Learning with Foucault: Towards Immanent Thinking in Critical Management Education

Abstract

This essay makes the case that the ideas of Michel Foucault can offer a valuable and original contribution to the promotion of critical thinking in management learning and education. Through reflection on a set of examples from my own teaching practice, I show how Foucault’s distinctive style of immanent problem posing – or ‘immanent thinking’ – can be of significant value for the renewal of our pedagogic practices. In so doing, I also clarify the ways in which a contrasting humanistic logic of practice continues to shape, and thereby limit, our roles and relations in the management classroom. Paulo Freire’s emancipatory-humanistic ‘problem-posing’ model provides an important point of reference here, as an enduring and influential presence within the field. The essay’s call for action is therefore for management educators to take up Foucault’s immanent thought, not as a purely theoretical concern, but as an invitation to further such experiments in ‘immanent thinking’ – both in the classroom and more broadly.