Over the last term I ran a series of film screenings for students on my final year undergraduate module. Contemporary Management Challenges, as it is called, was basically an introduction to Critical Management Studies, showcasing important concepts via which students might think about organizations and their operations, the main one being “identity”. I ran the film screenings as a way to both help the students get immersed in the module’s content and think about identity in a more relatable way, and to make myself more accessible to them.

We looked at three films: Wall Street, Up in the Air, American Psycho and after each one I spoke for about an hour on what we could learn about managerial/organizational life based on the depictions of it in the film. There were some really enjoyable moments in the film series including saying the sentence “Gordon Gekko is who Kent Business School trains students to be” and seeing the penny drop for everyone in the room, or introducing students to the Bechdel test and seeing it click for many of them that these films which were “all about management and managing” either didn’t have that many speaking roles for women or that when the women spoke, they only seemed to speak to men…

In aggregate, I had a lot of fun with it and so have decided to share the slides for anyone who might want to think about these films critically. They’re not very detailed because that’s not really my style, but the captions might offer some useful provocation.