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The purpose of this paper is to propose an approach for the teaching and delivery of HRD practices, professional skills and theory that challenges the modernist orthodoxy of contemporary organisational life and the requirements of professional bodies.

First, the territory of a critical HRD pedagogy is defined within practices that respect human freedom and individual dignity as opposed to instrumentalism and target setting. Second, it will advocate an approach for a HRD pedagogy that has its roots within the lost paradigm of sentimentalism that emphasises the belief in the goodness of humanity informing the romantic notions of human imagination, creativity and respect for the individual that is realised through the dialogical process.

The findings, evinced by vignettes, advocate a critical HRD pedagogy and the development of professional skills that base their values and ethics within emancipatory practices if organisations are to create and support sustainable learning environments rather than those located within the conventional wisdom of modernist orthodoxy.

This paper calls for a critical HRD pedagogy and learning environments where individuals are engaged in the transformation of their socio‐historical‐political worlds and advocates dialogue is central to classroom practice if it is to realise the potential and creative impulses of individuals.

This paper contributes to the critical HRD discourse in the development of knowledge, skills, values and professional practice by addressing the constraints of classroom practice in its response to the demands and tensions of professional bodies. It explicitly develops a critical HRD pedagogy that has implications for the assessment of HRD programmes and of their resourcing.

Management development programmes available to NHS managers focus on a performance orientation and sustain a culture of managerial and medical domination. This paper aims to question whether it is possible to consider NHS management development from a critical (empowerment culture) perspective. Features of the critical management studies approach (CMS) are identified. A new MSc is evaluated against these characteristics, examining the teaching and learning processes and students' perceptions of the programme. The aim is to develop critical thinkers who can return to their organizations and challenge existing power structures and practices to change local cultures and enhance health services.

Empirical research employed anonymous student questionnaires and a focus group.

Student evaluations suggest the MSc can deliver a critical pedagogy and help managers understand issues of power and empowerment, challenge dominant cultures, innovate and effect small, local changes in the NHS culture.

There is a need to continue evaluating the programme and include other stakeholders. Longitudinal research should assess the impact of the managers' changed values, attitudes and behaviours on colleagues, clients and the local cultures.

The paper identifies some of the tensions of developing “critical” health service managers, and the problems they encounter back in the “uncritical” NHS context, as well as some of the challenges in “facilitating” a critical curriculum. It questions the ethics of developing (or not) a critical perspective in a local context unfamiliar with CMS.

Management development in the NHS largely ignores critical pedagogy. This paper makes a small and unique contribution to understanding how developing “critically thinking” managers can challenge the dominant culture. However, the limitations of such a small‐scale study and ethical implications are noted.

This paper details how we adapted a critically informed third-year career management and development course to address an identified gap in our Human Resource Management students learning at both practical and theoretical levels. In order to address this gap, we explored and challenged the aims of our critically informed pedagogy, and alongside our campus career development services, collaboratively redesigned the course to enhance theoretical and practical learning outcomes of students.

We detail changes made through three stages of curriculum redesign and provide an exploratory analysis of 106 student reflections on the third iterative redesign. This exploratory analysis focuses on student learning outcomes resulting from their engagement with the career practitioner and the revised course content.

Students found the course theoretically challenging and practically relevant and were readily able to incorporate career theory into descriptions of their own careers. However, more significantly, students were also able to situate themselves within a wider critique of the context of careers, demonstrating the development of critical reasoning skills and moving towards practical and critical action, demonstrating praxis.

Our experience provides an example of bridging the seeming paradox of critical pedagogy and practice. Specific details of curriculum design may be of interest to those looking to improve both theoretical and practice engagement.

The purpose of this study is to examine the potential of integrating material from the arts into postgraduate curricula to deepen students’ engagement with marketing phenomena. The authors assess the use of arts-based activities, within a broader critical pedagogy, for encouraging imaginative and analytical thinking.

The authors devised two learning activities and an interpretive method for studying their value. The activities were an individual essay connecting themes in song lyrics to marketing, and a group photography project. These were applied, within a broader, critical approach, in postgraduate modules on sustainability, ethics and critical marketing. Data collection comprised diaries kept by the teachers, open-ended feedback from students and students’ assignments.

Students showed high levels of engagement, reflexivity and depth of thought, in felt experiences of learning. Their ability to make connections not explicitly in the materials, and requiring imaginative jumps, was notable. Several reported lasting changes to their behaviour. Some found the tasks initially intimidating or, once they were more engaged, stressful or saddening.

This adds to scholarship on management education by showing the usefulness of an arts-based approach towards a transformative agenda.

It offers a template of how to draw from the arts to strengthen critical engagement upon which marketing teachers can build. It also contains practical advice on the challenges and benefits of doing so.

The authors provide evidence that this approach can enhance sensitivity and reflexivity in students, potentially producing more ethical and sustainable decisions in future.

The pedagogical interventions are novel and of value to lecturers seeking to enhance critical engagement with theory. An empirical study of an attempt to integrate arts into teaching marketing represents a promising direction, given the discipline’s creative nature.

This article discusses the role of criticality in action learning and in Master's level management education; examines approaches to developing criticality through social constructionist approaches to learning and illustrates how a heightened consciousness of language use by managers can be used to develop critical reflection. Examines critical management pedagogy and critical reflection and their relationship to action learning. Discusses the nature of Master's level management education and the role of criticality in the pursuit of “scholarship”. Reviews social constructionist approaches to management learning and examines the use of critical management language in a Master's programme at a UK university. Shows how social constructionist approaches to management development can lead to critical reflection. This was a regional sample, requiring more geographical coverage. Provides information and ideas for management developers using action learning who wish to develop critical thinking. Gives a new and additional perspective on social constructionist approaches to learning.

The purpose of this paper is to draw the authors experience of teaching a crisis management module within a range of MBA programmes in the UK, EU and USA. A key characteristic of the module was its development as a means of critiquing conventional approaches to management education. The paper details that experience.

It reviews the literature on management education that has been critical of prescriptive and “toolkit-based” approaches to MBA education.

An approach to a crisis management course is shown to provide a means of challenging dominant theoretical and practical approaches to management.

The paper identifies challenges and personal and academic benefits for educators and students when engaging with critical perspectives and critical pedagogies.

Through introducing the notion of crisis management, the paper discusses the importance of challenging theory and practice and creating within students, an appetite to challenge the dominant paradigms of conventional teaching and business practice.

This paper sets out to explore the gendered nature of the MBA and the benefits men and women gain from the course. In so doing it aims to highlight a relationship between the masculinity of the MBA and the “un‐development” of men.

The paper draws on secondary data and critiques the masculinity of the MBA pedagogy.

Examining outcomes from the MBA, evidence suggests that while men may achieve greater progress in terms of career development and pay, it is women who are more likely to undergo “transformational” change.

Drawing on work from critical management education (CME) and on models of learning, this paper argues for the need to “feminise” the MBA, where feminisation is used in a critical context to include a challenge to rather than rejection of dominant discourses. This goes some way to address the charge that, while CME has highlighted some of the programme's moral and political foundations, it has failed to recognise the gendered implications of the MBA.

Critical marketing studies are currently on the margins of the discipline, and the ideas and challenges to conventional marketing thought posed by these critiques are rarely examined in the marketing classroom. Drawing largely from debates in the management literature, discusses the problems and considers the possibilities of integrating critical reflection into the marketing curriculum.

This paper aims to explore the challenges and opportunities for expediting critical reflection in management education and development to highlight particularly how critical reflection has been facilitated within the context of a professionally focused doctoral programme.

The paper draws on empirical research conducted for a broader project, focusing here on two awaydays for DBA supervisors (n=25 in 2005 and n=16 in 2006) and a UFHRD workshop in 2007 (n=12) for members involved and/or interested in doctoral programmes in HRD, where the empirical research findings were presented and discussed. The paper presents selected findings from the perspective of staff through their own critical reflections, drawing on the data from the two awaydays and the UFHRD workshop. Detailed handwritten notes were taken and transcribed, in addition to flipchart material provided by the participants. These qualitative data are analysed using thematic analysis. The quotations presented are as accurate as possible (verbatim) and any ambiguous notes have been deliberately excluded.

Emerging findings include the need to clarify the concept for both staff and students, and embed critical reflection from the beginning of the programme and throughout written assignments. Insights into how staff perceive critical reflection within a DBA programme are offered, including how staff might assume (incorrectly) that advanced practitioners arrive with a high level of maturity to engage in critical reflection, and yet advanced practitioners “worry” about critique and perceive it as negative and/or failure.

It is acknowledged that the subjective experience of student participants is not central to this discussion, and, whilst a limitation of this paper, this presents an avenue for further research.

The paper presents a critical and reflexive account from a facilitator's perspective and offers practical suggestions for incorporating critical reflection within a DBA programme.

Given the dearth of literature of facilitating critical reflection in the context of professionally focused doctoral programmes, this paper makes a small and initial contribution to this field.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a case study which illustrates how specific skills can be embedded within an undergraduate business module thereby promoting wider criticality and an ethos of sustainability.

The paper analyses a pragmatic approach to redesigning a third‐year undergraduate module on twenty‐first century business topics such as globalisation and sustainability in which students acquire subject‐specific knowledge as well as the tools necessary for challenging current approaches. The redesign was guided by a series of emergent paradigms within the pedagogical literature, including student‐centred learning, emphasis on skills development and elements of the critical management perspective. “Questioning perceived wisdom” became the subtext for a series of activities linked to continuous assessment. Action research provided a basis for curricular development, and resulted in lectures with multiple viewpoints and a variety of weekly tasks including analyses of in‐class debates, surveys, and online discussions in small groups. The new structure also sought to address instrumental attitudes and student engagement. Rich qualitative and quantitative data were generated from the surveys, discussion groups, exam scripts and student feedback.

Data show that students responded well to those activities which implicitly reinforced the skills of “questioning” and judgement based on evidence. The increased engagement may be due to incentivisation of the chosen assessment structure and/or the heuristic nature of the varied activities.

This paper invites practitioners to shift away from “teaching” sustainability or criticality as an intellectual topic, and rather to concentrate more on creating those experiential opportunities where the student can develop the skills to question current dogma, whether neo‐liberalism or even environmental fundamentalism.