Business School Research Articles

Grupo Vivências: Rehearsing resistance to abyssal thinking in business schools

<i>Grupo Vivências</i>: Rehearsing resistance to abyssal thinking in business schools

Informal Learning and its Moderating Effect Between Employability and job performance of Young Recent Graduates in Their First job

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of knowledge management through informal learning on the relationship between employability and job performance of recent graduates in their first jobs. A quantitative, cross-sectional survey of 392 graduates of business school management programs at 4 universities in Lima, Peru was conducted to study the relationship between employability and job performance as moderated by informal learning inside and outside the work environment. It is confirmed that informal learning positively moderates the relationship between employability and job performance of recent graduates. However, informal learning impacts the employability dimensions differently. The results challenge traditional methods of learning and training inside and outside the work environment and provide new insights for knowledge management, talent management and their induction, training and development programs for a dynamic workforce with digital skills developed since the university stage. The implications of limiting employees' access to informal learning activities may limit future employability and job performance; employees can develop knowledge and competencies through informal learning activities on their own initiative, however, it is important to facilitate this process within the organization's processes. This study provides further evidence of the relationships between employability, informal learning and job performance in young recent graduates. In addition, it provides knowledge on how business schools can include informal or non-instructional learning activities in their curricula, thus generating self-learning skills for upcoming graduates and improving their skills and competencies.

Let the students be heard – student voices on teaching excellence awards

ABSTRACT Globally, academics are encouraged to facilitate teaching excellence. Many business schools use teaching excellence awards to recognize exceptional efforts toward students’ learning, foster pedagogical innovation, and improve faculty motivation. However, prior literature has noted that many business schools lack clear and transparent criteria for TE awards, which can hinder the process and potentially reduce the motivational effects. Research has yet to fully incorporate student voices across a global setting into the evaluation criterion. As a result, this study seeks to identify universal criteria for TE awards based on a large-scale survey of 2,775 business students across eleven countries and five continents intending to capture global student perspectives. First, we reveal whether the possession of a TE award for an educator has any importance from students’ perspectives. Second, we find that students across the globe have a general agreement regarding the criteria for awarding an excellent educator by identifying 30 criteria for TE awards students noted across our global sample. Third, we reveal 15 criteria that are specific to some countries but not globally. Lastly, we explore the differences in TE award criteria across different study levels. Overall, our study makes a significant contribution by identifying global criteria based on student voice to inform the development of teaching excellence award criteria in business education or by higher education providers and professional bodies.

Being Swiss and International: Territorialities at Stake in the Field of Swiss Hospitality Management Schools

Being Swiss and International: Territorialities at Stake in the Field of Swiss Hospitality Management Schools

Re-envisioning corporate social responsibility education from a multicultural perspective: From pyramid to hourglass

While contemporary capitalist society is stimulating corporate social responsibility (CSR) and related themes such as sustainability, with the UN SDGs and ESG as dominant narratives, educators have voiced concerns about the actual issue of how to integrate these emerging phenomena into management education. This study adopted a sequential explanatory design using responses collected from international business school students in Asia over a 6-year period to examine this gap. Their perceptions were analyzed by matching them against Carroll's four-part definitional framework, the pyramid of CSR, to gauge the degree to which CSR theories are received by students. The results revealed that the majority of Asian students understand CSR differently from the mantra “CSR is about responsible business”. Depending on the context, Carroll's CSR pyramid is negatively perceived by students in Asia as many are aware that CSR is a culturally hypersensitive subject. The study proposes three recommendations for developing inclusive CSR education in multicultural settings: 1) emphasizing the “changing” role of business in the world and contemporary capitalism; 2) emphasizing the necessity of blending Western CSR theories with sustainable development issues in other nations; and 3) adding more details about cultural sensitivity in our use of CSR.

Sustainable development goals, sustainable finance, and financial inclusion: An awareness perspective of business graduates

AbstractThe study aims to inquire about the level of understanding of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Sustainable Finance (SF), and Financial Inclusion (FI) among business graduates. The data were collected through a self‐administered questionnaire from 342 business graduates from different universities in a developing country like Pakistan. The findings revealed that the respondents have a no‐to‐low understanding of SF, FI, and the role or importance of these in achieving the 17 SDGs. The findings suggest major revisions in the structure and contents of different business degrees in Pakistan. Overall, the study opens new avenues for research and provides important insights for all the key stakeholders, including universities, higher education institutions (HEIs), the Higher Education Commission (HEC), students, and parents. The study also has social and practical implications for various stakeholders in the HEIs.

Curriculum Updates and Their Impact on School Management Practices

Curriculum renewal influences not only educational content, but also overall school management practices. In this study, we investigate the impact of curriculum reform on school management practices with an interdisciplinary approach. Through a literature review, we identified various forms of impact, including changes in management paradigm, organizational structure, school culture, teacher skills, education quality, community involvement, management skills, resource quality, student involvement, and service quality. Our findings suggest that school management must adapt planning, training, resource provision, and community involvement to manage change. Regular evaluations are needed to develop more effective education policies and school management practices, with policy adjustments based on evaluation findings. Good communication and involvement of all stakeholders is the key to implementing significant changes in increasing educational effectiveness.

Technical Note: Dynamic Duopolistic Competition with Sticky Prices

Steven Heston of the R.H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Bo Hu of the Costello College of Business, George Mason University, resolve a puzzle about industrial competition in “Dynamic Duopolistic Competition with Sticky Prices.” Previous papers analyze the effect of frictions on competition in continuous time, such as sticky prices or transactions costs. Those papers conclude that miniscule frictions have a large impact on market prices and quantities. However, Heston and Hu show that these conclusions are an artifact of the continuous-time math. Heston and Hu use discrete-time models to analyze the effect of frictions that are small per unit of time. These models show the effect of small frictions is small.

“Oh Grandmother, what big teeth you have!” Incentives to spur scientific research at business schools have been treacherous

Scientific research was introduced in business schools in the mid-1950s to raise the quality of business education as well as to improve actual business practices. Schools expected scientific research to provide a benign and respected path toward improvements, and government support for research and students’ strong interest in studying business brought financial resources and hiring opportunities that made large changes possible. Consequently, hundreds of business schools began urging professors to publish scientific research. Sixty years later, plentiful evidence is showing that scientific research has not brought expected benefits for business operations; on the contrary, business-school research has generated a high percentage of untrustworthy “findings”. This disappointing outcome has six interacting causes: (1) Business schools have expanded by hiring professors who study fundamental topics of economics, psychology, and sociology rather than topics relevant for business practices, so few research findings have been adopted and tested by firms. (2) Instead of evaluating the quality or consequences of research, schools have relied on evaluations by journal editors and reviewers, whose overriding criteria emphasize theory at the expense of practical implications. (3) Editorial evaluations have high error rates because editors and reviewers only know what researchers choose to tell them, and because the complexity of manuscripts causes editors and reviewers to disagree frequently. (4) Schools have incentivized professors by making promotions and job security depend on publishing numerous papers in “prestigious” journals. (5) Many professors have responded to these incentives by engaging in covert practices that make studies unlikely to be supported in replications, and some professors have gone so far as to manufacture fake data. (6) Researchers, editors, and reviewers have largely relied on null-hypothesis statistical significance tests, which are prone to interpret small variations or random errors in data as “significant” findings. Although there are fresh efforts to make research findings more reliable and impactful, the need for further interventions to reform the present knowledge-production system is all too apparent.

An updated account of master’s level business school writing: Revisiting the genre family framework

Existing studies of student written genres across business school disciplines were undertaken more than a decade ago. This study has produced an updated overview of master’s level written coursework assignments from core modules across eleven business school degree programmes. Nesi and Gardner’s (2012) genre family framework was applied in analysing task briefs and related documentation to identify social purposes and genres. Results suggest that in the decade since the British academic written English (BAWE) corpus texts were collected, there has been a considerable increase in the proportion of genres with the ‘preparing for professional practice’ social purpose (Nesi &amp; Garner, 2012, p. 36), alongside a considerable drop in proportions of ‘demonstrating powers of informed and independent reasoning’ (Nesi &amp; Garner, 2012, p. 36) genres, which had previously dominated. We argue for the usefulness of further applications of the approach taken in this study across different disciplines and institutional contexts to regularly update knowledge and inform EAP practice. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .

Alternative payment models in Dutch hospital care: what works, how, why and under what circumstances? Protocol for a realist evaluation study

IntroductionThe predominant provider payment models in healthcare, particularly fee-for-service, hinder the delivery of high-value care and can encourage healthcare providers to prioritise the volume of care over the value of...

The Crowdless Future? Generative AI and Creative Problem-Solving

The rapid advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) open up attractive opportunities for creative problem-solving through human-guided AI partnerships. To explore this potential, we initiated a crowdsourcing challenge focused on sustainable, circular economy business ideas generated by the human crowd (HC) and collaborative human-AI efforts using two alternative forms of solution search. The challenge attracted 125 global solvers from various industries, and we used strategic prompt engineering to generate the human-AI solutions. We recruited 300 external human evaluators to judge a randomized selection of 13 out of 234 solutions, totaling 3,900 evaluator-solution pairs. Our results indicate that while human crowd solutions exhibited higher novelty—both on average and for highly novel outcomes—human-AI solutions demonstrated superior strategic viability, financial and environmental value, and overall quality. Notably, human-AI solutions cocreated through differentiated search, where human-guided prompts instructed the large language model to sequentially generate outputs distinct from previous iterations, outperformed solutions generated through independent search. By incorporating “AI in the loop” into human-centered creative problem-solving, our study demonstrates a scalable, cost-effective approach to augment the early innovation phases and lays the groundwork for investigating how integrating human-AI solution search processes can drive more impactful innovations. Funding: This work was supported by Harvard Business School (Division of Research and Faculty Development) and the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard (LISH) at the Digital Data and Design (D3) Institute at Harvard. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.18430 .

The efficiency of financial management systems in selected schools in the Amathole West education district in the Eastern Cape, South Africa

Managing school finances by school governing bodies (SGBs) in South African secondary schools has proven to be a challenge that has several negative consequences for education, infrastructure, and other resources. The purpose of this article was to assess the efficiency of financial management systems (FMSs) in selected schools in the Amathole West education district. A case study design and qualitative approach were employed in the study. Purposive sampling was used to select SGB members from 2 schools in the district. The research participants were interviewed using face to face and telephonic interviews. We found that while there is understanding and alignment of financial systems by SGBs, insufficient or limited financial resources, inconsistencies in dealing with financial management matters, and government deposit allocation delays, SGBs’ level of education and bank operations pose challenges and lead to the misalignment of school operations. Based on the study, we suggest that SGBs adopt strategies to enhance the financial management of schools, namely monitoring and evaluation, the appointment of qualified SGB members, increased training, a stipend system for SGBs and timeous deposit of funds to schools.

Why researchers work in management schools: A comparative study of motivation and job satisfaction in France and Norway

If any country is interested in high scientific results, it should have highly motivated and satisfied researchers. The purpose of this study is to establish the national characteristics and differences in motivation and job satisfaction of researchers in two developed European countries – France and Norway. The management schools of French and Norwegian universities were chosen for this study. A five-stage research methodology, including surveys, in-depth interviews, and statistical testing, was used to test four hypotheses. According to the vast majority (16 out of 20) of motivators considered, the average scores in Norway are higher than in France. Only four motivators are exceptions, namely challenging work, interesting work, job security, and social benefits, for which the French are somewhat better motivated. In general, French researchers have lower job satisfaction than their Norwegian colleagues. The only exception is the dissatisfaction of Norwegian senior researchers with their professional learning conditions. The considered case study proves that each European country, having its own system of incentives and working conditions, provides different levels of satisfaction for different researchers working there. The results will allow one to improve national incentive systems by benchmarking and adopting best practices within the continent. AcknowledgmentsThe authors acknowledge: the COST Action CA19117 – Researcher Mental Health (ReMO) for short-term scientific mission grant and supporting this study; academic staff of observed universities for participating in the survey; and the Hauge School of Management of the NLA University College (Kristiansand, Norway) for supporting this publication.

Fifty Years of Academic Activity in Teaching, Research, and Service

The main purposes of this paper are to (i) Report my experiences teaching Ph.D. students, MBA students, Masters students, and undergraduate students; (ii) Report my achievements and experience in research from 1973 to 2023; (iii) Report my experience of serving as the Ph.D. director of UIUC from 1978 to 1988 and chairperson of Rutgers Business School from 1988 to 1996; (iv) Report my achievements in textbook writing, editing, work on the Encyclopedia of Finance, and handbook writing; and (v) Report my experience of journal editing and conference organizing. From these experiences, I will provide some suggestions in regard to teaching, research, and service in the area of finance.

Technological And Connectivity Conditions of Undergraduate Students of Economics, Accounting and Administrative Sciences at A Peruvian Public University

The purpose of the research was to identify the ICT and connectivity conditions of university students and how they use them in their undergraduate studies at a Peruvian public university. Data was collected from 208 students of the Professional Schools of Business Administration, Tourism Administration, Accounting and Economics enrolled in the Academic Semester 2024-1, with the support of a Google Forms survey. The results show that students mainly use laptops (90%) and cell phones (95%). They use wifi networks for their studies, 35% of them do not a c c e s s a network at the University or home. The preferred mobile operators are Claro (38.3%) and Bitel (35%). The preferred online service is Canva (48.3%). The most used social network is Facebook (88.3%), followed by Tik Tok (66.7%), Instagram (60%), YouTube (43.3%) and Twitter (25%). Technological conditions are limited to promote academic learning.

Teaching and learning in business schools post-pandemic: a digital future

PurposeIn 2018, a group of higher education institutions (HEIs) in Switzerland started discussing the future of education. With the COVID-19 pandemic, many of their initial ideas and solutions were tested in the unpredictable, emergency online setting. This study aims to use student and faculty member perceptions to outline the future of higher education.Design/methodology/approachThis research is based on eight surveys from students and faculty members at one Swiss HEI in business studies. While many previous studies focus on one group or one moment in time, this study examines the future of business education from both perspectives and traces the responses throughout the pandemic.FindingsTeaching and learning strategies and perceptions evolved during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nonetheless, despite the potential, many HEIs simply reverted to normal instead of adapting to the “new normal”. Conversely, some HEIs have continued using the same exercises and tools that were used in the emergency remote pandemic-mode, without adapting or reflecting on the current learning environment. Based on the findings, both students and faculty members have increased their interest and proficiency in using digital tools although the students remained more open toward the opportunities of digital teaching and learning.Originality/valueBased on the results, this study offers a model for the future of education that HEIs could implement when moving forward, whether on campus or online.

Does MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) Influence Positively the Learning Process of Business School Students – an Empirical Study

Does MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) Influence Positively the Learning Process of Business School Students – an Empirical Study

Enhancing Tourism Sustainability of Archipelago Countries: A Bibliometric Exploration of the Triple Helix Concept

This study employs a comprehensive bibliometric approach to unravel the intricate economic, ecological, and social linkages in sustainable tourism within archipelago countries. Utilizing bibliographic methodologies, the research endeavours to map the literature related to this specified theme, with Scopus serving as the primary data source. The VOS-viewer analysis tool is employed to delineate and characterize the identified keywords. A total of 1,380 documents related to the research theme were meticulously gathered, with the study specifically limiting the recorded country areas to selected archipelago countries. Authorship analysis spotlights Hall C.M. as the foremost contributor based on the analyzed sample data, and the literature journal "Governance, the State and Sustainable Tourism: A Political Economy Approach" emerges as the most-cited publication. The United Kingdom takes centre stage as the primary contributor among countries. At the same time, the School of Business and Economics at Linnaeus University, Sweden, stands out as the institution making the most substantial contribution to publications concerning the economic, ecological, and social linkages of sustainable tourism in archipelago countries. This study significantly contributes to the mapping of literature on economic, ecological, and social interconnections, providing valuable insights into sustainable tourism in archipelago countries over the past 12 years.

The business case for sustainability: six takes on a cultural artefact

ABSTRACT The business case as the prime mover of business decision-making retains an iron grip on the public imagination and the business school curriculum. Recent studies suggest its influence may be exaggerated, and that its depiction as totalising is somewhat cartoonish. We survey the role and effects of the business case in corporate sustainability efforts. Rather than examining its validity or correctness, we approach the business case as a commonly employed cultural artefact. We argue that the business case is neither sufficient nor necessary for sustainable innovation, and examine how it operates as a fixation and impediment, as well as occasional enabler. We conclude by laying out paths for sustainability champions to innovate with and beyond the business case.