Managerial Education in Italy: Main Features and Recent Trends

Developing an effective and a integrity-centered management education system represents a priority. In fact, in an era of relentless change and increasing complexity, the importance of creating a fruitful context for the development of managerial education is increasingly being interpreted as crucial. Our contribution aims at analyzing the main trends and features that characterize the Italian management education system, interpreting them in the light of the prevailing theoretical dimensions debated in the international community and related to the concept of integrity and ethic. In our contribution, firstly, we go back to the concept of managerial work in order to grasp its relationship with management education: our analysis stems from the consideration that analysis of the content of the managerial tasks and its relationship with management education are, undoubtedly, one of the most interesting and debated issues in the organization studies literature. The second main section is focused on the analysis of the concept of management education practices between traditional and critical studies: by this way, we try to provide a wide perspective on the richness and heterogeneity of theoretical contributions that study the concept of management education. Finally, we sketch out the Italian situation, identifying the main peculiarities of management education initiatives. It emerges an interesting and articulated landscape where different typologies of initiatives cohabit , adopting different perspectives (ranging from international and global to extremely country-specific). We conclude underlying the risk that also in Italy we face to a sort of com-modification of knowledge. In fact, there is an attempt made by firms to acquire some sort of control over the system of professional knowledge, transforming knowledge into a specialist commodity characterized by a defined price.