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While identity has become an excessive preoccupation of people in everyday life, its centrality to critical management learning and education has sometimes been ignored. In this essay, we explore the strengths and limitations but also the neglect of George Herbert Mead’s analysis of self and identity for developing a pedagogy that facilitates critical management learning. Through a sociology of knowledge, we trace this neglect to earlier research wherein, with limited exceptions, Marxian inspired critical research tended to eschew a concern with processes of the self-formation of subjects. We argue that Mead’s ideas on reflexivity and indeterminacy are central to learning to think differently, which is the benchmark for teaching from a critical management perspective. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s ideas, we theorize identity work in the context of power/knowledge relations in ways that help us to transform our pedagogy. Overall, we seek to challenge not only our students but also ourselves in reflecting on identity work to facilitate ways of thinking and feeling differently in teaching and learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on ethnographic research of a large food retail cooperative in New York (the Co-op), this article raises the research question of whether organizations can cultivate an ethic of responsibility to others and, if so, how this can be secured in everyday working practices? It draws principally on the work of Foucault and especially his later writings on the care of the self and ethics but seeks to link these deliberations to Levinas in identifying responsibility to the Other as prior to identity. Indeed, one message that we seek to convey is that attachments to identities are frequently a stumbling block for developing ethically responsible relations and organizations and this may necessitate some normative control. While recognizing that normative control can easily become oppressive and there were occasional signs of this where staff were watching one another and demanding compliance, our research provides a platform for exploring conversations about alternative forms of organization. We explore how relations of power can produce ethically progressive relations, through generative norms that give space to, and nurture, care and responsibility for others to constitute morally engaging organizational life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigates critical pedagogy by focusing on an empirically-based evaluation of the difficulties surrounding its potential realization. Discusses student response to different pedagogical approaches and institutional context. Examines whether it is possible for management teachers to implement a critical pedagogy to greater extent and potential barriers to this. Focuses on the possibility of attaining critical dialogue in MBA teaching. (Author/KHR)