Africa

The Future of Management Education

Howard Thomas, Michelle Lee, Lynne Thomas, Alexander Wilson

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781787431744
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

Africa is commonly perceived as a global growth region and a continent on the move, with a huge demand for managerial skills to ensure sustainable economic growth. In order to gain a comprehensive understanding of the challenges to management education development in Africa, it is important to understand the diverse cultures, histories and contexts underlying the 54 member states. With this is mind, this book explores the future of management education, considering the differing scenarios for change and the practical realities of developing management education in VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) environments. This book, written with strong support from the EFMD (European Foundation for Management Development) and the GMAC (Graduate Management Admission Council), aimed at understanding and examining the challenges of developing management education across Africa. The authors, through a fine-tuned, face-to-face interview process, explore the perspectives and interactions between management educators and other business and government stakeholders as they look to the future of management education in Africa.

CHAPTER 1

THE PAST IS NOT THE FUTURE

INTRODUCTION

The first volume of this African study, Africa: The Management Education Challenge (Thomas et al., 2016), outlined the unique issues and challenges for management education posed by the African environment. It ended with a discussion of whether there should, or even could, be an African model of management education.

It is a topical and intriguing question.

Interest in the development of business schools throughout the world has grown markedly over the past decade. Books and articles have been written about the evolution, structure and functioning of management education not only in the West but also in Asia and other emerging regions of the world (Augier and March, 2011; Khurana, 2007; Thomas, Lorange, and Sheth, 2013; Thomas, Thomas, and Wilson 2013; Thomas, Lee, Thomas, and Wilson, 2014).

To assess whether any particular models are appropriate or meaningful for African business schools, given the significant differences in context and cultures among the widely diverse countries of the African continent, it is helpful to review the background and some of the key findings and current criticisms arising from the evolution of alternative approaches and models of management education across the world.

CRITICISMS, BLIND SPOTS, AND KEY FINDINGS

Many of the criticisms of management education arising in the existing literature were summarised in the 2013 and 2014 volumes Promises Fulfilled and Unfulfilled in Management Education and Securing the Future of Management Education (Thomas et al., 2013, pp 66-68 and Thomas et al., 2014, pp 33-34).

These criticisms are that the business school:

• lacks identity and legitimacy in the modern university and in society generally. It is often characterised as a ‘cash cow’ (Starkey and Tiratsoo, 2007) and an academic stepchild (Wilson and Thomas, 2012)
• is essentially a socialisation mechanism (Grey, 2005) – a business school is a necessary rite of passage for senior management and more in the nature of a ‘finishing school’ than an intellectual, liberal-thinking cauldron of research and teaching activity
• overemphasises shareholder capitalism and does not embrace models of stakeholder capitalism and corporate social responsibility (Locke and Spender, 2011; Muff et al., 2013)
• does not provide a clear sense of purpose, morality and ethics with respect to business and managerial roles in society (Colby et al., 2011; Ghoshal, 2005; Millar and Poole, 2010)
• focuses on analytics and scientific rigour at the expense of developing wisdom and interpersonal, leadership and managerial skills (Bennis and O’Toole, 2005; Mintzberg, 2004; Schoemaker, 2008)
• produces self-referential research that is seen as irrelevant by those involved in managerial practice (Hambrick, 1994; Pfeffer and Fong, 2002, 2004)
• overemphasises scientific rigour in the conduct of management research and knowledge development (Schoemaker, 2008; Thomas and Wilson, 2011)
• has pandered too much to business school rankings and has consequently become too responsive to the consumer voice (Khurana, 2007)

Dean Canals of IESE Business School in Spain (2011) added to these criticisms with a series of observations not only about the purposes of the business school but also about the need to address a number of immediate administrative crises (Thomas et al., 2013, pp 15-16). They include:

• a much stronger exploration of the business school’s role in providing leadership to handle the ethical and moral lessons to be learned from scandals such as ENRON and the global financial crisis. How can a stronger ‘moral and ethical compass’ be taught and learned?
• the importance of taking globalisation seriously. Perhaps a wider study of international economics and finance is required here
• the somewhat tense relationships between the business school dean and university authorities and the dean and his or her faculty. Universities often treat business schools as a source of funds for the benefit of the broader academic institution. This can hinder the ‘team’ development of a business school and increase the faculty’s feeling of lack of acceptance, identity, meaning and legitimacy not only in the business school but also in the broader university
• the widely held perception that business school research increasingly lacks relevance. The challenge here is to co-produce knowledge with business and industry, perhaps with interdisciplinary joint research project teams
• the search for appropriate forms of stakeholder capitalism and the definition of senior managers’ roles and responsibilities in society

Further, various ‘blind spots’ and tipping points in the management education field may also be identified. These blind spots are issues that have either been ignored, perceived incorrectly or sometimes attacked too slowly by experts in the field. Such blind spots (Zajac and Bazerman, 1991) have received insufficient attention in an academic field (business and management education) that has been severely criticised for its caution, complacency, conservatism and inertia in an increasingly fast-paced, hypercompetitive marketplace. The more common blind spots are:

• how to embrace technological change. How far have technological advances, particularly in the digital domain, deepened and enhanced the teaching and learning process in business schools?
• how to address the relevance gap between academia and practice. It certainly seems that this gap has become much wider with faculty incentives and foci directed increasingly towards academic A-journal research.
• the apparent presence of a paradigm trap in business school curricula. A dominant paradigm and curriculum model arising from the Gordon-Howell Ford Foundation of the 1950s report has stifled innovation in business school models and curricula developments.
• the poor quality of ethics, CSR and sustainability debates in business schools. Has mere ‘lip service’ been paid to research and teaching of responsible behaviour?
• the increasing importance of entrepreneurship in economic development. How can entrepreneurship be taught? Will the adoption of project-based experiential learning approaches create workable models?
• the urgent discussion of social and management innovation. How can principles of fairness and financial inclusion become part of teaching and learning in social entrepreneurship?
• addressing the lessons of leadership development. How can leadership insights be nurtured? For example, can community service projects promote leadership insights and abilities?
• localisation versus globalisation rhetoric. How can global mindsets be developed? Do they require that international internship programmes co-exist alongside study-abroad and international exchange programmes?

CRITICAL QUESTIONS AND CHALLENGES

In mapping the future evolution of the role, positioning and curricula of management schools commentators have framed these criticisms and blind spots as critical questions and challenges for management educators (Carlile et al., 2016, pp 12-17). In this process now may be an appropriate time to re-orient management schools towards a more professional, practice-oriented managerial direction using similar well-established approaches used in professional schools such as engineering, law and medicine. However, in mapping their futures, the following issues illustrate some of the dilemmas business schools face:

How does a business school innovate and what is the nature of the innovation process? Is it the result of a series of small, incremental innovations that accumulate to a logical, larger whole or rather the outcomes of a large, more radical disruption, as suggested by writers such as Clayton Christensen (2000)?

How should business school deans lead? What is the nature of the strategic leadership process in business schools? What incentives are there to take risks and promote innovation? There is plenty of evidence to suggest conservatism and inertia in the actions of many business school dears. Few studies have examined this leadership process, a notable exception being the work of Fraguiero and Thomas (2011) on strategic leadership in business schools.

Where, and in what respects, does management research offer distinctive insights to guide policy and practice? The ongoing concern about the widening gap between ‘cutting-edge’ research and management practice means that the lack of a multi-discipline approach in research and research teams looms large, particularly when we examine important societal research issues such as innovation, job creation, crisis management, and the alleviation of poverty.

Can management education be taught efficiently and effectively at scale? What is the future of IT-enabled learning? How can MOOCs (massive open online courses) and blended learning approaches to management education be implemented more successfully? For example, it is clear in the African context that a significant and major improvement in management education is to educate at scale a very large population of managers (estimated at approximately one million by the African Management Institute (AMI) (2013) who have little or no university education or adequate formal management training.

How should business schools engage business and industry actively in their programmes and activities? Challenges exist in how best to handle student-centred participative learning, which inevitably involves both close collaboration with business and industry and smaller class sizes in which to facilitate the learning process. This has strong implications for the funding model of business schools, particularly the ability to scale such programmes effectively and hire an appropriate number of high-quality faculty. This also requires a dynamic model of engagement by business, government and industry with business school research far beyond the existing passive ‘hands-off’ approach.

How quickly should we move beyond Western models of management thinking and teaching in emerging economies and developing markets? There is a tension between globalisation in the management education field and the need for clear local differentiation of curricula and learning approaches in different cultures and contexts. We call this the ‘glocalisation’ dilemma.

What new frames of legitimacy will emerge around the role and contribution of business schools as learning institutions? There is continuing debate in academic circles about the legitimacy of business schools: are they professional learning organisations, following the idea of the university offered by Cardinal Newman (1852), or are they simply uncreative ‘wastelands of vocationalism’, to use a term coined by Herbert Simon (1997)?

IMPLICATIONS FOR THE EVOLUTION OF MANAGEMENT EDUCATION GLOBALLY

It is clear from the above that a series of issues must be addressed to improve approaches to management education in different regions of the world. This applies particularly in Africa, Asia and Latin America, whose growth and promise provide a real opportunity for questioning and examining new models of management education.

Business schools are clearly a success story but continuing unease about their purpose, legitimacy and academic rigour remains among administrators and academics in other research disciplines. A clear implication is that the quality of business schools in terms of their teaching and research activities and of their relevance to practical management constituencies must be more strongly emphasised.

In addition, there is a perception that there is a lack of innovation in business school models. The model advocated by Gordon and Howell was formulated some 60 years ago yet remains the dominant approach. Although there are some recent examples of business model innovation (Thomas et al., 2013; Muff et al., 2013), the overall impression is of slow, conservative change.

There is also a growing and very worrying gap between theory and practice in the management education field. Business schools are probably further now from the domain of practice than they were in the vocational ‘trade school’ era of business school evolution around the end of the second world war. Unfortunately, the widespread professional school models seen in universities, including those in engineering, law and medicine, have hardly been adopted or even taken note of in any significant way in designing educational approaches in business schools.

This has exacerbated the difficulties faced in researching managerial practice and in creating new knowledge that would link theory and practice in an effective manner. In short, co-creation of research knowledge between practitioners and academics, which is common in medical and engineering schools, in business schools has been relatively insignificant and weak.

Many critics, including Mintzberg (2004) and Handy (2015) argue that business and management educators have been wilfully blind to the environment in which they are operating.

For example, Handy believes that the MBA is essentially a Master of Business Analysis degree rather than a qualification that embraces liberal management education and provides real insights into general management thinking. Both Mintzberg and Handy list numerous problems with existing business schools.

For example, new campus facilit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword: The Journey Continued
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 The Past Is Not The Future
• Chapter 2 The Environment of Africa: Managing VUCA Environments
• Chapter 3 The Future Evolution of Management Education in Africa
• Chapter 4 Scenarios of the Future of Management Education in Africa
• Chapter 5 Strategic Change and Management Education: Barriers to Change and Likely Change Horizons
• Chapter 6 Blind Spots and Other Areas Deserving Attention
• Chapter 7 Postscript
• Appendix
• Index