Empowering the already powerful? A feminist intersectional analysis of critical management education in a business school

This article investigates the possibility of critical management education to transform management education, that is, expose the ethicopolitical nature of managerial knowledge and practice, and empower students to act for social justice, in the context of a business school. Drawing on a conceptual framework on power rooted in Black feminism, we analyze three autoethnographic vignettes narrating our experience of teaching about discrimination and sexism, using participative methods inspired by pragmatic and radical critical management education, in a French business school. Our study shows that participative methodologies can empower the powerful and disempower the powerless and entrench rather than destabilize the neoliberal status quo in our classrooms. We empirically describe how participative methodologies can reinforce rather than challenge existing power relations connected to gender, race and class, as well as the neoliberalization of management education. We contribute to the literature on CME by empirically demonstrating that participative methodologies can be co-opted within business schools, thus highlighting a dark side of pragmatic critical management education and providing a feminist intersectional reading that goes beyond critical management education's dominant focus on teacher/students power dynamics. Our work also advances scholarship on intellectual activism as we reflect on the conditions to sustain critical engagement as feminist teachers and writers.