Supplementary note on the Agile Literature Review Approach II

The following literature review extracts lend support to the theoretical stance of the Agile Literature Review Approach II (ALRA II)(Ho, 2018) and further clarify the nature of ALRA II per se. There are two groups of literature review extracts here:  (i)  "the decline of university management education", (ii) "need of changes on contemporary management education", and (iii) "the value of critical thinking in management education".

Literature extracts: 3 categories	Comments as related to ALRA II (Ho, 2018)
I. On the decline of university management education 1.1. ""To be educated," said Aristotle, "is in fact to be able to do this."That is, a person can only claim to be educated if he is able to be "critical" in a wide range of scientific knowledge - if he is able to distinguish between sense and nonsense even if he is not a specialist in any one area of knowledge" (Van Dren, 1991). 1.2 "...a man of "universal education" - who is none other than our Renaissance man - is one who is "critical' in all or nearly all branches of knowledge. Such a person does not have the "critical" ability in some special subject only. He has it all, or nearly all" (Van Dren, 1991). 1.3. "The twentieth century has seen radical change in this traditional scheme of education...... achieving expertise in one field while others attained expertise in theirs. Much easier to accomplish, this course led to a more comfortable academic community. Now an authority in one field need compete only with experts in his field.... The original belief that an educated person should be "critical" in more fields than his own no longer existed" (Van Dren, 1991).	These ideas clarify the underlying aspiration of ALRA II to respond effectively to the concern of management education decline.
II. Need of changes on contemporary management education 2.1. "Employers desire graduates who can approach a real-world decision under circumstances of genuine uncertainty, work with others, and make meaningful contributions to sound business decisions. (p. 325) They precisely set the context for our borrowed approach to a more effective business education—experience-based, active, problem-oriented, and modified by feedback" (Blaylock, McDaniel, Falk, Hollandsworth and Kopf. 2009). 2.2. "The learning experience should expose students to the integrated operations and processes of business; provide opportunities for teamwork and team decision making; move students from just a comprehension level of understanding to an applications level of understanding; offer students awareness of how their actions are interpreted by others and the impact they have on success; and support a comprehensive assessment of students’ managerial effectiveness, which can be shared with potential employers" (Blaylock, McDaniel, Falk, Hollandsworth and Kopf. 2009). 2.3. ""A consistent finding and concern raised by studies of the American educational system is that students at all levels are unable to think effectively (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983; U.S. Department of Education, 1990). They cannot understand challenging texts or complex issues; their reasoning is often illogical and they do not critically assess arguments; they solve problems in a rote formulaic way, rather than through creative strategies grounded in sound analysis; and their decisions reflect biased appraisals that satisfy no plausible norms of rationality. This concern is echoed in studies of management education (Porter & McKibbin, 1988) and business school disciplines (cf. Accounting Education Change Commission, 1990) that urge programs to develop students’ higher order thinking skills" (Smith, 2003). 2.4. "Although conscious, high-level thinking goes by many names (reasoning, problem solving, and decision making, among others), it is essentially mental processing that uses one’s knowledge and intellectual capacities to achieve certain goals.....    Business schools that have accepted the challenge of teaching their students how to think typically address this task in one of two ways: by teaching critical thinking and through courses in managerial decision making" (Smith, 2003). 2.5. "When a concept has this aura, it tends to be overapplied. The educational system’s extolment of critical thinking has resulted in critical-thinking artifacts and activities that have no discernible effect on higher-order thought" (Smith, 2003).	The discussion on "need of changes" justifies the intellectual stance of ALRA II's specific pathway on management education as an appropriate for responding to the needed changes on contemporary management education.
III. The value of critical thinking in management education 3.1. "There has been a growing demand in the academic literature of the past Few years for management educators to engage more critically with their subjects than has been the tradition in business schools. There are examples of applying a critical perspective to various disciplines within the management curriculum (Alvesson & Willmott, 1992) and management education generally that employ a range of critical and postmodern ideas that highlight the social and moral aspects of management practice (Burgoyne & Reynolds, 1997; French & Grey, 1996)" (Reynolds, 1999). 3.2. "The principles of critical reflection might be summarized as follows: * a commitment to questioning assumptions and taken-for-granteds embodied in both theory and professional practice, and to raising questions that are moral as well as technical in nature and that are concerned with ends at least as much as with means; * an insistence on foregrounding the processes of power and ideology that are subsumed within the social fabric of institutional structures, procedures, and practices, and the ways that inequalities in power intersect with such factors as race, class, age, or gender; * a perspective that is social rather than individual, just as the nature of our experience as individuals is social; and * an underlying aim of realizing a more just society based on fairness and democracy, reflected in work and education as well as in social life generally" (Reynolds, 1999). 3.3. "Critical thinking is a form of higher-order thinking—consciously controlled reflective thought that draws on, but can be distinguished from, lower-order cognitive processes like perception, attention, and memory. Ennis (1991, p. 6) defined critical thinking as “reasonably reflective thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do” (Smith, 2003). 3.4. "Scholars agree that critical thinking has both cognitive and attitudinal dimensions: One must know how to think critically, and one must be inclined to do so on appropriate occasions. Knowing how involves possession of certain skills (as for analyzing arguments) and related knowledge of strategies, methods, heuristics, concepts, and principles. The attitudinal side of critical thinking is referenced by Siegel’s (1990) notion of the “critical spirit.” It also is expressed in claims that critical thinkers exhibit certain mental dispositions (Ennis, 1996) or “perfections of thought” (Paul, 1989)—for instance, thinking that is clear, precise, relevant, deep, fair, and complete" (Smith, 2003).	These ideas makes clear the rationale of ALRA II's endorsement of critical thinking (and its nature) for its fundamental stance on management education.

This supplementary note is based on the literature review of the writer that is intended to clarify the work on ALRA II from the writer (Ho, 2018).

References

Alvesson, M., and Willmott, H. C. (Eds.). 1992. Critical management studies. London: Sage.

Blaylock, B.K., McDaniel, J.L., Falk, C.F., Hollandsworth, R., and Kopf, J.M. 2009. "A Borrowed Approach for a More Effective Business Education" Journal of Management Education 33(5) October: 577-595.

Burgoyne, J. and Reynolds, M. (Eds.). 1997. Management learning: Integrating perspectives in theory and practice. London: Sage Ltd.

Ennis, R. H. 1991. "Critical thinking: A streamlined conception" Teaching Philosophy, 14(1): 5-24.

Ennis, R.H. 1996. "Critical thinking dispositions: Their nature and assessability" Informal Logic, 18: 165-182.

French, R., and Grey, C. (Eds.). 1996. Rethinking management education. London: Sage Ltd.

Ho, J.K.K. 2018. "Some further conceptual clarification of the recently proposed agile literature review approach (ALRA)" European Academic Research 5(12) March: 6313-6328.

Paul, R.W. 1989. "Critical thinking in North America: A new theory of knowledge, learning, and literacy" Argumentation, 3: 197-235.

Reynolds, M. 1999. "critical reflection and management education: rehabilitating less hierarchical approaches" Journal of Management Education 23(5) October: 537-553.

Siegel, H. 1990. "The generalizability of critical thinking" Educational Philosophy and Theory, 23, 18-30.

Smith, G.F. 2003. "Beyond Critical Thinking And Decision Making: Teaching Business Students How To Think" Journal of Management Education 27(1) February: 24-51.

Van Dren, C. 1991. A History of Knowledge, Past, Present and Future, Ballantine Books, New York.