Challenging the hidden curriculum: Building a lived process for responsibility in responsible management education

Abstract

This essay argues that conceptualisations of responsibility in the responsible management education literature are generally superficial or unstated. We propose that this leads to practical understandings of responsibility being drawn from the hidden curriculum of socialised learning in the background of formal educational contexts. To disrupt this and enable critical thought and action, we argue for the integration of three perspectives that can be combined in a dynamic, lived process. First, we suggest that evidence-based management challenges us to seek out evidence to inform responsible management practice in ways that are thoughtful, critical and reflexive. Second, we argue that an interpretive approach employing philosophical hermeneutics connects responsibility to situated judgement about how we should interpret evidence available to us in the context of lived human experience in dialogue with others. Third, deconstruction reveals (aspects of) the ways in which the hidden curriculum constructs responsibility in the context of responsible management education texts and talk – and helps us to remain open to other possibilities. We integrate these three perspectives to arrive at a definition of responsibility as a lived process with implications for students, educators and the institutions they inhabit.