Developing a critical appreciative process to review frameworks for social enterprise education

The object of this paper is to design a process for the development of curricula to advance social enterprise education using the lens of critical management studies (CMS). It is motivated by ongoing work to develop a new award in Cooperative Business and Responsible Management at [University] as well as ongoing work to develop the use of Understanding Social Enterprise: Theory and Practice (Ridley-Duff & Bull, 2011; 2016). Five projects have influenced the authors’ conceptualisations of social enterprise and responsible management. In this paper, we set out the rationale for taking a critical approach to curriculum development based on critiquing a framework developed by the ARIADNE project (Moreau and Mertens, 2013). We develop an argument for comparing it to four other frameworks that have competed to shape our thinking. Whilst acknowledging the potential danger of ‘closure’ through the development of curricula that converge on normative values and principles, our goal is the development and application of a critical appreciative process that ensures any normative consensus is destabilised to ensure that new curricula acknowledge where a dissensus exists. Guided by new research on ‘critical appreciation’ that explores the interaction between social systems and personal lifeworlds, we frame ‘competencies’ as system imperatives in social enterprise education, and ‘knowledge’, ‘skills’ and ‘attitudes’ as proxies for the lifeworlds that it aims to create. The paper sets out how critical appreciation provides a process for comparing and contrasting selected frameworks to deconstruct the discourse that underpins the values and principles in each implied curriculum. This process is designed to encourage the authors to re-examine their assumptions as they co-construct a new curriculum. By designing a process for deconstructing and comparing multiple frameworks for social enterprise education, we advance CMS by enabling institutions, academics and students to: 1) reclaim choice in how they shape and develop social enterprise courses; 2) develop a theory of social enterprise education that is reflexive regarding its impact on curriculum development and which encourages andragogy over pedagogy. The value of this paper lies is the process developed for the active construction of new courses on social enterprise that embed the perspective of critical management studies in their development. The paper also offers a new application of ‘critical appreciative processes (CAPs) in the field of management education.