Word from the Guest Editors Business schools: Between criticism, resistance and change

Critical approaches are today the subject of repeated and serious attacks inside and outside universities, all over the world. What’s more, they are probably one of the keys to meeting the complex and varied global challenges we are currently facing. Not only in a deconstruction project to which they are often assigned out of laziness, but to shed light on the possibilities of transformation. Business schools bear their responsibility in the production of a broken and drifting world, and in various aspects. Critical studies contribute to this de(re)construction work of knowledge, identities, practices, and discourses. They still insufficiently question, and this is particularly true in the French-speaking world, the very frameworks of (co)production and the transfer of knowledge, which is particularly destructive: business schools, our schools. Creating critical spaces. Since 2012, a community has been formed around critical management perspectives, under the impetus of the Université de Louvain, Université de Paris-Dauphine, and Université de Montpellier, and manifests each year through the organization of a doctoral seminar. In October 2019, the École des sciences de la gestion of Université du Québec à Montréal organized this seminar and hosted a research day dedicated to business schools, objects of criticism but also actors of resistance and of (their) transformation. Management international agreed to publish a call for contributions dedicated to these issues. We have put together a selection of papers after an evaluation process following the usual rules. We would like to thank all our colleagues who have supported us through the review process in a gracious and demanding manner. This essay begins with an article by guest editors that situates the issue within ongoing conversations in critical management education. The essay surveys several major issues that challenge and should concern business schools both as social actors and as organizations. The classroom holds a special place in this issue, as a place to experience the critical possibilities of transforming business schools. The first three texts invite us to reflect on the ways in which critical teaching can be led to break away from the overhanging position of the teacher mastering and delivering the right way to be critical. It is a matter of allowing a variety of critical operations to emerge in students without hierarchy, of accepting and receiving the unexpected, the disruption, specific to the (organizational) world and to learning, and finally to creating possibilities of connection with this world. Emmanuel Bonnet, Pascale Borel, and Daniela Borodak question the possibilities of aesthetic experience as a lever for transforming management education to respond to the criticism of business schools. For the authors, it is a question of considering the sensitive aspects of the learning experience, rather privileging abstract, and normative models. They propose, from a pragmatist perspective, to consider the test of trouble, whose outcome is not predictable, as a vector of transformation. To do so, an ethnographic observation leads them to study how an immersion workshop in a business school unfolds: students are led to create and realize in four days a model taking as a starting point a voluntarily not very defined theme. The article highlights the importance of a defined trouble as an attentional opening to the unpredictable, which could benefit the transformation of teaching in business schools. The authors illustrate the importance of reinvesting in the learning space, defined as an experience to be lived, making manifest unrealized but present possibilities in business schools. Management education is still dominated by models, devices and recipes that seem to be little disturbed by the repeated crises we are experiencing. Jean-Luc Moriceau, Isabel Paes and Robert Eahrhart suggest that the removal …