ABSTRACT
As practitioners with the primary responsibility for the coordination of human activity in organizations it can be argued that managers’ most significant contribution ought to be their ability to inform and be informed by multiple perspectives and to employ that information to guide appropriate action. As management educators we are constantly reminded of the need to facilitate managers’ development of the skills necessary to deal strategically with highly complex ‘soft’ organizational problems. At the heart of this perspective of management education is a recognition that organizations are, and deal with, environments that are made up of multiple stakeholders with a variety of needs, values and expectations. Systems and contingency models of organization have long since moved management education from prescriptive, one-best-way approaches to organization. We encourage managers to reflect on the ramifications their decisions have beyond their immediate concerns and to adopt a systemic approach to decision-making, taking account of environments beyond and sub-systems within the organization. It is surprising then that the curricula associated with management courses fail, by and large, to address explicitly a major source of difference between the management population and the populations with which it interacts, i.e. gender. Indeed, as we have experienced the treatment of women in management as a topic on a management education programme, we have been struck by the similarities between the treatment of the topic and the experiences associated with women working in management positions in organizations. One of the ways in which this similarity between the topic and its subject-matter manifests itself is via the process of marginalization. Our perception is that as an option the topic is too easily consigned to the margins and is further prone to be treated in this way via its association with a marginalized group.
