https://doi.org/10.1177/1052562921990420
Journal of Management Education
2021, Vol. 45(2) 163–176
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1052562921990420
journals.sagepub.com/home/jmd
Editors’ Corner
Small Silences: Privilege,
Power, and Advantage as
Management Educators
Kathy Lund Dean
1
and Jeanie M. Forray
2
As we write this editorial, “The Year That Was 2020” has ended, and many of
us have bid it good riddance. Yet we have all learned a lot since March
2020—about ourselves as educators and about our students as multifaceted
people whose lives away from our institutions impact their on-campus lives
in myriad, and now seemingly obvious, ways. No one learns effectively, for
example, if they are food or housing insecure—facts that are obvious on their
face but which many of us in higher education, prior to the pandemic, seemed
not to connect to the students we know.
As coeditors, we have been engaged in our own reflective learning process
(Dewey, 1938), moving from our individual to shared experiences to reflect-
ing on them as levers of learning. What we have determined through this
process is that it is impossible to consider what we learned in the past year
without engaging with the concept of privilege. Privilege is simultaneously
an enormously complex lived experience descriptor and a keenly accurate
label that we could affix to countless actions, outcomes, and occurrences.
Throughout our editorial and instructional work this year (and every year, of
course), we know that our privilege permeates most decisions we make.
From the choices we make about instructional design, to the articles we ulti-
mately accept to be published in Journal of Management Education (JME),
to our work with the Management and Organizational Behavior Teaching
Society (MOBTS) Board and membership, to the authors with whom we
1
Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, USA
2
Western New England University, Springfield, MA, USA
Corresponding Author:
Kathy Lund Dean, Gustavus Adolphus College, 800 West College, St. Peter, MN 56082, USA.
Email: editor@mobts.org
990420JME XX X 10.1177/1052562921990420Journal of Management EducationLund Dean and Forray
research-article 2021