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This paper explores how Selznick’s approach to leadership can inform contemporary organizational theory and research. Drawing on Selznick’s writing in Leadership in Administration and related works, we characterize organizations as simultaneously technical entities pursuing economic goals and value-laden entities pursuing non-economic goals arising from their members and their role in society. These two aspects of organizations are deeply intertwined and in continual tension with one another, and the essential task of leadership is to uphold both – protecting and promoting values while also meeting technical imperatives. To do so, leaders establish a common purpose that includes values and ideals not just technical imperatives, they create structures and practices that embody this purpose, and they make organizational decisions and personal behavioral choices that are consistent with this purpose. We consider each task of leadership in turn, showing how Selznick’s ideas enrich and extend contemporary research on competing institutional logics, organizational design, culture, and identity, leadership, and meaningful work.

This paper aims to review the evolution of management education primarily over the last 50 years and seeks to identify the challenges and lessons learned in management education and to assess the potential for change. To gain insight into these issues the authors draw on the perspectives of around 40 key individuals from academia, professional bodies, media, business and students.

The content of the paper is based upon a qualitative analysis of around 40 two‐to‐three hour interviews of key global players in the management education field.

The key stakeholders in management education are identified as students, business and employers respectively. But in terms of relative stakeholder influence faculty, business and students are the top three influencers. Faculty represent the supply‐side whereas business and students represent the demand side of management education. There is evidence that higher tuition fees may increase the power of students and business relative to faculty. The individuals who have had the greatest influence on management education are academics such as Mintzberg and Drucker rather than business school deans or administrators. Institutions such as INSEAD, IMD and Harvard have had the greatest influence. The main issues and challenges identified in Management Education include information technology, globalisation, the role of faculty, competition and business model performance. Few game changing innovations in curricula have occurred in management education raising the question of how change will occur in the future.

There are few in‐depth, open‐ended interview studies of key participants in the field of management education. It adds insights to a range of more reflective literature studies from writers such as Khurana, Mintzberg and Pfeffer.

This paper aims to argue that there is a strong imbalance in business education between providing abstract, rational concepts and opportunities for personal growth. Introducing spirituality in business education seems to be desirable if we want to prepare students for the complexities and challenges of the workplace today.

The paper gives an example of how techniques from voice and drama therapy can be used for enabling students to look beyond the rational and the material.

By engaging with their “true self”, students may discover dormant qualities in themselves and start to find their purpose, meaning and spirituality.

The paper shows that by introducing some new approaches in business education, we can provide opportunities for students to connect their rational thoughts with conscience and the “true self”. When students make an integrated use of our mental, emotional and spiritual resources, they are better equipped to make complex decisions and behave ethically in the workplace and in their personal lives.

In 1994 consumer company Scott Paper was tired, bloated and more importantly, it was losing money hand over fist. Enter “Chainsaw Al” (a.k.a. Al Dunlap). This cost cutting, job slashing turnaround specialist earned his nickname as a result of his ability to cut out the dead wood and revive the fortunes of flagging organizations. Sure enough, Scott Paper’s stock price began to rise and within 18 months it was involved in a major takeover deal. Liking what it saw, appliance manufacturer Sunbeam Corporation approached Dunlap in 1996 to become its CEO and in the beginning it appeared that “Chainsaw Al” was once again working his stock price magic.

The bankruptcy of Enron in December 2001 marked the beginning of broad awareness that American corporations had left behind the strategy of expanding through diversification that was the hallmark of the 1950s through the early 1980s. CEOs now made it job one to meet the earnings projections of securities analysts, such that by the year 2000 they were, in record numbers, “restating earnings” – admitting that they had cooked the books. Accounting shenanigans were the tip of the iceberg, and what lay under the water was a new approach to running the corporation to produce numbers that analysts and institutional investors would like. Three groups that stood to benefit from the new strategy spun it to investors as in the interest of all. Managers of hostile takeover firms defined their business as setting firms on the path to performing for shareholders. Institutional investors defined earnings management, rather than acquisitions management, as increasing shareholder value and focused management attention on earnings by popularizing stock options. Securities analysts hawked their own profit projections as the reigning metric of corporate performance, and favored easy-to-analyze single-industry firms through “buy” recommendations. These three groups changed the incentives executives faced, making accounting shenanigans in the pursuit of earnings management widely popular and enriching institutional investors, analysts, and executives in the process. Regulatory changes to end malfeasance have made it marginally more difficult to perform illegal accounting practices, but they have not changed the core corporate strategy that has emerged since the early 1980s. The changes illuminate the rise of groups of business professionals in the power structure, for it was not investors but different groups of business professionals who won the day. The changes illuminate, as well, the role of the social construction of interest in power relations among groups – it was by convincing executives and shareholders that a new corporate strategy was in their own interest, which these business professionals succeeded.

Agency theorists diagnosed the economic malaise of the 1970s as the result of executive obsession with corporate stability over profitability. Management swallowed many of the pills agency theorists prescribed to increase entrepreneurialism and risk-taking; stock options, dediversification, debt financing, and outsider board members. Management did not swallow the pills prescribed to moderate risk: executive equity holding and independent boards. Thus, in practice, the remedy heightened corporate risk-taking without imposing constraints. Both recessions of the new millennium can be traced directly to these changes in strategy. To date, regulators have proposed nothing to undo the perverse incentives of the new “shareholder value” system.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the prerequisite conditions for implementing a liberal management education and for fostering ethical students using examples from the core curriculum at Singapore Management University (SMU).

Beginning with a reading of the Carnegie Foundation's Rethinking Undergraduate Business Education: liberal learning for the professions (2011), the paper examines the contribution and limits of the findings and recommendations before discussing the place of the liberal arts in the modern university and describing a case study of liberal management education in process at SMU. It concludes with a reading of the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Asian philosophy as the basis for an ethical management education.

The paper uncovers a central shortcoming in an otherwise important Carnegie study: that business education is unlike other professional education because it lacks an autonomous discipline that studies business knowledge production as an object. Consequently, applying the liberal arts to business education risks neglecting the critical side of the liberal arts. With only the reflective side of the liberal arts in operation, management education cannot be grasped as a specific sphere of values within the pluralism of spheres advocated by the Carnegie report. Only by recreating the function of an autonomous discipline with an objective lens on business knowledge within the core curriculum at SMU can that university attempt to incorporate both the critical and reflective side of the liberal arts in management education. This kind of liberal management education can indeed lead to respect for the values of the others in the way that ethical philosopher Emmanuel Levinas envisioned.

Further development of the SMU core curriculum is necessary in order to confirm the hypothesis that the liberal arts can be brought together with management education to produce more mature, ethical students.

Liberal management education curriculum must incorporate the critical function of the liberal arts when faced with business knowledge production in order to promote a pluralist ethics. If SMU is successful, it can become a model for other global business schools in Asia and beyond.

Asian higher education is ongoing a rapid transformation in values. The shift is towards understanding the wider relationship between universities and society and the role of an education citizenry. Liberal management education can be a bridge to this new world of higher education in Asia, and beyond.

This discussion provides a fuller understanding of the two-sided nature of the liberal arts and the importance of both sides for building a liberal management education and creating ethically mature students.