Russ Vince

In this chapter we connect with three ghostly characters from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. In ‘the ghosts of papers past’, we talk about our historical connection to the achievements and shortcomings of critical management learning and education (CML&E) by reflecting on our own scholarship. There are enduring themes that continue to resonate and speak to us. There are elements to this that are also incomplete and unfulfilled. In ‘the spirit of papers present’, we talk about how the past resides in what we are doing now, and what we believe needs to be done to secure a future for CML&E. In ‘the spectre of diminishing words’, we consider our legacy in CML&E. We express our hope for the future of CML&E, and we reflect on letting go – on becoming ghosts ourselves.

This chapter considers the meaning of “learning” in the terms learning group and learning community, and critiques the assumptions of individual learning that are common in learning groups/communities. The terms learning group and learning community convey an underlying assumption of mutuality, togetherness, and belonging. However, the chapter argues that this togetherness is more about personal learning within a group/community than it is about understanding the social and organizational grouping in which learning is both encouraged and restricted. While reflection on personal learning in a group/community is common, reflection on social structures, oppressive relations, and the consequences of emotional contagion are rare. The “learning” in learning groups/communities reinforces learning alone and ignores how the complex politics of communities affects people’s social and emotional experience of learning together. Using examples from the literature and from the authors’ own practice, the chapter shows how power, conformity, and control—as well as prescribed and/or expected emotions surrounding learning—undermine and seek to individualize communities and groups. It speculates on what a critical notion of “learning” as a prefix would mean for groups and communities.

How do organisations that belong to a stigmatised industry manage negative perceptions? We contribute to answering this question by highlighting how organisational members turn external negative evaluations into positive self-idealisations. Our research offers a unique perspective on how stigmatised actors navigate their tarnished image, as well as how they remain attached to a group and its attributes despite its stigmatisation. The study reports findings from two French fruit and vegetable wholesalers, who are commonly perceived as thieves, bandits and unwanted intermediaries. We explain how organisational members were able to neutralise negative perceptions by mobilising and maintaining an idealised perception of their centrality. This structuring fantasy formed a powerful defence against stigmatised perceptions, transforming the stigma into self-idealisation that supported organisational stability. The organisations studied developed idealisation strategies based on members’ attachment to or distancing from nostalgic fantasies of the past. We suggest that awareness of the idealised construct that underpins a particular attachment to a stigmatised attribute may help organisations and their members free themselves from stigma.

Surely a leader should know what to do? But what happens when complexity means they cannot know which path to take? We answer this question with an ethnographic study of distributed leadership (DL) in an organisation grappling with inherent tensions within its mission. The article makes a counter-intuitive argument for the value and utility of unknowingness, defined as a state of awareness of both an absence of knowing and one’s inability to know. Three inter-related aspects to unknowingness are developed – acceptance of not knowing, tolerance of the discomfort of not knowing, and distribution of unknowingness – leading to an innovative theory of unknowingness. We reveal how unknowingness and DL are bound with each other in the sense that not knowing can enable distribution of leadership within the organisation, whilst DL addresses challenges in complex organisations associated with not knowing. We thereby provide an illustration of the interplay between those with hierarchical authority and others dispersed throughout an organisation. In sum, we provide an alternative perspective to the heroic, all-knowing individual leader.

Organizational scholars have treated emotions mostly as an individual‐level phenomenon, with limited theorisation of emotions as an important component in social embeddedness. In this review essay, we argue for the need for a toolkit to study emotions as an inherently social phenomenon. To do so, we apply insights from sociology that have been under‐utilized in management and organization research. We focus on three sociological concepts: collective emotions and social bonds, emotional energy and moral batteries, and emotional capital. We then develop an integrative model of emotional embeddedness to emphasize that emotions are socially constructed and socially authorized. We end the paper by setting out a research agenda for more research in management and organization that is informed by these three concepts.