Abstract:

Learning has become an important concern in management. The increasing interest in learning in management is often said to be due to the fact that the conditions of modern working life has changed: changing technologies, changing market conditions, changing consumer demands, changing working processes, etc. all mean that stability and predictability is followed by flexibility and complexity as basic conditions in working life.

However, management learning is a complex issue. The literature offers a lot of theories and techniques, models and methods, which all contains a lot of god ideas and intentions. But (too) often these ideas and intentions are characterized by a romantic rhetoric, which disguises some basic challenges, even dilemmas, regarding the management of learning and development. Neither management (or leadership for that matter) nor learning has a unified ground or paradigm. On the contrary, both management and learning involves many different, even contradictory, forms and understandings. Each of these are addressing important issues and insights, but they are not (always) easy to combine, thus making management learning a challenging, sometimes paradoxical, phenomenon involving different concerns and dilemmas.

This paper describes and discusses a partnership on management learning amongst 2 Universities and 7 Municipalities in the western part of Jutland, Denmark. The partnership is called UniQ. It was initiated in 2007, following a reform of the municipality structure in Denmark, which made management and management learning a key issue for the municipalities. The partnership is based upon the principle of work integrated learning (WIL), i.e. the principle of the educational strategy that facilitate the integration of academic theoretical knowledge with experiential knowledge gained in practice contexts.

The paper identifies different learning arenas as well as different levels of reflection in work integrated management learning and highlights some of the dilemmas that arise when different levels of reflection and different learning arenas are being mixed, making management learning a both fruitful and frustrating experience to the organizers and the participating managers.

Keywords:

Work integrated learning, management, logical levels.