What about the Workers?

Abstract

Scholarly interest in the work of managers and the nature of management has grown rapidly in the last few decades as management education has become established on a large scale in Britain's universities. Management education has, in turn, become the focus of a considerable amount of attention, largely in terms of its pedagogical and research practice and institutional organization. Yet as a form of work engaged in by a particular segment of the academic labour force it has received less critical scrutiny. Moreover, management educators have seldom themselves been considered worthy of investigation. In this article we sketch out a rationale for an investigation of this kind. We propose that such a study is timely for three main reasons: (a) because academic work, of which management education is a part, has been neglected as an object of research, (b) because management education is now a major activity in Britain's universities, and (c) because academic work in general and management education in particular have been exposed to significant changes in recent years whose implications are poorly understood. In addition, we report some results from a small exploratory interview study of university management educators which addressed a variety of questions concerning management education as work. We suggest that, undertaken on a broader scale, such an investigation could make an important contribution to our understanding of management education as a form of academic work in a context of change.

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