Cultivating an Aristotelian Paideia in the Pursuit of Practical Wisdom: A Qualitative Case Study of the Lancaster MBA (2016 - 2019)

Operating in a VUCA 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 the Lancaster MBA, 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.