Government influence
To the extent that they fund education, governments are significant stakeholders in the process. During the 1980s the UK government, concerned with industry’s apparent competitive weakness, started to wonder if the solution lay in better management training, and commissioned several reports on this. It emerged that management training was seen by employers as an overhead, rather than an investment. Of the 90 000 or so who entered managerial roles each year, most had no prior formal management education, and subsequently received on average only one day of training per year. The USA had only four times the population of the UK, but produced forty times as many management degrees and diplomas.
Some of the suggested reasons for this disparity were employer confusion over available qualifications, and worries that courses were over-academic and nonvocational. One response to this was the development of a framework of management competences, and qualifications based upon these. While these are successful at lower levels they have not supplanted the more academic and knowledge-based programmes available at Master’s level – though application of knowledge is strongly emphasised in many such programmes. The development of critical and analytical skills is generally agreed to be crucial for senior managers.
Indeed, the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) completed a benchmarking exercise for Master’s awards in business and management which lays down the expected standards for an award, and the attributes and capabilities expected of possessors of this award. The full set of standards can be accessed at:
http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/benchmark/masters/mba (accessed 13/01/2007). In summary, they outline the purpose of all such Master’s programmes as:
- the advanced study of organisations, their management and the changing external context in which they operate;
- preparation for and/or development of a career in business and management by developing skills at a professional or equivalent level, or as preparation for research or further study in the area;
- development of the ability to apply knowledge and understanding of business and management to complex issues, systematically and creatively, to improve business and management practice;
- enhancement of lifelong learning skills and personal development so as to be able to work with self-direction and originality and to contribute to business and society at large.
By the 1980s, concerns were surfacing in the USA about the MBA syllabus. There were complaints from employers that the focus on ‘hard’ quantitative and analytical skills neglected other areas crucial to success – interpersonal skills, for example, or creativity.
The Harvard Business Review itself addressed this issue (see Lataif, 1992). One view expressed therein, by a leading management writer, Professor Mintzberg, went so far as to suggest that business schools such as Harvard were seriously damaging US business. He claimed that the process of case study analysis fostered a willingness to pronounce on complex issues from a basis of dangerous ignorance! Thus, the method favours the ambitious, glib and quick-witted, rather than those committed to the good of their organisation. (More recent discussion of topics, such as ‘emotional intelligence’, leadership, ‘social capital’, the importance of teamworking in organisational structures, and recognition of the complex and ‘wicked’ nature of organisational problems, has continued to reinforce such doubts about a glibly rational approach.)
By 1990, many UK universities were coming under considerable financial pressure, and saw management courses, for which premium prices could be charged, as an important new source of income. There was therefore a big expansion in provision: many institutions with little track record in management started to offer a range of management courses, up to Master’s level, often ‘retraining’ redundant staff in other disciplines to teach on these. During the 1990s this extended to quasi-franchise arrangements, with colleges of further education offering courses under the auspices of (usually new) universities in the region. Undergraduate management programmes also expanded massively during this period.
Because of the prestige attached to the MBA qualification, and the high prices that could be charged, almost every college wanted to provide such a qualification, thereby threatening that very prestige. To fill all these new courses, entry qualifications were lowered, sometimes to the point of non-existence. Staff with limited academic background were pulled in as lecturers. It could be argued (indeed, I would argue quite strongly) that the best management teachers are those with current experience of senior management allied to a strong academic background in the subject and experience in, and a love of, developing managers. But many of those sucked into this expansion of provision as part-time lecturers did not fit this pattern.
Another major influence was the move away from full-time courses for managers. In the 1980s, the Open University, the major undergraduate distance learning provider in the UK, realised that many managers could not afford the luxury of full-time study and experimented with adapting their well-tried undergraduate methods to postgraduate management study. Because distance learning students are working while studying, they can instantly apply what they are learning to real life. This approach proved so effective for managers that distance management learning, and the emphasis on ‘improved management practice’ and transferable skills that it allows, have become the most widespread form of formal management education.
Such courses normally equate to little more than a year of full-time study. They take students with no formal management education, and cover the full range of subjects ‘management’ embraces. Considerable variation in quality of provision still exists: you can still find fairly undemanding (and correspondingly fairly unrewarding)
programmes, and need to choose very carefully in order to be sure that the course is well taught, sufficiently challenging, and well regarded by employers.
Because the marketplace for MBAs is now highly competitive, many universities have expanded into the provision of specialist degrees in management-related subjects. Thus, you can find, for example, an MSc in Human Resource Management or International Finance or Marketing or Development Management. Usually much of the teaching is shared with the generic MBA programme, but the coverage of the area of specialism will be greater, and the breadth less. This allows universities to expand their range of ‘products’, and staff to gain the satisfaction of teaching their favourite subjects in greater depth than an MBA allows.
The current situation can be summarised as:
- A highly competitive marketplace, which has forced universities to become more customer focused.
- Heavy emphasis on part-time provision, which allows managers, typically in their early 30s, to bring considerable experience to their studies: study can be designed to build on this experience, rather than relying exclusively on case studies, and can focus on application. This is consistent with government (and employer) emphasis on the importance of transferable skills.
- Provision of a range of programmes from generalist MBAs to a variety of more specialist Master’s programmes, which usually give the same basic understanding of the management context, but will then have a narrower focus on a specialist area.
