Managerial action skills in business education: missing link or misplaced emphasis?

Historically, them has been a tension between two fundamental orientations to business education: analytical detachment vs. practical relevance. This tension can be traced to a controversy between academics and practitioners regarding their respective roles in shaping the goals of a formal education

This tension, which initially surfaced in the form of a polarization of thought on the basic emphasis and mission of business schools, has, over the years, declined in intensity as the arguments for practical relevance gained ground. An offshoot of this has been that a skill component has gradually assumed a momentum and permanence of its own in management education. Unfortunately, however, the emphasis on managerial action skills has resulted in a preoccupation with pedagogy and a remarkable bankruptcy of thought on such fundamental questions as the effects of a skill bias on basic assumptions regarding the nature of management, management theory, and management education. This paper attempts to fill this gap by examining some fundamental questions, issues, and dilemmas implicit in an action skill approach to management education. The thrust of the article will be to examine (a) the present niche of the "action skill movement" and some issues and questions regarding how it can be explored further and better, and (b) potential redirections for the future. I will argue that a basic concern in an action skill focus is to ensure that it does not effectively restrict the scope of management education to that of training in management trade. In support of this argument, I shall attempt to pull together evidence -- theoretical, empirical and metaphorical -- from different streams of literature to suggest that there is an emerging commonality of thought about the broader task of management in today's turbulent environments, which an action skill approach fails to address adequately. I will argue that this is a task to which it must, of necessity, turn if it is to maintain its relevance to management thought, research, and theory. The article will conclude with a discussion of the implications and potential directions for the future.

Action Skills: The Background

The terms action and skill are both loaded. Action is practical; it produces results; it makes things work; it makes things happen. In a career spanning more than a decade in the public sector, I can recall countless occasions where action rather than idle thinking (somehow idle seemed to go well with thinking in the practitioner world) was proposed as the solution to a variety of problems ranging from employee morale to equipment failure. Likewise the case with skills. As a mere label, it seems to impute positive qualities to any activity. A cartoon showing a mother bragging about the TV watching skills of her young son captures this mode of thought.