From the Guest Editors: the legitimacy and impact of business schools—key issues and a research agenda

It is an appropriate moment to review research into the legitimacy and impact of business schools. It is more than a decade now since Pfeffer and Fong's (2002) provocative paper challenging the perceived orthodoxy of business school success in the very first edition of the Academy of Management Learning & Education

Restating the Case: How Revisiting the Development of the Case Method Can Help Us Think Differently About the Future of the Business School

© Academy of Management Learning & Education. Although supportive of calls for business schools to learn the lessons of history to address contemporary challenges about their legitimacy and impact, we argue that our ability to learn is limited by the histories we have created. Through contrasting the contested development of the case method of teaching at Harvard Business School and the conventional history of its rise, we argue that this history, which promotes a smooth linear evolution, works against reconceptualizing the role of the business school. To illustrate this, we develop a "counterhistory" of the case method-one that reveals a contested and circuitous path of development-and discuss how recognizing this would encourage us to think differently. This counterhistory provides ameans of stimulating debate and innovative thinking about how business schools can address their legitimacy challenges, and, in doing so, have a more positive impact on society

Teaching leadership critically: new directions for leadership pedagogy

Conventional approaches to teaching leadership in business schools have overrelied on transformational models that stress the role of charismatic individuals, usually white men, in setting compelling visions to which all organizational actors are expected to subscribe. Such approaches pay insufficient attention to the dynamics of power, the influence of context, and the significance of follower dissent and resistance. This article examines the pedagogical potential of critical leadership studies: an emergent, alternative paradigm questioning deep-seated assumptions that power and agency should be vested in the hands of a few leaders and exploring the dysfunctional consequences of such power dynamics for individuals, organizations, and societies. It also recognizes that follower compliance and conformity, as well as resistance and dissent, are important features of leadership dynamics. Informed by our own experience of trying to teach leadership more critically, this essay highlights a number of guiding principles that we have used in the classroom to encourage a more questioning approach from our students in their study of leadership