Cultivating an Aristotelian Paideia in the Pursuit of Practical Wisdom: A Qualitative Case Study of an MBA programme

Operating in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world, managers need to be equipped with certain dispositions, skills, and attitudes that lead to appropriate judgements. Accepting that techno-rational approaches to management education show little promise of developing pedagogies that can cultivate appropriate judgement in managers-to-be, management scholars have rediscovered Aristotle’s work on phronesis (practical wisdom). However, the majority of neo-Aristotelian approaches conceptualise practical wisdom in a constricted way and thus fail to address the crucial question of how, management educators can effectively develop the capacity to exercise ‘good’ judgement. Drawing on the pedagogical underpinnings of a full time Master of Business Administration Programme taught in the UK, this study explores whether a richer understanding of phronesis, rooted in Aristotle’s concept of practical wisdom and informed by Heidegger’s phenomenology, might be effective in cultivating the array of dispositions required for appropriate business judgement.