CfP: 50 years of Management Learning

Call for Papers: Anniversary Special Issue of Management Learning
Celebrating 50 years of Management Learning:
Historical reflections at the intersection of the past and future

Deadline for submissions: June 01, 2018
Guest Editors:
Gabrielle Durepos, Mount Saint Vincent University, Canada
Rafael Alcadipani, FGV-EAESP, Brazil
Mairi Maclean, University of Bath, UK
Stephen Cummings, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Management Learning marks its 50th anniversary in 2020. Management Learning has a
long history of publishing critical, reflexive scholarship on organizational knowledge and learning. This special issue provides a forum to celebrate and build on this history
through critical and reflective engagement with the past, present and future of
management learning, knowledge and education. Taking a historical approach is all the
more pressing given recent and impending crises – geo-political, technological,
environmental and humanitarian – since some crises only make sense when seen in the
fullness of time (Casson and Casson, 2013). We therefore encourage scholarship that
challenges the disciplinary past of management knowledge, learning and education and
enables more diverse, innovative futures to be imagined.
There are a growing variety of approaches and conceptual frameworks in management
and organization studies for writing histories of organizations (Maclean, Harvey and
Clegg, 2016; Rowlinson, Hassard and Decker, 2014), management thought (Bucheli and
Wadhwani, 2014; Cummings, Bridgman, Hassard and Rowlinson, 2017) and researching
management in historically conscious ways (Jacques, 1996; Kieser, 1994). This has been
accompanied by a rise in critical organizational histories (Cooke, 1999; Ibarra-Colado,
2006; Scott, 2007). Although diverse, this scholarship is characterized by reflexivity
(Cunliffe, 2002), anti-performativity – history is generated for reasons beyond improving
future business efficiency and effectiveness – and commitment to an agenda of denaturalizing both hegemonic organizations, by exposing problematic pasts, and dominant historiography like positivism that seeks unitary truth (Fournier and Grey, 2000). The rise of critical history research has involved scholarship on management learning and education that challenges the dominant history of management thought in a number of ways (Jacques, 1996; Genoe Mclaren, Mills and Weatherbee, 2015). While some have exposed processes of exclusion and marginalization of management knowledge in textbooks (Cummings and Bridgman, 2011; Grant and Mills, 2006), others have uncovered knowledge politics and marginalization around geographical boundaries.