Management Education and Humanities
On 10 September 2003, a group of scholars and researchers from various disciplines met on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, to take part in an international conference, promoted by the Giorgio Cini Foundation in collaboration with the ISTUD – Istituto Studi Direzionali, Milan and the Saïd Business School of the University of Oxford. The theme of the conference was the role of Humanistic culture in educating the European managerial class. The book Management Education and Humanities is a selection of the best papers given at the conference, often further 24 publications elaborated following suggestions made by the editors in an effort to map out a vast heterogeneous intellectual territory. The book looks at three key topics in the contemporary debate on educating the managerial class: management as a profession, Humanism as a world vision, and the Humanities as a field of study able to renew the study programmes of business schools. These themes are analysed within a framework, ranging between two very different points of view: a traditional perspective tending to idealise the Humanities, Humanistic culture and the social purposes of management, and a more skeptical point of view, less inclined to take the traditional values for granted and more interested in “de-constructing” social and cultural phenomena.
