Imagining management education: A critique of the contribution of the United Nations PRME to critical reflexivity and rethinking management education

Over 650 business schools worldwide have embraced the 2007 United Nations initiative, the Principles for Responsible Management Education. Proponents claim the initiative drives change and a fundamental rethinking of management education through questioning and the challenging of assumptions. Critical discussions of the Principles for Responsible Management Education have been slower to emerge, and this article contributes a necessary critique. We relate claims of questioning and social change to ideas of critical reflexivity, including those of Margaret Archer, who presents it as an open-ended process of deliberation, generating social transformation. In so doing, we ask whether the Principles for Responsible Management Education enables a critical reflexivity which might drive fundamental change in management education. Based on a critical discourse analysis of research data gathered in our UK business school, we answer this question in the negative, arguing that the Principles for Responsible Management Education, far from promoting critical reflexivity, operate as an ‘imaginary’ to inhibit critical reflexivity and to impose a particular agenda, limiting fundamental change. Rather it is resistance to the Principles for Responsible Management Education agenda and the availability of alternative imaginaries providing different meaning-making resources, which may contribute to a much needed rethinking of management education.