Over 650 Business Schools worldwide have embraced the 2007 United Nations initiative, the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME). Proponents claim the initiative drives change and a fundamental rethinking of management education, through questioning and the challenging of assumptions. Critical discussions of PRME have been slower to emerge and this paper contributes a necessary critique. We relate claims of questioning and social change to ideas of critical reflexivity, including those of Margaret Archer, who presents it as an open-ended process of deliberation, generating social transformation. In so doing we ask whether PRME enables a critical reflexivity which might drive fundamental change in management education. Based on a critical discourse analysis of research data gathered in our United Kingdom Business School, we answer this question in the negative, arguing that PRME, far from promoting critical reflexivity, operates as an ‘imaginary’ to inhibit critical reflexivity, and to impose a particular agenda, limiting fundamental change. Rather it is resistance to the PRME agenda, and the availability of alternative imaginaries providing different meaning-making resources, which may contribute to a much needed rethinking of management education.
Millar, JillPrice, Margaret
Oxford Brookes Business School\Oxford Brookes Business School
Year of publication: 2018Date of RADAR deposit: 2018-01-26