Learning atmospheres: Re-imagining management education through the dérive

Abstract

This article responds to the recent calls for rethinking management education, particularly to those that emphasize space, affect and atmosphere, and makes the case for the practice of dérive as a way of infusing management education with experiential, experimental and reflexive learning processes. The authors draw on ideas and practices of the art movement Situationist International who proposed the dérive, informed by the concept of psychogeography as a way of exploring and reimagining the atmospheres of everyday life. The paper is illustrated by the authors’ teaching experiences in this area (or space as one might say). The authors argue that the dérive in management education may foster future managers’ imaginative skills and inspire an imaginative self-reflection of the business school and its spatial organization. The paper concludes that in re-enacting their experience of educational space, participants may learn about, reflect on, and develop their affective capacities for becoming part of organizational processes, both as students of the business school and as future managers.

The sensory imperative

“…A desire for closeness has developed in the field of sensory studies, arguing that, far from being seen as signs of cultural models, the senses should be studied as unmediated, experienced phenomena of life (Ingold, 2000, 2011; Pink, 2009, 2010; Wacquant, 2015). Taken up in management and organization studies, researchers seek methods that are ‘as sensuous as possible’ (Michels et al, 2020: 560) and strive to learn ‘how to write in a more embodied way, with more emotion’ (Essén and Värlander, 2012: 406). While such aspirations are of course not problematic in themselves, they often approach the question of ‘feeling more’ uncritically.…”

“…While the body is seen as an active force and agent in academic research practices, Essén and Varländer’s concern is less in how the agent-body meets a research field than in how it meets itself. With the walking practice of the dérive, Michels et al (2020: 560) go further still, into the unconscious hidden desires of researchers, in search of new imaginative capacities and with the aim to sensitize prospective managers to their own bodies. It is ‘[t]he drifter’s own experiences [which] serve as the main material for such a spatial analysis’ (Michels et al, 2020: 562).…”

“…With the walking practice of the dérive, Michels et al (2020: 560) go further still, into the unconscious hidden desires of researchers, in search of new imaginative capacities and with the aim to sensitize prospective managers to their own bodies. It is ‘[t]he drifter’s own experiences [which] serve as the main material for such a spatial analysis’ (Michels et al, 2020: 562). Yet this elevation of a drifting, bodily phenomenology becomes akin to a profound loneliness.…”

“…These methodologies do not just study but actively ‘engage the senses’ as a way to get to new ways of knowing and thinking (Pink, 2013), such as when autoethnography is taken up for its ability to actively generate experience and empathy (Boncori and Smith, 2019). In turning to their own bodies and to extensive writing about methodology to ground their challenge of representational knowledge production and learning, such as in recent work on the sensuous nature of writing (Brewis and Williams, 2019; Essén and Värlander, 2012) and walking (Michels et al, 2020), management and organization scholars take up Wacquant’s carnal sociology uncritically. But why should the study of the senses from the body enjoy such eminence?…”

Unsettling bodies of knowledge: Walking as a pedagogy of affect

“…The walks of our ethnographers here become a form of drifting, resembling the ways in which the Situationist International enacted mappings digressing from and disruptive to the functional, routinised, usually non-conscious forms of moving through the city (Sadler, 1999). Walking is translated into practices of drifting through what is called dérive or an unplanned journey (Michels et al, 2020). Through the notion of psychogeography, which recognises that the self cannot be artificially separated from the urban environment and that a re-thinking of the city demands a collective effort, walking is connected to affect, play and subversion, ‘[as] the street-level gaze that walking requires allows one to challenge the official representation of the city (.…”