Cultivating Communities of Practice A Guide to Managing Knowledge
the character formation and organizational employments in today's management practices and roles. Thus, for them, the question is not whether we need to more integrate humanities and management; rather, it is how to critically examine their circular emulation and reinforcement. Yet according to Ken Starkey and Sue Tempset (chap. 7) all of these potential, promise, peril, and paradox for realizing humanities based management education may ultimately depend on rethinking the fundamental role of the business school, which in turn requires the same for the role of the university. Toward this, they provide a set of informative and provocative reports and ideas of how the rise of business schools seems to have contributed to the present debate on deciding the primary role of university between its traditional role as truth seeker and defender of knowledge versus its more contemporary role as provider of "professional training" and producer of the "professional elites" (103) These authors suggest that a redefinition of the business school role from that of merely training economic oriented managers to that of "knowledge mediator" between pure, applied, social and applied science and the humanities should be the way forward for resolving this debate. Such redefinition provides a "European identity," for the role of universities, which is based on a tradition of social science and liberal arts. This identity should serve both the professional development needs of business schools and should provide support for preserving the essential nature of universities for truth seeking and knowledge production. I believe to any interested reader, the totality of this book, including the chapters by Michel Serres (14) and Niels Dechow (9) proves to be quite an intellectual feat and amalgam of a range of ideas, proposals, and studies in the on going debate of basing management education on the rich grounds of humanities. Reflecting on this book, I would venture to say that I see a significant inclusion of humanities, especially in the popular culture form (e.g. movies) already being applied in management education. While, this is partly addressed by Czarniawaska and Rhodes, a greater emphasis or acknowledgment of this and similar practices would have been useful to the readers. Moreover, a review of the sponsorship and financial support for the humanities oriented programming by corporations, which is a common practice today, would have been illuminating for the readers as well. I started this review by using a quote from a movie as a manifest form of humanities to present the central theme of this book: the desirability and complexity involved in bringing humanities to management education. I would like to end it by showing the tension, as captured in this book, between the worlds of business management and humanities by drawing on a novel as another manifest form of humanities by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera (1998) In it, Florentino Ariza, the novel's main character and a romantic poet, out of the misery of his failed love life, is forced to ask his uncle to give him a job as a clerk at his river navigation company. As a clerk for the board of directors, he had to write business letters, and "he wrote everything with so much passion that even official documents seemed to be about love. His bills of lading were rhymed no matter how he tried to avoid it, and routine business letters had a lyrical spirit that diminished their authority " (167) After the first warning, his uncle "reproached him a second time" (168) Florentino replied: "Love is the only thing that interests me." "The trouble," his uncle said to him, "is that without river navigation there is no love" (168) This tension between humanities and business is so well, thoroughly, critically, and artfully captured by Management and Humanities book.