Teaching what is not there

Abstract

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 coor 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 Howmuch 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: