ABSTRACT
The space to be filled is the difference between established educational provision for managers, based upon what is believed to be required or what is marketable, and what is emerging from research as reality of management. The challenge was to develop, within a business school culture, an educational praxis that invited students to work with raw experience of their work lives as they struggled to disentangle fantasies of management qualifications from the reality of managerial practice. The aim of the university course titled "Managing Oneself in Role" is simple yet demanding. The aim is to provoke and to assist students into a deeper than usual understanding of how individual psychodynamic patterns may connect with work system dynamics, thus creating the force field that shapes a "given" work role. The creation of the sort of reflective space within the classroom has proved vital to the likelihood of students developing insight to the unconscious forces that systemically shape the client's work role.
