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.
On Becoming a Critically Reflexive Practitioner
Critically reflexive practice embraces subjective understandings of reality as a basis for thinking more critically about the impact of our assumptions, values, and actions on others. Such practice is important to management education, because it helps us understand how we constitute our realities and identities in relational ways and how we can develop more collaborative and responsive ways of managing organizations. This article offers three ways of stimulating critically reflexive practice: (a) an exercise to help students think about the socially constructed nature of reality, (b) a map to help situate reflective and reflexive practice, and (c) an outline and examples of critically reflexive journaling.