Creativity in Management Education

A Systemic Rediscovery

José-Rodrigo Córdoba-Pachón

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030509606
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Information Management
• Index: Business

This book proposes a new way to consider creativity in management education, inviting educators to rediscover themselves in the process. To date, creativity in management is a valuable skill, but one which has been institutionalized and subordinated to metrics such as economic growth, knowledge disciplining and employability.

After a critical analysis using Foucault's governmentality to identify how creativity is being organized in management education, this book examines diverse initiatives intended to nurture creativity. Then, and through a systemic recontextualization of governmentality and other notions like play, it provides conceptual and practical guidance derived from the author's own self-narratives (games) as student and educator. The book concludes with important reflections, implications and guidelines for the nurturing in creativity in management education and life in general.

This book will be a valuable reading for creativity and innovation scholars, academics working in management education and students in general.

© The Author(s) 2020

J.-R. Córdoba-PachónCreativity in Management Educationhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50960-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

José-Rodrigo Córdoba-Pachón¹

(1)

School of Business and Management, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK

José-Rodrigo Córdoba-Pachón

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

CreativityManagementEducationFoucaultGovernmentalityPlay (and seriousness)

End Abstract

Setting the Scene

Today, I am sitting in a large lecture theatre as an observer. I wait until everyone else leaves. My feelings of frustration as a student have resurfaced. I feel I am not capable to learn, let alone creative enough to put into practice what I have been lectured on. As a student, it might be tempting to take notes, check social media on my phone, or think of skipping the next sessions and doing nothing for this course.

I wonder if other classmates feel the same way, or how I would feel if I had to take over this course as a teacher.

I will have to learn about numbers and statistics again, teach in front of hundreds of students… Where will be my creativity , their creativity, in all of this?

This feeling and thoughts evoke memories of when I was an undergraduate engineering student many years ago. After a few semesters, I decided to pass rather than fully learn subjects like physics and later calculus, algebra, statistics and mathematical logic: I enjoyed other subjects like systems thinking, software programming or history and philosophy. The difference today is that I am (going to be) teaching many students. As an educator, I see myself as in a ‘saving’ mission to entice them to like what they are learning, to awaken their minds and nurture their creativity. My saviour and perfectionist-anxious selves surface again (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1

A feeling of old days

Fortunately, I am now bit more mindful of my fears, and try not to berate myself too much. When that happens, I stop, rest and reflect. Beyond me, there is an education system in management that influences all of us. And there is a perceived lack of time to reflect before acting, a paradox and a tension in our technology-mediated, Westernised societies worldwide (Rose 2013).

When I studied engineering in the late 1980s and early 1990s in Colombia, my home country, there were talks and meetings with students about making our curricula less mathematically driven and more oriented to consider technological solutions provided by (US-based) companies. Despite being initially inspired by American academia, our overall university curricula also paid attention to European research in informatics and systems thinking, developing awareness about our own country history and specific social problems. During my degree, I was able to take courses on history, social psychology, ethics and society.

And halfway through my five-year degree, one day the penny dropped, and it keeps doing so in my current job as a management educator: we need to challenge our assumptions about how we conceive of and nurture creativity in education. We need to continuously rediscover it for our benefit and that of our societies.

Many of my management students today seem to be wanting to have quick fixes or solutions to problems; many also say they enrolled in management, partly because they hate mathematics or numbers. They are impatient if they cannot see the impacts of their actions or their education (Wagner 2015). Students want to get high-flying jobs or set up their own (successful) business whereas others want to contribute to saving the planet. All with little time to consider several options when solving problems, asking us as educators to provide the ‘right’ answers or paths (Fig. 1.2).

Fig. 1.2

Management Education Today

As Fig. 1.2 also shows, in countries like the UK, there is pressure to strengthen data-driven, numeracy skills in management education, and link this with the use of data analytics solutions, many of which have been produced by globally known companies (SAS©, SAP©, etc.). There is also an imperative to educate our students to make them more aware of sustainability issues in contrast with a drive to only generate profits. And there is a drive to encourage students to be more entrepreneurial whilst also ensuring that they can fit into different types of organisations and cultural contexts.

As educators, we implicitly expect students to learn to live in an increasingly uncertain world, being able to reconcile tensions and sources of knowledge (Abbott 1988). We ask them to come up with creative ideas that could have some degree of (commercial) application or benefit to others. Through promoting continuous collaboration and practically oriented learning, we currently assume that in this way we are contributing to make them more creative and innovative. Throwing them in at the deep end, we expect them to learn to swim and survive.

In this rush to the top, as educators we are failing to ask our students to formulate and address more personal and relevant questions for today’s world: How about our curiosity and imagination? Are we being ‘true’ to ourselves? What could be the consequences of becoming creative as our societies want or need us to be?

As authors like Rose (2013) and Berg and Seeber (2016) concur, there is a need to slow down the pace of our higher education systems and reflect on what it means to be human. There might be a need to be solitary, pondering, introvert selves in our interactions with others that need to be rescued. Or there might be a need to transcend, with acceptance and humility, what we mean by the idea of a ‘creative self’ in relation to other living beings, our planet or even the universe. Developing ideas around these possibilities could require all of us to go back to what we used to enjoy as children (i.e. play), as well as taking the view that the more we try to normalise or standardise creativity in management education, the less we are helping our students become more creative. We also need to be serious to accept that which we cannot control and challenge what we think could change.

This book is an attempt to make better sense of what we mean by creativity in management education and provide some answers to the above tensions. It aims to help educators, students and other people involved or affected to appreciate the complex issues and dilemmas involved in the inclusion of ‘other’ forms of being or acting creatively, which could lead all of us to reflect on othe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Soft Tyrannies for Creativity in Management Education
• 3. Current Initiatives to Nurture Creativity
• 4. A Systemic Space for Selves
• 5. A Spirit of Play (and Seriousness)
• 6. First Rediscoveries of Creativity
• 7. Taking Creativity to the Classroom
• 8. Summaries, Implications and Epilogue
• Back Matter