Conclusion: Humanising Management Training: Preliminary Elements of Critical Pedagogy

Abstract

In the theory and practice of management training, the manipulation of students remains indispensable. Ideologies are vital for this, and they need to infiltrate virtually every eventuality of management and managerial issues that are discussed during training. Set against this is the triadic idea of mutual and equal recognition, communicative action, and ideal speech. When linked to emancipatory education, this has the capability to organise students quite differently and potentially away from the present antagonistic structure of Managerialism and its manipulative faces. The organisation of participants in communicative action directed towards emancipatory education is never automatically linked to solidarity. Instead, it is part of the evolutionary development of human altruism and kinship sustained by a “natural” empathy among human beings. Accordingly, emancipatory educators who pursue the human triage of altruism, kinship, and solidarity quite necessarily will—whether implicitly or explicitly—organise students in one form or the other solidaristically (human) rather than completive (domination). This requires not just being witness to the fact that the struggle for emancipation remains a thoroughly human task, it also entails an active engagement with managerial reality.