Practice Over Creativity: A Common Ground Between Art and Management Revealed by Disengagement in Arts-Based Learning in Management Education

Arts-based learning programs in management education have been explored for about 20 years by researchers. They have been understood as a confrontation between several orders of worth, providing an interspace for developing critical thinking and new ideas. But other researchers have pointed to the impossibility of translating artistic issues into management contexts, causing disengagement among learners. This article aims at overcoming this debate by exploring disengagement in arts-based learning. For this purpose, it studies two archetypal arts-based learning programs through more than 35 interviews and several observation sessions. It shows that among four types of rejection, suspicions of irrelevance are far more important than fears of appropriation or fears of illegitimacy toward art. This means that participants are not so opposed to using art in management contexts. Rather, they appear reluctant to invoke it for matters that do not concern their work. It shows eventually that arts-based learning, as a process of management learning, needs to be justified in the language of managers; considering art as practice rather than creative inspiration provides a common ground enabling translation between art and management. This translation focusing on practice instead of creativity makes arts-based learning possible and fruitful in management education.