Management learning and the unsettled humanities: Introduction to the special issue

Abstract

This special issue engages with the unsettling of the humanities to further explore its relevance for management learning and education. It explores how themes traditionally belonging to the humanities have spurred critical inquiry and raised theoretical issues within other disciplines, following the crisis of the classical humanist ideal as ‘the measure of all things’. It focuses on how the tensions resulting from this crisis can be constructively thematized in the field of management and organization studies, and how the unsettling of the humanities’ privileged access to studying the ‘especially human’ can be taken into the classroom. In this manner, the special issue engages with questions related to the Anthropocene, posthumanism and transhumanism, and raises issues concerning the human possibilities for knowing, learning and living in entangled ways. Additionally, it helps us understand the critical role of the humanities in making sense of the reciprocities between imagination, information and the human crafting of meaningful knowledge.