Abstract

The folklore of Groundhog Day is an invitation to reflect on continuity, choice, and reinvention in our daily lives. Groundhog Day is an annual opportunity to imagine how the future could unfold as a straightforward extension of what we are doing today in one another’s company, or as a departure from the typical course of our joined endeavors. The joined endeavor at issue in this paper is the act of justifying inclusion of the study of managerial practice, commonly called Management, in the undergraduate college curriculum in the United States. Management is routinely shielded from a process of intellectual justification. There is a fruitful alternative to this de facto exemption. I argue that there is a place in the undergraduate curriculum for systematic attention to managerial practice, but that place need not be filled with a Management major per se. This new curricular place is anchored in the experience of living our everyday lives in a world managed by others. The inspiration for imagining this different place came one Groundhog Day, as I was sorting mail delivered to me by the US Postal Service.