The art and practice of critique: The possibilities of critical psychodynamic education

In this chapter, I reflect on learning and critique in the management classroom. Critique in management education is sustained through a continuous desire to doubt or unsettle prevailing knowledge, as well as a wish to surface the emotions and power relations that maintain such knowledge. This makes it possible to call into question, for example, the established knowledge of professors; the nature of the knowledge desired by students and practitioners; and the preferred approaches to the delivery of knowledge that have become compulsory within business and management schools. I argue that one way to introduce critique into management education is by reflecting, in a broadly psychodynamic way, on the emotions and power relations that surround attempts to learn about leading, managing and organizing. Such reflection can reveal the complexities of behaviour and action that are integral to management and organization and that are also brought, both consciously and unconsciously, into teaching and learning groups. My main aim in this chapter is to illustrate the relationship between learning and critique through examples from my own practice, as well as encouraging other management educators to be influenced by ‘the art and practice of critique’.