Using Movies as Pedagogical Tool for Management Education

Management discipline is a relatively new field. Before the formal introduction of management education in the modern education system, there were informal mechanisms for learning trade tricks. Most commonly, the novice would spend time with the master as an apprentice and know enough within a few years to start independently. When first business school (B-schools) associated with University of Berlin in 1906 and Harvard Business School (HBS) associated with Harvard University in 1908 were set up, the search began for the right pedagogical tool in management education.

Historical records suggest that during the late nineteenth century, American colleges emphasized uniformity and discipline where instructors followed the lecture-and-recitation method. However, management education was not deemed fit to follow this approach. There was recognition that a manager needed to learn skills that went beyond rote learning. Just as a swimmer cannot learn to swim by reading a book on swimming, similarly, being a manager requires students to practice management by going beyond the lecture-and-recitation method.

B-schools in Germany tried to answer this problem by using seminars that promoted dialogue between instructors and business students. A few B-schools in the United States organized educational tours to factory premises and on-site visits to provide practical insights. HBS followed a unique approach to management education, which later became known as the case method and was widely adopted worldwide for management education.

The case method espoused holistic decision-making skills, which required decisions to be made with constraints and incomplete information, as seen in real business situations. Even though cases have been successfully used over a century in management education, they have been critiqued for multiple reasons. Firstly, using cases was not deemed appropriate in specific disciplines that could be more effectively taught using other methods. Further, cases were seen as having pro-company bias and sanitized versions of business situations as they were often written with the support of company officials. Moreover, in the internet era, where students have a short attention span, reading cases with long text (HBS focus on writing long cases, often running into 20-30 pages, is the main culprit) was seen as an inefficient approach. Recently, there has been some efforts to capture business student’s attention by making use of multi-media cases which provide a rich explanation but such cases have been very few.

In this context, movies can serve as a vital pedagogical tool for management education. Movies do not suffer from many lacunae on which case method is critiqued. Movies can be used either in entirety or parts to explain the concepts relevant to the course. Movies do not suffer from pro-company bias as they are produced independently of any company’s support and resources. Films provide a vibrant audio-visual mode for students, which keeps them engaged, thus addressing attention-related problems.

While some of the premier B-schools in India have started courses on management issues in the film industry, none of them have made prominent use of movies in their course curriculum. In this context, IMT Ghaziabad is an exception where the institute has tried integrating films into the course curriculum. For example, a professor in Marketing uses clips from a 1940 movie to explain the concept of customer value. Similarly, a professor teaching a course on ‘Diversity and Inclusion’ used the 2016 movie ‘Hidden Figures’ to explain the concept of intersectionality. There is a dedicated course called ‘Contemporary Issues in Management through Films’ where instructors from different disciplines have joined hands to deliver a course using only movies. This course has become one of the most sought-after courses at IMT Ghaziabad, with more than one-third of the batch opting for it.

While it may only be possible to use movies in some disciplines, it is possible to inter-weave movies in the course curriculum of multiple courses to provide a rich experience to business students. Since there is no such database that instructors can refer to identify movies relevant to the concepts, it will require efforts by instructors to watch the movies and try to relate them with the concepts covered in the course. This process is likely to take some time before the initiative starts bearing fruit, and the B-school leaders will have to be patient for it to emerge as an effective pedagogical tool.

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