Exploring hidden curriculum in responsible management education: A narrative inquiry of students' lived experience in management and leadership training programmes

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to reflect on responsible management education by exploring possible disjunctions between formal and Hidden Curricula in a Business and Management Faculty in Northern Uganda. Using the United Nations (UN) initiated Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME) as point of departure, we explore intertextual links between the PRME document and two formal master's degree curricula. To unpack Hidden Curricula, we analyse narratives by master's degree students in their final year of study. For this purpose, we apply narrative analysis combined with corpus-assisted genre analysis to identity frequently occurring themes. Our data consists of three documents (PRME, MBA and MPA curricula) and narrative essays from 10 students.While the keywords ‘ethical’, ‘sustainable’ and ‘responsible management’ were salient in the PRME document, themes such as ‘management’, ‘leadership’ and ‘business’ turned out to be more prominent in the formal Master's degree curricula, thus indicating some intertextuality. However, the intertextual relationship between the students' narratives and the PRME was weak.Based on our findings we argue a need for strengthening business and management education along the lines of PRME by paying more attention to the Hidden Curriculum for building ethical, sustainable and responsible competencies.