Structured Creativity

Has knowledge been forgotten? Notes from Cambridge

I had a wonderful couple of days at Jesus College, Cambridge, for the 8th Cambridge Symposium on Knowledge in Education. I was very pleased to have the opportunity to share my research with colleagues who have inspired my work. Thank you to Leesa Wheelahan and Johan Muller, who were so generous with their time and kind words. It is a strange thing to present an argument built on someone’s ideas while they sit in the room. Strange, and useful.

I presented my ongoing PhD work around the idea that knowledge has been forgotten in business education. The short version. I analysed five years of abstracts from two leading management education journals, using Legitimation Code Theory as the lens. On the surface the field looks knowledge-rich. The scholarship is theoretically ambitious and methodologically strong. But very little of it treats disciplinary knowledge, what business students actually need to know, as a substantive concern. Knowledge has not been lost. It has been crowded out by other priorities, and I think the consequences matter most for the students with the least to fall back on.

Since the conference I can see how Bernstein’s islands might help to explain my findings. The corpus reads like a set of separate specialised islands with no obvious way of travelling between them. I am still working that through. And I have some work to do in linking thinking the not yet thought to Amabile’s componential model of creativity, which is where the thesis goes next. If disciplinary knowledge is what makes new thought possible, then domain-relevant skills are not the dull bit of creativity. They are the precondition for it.

Back to the coding.