Critical management education: From pedagogy of possibility to pedagogy of refusal? Management Learning 35(1): 61–77

Abstract 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’. Key Words: criticality; debate; feminism; management education It is now more than a decade since Elizabeth Ellsworth incurred the considerable wrath of leading lights of the ‘radical ’ education movement by suggesting that their version of criticality had become a repressive myth that perpetuated relations of domination within the classroom.1 As a result of the vitriolic debate that followed the publication of Ellsworth’s article, her critique of Freirean and critical theorist educational practices—i.e. that it fostered a romanticized, essentialized interpretation of emancipation that failed to confront the authoritarianism inherent within most teacher–student relations—has become well established. The tension that exists between educationalists from differing critical per-spectives has undoubtedly influenced the development of critical pedagogy in the last 10 years, particularly in respect of awareness of structural and other differ-ences in students ’ experience of education. We would like to use this article to question why an equivalent debate has not happened within the field of critical management education (CME), which also positions itself as a ‘critical ’ pedagogy