HOW IDEOLOGY SHAPES WHAT WE TEACH ABOUT AUTHORITY: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE PRESENTATION OF MILGRAM’S EXPERIMENTS IN TEXTBOOKS.

Stanley Milgram's experiments in the 1960s, which measured the willingness of participants to obey an authority figure and administer what they thought were electric shocks to a stranger, have contributed greatly to an understanding of power relations, obedience to authority, and their potentially devastating consequences. Milgram and other Jewish scholars who lost friends and family in the Holocaust are regarded as pioneers of social psychology, yet they and the context that inspired them are muted within our field. Employing a comparative case analysis, we contrast the representation of Milgram's studies in introductory textbooks in psychology and management and consider how the fields' ideological commitments explain differences in coverage. Given their relevance to contemporary social movements that involve the abuse of authority by those in positions of power, we make the case for the inclusion of Milgram's experiments in the management curriculum. Beyond Milgram, our study encourages critical reflection on what we are teaching, and not teaching, our students about management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]