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The Odd Couple: Can Management Education and Liberal Arts Work Together without Driving Each Other Crazy?
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Godwyn, Mary |
| Copyright Year | 2013 |
| Abstract | In the Neil Simon play, The Odd Couple, Felix Unger, a culturally sophisticated, newly divorced man, moves in with his friend, Oscar Madison, a street-smart, rough-around-the-edges, sports columnist. Hilarity ensues. The comedic situations revolve around the interplay between Felix?s refined tastes ? he enjoys opera, gourmet dining, and is compulsively neat, and Oscar?s cavalier attitude ? he is slovenly, impulsive, and a habitual gambler. The audience is left to wonder, can these two men live together, without driving each other crazy??In some ways, the relationship between liberal arts and management education parallels the Felix and Oscar caricature. Liberal arts offerings are often dismissed as intellectual and academic; management courses are useful and practical. Liberal arts are far from exigent real-world problems, too delicate and theoretical to offer serious solutions. Management, on the other hand, is situated within the domain of business and involves various types of market exchange; it has immediate economic significance and the vitality associated with action and a self-evident importance. Within the academy, these orientations have erroneously become defined as polar opposites, undermining the power and effectiveness of each. Recognizing this early in the 20th century, Mary Parker Follett urges us to become ?thinking-doers;? she writes:Many of us are ashamed of our ?mechanical age??but we must realize that our daily living may itself become an art, that in commerce we may find culture, in industry idealism, in our business system beauty, in mechanics morals?Only when the spirit of art rises from the roots of our mechanical age will it ?redeem our civilization.? The divorce of our so-called spiritual life from our daily activities is a fatal dualism. We are not to ignore our industry, commerce, etc., and seek spiritual development elsewhere; on the other hand we shall never find it in these, but only by an eternal influence and refluence.? (Follett 1924/1995: 60)The argument here is that liberal arts and management education are irrevocably entangled and mutually interdependent. When we ignore that central to liberal arts education is the critical evaluation of and determination to act upon the most pressing economic and political issues, we trend into idealism and irrelevance. When we forget that management education must be engaged with and constantly attendant to the development and redevelopment of intellectual and ethical foundations, we plunge into corruption, alienation, and environmental disaster. The solution is for liberal arts and management education to work together ? without driving each other crazy. In this paper, I argue that a liberal arts and management education might most productively be integrated on the basis of ethics and entrepreneurship. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/api/datastream?datastreamId=FULL-TEXT.PDF&publicationPid=uk-ac-man-scw:199520 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
