Reflexivity in teaching and researching organizational studies

We live in a world where we are experiencing an increasing number of environmental disasters, social injustice, corporate scandals, and questionable leadership ethics. The issue I would like to address in this article is how we, as educators and researchers, might respond to or engage proactively with these issues. One approach is encouraging our students to become more reflexive, and to become more reflexive ourselves as researchers. I believe that reflexivity is becoming an increasingly important resource in organization studies. Defined as questioning taken-for-granted assumptions, practices, policies, and so on, reflexivity offers a way of developing more critical and responsible approaches to our intellectual strategies and to practical activities within the academic and corporate world. I will begin by summarizing some of the criticisms of business school education and the challenges we face as researchers and go on to define and discuss how reflexivity can help us engage with these criticisms in a productive manner.