Critical management education: From pedagogy of possibility to pedagogy of refusal?

In this article we use the frame of the debate between Ellsworth and the Freirean education movement over a decade ago to examine the current state of critical management education (CME). We question why an equivalent debate has not taken place within the field of critical management education, which also positions itself as a critical pedagogy. Our argument is that CME theory and practice need repositioning, much in the same way that Ellsworth’s challenge to critical pedagogy attempted to do for that field. We conclude that to define CME using ‘traditional’ emancipatory aims is to misread its possibilities and position as pedagogy. Instead we use the concept of ‘colonizers that refuse’, borrowed from Memmi to illuminate some of the dilemmas critical management educators face and to think through the implications of our ‘Pedagogy of Refusal’.