Abstract
There is really no aspect of higher education that has escaped major pressures to fundamentally reexamine its business model, and the higher education publishing industry is no exception. Publishers are facing increased financial pressure as students opt for low-cost options when accessing required textbooks. In its 2014 report, The Future of Textbooks, McKinsey noted that while educational publishers have long struggled to maximize sales of new textbooks to students, the impact of Amazon.com and eBay in the 1990s began to transform student buying patterns, and by the late 1990s, previously owned (used) textbook sales represented nearly 36% of the market (Benson-Armer, Sarakatsannis, & Wee, 2014). More recently, the textbook-rental market has emerged as another mainstream option that resonates with students. Businesswire.com, citing a report from Research and Markets, notes that the global E-textbook rental market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 20.74% during the period 2017 to 2021, with publishers adjusting their business model to include digital rental options (Businesswire.com, 2017). Senack (2015) shares a 2014 survey that concluded that 65% of college students neither bought nor rented their textbooks at all due to cost considerations. What these statistics suggest for management educators is that more and more students have chosen, and will continue to choose, “temporary ownership” of management concepts over the development of a “personal library” of knowledge.
Rather than bemoan the loss of canon reflected in this increasingly transient ownership of management knowledge, we consider these changes as an opportunity to reflect on our own management education “business model.” With the growth of evidence-based practice within and outside our field, we see the time as ripe for considering the ways in which we transfer knowledge about management within management education. If we regard social science research and the development of new management theories based on such research as contributions to enhanced management practice and education, why would we want to hold on to theories (in textbooks) that are seen as irrelevant to contemporary organizational circumstances or have been challenged in terms of evidence or universality? Other professional fields regard research as an iterative enterprise, with knowledge gleaned from research and experience as useful for improving the efficacy of practice. Medical textbooks, for example, do not cover “bleeding the patient” as a basis for improved health; it is incumbent on us to reflect on why, for example, our textbooks not only continue to use Maslow as a basis for understanding motivation, but why many do so without cross-cultural nuance or qualification. While cost pressures are certainly part of students’ decision to borrow textbooks, or forgo them altogether, we are uncomfortably aware also that students regard textbooks’ summative nature as increasingly irrelevant in a high-velocity environment where “Knowledge” frequently becomes obsolete within months or even days. Millennials, the generation most comfortable with diversity and engagement with others not like them, are skeptical about theories that purport to explain everyone’s behavior or orientation cleanly and without exceptions.
Scholars have written about the stale qualities of management textbooks as summative, backward-looking products (e.g., Foster, Helms Mills, & Mills, 2014; Snyder, 2014) and the benefits of moving away from the declarative and taken-for-granted nature of their content. Others have presented conference sessions exhorting us as a management education community to critically consider what we teach, and why (Allen, 2017; Coombs, 2017). Indeed, we know that many management educators, particularly those within an active/experiential learning paradigm, have eliminated textbooks from their teaching practice and prefer to use alternatives such as journal articles and research reports. In an irony, publishers’ attempts to remain current by pushing more frequent new editions to texts has backfired; because new editions are so expensive, the rental and prior-edition used book markets have proliferated. New editions, too, are not always very “new,” and websites abound that recommend using older editions, as the changes from one edition to the next can be negligible (see Ross, 2015; Senack, 2015). Even e-books and publishers’ digital sites have come under fire, as the e-version is not updated any more frequently than the print version, and there is no resale value at all for students who “buy” an e-book version.
But, we are not ready to give up on textbooks just yet. If we consider that the essential form of textbooks—whether print or electronic—is as repositories of a set of beliefs, and a starting point for the ways we “think” management practice works, we believe the content in textbooks can serve an important purpose in management education. These texts can provide a contemporary, efficient, and comprehensive means for introducing a broad array of evidence-based concepts and ideas that will ultimately inform students’ management practice. In other words, we want to advocate for a rethinking of textbook content in terms of iterative management knowledge, seeing this as a means of acknowledging not only the new ways in which textbooks are used by students but also the research–teaching gap noted by others (Burke & Rau, 2010).
What if we considered textbooks not as tomes of “Truth” but rather as launching-off points for engaged student discussion of how management practice could suffer when the “knowledge” underpinning it is outdated, speculative, or grounded in research practices no longer considered effective or responsible? Theories covered in texts, then, become rich avenues for questions: Why is Maslow so compelling for us, even as evidence to support that theory has been elusive? Do the Big Five traits really help us understand everyone, as the model claims? Why has not our understanding of deeply rooted cognitive bias supplanted teaching the rational decision-making model? Textbook content comes alive when it is held up to scrutiny, and the process of such scrutiny could support many important student learning outcomes, including practice in critical thinking, considering global/diversity perspectives, and vetting research methods and generalization assumptions. There is quite literally no end to the critical analysis options that management educators might draw textbooks into the service of realizing. The key, though, seems to be in not accepting textbooks as a priori valid, reliable, or even truthful. In engaging with textbooks as artifacts that deserve critical focus, we might change the tide of temporariness in the way students “buy” their knowledge.
In This Issue
As we consider the promise of critical analysis for textbooks, a cornerstone of our teaching resources, we offer in this issue other examples of where critical consideration of taken-for-granted aspects of our management education practice might yield enhanced learning outcomes.
Sandra Spataro and Janel Bloch share their experiences with making active listening its own valuable learning outcome with an instructional innovation designed to enhance students’ mindfulness of this important managerial capacity. Those authors get to the root of how we might help students practice, and transfer, truly active listening to any environment.
In another in our series of occasional interview articles, Sarah Wright collaborates with Gundars Kaupins to raise awareness of, and resources toward, those management educators with Asperger syndrome. While resources for students with Asperger’s have dramatically increased over recent years, the literature has been virtually silent about Asperger’s on the educator’s side. In this frank and personal discussion, Kaupins shares his experiences of being diagnosed with Asperger’s, and how his teaching career had been affected much before his diagnosis. Laura Parks-Leduc, Matthew Rutherford, Karen Becker, and Ali Shahzad also examine taken-for-granted aspects of the human resources classroom, in considering how the Society for Human Resource Management influences human resources curricula. Those authors note the dual influences on our curricula of both professional associations as well as accrediting bodies, and they offer readers a roadmap by which to mindfully track changes in curricula to ensure alignment with our learning objectives.
Similar to our call to reconsider how relevance is viewed from the vantage point of textbooks, Jennie Walker shares outcomes of her study considering what global leadership means, and how to assist students in gaining unique skills for a global management arena. Testing a model of integrative learning modalities, Walker calls for revising the Global Leadership Development Ecosystem model, increasing the probability that students will gain these crucial skills.
In our Essay for this issue, leader character gets a fresh perspective. Alyson Byrne, Mary Crossan, and Gerard Seijts propose a provocative viewpoint that leader character can, and must, be developed in management education experiences. Using “crucible moments,” moments of difficulty and personal challenge, those authors consider where opportunities might lie to develop our students’ capacity to do the right thing when it matters most. We are delighted, also, to offer three rejoinders to the Essay as ways to spark thinking and conversation. Kevin Barge shows the possibilities for character development that discourse, or the core human activity of conversation, add to Byrne, Crossan and Seijts’ psychologically based character paradigm. Scott Taylor considers the “messy side” of how character develops and reminds the reader that the entire concept of “character” is complex and nuanced. Finally, Scott Allen notes the tension that exists for many experiential educators: Transformative learning opportunities and “crucible moments” can be exhausting and, depending on the approach, come with risk not always considered when we choose learning techniques for our students.