Our paper contributes to moves to humanize the business school by challenging the denial of the human emotion of doubt as an integral aspect of learning. Adopting a Freirean lens on humanization, we seek to understand business academics’ experiences of doubt as a starting point to enhance future learning possibilities for ourselves and our students. We draw on 30 semi-structured interviews with academics across the globe to offer two contributions. First, we offer thick descriptions of academics’ experiences of doubt which enable us to begin to reclaim it and recover who we are as unfinished and questioning human beings. Second, our analysis of doubt extends Freire’s discussions of humanization by deepening understandings of its emotional aspects. Building on Spicer’s (2021) conceptualization of doubt as a ‘double edged sword’, we show how in the neoliberal business school context, since doubt is experienced as ‘beyond reasonable’, its capacity to cut often endangers its capacity to sharpen so fundamental to learning. Our implications, consider both how educators’ doubt can be better supported through collective and structural solutions, and how if proclaimed, this can be mobilized in the classroom with our students to imagine a more human and, perhaps more purposeful, management education.
