Interweaving positive and critical perspectives in management learning and teaching

Management learning is increasingly and rightfully called upon to address societal challenges beyond narrow concerns of economic performance. Within that agenda, we describe the generative aims of a special issue devoted to interweaving positive and critical perspectives in management learning and teaching. The five articles that comprise the issue describe the prospects for such interplay across a range of empirical and theoretical contexts. Together, these contributions suggest a way forward for work that is at once critical, positive, and reflexive. We identify key themes for future directions: the generative potential of contrarian learning dynamics, an ethics-first focus on ecological and human well-being, and the prospects of scholarly practice for systemic activism.

Network structure and social learning

We describe results from Dasaratha and He [DH21a] and Dasaratha and He [DH20] about how network structure influences social learning outcomes. These papers share a tractable sequential model that lets us compare learning dynamics across networks. With Bayesian agents, incomplete networks can generate informational confounding that makes learning arbitrarily inefficient. With naive agents, related forces can lead to mislearning.

Sustainable Education: Using Social Networks in Education for Change

Creating societies of the future goes hand in hand with promoting sustainable education and, therefore, universities must train educators who, through their own professional development, put into practice methodologies that are active, participative, and focused on the overall development of their students. The use of methodologies like Design Thinking and the use of social networks generate learning dynamics that bring into play key competences in the development of dedicated future educators. In this study, 156 students from Education degrees at the University of Jaen analyze how the use of these methodologies supports the learning process in dimensions such as creativity, motivation, communication, and involvement in learning, among others. The results shows that all dimensions correlate positively, and that the benefits derived from the use of these methodologies are perceived by students as greater than the effort required to put them into practice.