Who is it That Would Make Business Schools More Critical? Critical Reflections on Critical Management Studies

We suggest in this paper that whilst exploring how to make business schools more critical we must also turn a critical and reflexive lens upon ourselves, critical management thinkers. Our endeavour is outlined here as a 'reflexive journey' in which we turn upon ourselves, academics who identify as 'critical' thinkers, the theories we use to analyse others. Our focus is upon critical management education. We use three vignettes drawn from our previous research. One is of graduands from the postgraduate programmes on which two of us teach, the second an analysis of knowledge transfer programmes in which we have participated, and the third a study of the construction of academic identities. The first study shows the academic teacher may become an internalized, judgemental gaze, the second that what we see as a critical approach may be construed by our students as another 'truth' that fails to encompass the complexities of organizations and management, and the third encourages us to ask some questions about our own positions. This causes us to ask some uncomfortable questions about our own positions as critical management scholars and the ways in which we conceptualize business schools and our colleagues who work in them.     

A comparison of methods to obtain active parental consent for an international student survey

Many school-based research efforts require active parental consent for student participation. Maximizing rates of consent form return and agreement is an important issue, because sample representativeness may be compromised when these rates are low. This article compares two methods for obtaining active parental consent: return of consent forms in the mail versus return by students to their classrooms. The methods were tested in a pilot study of 46 schools (1,058 students), with half of the schools randomly allocated to each of the alternative methods. A hierarchical nonlinear model of consent form return and agreement rates suggests that the student-delivered method is more successful at producing higher rates of consent form return and agreement to participate in the study, after controlling for school-level characteristics. The authors discuss the findings and their implications for other researchers engaged in school-based research with adolescents.     

Superstitious Beliefs in Gambling Among Problem and Non-Problem Gamblers: Preliminary Data

Superstitious beliefs, defined as a strong conviction based on the erroneous perception of a cause-effect association between two independent events, are considered to play an instrumental role in the maintenance of gambling behaviour. In this preliminary study, responses to eight items assessing superstitious beliefs were compared among 56 electronic gaming machine (EGM) problem gamblers, 22 non-problem EGM and 23 non-EGM non-problem gamblers. Results suggested that problem gamblers endorsed more superstitious beliefs than non-problem gamblers and that such beliefs were correlated with gambling intensity. Further research is required to determine if superstitious beliefs represent a vulnerability factor for the development of problem gambling or emerge as a consequence of involvement in gambling.