Reclaiming the Humanities in Management Learning: A Non-Instrumental Approach to Empathy and Self-Liberation

This paper reports on a three-year pedagogical experiment exploring the integration of humanities into management education at a UK business school. Seeking to de-instrumentalize management learning, the experiment focused on teaching the humanities intrinsically, as valuable in themselves rather than as tools for re-producing economically “useful” management knowledge. The research investigates the lived experiences of students who participated in the module, drawing on interviews, reflective essays, and correspondence. Our analysis reveals four key phenomenological modes of being and becoming management learners via the humanities: defamiliarization, intersubjectivity, abductive action, and self-liberation. Our findings surprised us. Expecting to instill ethical awareness and enhance students’ empathy for others, we discovered a more nuanced mode of learning, in which students explored their own emotions and sense of self. We explain this unexpected outcome and contribute to theory in management learning by reconsidering the work of Robert Coles on moral imagination alongside recent debates on the nature of empathy. We argue for a shift in our theoretical understanding of why the humanities belong in management learning. Rather than “using” the humanities to make managers more ethical or empathetic, the humanities are most “useful” when they allow students to learn about themselves in ways that inculcate their innate empathic capabilities. We further reflect, however, on the challenges of integrating such a non-instrumentalist approach in an institutional context that prioritizes the acquisition of management knowledge over the experience of management learning.