Exponential Growth of Business Schools - A Paradigm in Emergence: An Imperative Need to Transform Management Education and Development
Rapid technological advancement coupled with ever increasing interconnectedness has been opening the global opportunities for everyone, amidst rising global population and declining resources. It is an imperative need of management professionals to deal with newer and dynamic challenges in the public or private systems. Often newer challenges require varied solutions that can come from critical thinking younger generation management graduates and quality of tomorrow’s professionals is the result of today’s efforts in educational systems. Present scenario of management education presents a bleak future as most of our educational policies and systems are designed to produce mediocre professionals. Therefore, it is need of the hour to reengineer and transform most of the management programmes the way they are offered. The paper discusses the present scenario of management education, prerequisites for quality of management education, sustenance of quality, pedagogical tools and future outlook.
Management Education for Practicing Managers: Combining Academic Rigor With Personal Change and Organizational Action
For several decades, management educators have discussed the difficulty of accommodating the competing values of academic rigor and organizational relevance. Only a few articles, however, consider approaches for integrating theory and practice in educational programs for working managers. Building on 15 years of experience in executive education, this article presents an approach grounded in experiential and action learning, which combines personal learning and organizational action without compromising academic standards. The following educational practices are discussed and evaluated: reflection reports, personal learning contracts, roundtable examinations, live cases, action-oriented thesis work, and organizational knowledge theaters. Taken together, the approach constitutes a powerful program design to address multiple learning loci and combinations of reflection and action, albeit one with considerable challenges and difficulties, as the authors discuss.
Old topics, old approaches? ‘Reception’ in television studies and music studies
The question of reception is closely linked to the history and the roots of audience studies. But what is ‘reception’ and what exactly does it mean? As audience studies have developed from a contested novelty to a now established academic field, what do we do with a concept that defined our interests in the past and may now be too wide or even obsolete? This article deals with this issue by mapping how the concept of reception was conceptualized and researched in audience studies of the past ten years, with a focus on studies of music and studies of television. We find that in music, strong focus remains on music reception in the context of performances and events, and this lies in contrast to a small number of studies which instead focus on a framework of music in ordinary life and the audiences’ contextual localities. Concerning reception of television, much of the scholarship starts from the cultural studies tradition and looks at television viewing as a means to construct identities. Discussing these findings, we inquire whether the hybridization of media also implies a hybridization of research traditions and methodologies, and what consequences it has for the balance between textual, production and audience approaches.