Business School Education Research Articles

Value Added in Undergraduate Business Education: An Empirical Analysis

A substantial body of research since the early fifties has been conducted addressing the economic benefits from higher education. A more limited body of research has further demonstrated that there exist important qualitative differences in the academic returns or academic performances due to college education. It has been established that such qualitative differences occur because of the choice of the major, quality of institution and quality of the students. Although graduates from higher quality institutions generally exhibit higher academic performance, this can explain only a small proportion of the variability of student’s performance. The present study attempts to address the institutional quality issue from a value-added perspective. We investigate how the business school education from an undergraduate institution can affect the academic performance of its students. Data for this study were collected in a four-year college in the northeast region of the United States. The School of Business in that institution offers majors in Accounting, Business Administration (with five specializations), and Economics. All business students must take a common core of required courses including accounting, economics, finance, marketing, management, information technology, and statistics prior to taking their courses in the major discipline. Our sample size contains 415 graduating students over two time periods: 2008 and 2012. Results suggest that undergraduate business school education accounts for about 25% to 35% of the variability of the academic performance for the students.

Educating consent? A conversation with Noam Chomsky on the university and business school education

In what follows, we present a conversation with Professor Noam Chomsky on the topic of whether the business school might be a site for progressive political change. The conversation covers a number of key issues related to pedagogy, corporate social responsibility and working conditions in the contemporary business school. We hope the conversion will contribute to the ongoing discussion about the role of the business school in neoliberal societies.

Using mind maps to study how business school students and faculty organize and apply general business knowledge

Concerns have been raised that business school pedagogy has limited students' intellectual development with respect to integrative thinking, synthetic reasoning and the ability analyze complex problems. Mind maps were used in this study to explore these concerns. Specifically, undergraduate and MBA students, and business school faculty performed a mind mapping exercise for a complex, multifaceted problem. Results supported concerns about students' intellectual development. Mind maps indicated that advanced undergraduate and advanced MBA students partitioned knowledge into distinct silos and that their knowledge bases were thin. In contrast, business school faculty developed rich mind maps characterized by dense connections among concepts. Implications of these findings for business school pedagogy were discussed.

Business school education and technology–a case study

This paper discusses the holistic integration approach that a management school has to adopt, so that the students are equipped with enough skills and techniques to face the challenges of the varying business dynamics. There is a need for Business schools to integrate academic activities with all other relevant processes such that at the end of their tenure, the students are ready to tackle issues related to society, business and technology. However, for this to happen, the Business schools need to redesign their approach for framing the curriculum. Instead of designing a standalone curriculum, the Business schools need to understand the requirements of all stakeholders such as recruiters, business, students and faculty. The Business schools can achieve this by gaining knowledge through research, consulting and delivering through improved pedagogy using technology. For this research, data was collected by conducting primary survey of 5 Business schools taken as case study and using secondary source to get details of their processes. The findings can be used by any other Business school aspiring to produce effective managers.

Making strategy matter: Social theory, knowledge interests and business education

The tensions and challenges facing business education frame this paper, which takes a critical look at the historical evolution of business school education in the context of the present conjecture, with a particular emphasis on the role social theory can play in the analysis of strategy and ethics. Flyvbjerg's phronesis and Selznick's sociology are deployed to address the challenges facing business schools and their place in higher education. Kant's moral anthropology opens common grounds to both approaches. Our aim is to provide a platform from which business and university leaders can debate and discuss the current and future role and impact of business school education, particularly focusing on linking and cultivating ethical and strategic capabilities in management and organizational practices.

Commentary on Sowcik and Allen: Getting Down to Business

When I am asked to speak on leadership, and leaders hip development specifically, invariably someone in the audience will offer that “leadership really cannot be taught; you either are born with the ability to lead or you are not.” I then sp end a few minutes describing what we know about leadership development and the evidence showing that skills can be attained. I also suggest that while athletes may come to a game with raw tal ent, there is much that can be and is done through training to hone that talent. Historically, business schools have existed to educ ate management professionals, and although the concept of leadership has been a more recent ad dition, it is clear that individuals enrolled in courses in advanced management and technical skills are being prepared for upper level management positions or what we now call leadership roles (Khurana, 2007). Today, business educators design courses to reinforce and develop l eadership skills across the curriculum and within technical specialties. However, the success of these efforts varies. Employment surveys still suggest that business school graduates lack s ome skills associated with effective leadership, indicating that leadership education within busines s schools may benefit from dedicated, planned efforts. Sowcik and Allen’s paper, Getting Down to Business: A Look at Leadership Educ ation in Business Schools , identifies a number of compelling issues in impro ving leadership education in business schools and provides a thorough overview of how these efforts could benefit from the considerations present in the National Leadership E ducators Research Agenda. In a cursory analysis of the offerings in leadership within US b usiness schools in 2010, we found that the top schools focused on comprehensive ways of addressing leadership (Murphy & Johnson, 2011). These efforts range from graduate programs that inc luded a singular focus on developing leaders in business to those who offer support for student leader development while one transitions through an MBA program. A review of the top 10 undergraduate programs showed that many more are focusing on soft skills that support effec tive leadership (Murphy & Johnson, 2013). And as Sowcik and Allen note, at least one leadersh ip course is offered at 45 out 50 of the top US business schools. However, this does not mean that business schools embrace leadership education. Some schools consider leadership as a di scipline less important than other technical areas (Kurana, 2007) and deem the leadership piece as too “touchy-feely” or refer to it as “charm school.” My commentary will focus on what we know historically about leadership and leadership development that can help support an age nda of improving leadership education and research. I will also suggest a few areas of attent ion that complement Sowcik and Allen’s paper.

Getting Down to Business: A Look at Leadership Education in Business Schools

In the context of business schools, the word “leadership” is widely used in missions, visions, and marketing materials. However, underlying support and the infrastructure to truly develop leaders may be lacking. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the challenges and issues facing leadership education in the context of business education. More specifically, we highlight some of the structural challenges, foundational issues, and research related problems and identify several opportunities to address some of the areas for development. Throughout this paper, we discuss how the National Leadership Education Research Agenda can spark research that will legitimize our work not only in business, but across disciplines.

Corporate Responsibility to Respect Human Rights and Business Schools' Responsibility to Teach It: Incorporating Human Rights into the Sustainability Agenda

The Preamble to the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UNDHR) calls on every organ of society to teach and educate for the promotion of the rights it contains. However, few if any business schools have any systematic or critical human rights content in their accounting and business curricula. This oversight is increasingly problematic as concern grows over the burgeoning size and power of multinational corporations in relation to nation states, cases where large multinational corporations have been complicit in human rights violations, and increasing corporate roles in the provision of state services. This shift of human rights duties, responsibilities and accountability from nation states to corporations has resulted in a number of new United Nations initiatives, voluntary standards and international protocols to bring the UNDHR to bear on business activity. This paper explores how the universal human rights apparatus and discourse is impacting corporations' responsibilities for the protection and promotion of human rights and sustainable development. The emerging business and human rights discourse presents a number of challenges to the dominant ideology taught in business schools and is likely to be resisted. This paper presents a moral and pragmatic case for incorporating human rights into business and accounting education at tertiary and professional levels. It also outlines the principles that should underpin attempts to effectively integrate human rights into the accounting and business curricula as well as exploring the articulation between the human rights and sustainability discourses.

Cultures as Learning Laboratories: What Makes Some More Effective Than Others?

With a mandate to globalize, business school educators have increasingly embraced global service learning as an important technique for creating global mind-sets and enhancing cultural understandin...

Agility in business school education through richness and reach: a conceptual model

PurposePedagogy today has become a function of technology and this relationship becomes all the more promising when used to address the educational needs of the constantly changing and fast evolving business school education. Business schools today are responsible for empowering future managers and leaders with not only the knowledge and insights but also with the ability to sense and respond to the unanticipated changes of the turbulent business environment. The objective of this paper is to conceptualize an integrated pedagogical framework that combines “richness” of augmented reality, classroom teaching and academic research with “reach” of social networking to yield a paradigm of agile business school education.Design/methodology/approachThe authors propose a conceptual model that would help in building entrepreneurial agility through business school education when internal factors collectively optimize the richness of education content and external factors provide the reach necessary to create a field for socialization that helps in building knowledge.FindingsThe authors’ conceptual model consists of three sub‐paradigms derived from the theories they discuss: richness (from theory of experiential learning), reach (from social network theory) and business school education agility (from contingency theory). These three dimensions together enable the authors to understand and propose a new model for business schools, which would have the objective of producing more graduates with entrepreneurial agility.Research limitations/implicationsThis research is just an attempt towards integration of emerging technologies to offer agile and experiential education. More research is needed to assess the effectiveness of various teaching and learning techniques. Multivariate analysis would be helpful in determining the multitude of effects on learning that can occur within a business school environment.Originality/valueAgile business school education is a new variation on business school pedagogy that combines traditional‐style education with technology to provide education that is relevant today and will be relevant in dealing with unforeseen events in the future. Agile business school education will enable graduates to build and lead agile and successful organizations.

Developing globally responsible leaders in business schools

PurposeIt is 50 years since the Gordon/Howell and Pierson reports substantially influenced and shaped management education. “Vision 50+20” offers an alternative future in management education for the next 20 years. The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into the suggested new purpose of business schools as role models in providing responsible leadership for a sustainable world. The article proposes a model of implementation of the vision in the domain of teaching and learning, with concrete best practice examples collected from around the world. The evolution of teaching and learning in business education is briefly reviewed in light of newly proposed “collaborator” method, hopefully launching a debate and further research in this important domain.Design/methodology/approachThe 50+20 vision of management education for the world resulted from an 18‐month collective creative visioning and back‐casting process, looking into the future and based on explicitly normative assumptions about the need to change business education. The vision was thus primarily developed deductively from a vision of the future, rather than inductively from existing literature and theory. The scholarly assessments of business schools and business school education were used as a starting point for a normative approach, but cannot explain the vision which spans a broad area of topics and fields both within management and beyond. The author complements the vision with examples from around the world to illustrate the emergence of this vision and suggests a model for considering the implementation of vision 50+20.FindingsBusiness schools need to fundamentally transform their purpose to serve society by providing responsible leadership for a sustainable world, embracing three relevant roles and becoming themselves a role model and a showcase for transformation.Practical implicationsThe paper summarizes the result of the global co‐creative visioning process of project 50+20 offering an alternative vision of management education for the world. More importantly, the paper also suggests a model on how to implement the vision in the domain of teaching and learning by providing concrete applications and leading examples from around the world. As such, it provides a visionary guide for any business and management scholar interested in engaging the future of management education.Originality/valueThe paper summarizes the 50+20 vision and introduces a practical perspective for implementing a meaningful new approach to teaching and learning.

Serving culturally diverse e‐learners in business schools

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to highlight how future teaching in business schools will probably take place in an online (here called 24/7) classroom, where culturally diverse e‐learners around the globe meet. Technologies such as iPhone, iPad and a variety of social media, to mention but a few, give management learners of any age easy 24/7 access to information. Depending on the quality of the materials and the competences and cross‐cultural sensibilities of the teachers and trainers, this information may support the progress of e‐learning in business schools. At the same time, easy online access to knowledge and educational structures is not, in practice, equally available yet across cultures, and this will be documented with comparative cases from the Arab world and African learning communities.Design/methodology/approachThis article contributes to multicultural education by identifying various barriers in the online management classroom. It combines theories from educational and cross‐cultural leadership studies, as well as e‐learning studies.FindingsThe outcomes of this analysis show how technical, language and cross‐cultural barriers still hinder particular adult learners to benefit from the “24/7 business school”. It is concluded that by understanding and serving a wide range of culturally diverse e‐learners in business schools, the stewardship role of the business school teacher is key.Originality/valueThe interplay between technical, language and cultural barriers in the online business school is rarely reflected upon. It is the intention of the authors to trigger a broad discussion process by focusing on culturally diverse management learners and by connecting with innovative educational insights across histories and cultures.

Texas Roundtable on: The Future of Graduate Business School Education

A small group of academics and practitioners discuss the challenges now facing today's business schools. First and foremost is the challenge now being mounted by “online” courses to the traditional methods of classroom lecture and discussion, supplemented in some cases by apprenticeships and other kinds of “experiential” learning. How will traditional universities burdened with high and rising fixed costs for buildings and faculty compete with very low‐cost competitors—programs that reportedly have enabled star lecturers to reach audiences that, in some cases, have exceeded 100,000 students?In assessing the seriousness of the challenge, the panelists start by attempting to articulate what is valuable in current business school education—valuable enough to enable the best business schools to command as much as $175,000 for two‐year (or shorter) programs that confer MBAs. Much of the discussion focuses on establishing the relative importance of the disciplines, or body of knowledge, that are taught in business schools, as compared to the development of “collaborative” habits and interpersonal skills aimed at enabling students to make more effective use of their knowledge within large organizations. Some of the panelists, notably Jeff Sandefer, founder of the (now ten‐year old) Acton School of Business, argue that far too much of today's business school curriculum is devoted to the classroom and conventional learning. And many of the changes in the top business schools during the past decade appear to reflect Sandefer's charges. But, to the extent there is a consensus among the other panelists, it is that the best business schools will continue to try to accomplish both of these goals, though with varying degrees of effectiveness, while most schools attempt to maintain their specialized capabilities, and carve out distinctive niches based on them. For some schools, such specialization is likely to mean continued emphasis on theory and classroom learning—though almost certainly with more attention to practical application and collaborative decision‐making. For other schools, the main focus will continue to be the development of general management and leadership skills.

MARCH 2013 PLACEMENT ADS

<b>MARCH 2013 PLACEMENT ADS</b>

Enhancing Quality of Management Education in the Average Indian Business School Through Shared Responsibility

The Management education market in India has taken rapid strides during the last two decades, a post graduate qualification in management has been perceived as the passport to a fruitful and financially beneficial corporate career. This resulted in massive demand for higher education in management and true to orthodox economic theory; there has also been a corresponding supply response. However MBA/PGDM education now appears to be a victim of its own success. Deterioration in the quality of management graduates has contributed to a corresponding lowering of the job profile, a gradually emerging job market which considers MBA/PGDM degree merely as an entry level graduate qualification. Unsurprisingly, the compensation package has also reflected the changed job profile. This research paper is an attempt to focus on the root causes of low grade management education in average business schools in India, and also aimed to explore the responsibilities of average B-Students and B-Schools to overcome with this unwanted situation.

Enhancing Quality of Management Education in the Average Indian Business School Through Shared Responsibility

The Management education market in India has taken rapid strides during the last two decades, a post graduate qualification in management has been perceived as the passport to a fruitful and financially beneficial corporate career. This resulted in massive demand for higher education in management and true to orthodox economic theory; there has also been a corresponding supply response. However MBA/PGDM education now appears to be a victim of its own success. Deterioration in the quality of management graduates has contributed to a corresponding lowering of the job profile, a gradually emerging job market which considers MBA/PGDM degree merely as an entry level graduate qualification. Unsurprisingly, the compensation package has also reflected the changed job profile. This research paper is an attempt to focus on the root causes of low grade management education in average business schools in India, and also aimed to explore the responsibilities of average B-Students and B-Schools to overcome with this unwanted situation.

What Drives Ethics Education in Business Schools? Influences on Ethics in the MBA Curriculum

This paper discusses the impact of four key issues on ethics education in MBA programs: (1) the geographic location of business schools, (2) a school’s ranking in the Financial Times list, (3) the length of the MBA program, and (4) a school’s participation in the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME). Our discussion is based on detailed coursework data underlying the 2009 Beyond Grey Pinstripes survey of full-time, in-person MBA programs. We find that the four discussed issues influence whether ethics education is delivered through core or elective courses. Further, we find that the four issues also impact whether schools teach ethics through standalone courses or integrate relevant content into other disciplines. However, our results also indicate that the four issues do not significantly influence in which disciplines ethics-related content is infused.

Exploring sustainable tourism education in business schools: The honours program

Abstract This paper examines the future of sustainability education in tourism honours programs in Australian tertiary institutions, an issue of international relevance as many tourism programs are located in mainstream business schools. Its suggests that while industry relevant skills acquisition is an important characteristic of undergraduate tourism education; the tourism honours year requires the opportunity for students to incorporate critical reflection into their study of tourism and in recent times particularly those issues related to sustainability. Sustainability embraces the critical and has sought to straddle neo-liberal and socialist positions through its incorporation of various strands of intellectual thought including equity, limits to growth, nature, poverty and development. In order to improve the quality of sustainability education in tourism honours programs the authors have looked for lessons that can be taken from geography. Within Australian tertiary institutions tourism programs are increasingly being incorporated into mainstream business faculties. Tourism offers an applied lens through which business students can be exposed to the various themes of business practice including: sustainability, ethics, marketing, economics and statistics. This paper does not argue against business focused tourism teaching but instead looks at ways in which renewed engagement with tourism’s various disciplinary bases can equip Honours students with the visioning and critical thinking skills that are necessary for a rounded sustainability education.

Sustainability, Epistemology, Ecocentric Business, and Marketing Strategy: Ideology, Reality, and Vision

This conceptual article examines the relationship between marketing and sustainability through the dual lenses of anthropocentric and ecocentric epistemology. Using the current anthropocentric epistemology and its associated dominant social paradigm, corporate ecological sustainability in commercial practice and business school research and teaching is difficult to achieve. However, adopting an ecocentric epistemology enables the development of an alternative business and marketing approach that places equal importance on nature, the planet, and ecological sustainability as the source of human and other species’ well-being, as well as the source of all products and services. This article examines ecocentric, transformational business, and marketing strategies epistemologically, conceptually and practically and thereby proposes six ecocentric, transformational, strategic marketing universal premises as part of a vision of and solution to current global un-sustainability. Finally, this article outlines several opportunities for management practice and further research.

Business Intelligence and Analytics Education, and Program Development

“Big Data,” huge volumes of data in both structured and unstructured forms generated by the Internet, social media, and computerized transactions, is straining our technical capacity to manage it. More importantly, the new challenge is to develop the capability to understand and interpret the burgeoning volume of data to take advantage of the opportunities it provides in many human endeavors, ranging from science to business. Data Science, and in business schools, Business Intelligence and Analytics (BI&amp;A) are emerging disciplines that seek to address the demands of this new era. Big Data and BI&amp;A present unique challenges and opportunities not only for the research community, but also for Information Systems (IS) programs at business schools. In this essay, we provide a brief overview of BI&amp;A, speculate on the role of BI&amp;A education in business schools, present the challenges facing IS departments, and discuss the role of IS curricula and program development, in delivering BI&amp;A education. We contend that a new vision for the IS discipline should address these challenges.