The Odd Couple: Can Management Education and Liberal Arts Work Together Without Driving Each Other Crazy?

Date: 25 September 2013 Time: 11.00 am

Abstract:
Liberal arts offerings are often dismissed as intellectual and academic; management courses are useful and practical. This paper argues that these orientations have erroneously become defined as polar opposites, undermining the power and effectiveness of each. When we ignore that central to liberal arts education is the critical evaluation of and determination to act upon the most pressing social, political, and economic problems, we trend into idealism and irrelevance. When we forget that management education must be engaged with and constantly attendant to the development and redevelopment of aesthetic considerations, intellectual foundations and ethical practices, we plunge into corruption, alienation, and environmental disaster. Though there are many avenues for integration, here I discuss how liberal arts and management education might be integrated on the basis of the disciplines of ethics and entrepreneurship. I offer three parameters that lay the foundation for a distinct type of integration that respects the disciplinary integrity and orientations of both liberal arts and management courses. The goal of integration should not be merely to ensure that students get jobs, but to put students in the position to construct the basis of work and employment in the future: to make jobs.

About the presenter:
Mary Godwyn is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the History and Society Division at Babson College. She holds a BA in Philosophy from Wellesley College and a PhD in Sociology from Brandeis University. In addition to teaching at Babson, she has lectured at Harvard University and taught at Brandeis University and Lasell College, where she was also the Director of the Donahue Institute for Values and Public Life.

For further information please contact Jim Sheffield, School of Management:
Jim.Sheffield@vuw.ac.nz Ph. (04) 463 5085