The SAGE Handbook of Management Learning, Education and Development

Steven J Armstrong, Cynthia V Fukami, Steven J Armstrong, Cynthia V Fukami, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781412935395
• eBook ISBN: 9781473971790
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

The scholarship of management teaching and learning has established itself as a field in its own right and this benchmark handbook is the first to provide an account of the discipline.

Original chapters from leading international academics identify the key issues and map out where the discipline is going. Each chapter provides a comprehensive and critical overview of the given topic area, highlights current debates and reviews the emerging research agenda.

Chapters embrace the study of organizations as a whole, the concepts of individual and collective learning, the delivery of formal management education and the facilitation of management development. Through consideration of these themes the Handbook analyzes, promotes and critiques the contribution of management learning, education and development to management understanding. It will be an invaluable point of reference for all students and researchers interested in broadening their understanding of this exciting and dynamic new field.

1

Past, Present and Future Perspectives of Management Learning, Education and Development

Steven J. Armstrong and Cynthia V. Fukami

INTRODUCTION AND THEORETICAL OVERVIEW

The scholarship of management teaching and learning is increasingly being recognized as a field in its own right. Postgraduate courses in management learning are being offered in some of the most prestigious business schools around the world. The Journal of Management Education, founded in 1976 to serve as a forum for the improvement of management education in both classroom and corporate settings, continues to prosper, as does Management Learning, founded in 1978 to provide a forum for the understanding of learning in management and organizations. The US Academy of Management, regarded by many as the premier scholarly society in the discipline of management, has a division (Management Education and Development) devoted to the field. Its membership, drawn from more than 40 nations, has increased by more than 75 per cent over the past ten years. The journal Academy of Management Learning and Education (AMLE) was launched in 2002 to sit alongside the Academy’s other prestigious journals to address the scholarship of teaching and learning.

The time is now right to present an account of the ‘state of the art’ in management learning, education and development (MLED), to map out where the discipline is going, and to identify what are the key debates and issues that concern management educators. This Handbook of Management Learning, Education and Development (MLED) has therefore joined the series of Sage Handbooks that are recognised as benchmark volumes in their field in order to fulfil these important requirements. The book consists of original chapters by leading international scholars in the field from around the globe. A key dynamic of the handbook is a retrospective and prospective overview of the discipline, a critical assessment of past and present theory that also looks to the future. The handbook emphasizes the theoretical diversity within MLED by examining the integrity and intellectual coherence of the discipline, while also looking at resonances within and between its key components.

The focus of the handbook is on the education and development of managers, which will necessarily embrace theoretical aspects of individual and collective learning, the delivery of formal management education, and the facilitation of management development in educational and non-educational contexts. The interdisciplinary nature of the field is reflected in the contributions whose aims are to analyse, promote and critique the role of MLED to management understanding.

Each chapter offers a comprehensive, critical overview of aspects of the field, a discussion of key debates and research and a review of the emerging agendas in the topic area. Topics include the application of learning theories, theoretical advances about effective instructional and evaluation methods, innovations in the use of technology, both in the classroom and in virtual learning environments, and ways of developing practising managers in the context of lifelong learning.

Management is a practice that has to blend a good deal of experience with a certain amount of insight and some analysis (Mintzberg, 2004). It is not too difficult to imagine how analytical skills can be formally taught. It is difficult to imagine, however, how insight or the outcomes of management experience can be formally taught; and it is easier to imagine how they can derive from a developmental process. Herein lies the need for the use of two terms – ‘management education’ and ‘management development’ – and it is important to differentiate between these processes. Within this perspective, ‘management education’ is taken to imply formal learning which takes place under the auspices of academic institutions within credit-bearing courses to enhance managers’ analytic and critical skills. This type of learning is usually provided in organized, time-bounded and structured programmes. Such programmes sometimes emphasize the scientific aspects of management, but they are often criticized for spoon-feeding analysis and technique, and for being rather static in nature, emphasizing memory and repetition and being somewhat divorced from managerial reality. In contrast, informal learning, which is more closely associated with ‘management development’, is believed by some to offer a more effective approach by emphasizing on-the-job learning that occurs experientially in culturally embedded ways, situated in communities of practice within work-based organizations. Such learning is believed to result in the acquisition of tacit or procedural knowledge contributing to the art and craft of management, whereas formal education is believed to result in the acquisition of explicit or declarative knowledge. The former is believed to be more closely associated with successful managers.

Formal and informal learning approaches, however, should not be treated as being mutually exclusive. Instead, they should be regarded as being complementary and necessary components in the overall process of management learning. With this in mind, this handbook seeks to explore a variety of challenging approaches to the many diverse forms of management learning, linking new ideas and developments as a way of advancing both theory and practice. It seeks to identify and examine best practices in university-based management education programmes, and training and development processes in corporate, consultancy and independent college settings. The handbook, which is designed to appeal to academics, researchers, educators, programme directors, deans of business schools, advanced postgraduate students and practitioners in corporate education, is presented in three main parts. Part I covers theoretical aspects of knowledge acquisition in the context of management learning. It draws on other disciplinary fields such as philosophy, education, psychology and sociology, as well as organization theory, with a commitment to broadening and deepening our knowledge and understanding of the most relevant management theory. Part II is concerned with using theory to improve practice and promote ways of enhancing learning effectiveness in formal settings. The chapters in Part II explore a variety of learning and teaching phenomena, including potential use of the arts, cognitive styles and learning strategies, course design, technology in the classroom, distance learning, mentoring frameworks, culture and diversity issues, assessment and accreditation, problem and project based learning, team learning and importantly, the research-teaching nexus. Part III is concerned with exploring non-credit based management development through a variety of approaches and concepts, including reflexive practice, action learning, development of competencies, leadership development, coaching and mentoring, preparation of global business leaders and communities of practice. Part III finishes with a chapter that considers ways of assessing and accrediting these non-formal learning approaches. The handbook ends on a provocative note with the concluding chapter from James O’Toole that considers future perspectives of management learning, education and development in light of what has been presented in preceding chapters.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Although there has been dramatic growth in the provision of management education and development programmes over the past century, there have also been increasing doubts over the relevance (Grey, 2004; Pfeffer and Fong, 2002) and effectiveness (Mintzberg, 2004) of their educational products. It has even been suggested that the field is on the verge of a paradigm shift (Whetten et al. Chapter 13 this volume) evidenced by the number of radical business school reforms being conducted around the world. To shed further light on this debate it is helpful to consider the origins and history of business schools in general and management education in particular.

According to Engwall (2007) while there were early attempts to introduce economic disciplines into universities in Europe in the eighteenth century (e.g. Frankfurt-ander-oder, Rinteln and Halle in Germany, 1727 and Uppsala, Sweden, 1741) the first notable institutions for academic business education began to appear in the middle of the nineteenth century as shown in Table 1.1.

Business colleges were also being founded in other parts of the world around this time, such as Tokyo (1887), Osaka (1901) and Kobe (1902) in Japan and also in India (1913). In the UK it was not until The British Institute of Management (founded in 1948) assembled a committee to address aspects of management education (Ivory et al., 2006) that interests began to accelerate (Tiratsoo, 1998). However, business education really began to gain momentum in the UK in the early 1960s following the Robbins Report in 1963 which called for two postgraduate business schools to be established. Shortly afterwards, a centre for business education was created at Warwick University and then two new business schools were founded within the universities of Manchester and London in 1965. By the 1970s, management education was being provided by 237 different institutions in the UK (Tiratsoo, 1998), and by the 1990s UK business schools brought in more than £400 million a year (Crainer and Dearlove, 1999) to the nation’s economy. Engwall (2007) reports a similar proliferation of business schools across northern, central and eastern Europe and notes that the American model has played a dominant role in their development. For a more complete discussion of the history of management education, refer to Engwall (2007), Engwall and Zamagni (1998), and Warner (1997).

The roots of many of these business schools (despite others appearing in Europe at the same time, such as HEC in Paris and Handelshochschulen in Germany) can be traced back to the United States and in particular to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania when a Bachelor’s degree in Business was initiated in 1881 by Joseph Wharton, an American businessman. Believed to be the first of the prominent business schools, it was founded, somewhat ironically, as we will demonstrate later, on the basis of his criticisms of the ‘learning by doing’ approach common in colleges at that time. Wharton favoured a more structured and theoretical approach to management education (Sass, 1982). Wharton’s criticisms were to be echoed nearly 80 years later in two landmark studies which were to change the face of management education. The first Master’s degree in Business Administration (MBA) appeared at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business in the US in 1902. This school was established in 1900 by Edward Tuck, an international financier and philanthropist (Friga et al., 2003), at a time when there was explosive growth in commerce and industry. In 1908, the Harvard Business School launched its first MBA and Stanford followed suit in 1925. By 1915, there were approximately 40 business schools in the US and a year later the American Association of Collegiate Schools of Business, otherwise known as the AACSB, became the accrediting agency. The number of business schools then increased in the US five-fold to nearly 200 by 1925. Interestingly, most business professors at that time were either practising or retired corporate managers who focused on sharing lessons learned in the workplace (Friga et al., 2003).

Table 1.1 Institutions for Academic Business Education: Europe and United States

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1851	University of Louisiana (US)
1852	University of Wisconsin (US); Institut Superieur de Commerce de l’Etat, Antwerp, Belgium; Institut Superieur de Commerce Saint Ignace, Antwerp, Belgium
1854	Ecole Superieure de Commerce, Paris, France
1856	Wiener Handelsakademie, Austria
1866	Ecole Superieure de Commerce, Mulhouse, France
1867	Scuola Superiore di Commercio, Venice, Italy
1869	Washington & Lee University, US
1871	Le Havre, France; Sciences Politiques, Paris, France
1872	Lyon, France; Marseille, France
1874	Bordeaux, France
1881	Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales, Paris, France; Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, University of Pennsylvania
1884	Genoa, Italy
1886	Bari, Italy
1892	Lille, France
1895	London School of Economics, England; Rouen, France
1896	Nancy, France
1897	Montpellier, France
1898	Aachen, Germany; Leipzig, Germany; St Gallen, Switzerland; Vienna, Austria; University of California (US); University of Chicago (US)
1900	Budapest, Hungary; Dijon, France; Nantes, France; Amos Tuck School, Dartmouth (US); New York University (US)
1901	Cologne, Germany; Frankfurt, Germany
1902	Birmingham University, England; Bocconi, Milan, Italy
1903	Brussels, Belgium
1904	Manchester University, England
1905	Toulouse, France
1906	Berlin, Germany; Rome, Italy; Turin, Italy
1908	Mannheim, Germany; University College Dublin, Ireland; Columbia University (US); Harvard Business School (US)
1909	Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden
1910	Munich, Germany
1911	Finnish Business School, Helsinki, Finland
1913	Rotterdam, Neitherland

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Source: Adapted from: Engwall and Zamagni (1998) Reprinted with permission.

This became known as the trade school approach to management education and drew major criticisms such as the one by sociologist Thorsten Veblen in 1918 cited in Engwall (2007: 11) as saying ‘A college of commerce belongs in the corporation of learning no more than a department of athletics’. Nevertheless, this trade school approach continued through the first half of the twentieth century until massive reforms took place aimed at making business schools more academic and research oriented, like many other academic programmes at universities (Schmotter, 1998). Major driving forces behind these reforms were two landmark studies in the 1950s commissioned by the Ford Foundation (Gordon and Howell, 1959) and the Carnegie Corporation (Pierson, 1959) to review the state of management education. By today’s standards, the Ford Foundation alone dedicated more than 250 million dollars to this effort (Friga et al., 2003). Essentially both of these studies argued that to give business schools more respectable academic underpinnings, they needed to shift their strategies to be more research focused and less vocational (Schlossman and Wechsler, 1998). Both reports called for the careful recruitment of staff whose credentials should include academic research. This gave rise to more rational, analytical decision-making approaches as the key to management education (Bach, 1959). The professionalization of management teaching that ensued brought about the domination of business functions such as finance, marketing, law, management science, and so on, but interestingly, not management per se. These reforms encouraged a scientific model of management education (Bennis and O’Toole, 2005). The strategies and structures of business schools today, both in the US (Mintzberg, 2004) and in Europe (Ivory et al., 2006), are almost identical to those established in the 1950s as a result of those two landmark studies.

Following these reforms, most leading universities now treat business schools as seriously as other long-standing schools. Their focus has switched from being vocational trade schools to being schools which conduct rigorous scientific research and adopt scientific principles to underpin the management education process. Some have argued, however, that the pendulum has swung too far from the trade school paradigm and that business schools have become too academic (Porter and McKibbin, 1988) and that it is now necessary to strike a balance between scientific rigour and practical relevance (Bennis and O’Toole, 2005: 98). In their Harvard Business Review article entitled ‘How business schools lost their way’, Bennis and O’Toole argue that this scientific model is predicated on the false assumption that business and management studies are an academic discipline like chemistry or physics when they should be viewed as a profession like medicine or law schools. In their pursuit to educate practitioners and to create knowledge through research, these schools deliberately engage with the outside world. Faculty members are expected to be first rate scholars, but not to produce studies at arm’s length from actual practice which is so often the case with business schools. They argue that business school professors know a lot about academic publishing, but few have ever worked in a real business. This contrasts sharply with medical schools, for example, where members of teaching faculty are often practising doctors. Benni...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• List of Contributors
• 1 Past, Present and Future Perspectives of Management Learning, Education and Development
• PART I MANAGEMENT LEARNING: THEORETICAL ASPECTS OF LEARNING AND KNOWLEDGE AQUISITION
• PART II MANAGEMENT EDUCATION: IN A FORMAL LEARNING CONTEXT
• PART III MANAGEMENT DEVELOPMENT: NON-CREDIT-BASED LEARNING
• Index