Abstract
This book conveys policy implications from a Carnegie-sponsored project on Business, Entrepreneurship, and Liberal Learning (BELL). The authors, all academics from nonbusiness disciplines, establish credibility through vignettes that convey insights into the strengths and weaknesses of a range of business theories and related pedagogical strategies. They believe that undergraduate students majoring in business should have strong exposure to the liberal arts and sciences. They identify serious, long-standing deficiencies, however, in the provision at undergraduate level of both business education and liberal education. As a way forward, they recommend reciprocal integration, under which mutual weaknesses are cancelled out by alignment of and integration between the respective strengths of business educators and of their colleagues from general and liberal arts and sciences in designing and facilitating coherent sets of educational experiences. They acknowledge that this vision is a highly challenging one that requires radical institutional changes, but they identify seeds of good practice. Although the book focuses exclusively on the US scene and does surprisingly little to bring out the voices of undergraduate students, it is nonetheless relevant to business educators worldwide insofar as the United States is a perennial source of referent, institutional, and perhaps expert power within our domain.
Following a foreword by Lee S. Shulman, the book comprises nine chapters. Chapter 1 provides a brief overview and lists the 10 institutions at which the authors conducted interviews, focus groups, and class visits under the BELL project. The authors invoke the metaphor of a barbell to represent what they observe as the typical disconnect between business students’ experience of their core business courses and the general-cum-liberal courses that they may take as distribution requirements. They compare this with the metaphor of a double helix, representing programme designs intended to invoke synergy between and synthesis of these different sets of perspectives.
Chapter 2 reviews what the authors portray as 130 years of institutional failure to develop a professional paradigm for business education that balances efforts to establish technical rigor and scientific respectability, which have become largely established, with attention to moral sensitivity and human insight, which business education has largely traded-off and ignored.
Chapter 3 observes that business education has come to emphasize the teaching of analytical methods and the provision of opportunities for students to apply them to realistic situations, but may provide insufficient facilitation of critical reflection on broader social and moral questions and implications. The authors compare and contrast instrumental and exploratory orientations toward learning. They consider that the former are typical among business students while the latter prevail among students pursuing liberal arts or science majors. They imply that it would be desirable to equip all students, whatever their major discipline, to entertain both opposing orientations in dynamic tension. However, this did not appear to be the case with business students at the 10 sites investigated. They were required to take courses in liberal studies, but it seemed that any insights and ways of thinking arising from such courses remained compartmentalized, and that they received relatively little support and guidance on bringing liberal arts insights to bear on their studies of business disciplines, functions, and issues.
Chapter 4 explains four central modes of learning under liberal-cum-general education: analytical thinking, multiple framing, reflective exploration of meaning, and practical reasoning. The authors advocate that business students should experience all these modes of learning in contexts in which they synthesize ideas and issues drawn from liberal-cum-general education with those drawn from business education. Chapters 5 and 6 entail appreciative-cum-critical analyses of several examples of courses across the 10 institutions that seek to facilitate the four modes of liberal learning among business students and hold potential for a synthesis between liberal studies and business education. We get glimpses of how students can be encouraged to view social phenomena from various angles, consider meanings and purposes in their lives, and articulate and pursue questions about the responsibilities of global citizens, but the authors often comment on missed opportunities to bring insights from liberal education to bear on business issues. They also warn that the moral potential of business education may founder on the reef of reductionist models, reified as “the truth,” and on the reef of obsession with rugged competition as the way to get on and stay ahead in study, business, and life in general.
Chapter 7 focuses on current integrative offerings at the wider, programme level across the 10 focal institutions. These include a four-course curricular sequence on business and society required for undergraduates at the Stern School of Business; a similar compilation offered as an elective programme at Wharton; the “Pathways” clusters required at Santa Clara University, under which students take theme-based courses, designed to juxtapose business issues with global and societal phenomena; and a similarly oriented liberal studies major programme at Bentley University. The importance of campus culture and the co-curriculum is also noted.
In Chapter 8, two issues are singled out as special challenges: learning for globalization and learning for (social) entrepreneurship. Regarding globalization, the authors note that study abroad is no panacea, since in the absence of clear framing (and perhaps assessment) of educational goals, students may emphasize pleasure-seeking and pass over opportunities for deep-level learning. Regarding entrepreneurship, the main institutional challenge appears to be a shortage of qualified faculty members. An emergent theme is the power of team-based assignments as vehicles for appreciating the value of diversity and practicing integrative thinking, given appropriate facilitation and feedback.
The authors conclude in Chapter 9 with the following five institutional wishes: (1) Business students should receive strong liberal and general education, (2) liberal and general learning ways of thinking should be brought into business classrooms, (3) there should be vehicles to ensure that business students integrate their liberal and general learning with learning from their majors, (4) institutions should embrace the need for such integration as an objective and assess their progress toward it, and (5) institutions should recognize that business educators can make valuable contributions to the education of students in the liberal arts and sciences.
The authors anticipate struggles ahead, and I perceive that there are strong headwinds against each wish. First, it may be difficult to recruit students to business programmes that require deep engagement in liberal and general education, unless the host schools already enjoy a high level of institutional prestige. Second, business academics may take the view that their respective career ladders were not and/or will not be climbed by building liberal perspectives into their own academic work, so they may not see the point of arranging corresponding exposure for their students. Third, it may be hard to find curriculum space for grandly integrative action-learning projects, and it may be even harder to convince faculty members that they have sufficient sage-like expertise to serve as supervisors or mentors for such projects. Fourth, in some liberal arts universities, business faculty members may worry that “disintegration,” under which their school loses its major(s) and is downsized into a service department, is a more likely scenario than “integration,” under which their school preserves its integrity while its members collaborate as coequals with other academics across the university. Furthermore, even under an integration scenario, administrators are likely to face formidable difficulties in persuading, reminding, facilitating, and coordinating business academics and (especially) nonbusiness academics as they revise programme-level goals and undertake programme-level assessments of students’ attainment of these goals. Fifth, while students from outside business may welcome the opportunity for greater exposure to business thinking, some nonbusiness academics may discourage such opportunities if they have unfavorable stereotypes about business academics’ lack of academic prowess.
The various headwinds seem to me to be underpinned by political rivalries and dysfunctions within academe in general rather than by well-founded educational objections. The good news is that I know that in spite of all these headwinds, progress is being made!