Supervising in Graduate Management Education: Relational Configurations, Power Asymmetries, and Pedagogical Implications

This article examines academic supervision in graduate management education as a relational and symbolic practice shaped by institutional hierarchies and power asymmetries. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of practice—particularly the concepts of field, habitus, capital, and symbolic power—we analyze how supervisory practices both reproduce and challenge unequal access to recognition, support, and academic capital. Based on 37 thematic oral history interviews with students and supervisors from Brazilian master’s and doctoral programs in Management, the study identifies relational configurations of supervision that reveal tensions, expectations, and strategies mobilized by participants in navigating their positioning within the academic field. Rather than treating supervision as an individual skill or a normative model of “effectiveness,” we highlight its role as a pedagogical and institutional practice embedded in broader structures of inequality. By foregrounding the symbolic and relational dynamics of supervision, the article contributes to more critical and reflexive approaches to supervisor training and program design in graduate management education. The findings encourage institutions and educators to reconsider how supervision is conceptualized, practiced, and evaluated within management education programs.