Critical management education: Selected auto-ethnographic vignettes on how attachment to identity may disrupt learning

Knights, David; Huber, Guy; Longman, Richard

Abstract

In this essay, we explore the underlying processes of identity work in teaching from a critical management education (CME) perspective. Identity is a concern for both teachers and students and especially where the assumptions and routines on which it is grounded are challenged as in a CME learning environment. Through auto-ethnographic accounts of our teaching experience, we focus on the problems that result from being attached to an identity and how this might be explored through reflexive participative learning. Identity work describes the pursuit of these attachments without challenging the pursuit itself. A distinctive part of o2ur contribution is to consider how in taking identity for granted as a laudatory accomplishment, CME scholars often fail to recognise how our attachment to it can be an obstacle for management learning. To conclude, we speculate on the implications of our pedagogy for inculcating more critical forms of identity work, through which we might free ourselves to think and engage with the world differently.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Sep 14, 2021
• Online Publication Date: Oct 20, 2021
• Deposit Date: Sep 14, 2021
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 8, 2022
• Journal: Management Learning
• Print ISSN: 1350-5076
• Electronic ISSN: 1461-7307
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 53
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 605-616
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/13505076211049868
• Keywords: attachment to identities; Identity work; Critical management education; engaged teaching and learning
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/7768909