Time to belong: Why management education needs a pedagogy of contemporaneity

Calls to ‘transform’ management education often presume a linear temporal trajectory, from a deficient present towards a better future, while leaving the present itself unexamined. Drawing on philosophical accounts of contemporaneity as a conjunctively disjunctive historical condition, we argue that transformation must be grounded in how the present is lived and shared, not merely measured or projected beyond. Through auto-ethnographic vignettes of life under late Communism and subsequent migration to Britain, we show how ostensibly progressive narratives can reproduce exclusionary temporal politics, creating experiences of temporal displacement even among those chronologically ‘present’ in academic communities. We then propose a pedagogy of contemporaneity for management education – an adaptive scaffolding organised around three principles: commitment to the layered present (refusing nostalgic or utopian escape routes); collaboration across different temporal trajectories (not only across perspectives or disciplines) and contextualisation of learning within situated historical, social and political timescales. Rather than offering a blueprint for the future, this pedagogy equips educators and students to recognise and navigate temporal multiplicity as the condition of belonging in time. Our contribution is to recast transformation not as an endpoint but as the means of working with the temporal complexity that already constitutes our classrooms and institutions.