Practice as Complexity: Encounters with Management Education in the Public Sector

Abstract

This chapter proposes that a cogent conceptualisation of practice as complexity provides a basis for management education within contemporary hierarchical public sector organisations. It identifies the possibilities, tensions and dilemmas for management educators working with such a framework in public sector organisations in which the logic and practices of neoliberal managerialism prevail. It references senior-middle managers within the South Australian public sector and considers the complexity for management educators of working with such managers. It argues that practice as complexity provides insight into the complex dynamic of management and management education, allowing nuanced understandings of the processes of ‘going on’ by managers in complex organisations and appropriate responses to those processes by management educators.