The Future of Management Education

Martin R. Fellenz, Sabine Hoidn, Mairead Brady, Martin R. Fellenz, Sabine Hoidn, Mairead Brady

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000569094
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Éducation commerciale

To remain relevant, management education must reflect the realities that influence its subject matter, management, while at the same time addressing societal needs and expectations. Faced by powerful drivers of change, many of which are amplified by the immense turbulence caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, an assessment of where management education stands and where it is going is timely.

This book brings together management education scholars, practitioners, and stakeholders to identify trends and to critically analyse key challenges from their respective perspectives. They consider the requirements for providing relevant management education in the future and explore changes and opportunities around themes such as responsibility, sustainability, innovation, competitive strategy, and technological change. The different perspectives of the authors contribute distinct insights and form a fascinating kaleidoscope of reflections on the present and predictions and prescriptions for the future of management education.

The result is a comprehensive volume that will be essential reading for scholars and administrators committed to the growth and development of management education. It also will be of keen interest to management educators as well as management learners who will shape and be shaped by the management education of the future.

PART I The Changing Context of ME

1 “May You Live in Interesting Times”: Considering the Future of Management Education

Martin R. Fellenz, Mairead Brady, and Sabine Hoidn

DOI: 10.4324/9781003095903-2

Introduction

Worldwide there are more than 13,000 business schools offering degrees (Williams, 2011) to millions of enrolled students. Many of them also offer non-degree management education (ME) to many more learners, which includes the commercially important segment of executive education (CABS, 2017). Business degrees are the most popular choice among all academic disciplines. In 2018, business degrees awarded in the USA accounted for 19.5% (n = 386,201) of all bachelor's degrees conferred (NCES, 2019). In the same year more than 400,000 bachelors and masters degrees in management and administration and/or business were awarded across the EU-27 (Eurostat, 2018). In addition to such formal higher education settings, management learners also receive formal ME in many other professional, vocational, and corporate educational settings. This scope and variety of ME highlights the value it is held in by students, employers, and other stakeholders.

Yet to remain relevant, ME must address both societal needs and expectations and the realities that influence its subject matter, management (Ghoshal, 2005; Khurana, 2007; Murillo & Vallentin, 2016; Spender, 2016). In the context of immense turbulence that has characterized the time since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, an assessment of where ME stands and where it is going is timely. Even without the global pandemic, ME stands at the crossroads of significant changes that require innovative responses (see Bachrach et al., 2017; Peters, Smith, & Thomas, 2018; Thomas, Lee, Thomas, & Wilson, 2014; Üsdiken, Kipping, & Engwall, 2021).

The drivers of change are multifaceted, and include changing local, regional, and global markets for ME; evolving business models resulting in changing requirements for management learners’ skillsets and mindsets; increasingly diverse and complex social and cultural contexts; shifting societal expectations; speed, complexity, and variety of technological development; evolving and new roles for ME stakeholders in the face of emerging new players and new forms of competition; expanding policy, regulatory, and accreditation influences; and issues related to environmental and sustainability concerns. These factors have recently been over-shadowed by the global COVID-19 pandemic and its direct impact on the provision of ME worldwide, particularly as rolling lockdowns, travel restrictions and education system closures have forced an increased reliance on remote and digitalized delivery of teaching and learning. Many of the pandemic-induced changes will be temporary, some will be permanent, and others have accelerated or amplified existing trends and developments that will profoundly alter ME.

In this context, ME, in general, and business schools as the traditionally most visible actors in the ME space in particular, face questions about their future. It remains to be seen to what degree current models of ME practice may be sustainable, and how the changing modes of ME and of competition among existing and new players in this arena will drive business schools to change and adapt. It is also unclear which existing approaches will prove to be fit for the emerging expectations and requirements for success, and which will not and if not what may take their place.

Against this backdrop this edited volume considers a range of issues that reflect the dynamic and complex context in which ME currently exists and continues to evolve. The individual chapters contribute to our understanding of relevant dynamics in a variety of ways. Some identify and discuss aspects of ME that are in flux and identify trends that are influencing ME's future. Others alert us to somewhat less visible aspects of the complex dynamics shaping ME that are likely to come to the forefront over time as important factors that influence the where, how, what, and who: where and how management will be learnt and taught, what content or orientations will be central to ME, and who will design and teach – and who will learn about – management in the future. Individually and collectively, the contributions in this book provide insight and direction for those interested in ME at the level of individual learners and educators, at the strategic level of business schools and their current and emerging competitors, and at the level of markets and the ME industry as a whole. They provide a timely exploration of likely and possible scenarios, probe current practices as to their continued relevance and sustainability, and present arguments about how ME can, will or should develop into the future.

The book is structured as follows: the first part focuses on the changing context of ME, the second on evolving prospects and perspectives followed by the third part on innovative practices in teaching and learning practices, and the concluding part exploring the dynamics of accreditation and other external regulatory influences on ME. The overall picture that is emerging is one of increasingly complex interactions and multi-layered dynamics that make specific predictions about the future difficult, maybe even impossible. Yet such predictions are not the only valuable outcome of an exploration of the future of ME. This edited text also provides description of current trends, explanation of visible changes, exploration of less visibly, almost tectonic shifts in the underlying fabric of the ME ecosystems, as well as more normative statements about what should (or should not) become center stage in the ME of the future. All of these offer valuable insights, which inform and may aid developments in the ME domain.

Pandemic-Induced Change and the Wider Themes of ME Evolution

To frame these critical considerations it is useful to briefly outline some of the recent, pandemic-influenced changes, and to briefly consider them separately before framing them in the context of the overarching themes that outline the factors influencing the future development of ME that are identified and discussed across the different contributions. At the time of writing, among the most visible issues with the most profound implications for ME related to the ongoing pandemic are (1) social distancing and global travel restrictions which have placed limitations on ME learner mobility both domestically but also impacting on the international ME markets, and (2) the resulting changes to delivery formats through the forced technological pivot experienced across ME through the immense acceleration of technology adoption in the delivery of ME (Brammer & Clark, 2020; Greenberg & Hibbert, 2020).

These two particular issues are closely connected to the wider themes that mark the dynamics influencing the future evolution of ME. The next parts will briefly discuss these two pandemic related issues and then broaden the view to preview wider themes of ME evolution.

International ME Markets and ME Learner Mobility

Even though worldwide only about 2% of all students are international students (Altman & Bastian, 2020), higher education in European, Oceanian, and North American countries is an internationalized industry. As an OECD average, foreign students comprise 9%, 21%, and 29% of newly enrolling students in bachelor, masters, and doctoral programs, respectively, and, as an extreme example, foreign student account for more than a quarter of total funding for Australian universities (Hurley & Van Dyke, 2020). In 2018, English-speaking countries such as the USA (987,000), the UK (452,000), Australia (445,000), and Canada (225,000) attracted large numbers of international students, with other countries such as Germany (312,000), Russia (262,000), France (230,000), Japan (183,000), and China (178,000) also important destination countries (OECD, 2020). The largest home countries of international students are China, India, and Korea (OECD, 2020).

The relative proportion of international students in business disciplines is considerably higher than the general average with, for example, 61% and 43% of master's students enrolling in business schools in Australia and the UK in 2018, respectively, coming from abroad (OECD, 2020). About a third of international students in the UK study business (CABS, 2016), and between 2015 and 2018 nearly seven out of ten business and management master's graduates in the UK were international students (ICEF Monitor, 2019).

The widespread COVID-19 related travel restrictions and the pandemic's impact on the willingness to travel has significantly affected enrolment in business schools in 2020. Many internationally oriented business schools as well as those national ME markets that are particularly focused on attracting international students (Wood, this volume), such as the UK and Australia, were particularly hard hit by the impact of the pandemic (Hurley & Van Dyke, 2020; Jayasuriya, 2021). The effect of the pandemic on longer-term mobility patterns among ME students remains to be seen, but the financial impact on those providing ME primarily or even exclusively to international students is likely to be severe (The Economist, 2020). Overall, the predictions are that, especially in segments catering to international students, the impact of the pandemic on ME and ME providers will be significant for the short term or even the long term through shifting and reduced student cohorts, reduced revenues, and serious financial implications (Drayton & Waltmann, 2020; Korn, Belkin, & Chung, 2020; Maslen, 2020; The Economist, 2020).

This impact is likely to spread beyond business schools especially in higher education institutions that have used their business schools as cash cows to finance other activities (McKie, 2018). An outcome could be that particularly university-based business schools may find their status affected and their ability to invest back into their own activities severely curtailed as their host universities suffer general financial difficulties as a result of the pandemic's impact on student numbers and university revenues. Both university-based business schools and their independent competitors will likely feel significant financial and competitive pressures that may lead to many of them being taken over, forced to merge or engage in close strategic collaborations, or go out of business altogether (Drayton & Waltmann, 2020; Rosowsky, 2020; Schifrin & Tucker, 2021).

The Technological Pivot in ME

The adoption of educational technologies as a significant element of ME provision significantly accelerated in response to the mobility and congregation restrictions and shutdowns of education systems across all levels in most countries worldwide in response to the COVID-19 pandemic (Brammer & Clark, 2020; Goyal, Daipuria, & Jain, 2021; Teräs, Suoranta, Teräs, & Curcher, 2020; UNESCO, 2020). The previously relatively slow adoption of digital educational technologies, the incorporation of blended educational designs, and the step to offer ME programs that are largely or even exclusively delivered online have all seen significantly accelerated developments that are unlikely to be reversed or reversed fully (see Lefevre & Caporarello, this volume).

This technological pivot has transformed ME within the space of a single year in ways and at a speed inconceivable before the outbreak of the pandemic. Technology adoption and concomitant educational redesign, along with the broad-based involvement of (and required skill-building by) ME faculty, now provide a very different platform for future development of technologically enabled, enhanced, and transformed ME.

Predictions of transformations of ME state that technology will play an increasingly central role even in segments such as executive education where the move to online has been comparatively slow (Kohan, 2020; Sawhney, 2021). For this sector, Sawhney predicts growth at the bottom end of the segment through comparatively low-cost options, and at the high end of the market through high quality and premium-priced in-person programs. This latter segment will likely be concentrated among a small number of prestigious providers, and he warns of the danger of getting caught in a competitive niche not aligned with the resources, capabilities, and reputation of the ME provider.

The Wider Themes of ME Evolution

Such developments and the resulting competitive dynamics will play out in the complex context of an evolving ME ecosystem where new players emerge (see Hommel & Vandenbempt, this volume) in the context of changing ME designs and delivery approaches (see Lefevre & Caporarello, this volume; Rivers & Holland, this volume) in a sector significantly disrupted and changed by an increasingly u...