Comedy, pain and nonsense at the Red Moon Cafe: The Little Tramp's death by service work in Modern Times

Paper presented at the Art of Management Conference, 2004, ParisThis paper was originally presented at the Art of Management Conference, in Paris in 2004. The paper is an essay about The Red Moon Cafe scene in Charlie Chaplin's masterpeiece, Modern Times (1936). In this scene, famous for the Nonsense Song, where the Little Tramp 'speaks' for the first and the last time on screen, Chaplin explores service work, especially the theme of authenticity, and uses his skills as a dancer, musician, choreographer, and film maker, to provide a commentary on service work

Re-conceiving management education: Artful teaching and learning

Artists derive inspiration from daily life. According to John Dewey, common experiences are transformed into works of art through a process of compression and expression. In this paper we adopt this frame, showing how it is used within the pedagogical environment. Students were asked to reflect on their lives and offer an artful response to those experiences. Artfulness is defined here as a process which relies on the discursive practices of satire, and in particular irony and parody. We demonstrate the use of these rhetorical techniques as reflective tools, offering a service management class as an exemplar. In this class students were asked to consider their common experiences as both customers and service providers, and create an ironic artefact. We analyse a cartoon sequence produced by students in response to this assignment, where they parodied the fast-food service experience, illustrating how a business studies classroom can be transformed into an artful space

Mary Follett's nowhere man: the leadership of "Everyman"

Mary Parker Follett wrote on business administration almost a century ago. Leading management scholars today generally agree that although often invoked and lauded her work has never been widely read or discussed. Our paper argues that it should be. Our close reading of ‘The Essentials of Leadership’ demonstrates that Follett’s ideas about leadership are not only seminal to current leadership theory, but are also more complex than readings to date have acknowledged. Follett argues that the primary responsibility of leadership is to discover the sense-making thread that structures understanding of the ‘total situation’, establish the ‘common purpose’ that emerges from this, and by leading, ‘anticipating’, make the next situation. But paradoxically, because time ensures that the situation is always transitory, it is always finally unknowable to the sense-maker. Leadership entails working with limited understandings. Reworking these abstractions, Follett also argues that leading and following are not antithetical because both should be lead by common purpose. Her arguments subvert the word ‘leader’, for her text ultimately suggests that a leader is ‘Everyman’