Management learning: a scholarship of practice centred on attention?

Abstract

This article explores the scholarly processes involved in management learning and education. Drawing on a practice turn in social sciences, the article develops current thinking on epistemologies of practice, Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of phronesis and Shotter’s social poetics to suggest a scholarship of practice. Building upon Shotter’s interpretation of Wittgenstein’s later work and the literatures on mindfulness, it is argued that such a scholarship of practice is centred on deliberative attention rather than knowledge. An account of a 30-month action research project is then used to illustrate a scholarship of practice, in which is identified three domains of attention: an engagement with ideas, a practice of inquiry and a navigation of relations.