Informing Education Approaches to PRME with the Ideas of Michel Foucault

This essay argues that careful thought should be given to understanding the impact that external forces and the university milieu have on the potential of learning approaches that inform Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME). Drawing on Foucault’s “early” work on power-knowledge (1980), the essay discusses how the potential of PRME to graduate students who will be everyday responsible managers is constrained by the “logic of performativity” that is a dominant ethos in university education. However, following Foucault’s “later” work, we subsequently suggest that education approaches to PRME can nurture an “art of living” (1988), whereby responsible management becomes an everyday response in students. This requires pursuing self-care practices that engage the self in critically enquiring how forms of domination exist and can thus be changed.