The question
If management is taken seriously as a technical craft, the family that also includes surgery, engineering, and watchmaking, how should business schools rethink management education?
The method
This is a conceptual/argument paper, not a study: it does not collect new data. It synthesizes prior scholarship on craft, skill acquisition, and management education, drawing on Aristotle’s distinction between techne, episteme, and phronesis, Lave and Wenger’s apprenticeship theory, and medical-training research, to transpose how other technical crafts are learned onto management education [2].
The findings
Pedersen and Hartmann’s central claim is that management belongs to a specific craft family: not the traditional or pure crafts (pottery, woodworking), but a technical craft that, like watchmaking or surgery, depends on real scientific knowledge and still cannot be practiced without hands-on, situated learning [1]. From that premise they propose four modes for teaching it: technical foundations, learning from masters of the craft, simulation, and the craft of research [2].
The “learning from masters” mode runs on the same progression medicine uses, “see one, do one, teach one”: a novice observes an expert, performs the simplest elements first, takes on harder ones as skill grows, and eventually teaches others, all under a supervisor who can step in at the edge of the novice’s competence [3]. The more conventional technical-foundations mode (closer to today’s case-and-textbook business school) carries a risk the authors name directly: it can conflate the technical foundations of a craft with the craft itself [4].
The paper’s most speculative proposal is simulation: virtual organizations populated by AI avatars modeled on real organizational actors, letting students rehearse management decisions against something closer to a live organization than a case study, without the cost or consequence of a real one [5]. The fourth mode, the craft of research, reframes what management education should train: not technical content but the methodological habits of mind of a researcher (literature assessment, gap-finding, updating beliefs on evidence), on the claim that managers who reason this way make better decisions, not that they need to become scientists [6].
The limits
None of the four modes is tested here; this is a proposal for how business schools could reorganize, not a report on what happens when they do. The paper’s own caution about evidence-based management applies to itself: it notes, citing medical practice, that evidence-based approaches have “clear limits” because practice is “relentlessly contextual” [4], a caution worth holding against the paper’s own four-mode framework as much as against the status quo it critiques. The “leading-edge practices” the authors point to (MIT Sloan’s action learning, IMD’s field placements, one author’s own AI-in-organizations course) illustrate existing practice; they are not evidence that the four proposed modes produce better managers.