Staged by the BAM Fellows College. Professor Howard Thomas FBAM in conversation with Professor Lisa Anderson about historical and future-oriented perspective on the field of Management Education.
History matters – business schools have been a very successful feature in higher education globally over the last 50 years. Yet they have more recently faced increasing scrutiny and criticism. Before the middle of the 20th Century, business schools were typically called schools of commerce, whose purpose was to train individuals for managerial roles. They were essentially ‘trade or vocational schools’.
However, following WWII when operational research and other methodological planning processes had become commonplace, there was pressure from leading foundations in the USA such as the Ford Foundation, to develop new approaches and models for business schools. Subsequently recommendations were made in reports commissioned by the Ford Foundation, for example, the Gordon and Howell Report, to implement a new curriculum anchored around theoretical and methodological approaches focussed on quantitative analysis and core social science disciplines.
This so-called ‘logical positivist’ paradigm became dominant in leading USA schools and was copied by other leading western schools. The period from 1960 – 2000 was called ‘The Golden Age for Business Schools’. This dominance was reinforced by the publication of rankings by media outlets such as Business Week and the Financial Times, whose ranking criteria focussed on citations counts and league table positions of faculty and programmes.
However, following events such as the Asian financial crisis, the dot-com boom and bust and the global financial crisis, there was an increasing perception among stakeholders and professionals that management research was largely irrelevant and did not engage with practitioners and management practice. There was increasing pressure on business schools to re-evaluate their value to all stakeholders in business, Government, and society rather than just shareholders.
Yet business school innovation in the second decade of the 21st century was largely incremental in character with modest adjustments in curricula and technology adoption. Radical innovations however arrived in early 2020 with the huge turning point of the global pandemic.
In this seminar Professor Thomas examines questions such as why business schools acted incrementally until the jolt of the Covid pandemic. Also, what adaptions to the pandemic disruption were undertaken more recently? How were business models adapted and what longer term propositions have been made about the future directions for management education.
This event is part of the annual BAM Academic Affairs of Conference and Capacity Building (AACCB) Masterclasses.
Our series of BAM Masterclasses are delivered by prominent management theorists from across the globe each year. These online webinars are an exceptional learning experience, revealing how top academics think about the world, what inspires them, and how they develop and apply their ideas. Where do influential ideas come from? What leads to them to being widely taken up?
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BAM Fellows College
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The event speaks to Sections A1 and A2 as detailed in the BAM Framework
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Emeritus Professor of Strategic Management and Management Education, Singapore Management University
Emeritus Professor of Strategic Management and Management Education, Singapore Management University
Howard is an Emeritus Professor of Strategic Management and Management Education at Singapore Management University (SMU) where he was an LKCSB Distinguished Professor of Strategic Management, Mastercard Chair of Financial and Social Inclusion (2015-2018) and Dean of the Lee Kong Chian School of Business (LKCSB) (2009-2015).
He is a highly cited scholar, with fellowship awards from the U.S. Academy of Management (AOM), the British Academy of Management (BAM), the Academy of Social Sciences, UK, the Learned Society of Wales (LSW), the European Academy of Management (EURAM), the Institute of Directors (IOD) and the Strategic Management Society (SMS) for which he also served as Dean of Fellows and President of SMS. He was the Dean of Fellows at BAM. He was awarded the Richard Whipp Lifetime Achievement Award by BAM in 2013 and the Cooper Leadership Medal by BAM in 2022
He has also served as Chair of the Board of AACSB (UK), CABS (UK), GFME (Global Foundation for Management Education) and GMAC (USA) and is a past Vice-President (for Business Schools) and honorary life member of EFMD. He was given the Strategic Leadership Award from AACSB in 2014. His academic and administrative career has spanned at least three continents – Asia, Europe and North America. He has held visiting and permanent posts at AGSM (Australia); London Business School (LBS); Edinburgh University; Boston University; MIT; Kellogg School, Northwestern; University of Southern California (USA); HEC Montreal; University of British Columbia (UBC) Vancouver (Canada) and at the University of Johannesburg (UJ) as well as GIBS, University of Pretoria, South Africa. He has held Deanships/senior administrative positions at LBS, AGSM, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (U.S.), Warwick Business School (WBS) and SMU. He is also the recipient of several honorary degrees.
Professor of Management Development, University of Liverpool
Professor of Management Development, University of Liverpool
Professor Lisa Anderson is Professor of Management Development and Associate Dean (Postgraduate) in the Management School at the University of Liverpool. She has worked at Liverpool since 2005 and have held a number of roles in that time including Director of Online Programmes, Director of the DBA and Director of the Online MBA.
Lisa gained her PhD from Leeds University in 2008 and also holds CIPD professional qualifications. In 2008 she was appointed Lead Evaluator for the Northern Leadership Academy, a £5m regional development agency project, and was a member of the project Think Tank. She has a wide range of teaching experience covering all levels and modes and has designed and launched a number of new programmes.
Lisa's research, teaching, engagement with practice and leadership within and outside the university are all focused on the the aim of improving management practice and developing the management profession. Her research focuses on how managers learn in a range of contexts, from on-campus and online management classrooms through to formal and informal learning in the workplace. She has a particular interest in action learning and has written about it in the context of the experiences of owner-managers in SMEs and senior managers studying for a professional doctorate. She still regularly works with small businesses on leadership development projects and is currently working on a knowledge exchange project with Wood plc aimed at developing women scientists and engineers for senior mangement roles.
Lisa's research has been published in British Journal of Management, Management Learning, Human Resource Development International and her co-edited book 'A Guide to Professional Doctorates in Business and Management' was nominated for the CMI's Management Book of the Year.
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Please contact the BAM Office at [email protected] with any queries.
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BAM Members: Free
Non-Members: £50
For more information, please visit BAM Membership
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Registration closes on 24th June 2024 at 23:59 BST
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