A proposal for developing a critical pedagogy in management from researching organizational members' everyday practice

This article outlines a proposal for developing a critical pedagogy in management which also overcomes four specific problems associated with critical approaches. They are: superior moralizing abstraction/irrelevance; difficulties in surfacing and questioning the 'taken-for-ganted' that pervades management practice; and availability of appropriate curriculum content for doing so. It is suggested that the crucial first step is to under take research in a way that preserves the complex interpersonal weaving of the taken-for-granted social/moral, political and economic threads of organizational members' lived experiences. This necessitates undertaking organizational ethnographies which are extended here to include audio recordings of the naturally occurring talk-based interactive routines of managers over a period of time. The subsequent generation of empirical materials in the form of detailed transcribed interactive routines, when allied with the interpretive resource of 'validity claims' drawn from Habermas's critical theory of communicative action, allows for a fine-grained analysis of the everyday taken-for-granted construction of social order. One short extract is reproduced to illustrate the level and scope of analysis and the possibilities for critical reflection.