Realizing the artful in management education and development: Smoldering examples from the Burning Man Project
J Duane Hoover
Graduate Faculty Instructor, Area of Management, Rawls College of Business, Texas Tech University, Lubbock TX, United States of America
PP: 535 - 547
Abstract
The concept of artful management education and development is applied to the Burning Man Project. The unique social routine of the Burning Man community is highlighted, including an explanation of the 10 cultural Guiding Principles embraced by that community.
Various ways the identity of ‘Burner' manifests are used to examine how the smoldering potential of shared community can be transformed into managerial practices and organizational frameworks that facilitate positive learning and lasting individual change.
The paper concludes with illustrations and examples from the author's personal experiences with specific techniques used in conducting the annual Burning Man event.
Keywords
Burning Man, self transformation, authentic self, ethnonarrative, liminality, cultural outreach
Article Text
Rationale and Method
Realizing the artful in management education and development is not just about making a content laden power point more pleasing to the eye. It is about producing learning experiences that transcend the normal state of human affairs and our educational processes. It is about lighting a flame of self-awareness in the learning person that takes them to a level of self-knowledge and personal perspective sufficient to induce real and lasting personal change and individual development. Educational pioneer John Dewey (1938) lamented about the lack of active participation by students in educational processes 70 years ago. Dewey (1938: 18) called for something other than ‘the attitude of pupils (as being one) of docility, receptivity, and obedience'. Kilpatrick et al (2008: 201) feel that this challenge can be met in current times by ‘recognizing the whole person and engaging the whole person in the experience of learning and the processes of personal development'.
In my opinion, the dynamics reflected in the Burning Man approach to participation and individual involvement generate the energy to not only activate these processes, but also provide an avenue for their application. I chose the ‘smoldering' in the title of this paper to suggest potential energy imagery from the Burning Man Project. Based on my twelve years of experience in working in and with the Burning Man organization, I assert that the Burning Man model can be imitated to infuse energy potential into the management education student, an energy potential that will hopefully spring into the full flame of managerial effectiveness and organizational innovation.
Artful management education is also about time and place. It is about time in the sense that we need to accept the full implications of the fact that our time is now and we are now practicing our art in a dynamic knowledge economy (Seers 2007). It is also about matching what we do and how we do it with the characteristics of our students. This involves not only addressing our roles as management educators (Greenberg, Clair & MacLean 2007), but also the effects our actions have on those students as learners and later as managers (Reynolds 2007). An ideal way to address these challenges in tandem would be to find an organization where these processes are effectively addressed and then to use that organization as an exemplar. The Burning Man Project is just such an organization (Kozinets 2002; Chen 2003).
The Burning Man Project is used as a model because it has become a high profile example of an artistic-cultural organization (Sukel 1978). In addition, Burning Man provides illustrative examples of that organization's creation of an innovative socio-cultural paradigm and an ongoing organizational reality that has functioned to not only expand the human consciousness of Burning Man participants (called Burners) during the event, but also to produce artful, creative and expressive lifestyles for Burners the other 51 weeks of the year (Gilmore 2005). The Burning Man Project is steered by 10 unique Guiding Principles distilled from the Burning Man Mission Statement (http://www.burningman.com/whatisburningman/about_burningman/principles.html). The product of these guiding principles (described in more detail later) produces a culture with aspects of community and shared experience that yield the requisite energy for transformation of self and transformation of managerial and organizational processes.
My methods are a combination of discourse and narrative analysis of data collected via auto-ethnographic participant observation and reflection. I take an ethnonarrative approach (Hansen 2006), which entails ethnographic and narrative methods that take on a particular sensitivity to the live ‘context of construction' from which the discourse and narrative data emerged. ...continues...
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