Chia, Robert. “A Whiteheadian View of Management Education.”  In Alfred North Whitehead on Learning and Education: Theory and Application (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2005) : 215-235.

Abstract

The field of professional management practice emerged as a consequence of the gradual separation of ownership from the operational control of production activities in the early part of the twentieth century.  As the size and complexity of organizations became more of an issue in terms of effective control of the workforce, owners and shareholders began appointing managers to look after the daily running of their businesses.  An elite class of managers was created.  One major consequence of this emergence of a class of professionally trained managers is the tendency towards overspecialization.  Management education and training via the now universally-accept qualification, the Masters in Business Administration (MBA) has created a distinctive breed of  bright, young, ambitious, and highly specialised individuals for the ever-burgeoning market for qualified managers.  The MBA was initiated by business schools in the United States (Harvard being the very first to offer this kind of management education in the early 1920's) but now has a world-wide appeal and is currently offered from Beirut to Beijing and St Pauls to St Petersburgh.  In Britain alone there are some 120 institutions offering one kind of MBA or another.  But despite the overwhelming popularity of this specialised training and preparation of managers the actual contribution of such professionalised training and education towards effective management practice remains contestable.  Indeed, even within the United States itself, there has been a growing criticism of the adequacy of the MBA in preparing students for the real task of managing.  According to one prominent source of criticism, MBA-type education produces 'silo-type' thinking.  Each student comes in ostensibly as an 'empty bucket' and is filled with knowledge about the functions of business - marketing, operations, finance and human resources - treated with a diet of artificially-simplified case studies and then let out into the real world of work where they find themselves ill-equipped to deal with the cacophony of problems that confront them.  What MBA training tends to do is to create what the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead calls "minds in a groove" (Whitehead, 1985: 245).  For Whitehead, this kind of training inclines such individual professionals to live their lives contemplating a given set of abstractions and to actively encourage disconnection with the real world of managerial life.  This tendency to produce and reinforce minds in a groove has wide-ranging ramifications for the practice of management.  This chapter will explore this dominant trend in management education, outline its consequences for the preparation of managers for the world of work and explore its implications for the effective and ethical management of enterprises in the twenty-first century.