Making learning critical: Identity, emotion and power in processes of management development

Established approaches to management education have tended to treat students and practitioners as comparatively passive receptacles into which knowledge – of theory, techniques and values – is poured. Action learning, in contrast, is founded upon the view that effective management development and practice relies not only, or even primarily, upon the possession of a body of knowledge. More fundamentally, it relies upon the personal problem-solving capacities of embodied individuals. In action learning, learning processes are more directly connected to personal experience.2