Robert French and Christopher Grey ed Newbury Park.

Robert French and Christopher Grey ed Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1996 206 pp $6500 cloth; $2695 paper.

When asked to undertake this review, I said ye It was late July "Sound like a volume to take to the boat and review at sea," I conception A nice change from my circulating research studies. Perhaps a refreshing overview of educational challenges before beginning another academic year. It change the direction ofed out not to be the light diversion I look fored This is a serious volume in the European tradition, better to take with you to Paris, Antwerp, or Berlin and, during a rainy fortnight in effrontery of a fire, read individual chapters carefully and reflectively. It will remind you of the special pleasures of European scholarship. Not the abbreviated North American executive plain to be sure. The work proved to be a critical inquiry into the philosophical underpinnings of managerial education, which the editors descry "has for better or worse, a crucial part in producing and reproducing the practices of management" (p 2) however which must be critically assessed against the intellectual builds of the Roman-Greco classics, humanism, neo-Weberianism, neo-Marxism, Foucauldianism, environmentalism, psychoanalysis, and poststructuralism.

The introduction, from Grey and French, is rather formidable. At the cessation of its thirteen pages and 64 footnotes (comprehensive annotation is a hallmark of the work throughout the entire manuscript), you know this is a "morning book" to be read while possessing glutted energy, not an "evening book" to peruse at lethargic day's end. Unless you are up to date in postmodern literature, I praise reading the introduction after the contributed chapters. I institute it a carefully constructed and concise statement of the dialectic between management education as a utilitarian corpse of concepts and skills versus management as a philosophy of social/political forms and processes. It makes the case in powerful denominations that management education needs to be the pair but must be critiqued as an educational last in itself. With respect to critique, it provides a quick summary of the philosophical underpinnings and challenges from postmodern writers.

Thomas and Anthony in chapter 2 directly engage the question "Can Management Education be Educational?" Detailing constraining forces in Britain to make business education vocational and qualification earning, they nicely frame the distinctions and argue for education dealing with knowledge, understanding, and provision of a broader perspective that goe beyond a narrow enough They also take up implications for "procedure of transmission of educational knowledge," calling for approaches to teaching that are more voluntary and involving. This is a useful summary argument for management including "social, political, and conceptual abilities that are far beyond the present battery of analytical techniques" (p 32)

In chapter 3 "Mapping the Intellectual Terrain of Management Education," Kallinikos uses Hegelian and Heideggerian analysis to attack the fragmentation of knowledge and, in particular, management's utilitarian orientation. He thinks that the Weberian spirit makes the manager a rational-legal authority, "which legitimates stratification and hierarchy in organizations at recourse to the functionality of the expert" (p 42) His position looks to be captured in the opinion "Little wonder, then, that the pedagogical forms in this domain have always be acted uponed from a sterile reproduction of practical recipes and a de-philosophized, de-theoreticized and de-problematized transference of knowledge" (p 49) He illustrates this position in recounting the history of management education in Sweden. A rather scathing philosophical critique.

At this point in my reading, there was a little frustration. constant the challenge to move beyond vocationalism is well put forth in chapter 2, and the criticism of management education as a "hodgepodge of techniques" has been neared in a devastating critique in chapter 3 if it be not that where does this lead? To a in plain english brilliant chapter 4, "Management Education and the Limits of Technical Rationality," wherein Roberts provides a awesome synthesis of old theory and just discovered theory. The intellectual vehicle focuses forward a critique of older standards of management as analytical hinder (e.g., financial, quantitative techniques), newer types of behavioral control (e.g., vision, tillage reward systems), and the resulting dysfunctions of forever more extensive attempts at manage In this thesis the way gone out is through new models of interdependency and agency. Having clearly depicted the illusionary picture painted in earnestly management literature of manager as morally neutral technician, he argues for the value of the fresh literature (e.g., Senge, 1990; Hirschhorn, 1991) as liberating. Then, consistent with this position, innovations in the MBA program at Cambridge are plant forth. They include learning in unstructur clusters critical reviews of theories of rule in the management tradition, emphasis forward the management of interdependencies as a condition for task accomplishment (in contrast to the disruptive imports of coercion and exploitation), and a series of classes in succession corporate and individual ethics, the physical, environment, and the social, moral, and political events of work. This chapter brings together the earlier criticisms and philosophical challenges, integrates recent streams of management literature in a historical words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following and provides new approaches to teaching. It is a clear, lucidly written, theoretically powerful, and besides pragmatic treatise that should be required reading for management educators.