories were dictated by the gods. (467)

Poetics is about the whole; it embraces ambiguities and seeming oppositions, not by defining them or upholding their identity but by bringing them together in a dynamic synthesis.

By contrast, rhetoric is concerned with the

propriety of acting, the comportment of the actor and the reception of the performance by the audience. Thus, rhetoric can be defined by its incompleteness. It requires fulfilment in the Other. (466)

However, it does not embrace the Other, as that would require synthesis and destruction of persuasive identities; it lacks inherent morality: ‘it employs appropriate means to gain specific ends, that shades persuasion into manipulation’ (466). The rhetoric is about the display, whereas the poetic is about the experience. It is not necessary to extract rhetoric from learning but to include and embrace the poetic. Without it, rhetorical learning is devoid of deeper meaning, superficial but resentful in its superficiality. Being provisional, it leaves a surge of longing in its wake, a desire for what it cannot provide: experience. Poetics is the vehicle for knowledge that tolerates contradiction and ambivalence, and it requires no displays from the Other. It is not rational linearly,because it is animated by emotional and social congruence, which lies beyond linear logic. The poetic ‘resists subjection and appropriation’ (472) and does not lend itself to being categorized by reductionist assumption. It is liberating and instructive. Höpfl (1994) argues for a management learning that would hold the poetic at its heart, giving attention to the discursive powers of rhetorics and poetics. She believes that the student should be made aware of the rhetorical and poetic role they are being taught to call attention to management education as Pharmakon offering and reinforcing modes of thinking that can be remedy and poison.

Morality and reverie

But there is one more important issue connected to the mode of teaching and learning that we propose in this special issue, and it concerns a combination of morality and motivation. It can be of particular interest for business school education. Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis (2013) argue that our times are characterized by adiaphorization: placing certain events and human beings outside of the moral categories. Management – and the way it is being taught – is one of such domains where ordinary ethics has ceased to have access and has been replaced by a specialist entity called ‘business ethics’, which is disconnected from embodied moral experience (Rhodes 2020).

For Michael Lerner (2019) it is imperative to re-introduce morality into the heart of society. He argues that the neoliberal focus on the individual is to blame for much of the misery we experience as members of neoliberal societies. Instead, we should direct more of our attention towards care and compassion for the Other. Care, understood as an organizing principle, can develop into a strong and generous bond between people – solidarity. It is a force, holding people together which does not require unanimity, conformity or even similarity. But can this message replace the current position of economics and the business school?

We propose that a shift of social energy is of the essence. Heather Höpfl (2000) makes a persuasive case for that such a shift can be acquired thanks to art: it can re-connect and move, offering a humanizing theme set against the trajectory of the linear world. It generates sustained ambivalence and empowers to carry, conceptually and in an embodied way, a counter-balance to a mindset of purposive rationality, rules and control systems, the ideological mechanisms of work and the reification of work (16). By letting oneself to be carried and moved by art one may acquire the necessary insight to gain a perspective on the relationship between consciousness and the mode of organizing.

Gaston Bachelard (1969) maintains that dreams and reverie are an occasion to focus on important symbols in a space less distracting and tumultuous than the everyday reality around us. This subversive practice can be used against the neoliberal-dominant mentality. In the words of Bachelard, reverie takes place in the space of elsewhere, which does not mean escapism, but the acquisition and addition of a radically new perspective. Reverie and poetic dreams help us inhabit the world and reclaim it and our place in it. Radical reverie is a seed of a new world, leading us away from the sinister mindset of capitalist realism. This has a great political and organizational power because images give birth to whole universes, according to Bachelard.

Art, we assume, can open up a vast poetic space, an inter-space (Berthoin Antal and Strauß 2016) that suspends social norms and conventions that determine our reality and make room for imaginings and intense encounters. This is a living – and learning – space. Johan Asplund (2016) upholds that the seemingly ephemeral coincidence of the artist and the viewer manifests itself as something much deeper and more important – a mystery of encounter with the Other’s moment of revelation and participation in something greater than law and economics. The encounter with art is personal: a presence of an intense experience, just like meeting another person, more than mere joy or curiosity. The original artwork is not about perfection but about meeting a moment of creation and addition. That moment lights new lights amid everyday life allows us to stand before the embodied presence of the artist, and the work itself constitutes a physical place through which a presence passes, the doorway between something greater than ourselves and our senses.

In a book dedicated to the sociology of computerization, Asplund (2002) writes that ‘beauty is not a matter of pattern recognition’ (152). The encounter with beauty is about a miracle, about being astonished and amazed. But this is not about a religious miracle but one of the imaginations. It can open minds in a trusting and learning mode. And so art can create a trusting and learning mode of understanding that builds social and organizational vision and facilitates aspectual vision beyond the narrow imperative of seeking an explanation of phenomena. Learning and art are profoundly connected.

Multiple engagements with what is yet to come

The contributions to this Special Issues perceive, interpret and relate in different ways to that which is not yet present in (mainstream) teaching in the business school. Their reactions range from engaging with lived experiences that are usually never shared, to addressing the lack of critical engagement with business approaches to making the unknown part of management education. All contributions in some way teach and write from the margins, a place that might not be a place of power but, as Heather Höpfl once said, a place ‘where all interesting things happen. It's where I want to be’.

The margins have their own topography, since they are not always situated at the periphery of management and education studies. While some of the contributions walk out of and leave behind mainstream management approaches, others inject artistic or aesthetic approaches into well-known management discourses to temporarily open marginal spaces from within. These margins that teachers open up to explore with their students for meaningful engagement with questions relating to management and organization need a particular form of maintenance work, and many contributions account for the challenges and efforts that holding such marginal space for someone entails.

The promising vulnerability of embracing not-knowing

All contributions grapple with the paradoxical relationship between the potential of not-knowing for meaningful learning and the demands of formal knowledge transmission dominating management and organization education. However, the positionalities of knowing and non-knowing, the ways they relate, and the rhythms they develop, play out very differently.

Mathias Karlsson posits that the neo-liberalization of academia turns university teaching into training for employability, understood as promoting attitudes devoid of critical thinking, and oriented towards efficient solving of problems within the given system. Yet universities used to be safe havens for the pursuit of independent knowledge and intellectual emancipation. Adopting the perspective of Jacques Ranciére, the author explores how to change this by opening up imagination through not-knowing. Learning under the conditions of equality helps create spaces for intellectual emancipation.

Michał Zawadzki and Thomas Lennerfors turn to Herman Hesse’s novel The Glass Bead Game as a ‘repository of knowledge about the complicated relationships between institutions and individuals’ to counter their experiences of alienation in the management classroom and find hope for escaping it. Like Karlsson, they propose a humble position of an academic who serves students by re-inventing a ‘democratic association with students’ lives’ that provides conditions for self-transformation to challenge the status quo of teaching as customer satisfaction.

Hegemony, however, is not only established in concepts, language, technologies and ways of thinking. It is also felt. Ana Paula Lafaire, Ari Kuismin, Johanna Moisander and Leni Grünbaum write about engaging art to open up a space in which Ph.D. students – possible future academic educators – could share the affectivities of the neoliberal university system. Although it resonates with each body in a singular, these resonances are usually never individual but can be shared. They show how empathy as epistemic practice can lead to knowing – however incomplete – that ‘unfolds by different affective positions that are reciprocal’.

The vulnerability that uncertainty evokes is not only felt by students or early career scholars but also experienced by academic educators. Emmanuela Mandalaki, Noortje van Amsterdam and Ely Daou ponder upon the messy, uncertain, ambiguous space and time that precedes teaching practice and whose texture is rich of unknowing. In a beautifully written account that itself embraces not-knowing, they allow readers to follow them in their embodied explorations of the preparative phase of teaching, which affords a poetics of not-knowing that turns teachers into learners. To a certain degree while this phase of insecurity even exists in more mainstream teaching formats clinging on to the notion of teaching as knowledge transmission, the authors have not only made this precarious phase of unknowing visible as an important part of teaching practice but also pushed this unknowing as pedagogical ethics practised in the classroom. They thereby open up the pedagogical space to allow for an active co-creation of knowledge.

Beatriz Acevedo, considering education itself an art, offers a frank account about how long it takes to develop and constantly refine one’s teaching in such an insecure terrain of not-knowing to ‘engage with authentic aspects of learning’ that enable ‘meaningful education and ways of action’. Bringing students into an ‘active learning mode’ is also the aim of François-Régis Puyou’s pedagogical experiments of teaching accounting literature as Literature. Entering into a new terrain (in this case, literature) Puyou seeks to expand students’ understanding of accounting that usually is considered a merely technical solution of definite questions, criticizing the dominant mode of reducing accounting practices to the correct application of specific tools to produce unambiguous answers to clear-cut questions and finds an answer with an interesting twist. He meets this reduction with yet another reduction: reducing the academic research texts that the students were asked to read to their empirical parts. Stripping away theoretical framing and interpretation of the findings get students to feel ‘awkward about what they consider true’, opens up accounting knowledge for questioning the unambiguous character of calculative routines, and nourishes an understanding of the complex and multiple layers of reality.

Fernanda Paquelet Moreira Barbosa, Eduardo Davel and Miguel Cunha agree with Puyou that they assume the necessity of getting to know oneself and one’s own dealing with rules. Yet their argument for integrating art in management education is the opposite direction. Instead of taking on a critical perspective that opens up dominant management approaches, they make a case for accommodating an engagement with not-knowing in existing management education. In an increasingly complex and incalculable world, the ability to deal with uncertain situations and ‘manage unexpected threats’ is key for managers to maintain control and ‘ensure high performance’, they explore the potential of theatre to tap into one’s intuitive capacities for making improvisation part of management education.

Knowing differently

Daniel Ericsson, Robert Stasinski and Emma Stenström propose a futuristic framework for the elaborative teaching for developing different kinds of knowledge, where art plays a central role. The authors’ experiences lead them to propose three design principles for management education: the principles of body, mind, and soul, where the students are active co-creators of knowledge. Such knowledge forges own relationships to the world and make alternatives visible (and available).

The body, senses and feelings as means and methods of learning are also addressed by Kristian Firing, Rannveig Þorkelsdóttir and Tatiana Chemi, who suggest theatre as a method of developing and teaching new leadership knowledge. Engaging students in the staging and performing of a theatrical performance, it is possible to involve and embrace feelings of uncertainty and anxiety as a community experience. This transformative learning process helps the experience of community, holistic identity, empathy towards the other and oneself. Christine Mortimer and Maria Alejandra Luján Escalante likewise employ theatre as a way of teaching and learning complex (interdisciplinary) knowledge. They propose a dramatic ‘response-able pedagogy’ that serves as a tool for hearing and learning from different voices. This helps recognize and make practical use of different pieces of knowledge.

Legitimacy work as maintenance work

While many of the contributions to this Special Issue agree that the reductive continuation of transmitting one single dogmatic approach cloaked in a narrative of truth would ultimately lead to perish business higher education, many also address the efficacy of this myth and how to deal with the challenges for teaching differently.

Sharing with many the acknowledgment of vulnerability when deviating from as master of knowledge that prevails in business schools, Puyou addresses in his article the discomfort of transgressing the boundaries of that knowledge, which maintains, confirms and legitimizes his professional identity as a professor of management and accounting practice. The discrete, nearly subversive way of ‘hiding’ his literary engagement with accounting in the curriculum of an otherwise conventionally taught module points to the challenges that alternative pedagogical approaches the business school environment entails.

Maybe more than other subjects, sustainability demands a different way of engaging with the issues at hand than the functionalist and techno-centred approaches that accommodate sustainability as a business case that still dominates curricula in business schools. Beatriz Acevedo reflects on her more than 10 years of experience in engaging aesthetics and art-based practices for developing management classes on sustainability. For providing a space ‘to live virtues as everyday practice’, she reports on the difficulties she had at the beginning of making sustainability-related topics relevant to students, who mainly considered it a waste of time. While this perception has considerably changed among students, operating between the worlds of art and business education remains a challenge, with regard to business students and art institutions.

Jenny Helin, Pierre Guillet de Monthoux and Matilda Dahl, reflecting on their teaching in a master programme in sustainable management, guide students’ expectations right at the beginning with a poetic intervention to open up the reductive neo-positivist notion of reason that always ‘economizes thought in one way or another’ (Bachelard 1970, 414). Using this intervention that marks the doing differently, the authors – like many other educators in this special issue – to create a ‘home for education’ that interlinks a desire for knowledge with the ability to get in touch with vulnerability – one’s own and the world’s. This also includes their own vulnerability when they address how exhausting experimenting with artistic collaboration for teaching differently is in an environment obsessed with measuring outputs and cherishes knowing.

Acevedo and Helin et al. acknowledge that preparing the space for teaching differently is more effortless than holding it over a considerable period. Holding such a space of vulnerability and not knowing to nourish personal engagement becomes far more challenging, as it needs on-going efforts to legitimize such approaches. While Helin, Guillet de Monthoux and Dahl reflect on the exhausting paradoxical demands of legitimizing teaching differently with the position of the knowing master in a learning situation that embraces un-knowing, Puyou uses prestigious names of authors and institutions that have written the articles he reframes and treats as the literature as ‘legitimacy infrastructure’. Instead, Acevedo reports on how they felt it was necessary to highlight employability in every single session while engaging the highly contested terrain of aesthetics and design with sustainability-related questions that were highly welcomed by some students and critiqued by others as too personal, too impersonal or ‘too beautiful’ and ‘not dense enough’. Daniel Ericsson, Robert Stasinski and Emma Stenström create a space for learning differently by proposing an engagement of the imagination, a stroll into the future, which they label an ethnography of the future.

These contributions point to the intricate fact that open up and hold a marginal space for students is related to the situations university teachers are in. Within the disabling academic atmosphere that operates using fear, aggressive competitiveness and lethargy, enabling and holding a space in which students are inspired to leave the safe but meaningless tracks of management education takes courage. The teachers and students contribute to this special issue all dared to care (Phillips 2015) about each other and the world in this more often than not, undervalued aspect of academic labour which gives us hope.

We believe that in times of profound transformation, we need to use every source we have to re-invent our being and doing together on this planet. We close our editorial with 10 rules that Corita Kent, artist, activist and educator, had developed for her teachings and later have been taken up by (and subsequently attributed to) her brother composer, artist, philosopher John Cage.

10 Rules for Students and Teachers

1. Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for a while

2. General duties of a student – pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students

3. General duties of a teacher – pull everything out of your students

4. Consider everything an experiment

5. Be self-disciplined – this means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.

6. Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail; there’s only make.

7. The only rule is work. If you work, it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.

8. Don’t try to create and analyze at the same time; they’re different processes.

9. Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.

10. ‘We’re breaking all the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities’ (Kent 1992).

Notes

1 One does not preclude the other! Quite the contrary … The more organizational diversity, the better for the ecosystem.