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Business and management education globally is in a state of flux arising from significant long-term contextual changes and the more recent and profound coronavirus COVID-19 crisis. As we write this introduction in Spring 2021, we reflect on a year where shifts in higher education provision that might previously have unfolded over decades have been implemented within weeks. These shifts have accelerated pre-existing trajectories of change that are themselves significant, and two of these change trajectories are particularly worthy of note for their impact on educational design and practice. First, politically, across the world, direct state support for universities has been declining with the cost of tuition and maintenance transferring wholly or in part to students (Marginson, 2018). The system has thus moved to some extent from being supplier-led to demand-led. Universities are to varying degrees, liberated from quantity and price regulation and are able to operate within quasi-markets. Universities are therefore becoming service-providers competing for students and those students, positioned as customers, have the associated power of choice and the ability to influence the nature of their learning experiences (Calma & Dickson-Deane, 2020; Guilbault, 2016, 2018). Second, alongside this marketisation of higher education, and in responding to the needs of knowledge economies, so participation has significantly increased and broadened. In many developed economies, around 50% of young adults are students in higher education (e.g. Kershaw, 2019). Moreover, political interventions have encouraged access to higher education from previously under-represented socio-economic groups such that a country’s domestic student body is increasingly diverse (HESA, 2020a; Sambrook & Stewart, 2010). Higher education is now also characterised by global mobility with up to 20% of students in certain countries such as the UK being international students (HESA, 2020b; Universities UK, 2019). A typical higher education class is thus characterised by cultural heterogeneity. A cohort of learners will therefore contain students with a far wider diversity of learning style preferences and levels of engagement than existed in the past when learners largely shared cultural backgrounds and were similarly well prepared and motivated for study (Manzoni et al., 2021; Wheaton 2020).
While these two key trajectories of change have significantly influenced business and management education in general and Organisation Studies and Human Resource Management (OSHRM) education in particular, it is the rapid pandemic pivot to blended and on-line learning that is having the most significant influence on educational approaches and practices. Until the pandemic, technology had been making only slow in-roads into higher education. For example, whereas a decade ago it was speculated that Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) would obliterate face-to-face learning provision in classroom contexts (Bulfin et al., 2014), this had not happened by early 2020. Face-to-face provision at least within mainstream programmes remained remarkably resilient albeit supplemented by technology with resources such as lecture recordings and activities such as group discussion boards and quizzes, offering a varying degree of blended learning experience. However, during the early part of 2020 a rapid, worldwide pivot towards technology-based learning, to a ‘pandemic pedagogy’ (Williamson et al., 2020), occurred with much, if not all, of business and management education moving on-line. Not only has this technological pivot brought the benefit of enabling teaching, learning and assessment to continue safely through the pandemic, there will undoubtedly be many longer-term benefits from the continued use of aspects of the pandemic pedagogy. For instance, a more blended approach to provision will enhance flexibility, enabling learning-on-demand and more personalisation and support for those who need it (Yen et al., 2018). However, the technological pivot would seem not to have advanced educational practice as much as might have been hoped (Ma et al., 2021). Technology has tended to be used only in facilitating the ‘delivery’ of educational materials and, thereby, students’ acquisition of knowledge and technology has, to some extent, been wagging the pedagogic dog with some pedagogic regression evident in the form of increasing standardisation, de-professionalisation and managerial control (Ma et al., 2021). Nonetheless, as the chapters in the text will demonstrate, the future is full of pedagogic possibilities and towards the end of this introduction, the possibilities showcased within the chapters will be previewed. First, though, this introduction will set the scene by examining the meaning and scope of OSHRM and it will then evaluate the factors that have constrained educational innovation in OSHRM. It is argued that one of these constraints is a prevailing but outdated and restricted conception of the educational outcomes, in terms of knowledge and knowing, that OSHRM might, without reflection, aim to enable. Therefore, the introduction models the changing nature of the educational outcomes needed for learners to have successful careers and worthwhile lives in the contemporary world. It is then shown how the chapters in the text provide bridges to enable learners to achieve these new educational outcomes.
The meaning and scope of OS and HRM
The significance of this volume, dedicated to enhancing OSHRM education, lies in part in OSHRM being one of the largest subject areas in the Business and Management curriculum in higher education around the world. The subjects are taught on all generalist business and management undergraduate and postgraduate taught degrees at one if not more levels of study (e.g. first year and final year), and the subjects also form the core of specialist HRM or HRD (human resource development) degrees. The subjects also feature on courses as diverse as sports science and construction management, and few vocational courses in the contemporary university do not embrace some element of the curriculum of OSHRM. Moreover, the subjects are not constrained to universities and higher education institutions but also feature on corporate HRD and management development programmes with OS theorising in the areas of motivation, leadership, power, culture and team-working forming the core of such programmes. Therefore, changing educational approaches and practices in OSHRM is, potentially, a catalyst for transforming business and management education in general.
Many of the contributions to this volume examine educational advances in both OS and HRM, and although in many respects the two subjects are so closely interrelated and symbiotic as to be indistinguishable, teasing out the differences will aid subsequent understanding. OS is primarily the academic study of how people, whether individually or socially, interact in organisations with a view to better understanding such behaviour. The field draws upon the established disciplines of sociology, psychology, economics, political science and philosophy. By contrast, HRM is primarily a management activity and only secondarily a field of study. As a field of study, the foundations of HRM lie in the same disciplines as OS but HRM is an applied field, comprising, in essence, researching and theorising the processes of managing people at work with a view to the ‘enhancement of individual and organisational performance’ (Sutton, 2018). However, both areas are paradigmatically fractured. While some OS and most HRM academics are positioned squarely within the functionalist paradigm, the radical paradigms are the natural homes for most OS academics and to a few of their HRM colleagues working, in particular, in the employment relations area.
Constraints on educational advances in OSHRM
Clearly, OS and HRM are in robust shape as evidenced by their prominence in the business school curriculum, and as fields of research, OSHRM are well catered for with established conferences and conference streams, multiple highly rated academic journals and a plethora of volumes in even quite niche areas. So why, therefore, is this text focused on examining education in these fields?
To answer this question, it is first necessary to examine the evolution of the business schools in which OSHRM teaching and learning largely occurs. From their origin until the 1980s, business schools prioritised communicating and cultivating the practice of management over researching into business. The close relationship between business schools and the corporate sector was at the time seen positively (Louw, 2019), and business schools were therefore perceived as working for the public good, in enhancing economic activity and societal well-being (Alajoutsijarvi et al., 2015). As management was considered a practice-based craft, nearly all business school academic-faculty were or had been managers or business owners and were therefore able to teach using first-hand anecdotal experiences. Such academic-faculty were suppliers of tools and techniques grounded in business experience and only loosely connected to established academic disciplines such as economics and psychology (Sambrook & Willmott, 2014). Business education thus amounted, in essence, to vocational training such as medicine (Schoemaker, 2008).
However, in recent years research has enjoyed the limelight in most business schools and the prestige of a business school is increasingly derived from its research credentials. Schools now hire doctorally qualified, research-active academic-faculty and have re-trained their established academic-faculty through in-house doctoral programmes. The old-style teacher-manager faculty who did not re-train have typically been released through early retirements. While a limited number of universities have established distinct ‘teaching and scholarship’ career tracks (Anderson & Mallanaphy, 2020), for most academics, career advancement is achieved through securing research funding and achieving research outputs in high-ranking journals. While research and teaching can be synergistic and outstandingly good researchers are often outstandingly good teachers, for the majority of academics, research and teaching exist in tension with the former prioritised. Quite simply, while university managements assert the importance of quality teaching to achieve an excellent student experience, it is research that is typically rewarded with career success (Alajoutsijarvi et al., 2015). Kerr (1975) famously referred to the folly of rewarding A while hoping for B, and therefore, it is no surprise that academic-faculty prioritise research outputs over advancing their educational practice. Moreover, positions of power in universities are typically occupied by successful researchers who may have little affinity with the craft of teaching (Kenedi & Mountford-Zimdars, 2018). Educational innovation has thus to some extent languished in the shade (Kriz et al., 2021).
That OSHRM might have moved more strongly than other subjects towards a focus on research, thereby eclipsing teaching, might be attributable to a couple of subject specific factors. First, HR in particular has suffered a legitimacy problem from the perspectives of academic-faculty but also of managers. On the one hand, the field has been perceived as too closely aligned with the needs of practising managers to enjoy academic credibility. On the other hand, the field has been perceived as soft and vague and thereby unable to clearly demonstrate added value to businesses and managers, being subaltern to heavier subj...
