Leicester’s ‘critical’ approach to management emphasises how economic and moral crises constitute the challenges and dilemmas facing the modern manager, and did so long before “the crisis” even took hold…

Until recently, The University of Leicester’s School of Management was housed as an entrepreneurial unit within the university’s Department of Economics. However, it has since grown into one of the UK’s largest providers of distance learning management education, as well as the largest AMBA-accredited MBA provider in the country. Leicester’s School of Management certainly boasts all the credentials which you might expect from a recent recipient of The Times Higher University of the Year Award: World-leading research staff, award-winning levels of student satisfaction, glowing recognition from competitors and students alike, United Nations approval, Association of Business Schools membership, and AMBA accreditation – the list goes on. This constantly evolving roll of honour is something which the school has been regularly tending to since its humble inauguration back in 1989.

Critical approach
Nevertheless, it isn’t this list (impressive though it might be) which makes Leicester distinctive. On the contrary, it is the school’s “critical” approach to management education, with its emphasis upon career-relevant intellectual stimulation, which sets it apart from all the others. On this point the school’s representatives, advocates and students all concur – the school’s success is directly attributable to the idiosyncratic approach which it takes towards questions of management and organisation, an approach which underpins everything it does. Unlike the approach taken within most mainstream western business schools, Leicester’s critical approach to management challenges the status quo, rather than simply perpetuating it. Its research, which forms the basis for its teaching, contributes to fundamental management theory and serves as the basis for critical evaluations of contemporary management practices.

Head of School and Professor of Information & Organisation, Simon Lilley describes this critical approach to management, the school’s guiding philosophy, as follows, “At least ever since Frederick Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management was written, management and organisation scholars have all too frequently reduced problems of management to problems of efficiency. Later on the all too human elements of modern workplaces were brought into the mix, for sure, but again these were all too quickly reduced to the overly simplistic questions of inputs and outputs alone. We have always approached the modern organisation from the opposite direction, asking not how managers can reduce the challenges of their roles to a set of abstract linear principles, but rather demonstrating how they must embrace the dynamic complexity inherent within the challenges of management across all aspects of life. It is our belief that in so doing, would-be managers put themselves in a situation where they can better address the challenges that face them, precisely because they have more rigorously analysed them. We call this ‘The Leicester Model’, and whilst we’re by no means alone in doing so we are, I think, more or less alone in the insistence that such a model should be seen as foundational. At least for now!”

The Leicester Model
The renowned Leicester Model has its roots in a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of management and organisation which draws inspiration from across the social sciences and the humanities. The chief focus in this regard is on management as a primarily social phenomenon. From this perspective, management is assessed both with regards to the positive role it plays in fostering economic and social prosperity, but also in terms of the negative role it plays in creating the economic, social, ecological, medical and physical problems of our times.

Deputy Head of School and Professor of Organisation and Consumption Jo Brewis, clarifies the unique perspective along the following lines: “If you think of management not in the narrow sense of its being a relatively exclusive set of activities which people called managers do, but rather in the broader sense of it being something which we are all engaged in whenever we want to get something complex done, then you get a sense for the radical approach which we take towards questions of management here at Leicester. Issues as diverse as stock return calculation, harassment and anxiety in the workplace, anti-capitalist protest and environmental activism, right through to the difficulties in being creative, in regulating our speech and body language, or in shopping so as to communicate to our peers, all qualify as legitimate and constitutive concerns of the modern student of management. And what is more, all of these diverse issues, as well as many more besides, have been analysed here as managerial issues in ways which cannot but enrich our teaching, and in so doing improve our student’s experiences of their time with us.”

Eclectic and heterodox as all of this might sound to the sceptical or the uninitiated it clearly works: just ask some of the 20,000 students spread across approximately 100 countries currently studying with Leicester: ample evidence that the Leicester Model meets a very concrete demand in the marketplace. Ample evidence also, perhaps, that Leicester has created a niche all of its own. Management, as the proponents of the Leicester Model have always insisted, is too important not to be debated. Perhaps now, amidst these times of unprecedented ecological and economic crisis, such an approach to business and management education is precisely what is required. The next generation of managers might well have to be critical.

Contact details:
For further information: ulsmpgadmiss@le.ac.uk – www.le.ac.uk/management