Experience-based views of management education became fashionable in the 1970s in reaction to the highly rational and analytic methods that had dominated in North America (and thus most of management education elsewhere) since the Gordon/Howell report in 1957. The reaction was driven partly by the libertarian ideas of the 1960s which set themselves up in political opposition to the technocratic rationality of ‘big business’ (Schumacher, 1973; Nader, 1973), and partly from a logical analysis of its own regarding the increasing rate of change and uncertainty in business and social life (Toffler, 1970). Thus it was argued by a number of authors (Livingston, 1971; Hayes and Abernathy, 1980; Peters, 1987) that the application of generalized problem solving techniques to any situation fails to consider that many of the problems tackled by practitioners are ill-defined, unique, emotive and complex. According to Schfln, instead of leading to more effective practice, education based solely on rational methods has resulted in: ‘a crisis of legitimacy rooted both in their perceived failure to live up to their own norms and in their perceived incapacity to help society achieve its objectives and solve its problems’ (1983, p. 39).
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