What is your MBA for? What’s the story?

Abstract

This article shows how the MBA plays a role in some students’ lives that goes beyond conscious cost–benefit analyses and instrumental value and engages the personal and intimate. It presents a thematic analysis of essays written by MBA students exploring what their MBA was for. The analysis revealed that the MBA functioned as an element or character in a life story and how, in some instances, doing the MBA was not about the MBA as such. The article advances our understanding of the MBA as an element in a life story, as a rite of passage, and as part of the intersection of boundaryless careers and changeable life patterns. Enhancing the awareness of this on the part of students may improve their understanding of what they are doing by embarking on an MBA and could enhance the ability of faculty and business schools to address the sometimes less explicit interests of their students. The article also confirms the value of a qualitative ‘storied’ approach to the study of the MBA.

Keywords

Management development MBA stories careers rite of passage

Introduction

She leans across the table, almost conspiratorially. ‘In fact’, she says, ‘that was actually why I did the MBA’. ‘That’ was getting over the death of her young daughter. On another occasion, a student told me, a while after she had graduated, that the ‘real’ reason why she did the MBA was to develop a social network independent of her new husband’s whom she had just joined in his city. I am no longer surprised by such confidences.

There is a way of considering the MBA which has been implied in the literature but has not been explicitly and substantially pursued. The large body of survey data, useful as it is, does not always capture the actual or real motivations of students. Essays analysed in this article written by MBA students in answer to the question ‘What is your MBA for?’ suggested that for some students, their reasons for doing the MBA were not so much about the MBA as a qualification but had to do with the MBA as an element or a character in a larger story. Analysing the MBA as an element in a life story refines our understanding of the MBA as a rite of passage (Kelan and Dunkley Jones, 2009) at the intersection of boundaryless careers (Muja and Appelbaum, 2014) and changeable life patterns. The essays indicate the role of career shocks (Seibert et al., 2013) and of altruistic values in the context of protean careers choices (Vigoda-Gadot and Grimland, 2008) that take us beyond the MBA as an instrument for financial gain, a view which no longer is widespread anyway (Hay and Hodgkinson, 2008; Warhurst, 2011).

The essays and the analysis occurred for several reasons. As a faculty, we were asking ourselves what kind of MBA we should offer and why, who we wanted to teach and why, and we wanted to acknowledge our specific locale in the world. We deliver an Executive MBA in New Zealand. (More contextual detail is given below.) Most of our faculty are familiar with the tensions over the role of the university (Barnett, 2011; Collini, 2012; Readings, 1996; Rolfe, 2013), the need for business schools to revise their roles and purpose (Amann et al., 2011; Dameron and Durand, 2011; Datar et al., 2010; Morsing and Rovira, 2011) and specific debates over the MBA (Baruch, 2009; Brocklehurst et al., 2007; Gabriel, 2005; Mintzberg, 2004; Pfeffer and Fong, 2002). It made sense since we were asking ourselves what universities were for, what business schools were for and what management education was for, to engage students in these debates. As we inquired after what exactly we were trying to accomplish, I thought it behoved us to ask what our students were trying to accomplish and to challenge them to ask themselves.

Seeking to understand comments on the role of the MBA in students’ lives as well as wanting to explore what students were trying to accomplish led me to pose the question not in the context of their motivation, but in broader terms of the purpose of their education. This was one of the reasons why I asked my students who were doing their strategy course straight after their MBA orientation programme, to think about what their MBA was for. But there was a specific slant to the question. I did not ask them to list their reasons for doing the MBA. I already had that information from their applications, and there is no shortage of data on motivation and reasons for doing an MBA (Graduate Management Admissions Council, 2012, 2014). I was inspired to ask them to think in terms of broader purpose by David Orr’s (1991) ‘What is education for?’, which they were asked to read. Orr’s article begins by pointing out that the earth is in a dire condition and that this is the result of the work of highly educated people, often with PhDs and MBAs, and he goes on to challenge the common assumptions that with enough knowledge and technology we can manage planet earth and that the purpose of education is to provide upward mobility and success. A central principle of Orr’s work is that real education is mastery of one’s person. Indeed, it is not planet earth that needs managing but us. It was an influential reading – there is evidence of that in the essays – but it is impossible to precisely adumbrate its influence.

Attention to mastery of one’s self fits into the literature on the need for reflection in management education which is related to the nature of management itself as a relational activity (Cunliffe, 2002; Petriglieri et al., 2011; Segon et al., 2010; Smith, 2011). It fits into the experience of management education as part of an identity construction process (Andersson, 2010) and the challenge to question beliefs and consider alternative possibilities for action and identity construction (Gagnon, 2008; Hay and Hodgkinson, 2008; Sturdy et al., 2006; Vidaillet and Vignon, 2010). Reflections on one’s self and one’s identity as a manager would usually entail reflections on one’s career.

The MBA is usually part of a career story, and MBA success goes beyond the explicit curriculum and pertains to self-confidence and self-efficacy (Hay and Hodgkinson, 2006: 109). Students do an MBA because of the benefits it confers, which are considerable and both tangible and intangible (Baruch, 2009: Sturges et al., 2003.), This relates to the protean career (Vigoda-Gadot and Grimland, 2008), informed by a whole-of-life perspective and a sense of development (Briscoe et al., 2006; Hall, 2004) in a boundaryless era (Kelan and Dunkley Jones, 2009). For many students, career progression is conflated with development of the self (Arthur et al., 2005; Hall and Chandler, 2005). The relationship between self, career and pursuit of MBA is complex and fluid (Muja and Appelbaum, 2014). All these factors can be discerned in the essays which I analysed. However, the research that comes closest to what I offer here is the analysis of the MBA offered by Kelan and Dunkley Jones (2009) as a rite of passage, although I do not use their framework of the three stages of separation, liminality and incorporation.

By reflecting on a ‘storied’ view of their MBA, students can enhance their awareness of what they are trying to accomplish. These stories also provide business schools with a basis for thinking about how they can address the sometimes less explicit and less conscious interests of their students.

Methodology

Over 3 years, I read nearly 100 essays of three cohorts of approximately 30–35 students each. In this same period, I heard intriguing anecdotal evidence and throwaway comments by students that linked the MBA with changes in their relationships and domicile and deeply personal crises. This led me to ponder the role of the MBA in students’ lives. Clearly for some – not all – the MBA had a role in their lives beyond a simple cost–benefit analysis. Analysing the essays presented a golden opportunity to find out what that role might be. Almost a year after the last cohort had completed their strategy course, I secured appropriate ethics clearance and the students were invited to submit their essays for analysis. Out of nearly 100 eligible students, 91 agreed to participate and offered their essays for analysis. The essays were stripped of any identification by an administration assistant and then thematically analysed by me adopting an open-ended inductive approach (Berg and Lune, 2004).

Due to the nature of the access I had to the students and their essays, and the ethics clearance which assured students of anonymity, I cannot link the circumstances of specific students to their essays and quotes. However, we deliver the Executive MBA in New Zealand; the cohorts comprised mature students from different backgrounds. Ages ranged from early 30s to early 50s; the gender balance slightly favoured males and there was a range of nationalities, but the majority were New Zealanders. There were a minority of Māori and Pasifika New Zealanders. There was a widespread professional and industry representation.

The process of inquiry was a complex iterative process. Analysis proceeded from initial broad categories to more refined identification of themes, with the emerging constructs triangulated with different colleagues at different times. What is offered is a ‘constructed understanding’ (Hay and Hodgkinson, 2006: 113), an inductive approach similar to the grounded theory approach (Glaser and Strauss, 1967; Strauss and Corbin, 1990), but focused on content analysis. In this respect, it was similar to Warhurst’s (2011) UK study of three illustrative cases from 61 part-time MBA students in which he encouraged extended narrative accounts and story-telling. It also relates to the discourse analysis employed by Kelan and Dunkley Jones (2009) which focused on large frames of meaning to illuminate how students conceptualised the MBA and its significance for their future careers. Further explication of the method is imbricated with the theoretical literature below because this is how the analysis proceeded.

My initial analysis of the essays revealed several broad themes. It was at this early stage that I discarded those essays that were simply a polemical response to Orr and those that did not indicate any personal engagement with the topic but offered a textbook account of why students might want to do an MBA. This process of elimination still left 83 essays which constituted personal narratives in which the MBA had a role.

My analysis at this point was a rather crude coding of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation which I presented at a local conference. I was then joined by a colleague from another university who was at the conference and who independently analysed all the essays and produced her own thematic analysis (King, 1998; Wolcott, 1994). We combined our findings which led to a slightly refined coding of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Our findings reflected those of surveys by Net Impact (2011) and the Aspen Institute (2011, 2012, 2013; Graduate Management Admissions Council, 2014; Net Impact and Aspen Institute, 2011) which are annual and can be taken as representative. In these surveys, the major reasons cited by prospective MBA students for seeking an MBA qualification include intellectual challenge, skills acquisition, increase in salary, increase in status, improved professional network and personal satisfaction. We quickly realised, and it was confirmed by colleagues in local seminars, that our intrinsic/extrinsic coding was still too crude to be of interest; motivations were never that clear and distinct and it was the overdetermined and complex relationships between motivations that were the real interest. We were not getting at the actual or real reasons, although we could not yet know what they were. I thought there was potential for a more fine-grained analysis that went beyond motivational categories and captured the startling personal revelations that some students had confided in me. However, I still lacked an analytical framework.

I began to wonder whether the inquiry would be enriched with reference to the humanities which ‘could provide fresh inspiration for management schools’ curricula’ (Gagliardi and Czarniawska, 2006: 14). Many of the essays were vignettes, little stories, that quintessential expression of humanity (Polkinhorne, 1988). As a result, I turned to the literature on stories and developed an analysis of the essays qua stories. I had to do this alone because my colleague who had shared her thoughts on the initial analysis had emigrated and was no longer connected with the inquiry. I discovered stories of students acquiring an MBA that were narratives, attempts by writers to explain, justify and interpret themselves and their circumstances (Gherardi, 2006: 175). I began rereading and annotating all the selected essays in these terms.

The analysis in terms of story revealed an intersection between the many aspects of a life story and the formation of career, social identity and management identity (Alvesson et al., 2008; Andersson, 2010; Gagnon, 2008; Sturdy et al., 2006; Warhurst, 2011). Certainly, the situation seemed more subtle and nuanced than what might be revealed through standard surveys. As will be shown in the presentation of the stories below, stage of life, quality of family life and experience levels are just some of the factors that impact both espoused and unconscious motivations for pursuing an MBA. The framing of careers as metaphors indicates this complexity. Inkson’s (2004, 2007) discussion of key career metaphors and their functions, such as establishing coherent identity or creating a future (pp. 231–234), was the kind of analysis I adopted. The answers of some of the MBA students suggest, paraphrasing Rubin and Dierdorff (2013: 136), that the MBA was doing more than meeting ‘educational needs more requisite to a long and satisfying career’. It was certainly doing more than dealing with career shocks (Seibert et al., 2013). The essays seemed to me like Inkson’s career stories.

The first tentative analysis at this stage was of the MBA as a bildungsroman and other ‘big’ stories: a romance, an odyssey, even a ‘whodunit’. Some provisional codes discerned were as follows: the god, the challenger, the inspirer, the catalyst or agent of change, the deus ex machina, the solution, agent, sustainability of career, MBA as protagonist, as a tool. After producing more initial coding (Saldana, 2009: 81) in terms of stories based on analysing a third of the essays, I employed a research assistant who analysed a different third of the essays. She discerned similar themes, but differences were noted in order to produce the next iteration of coding. I was still searching for a recognisable and plausible frame of analysis. For this next iteration of coding, I turned to the literature on story-telling archetypes.

There are, according to Booker (2004) who draws on Jung, seven basic story-telling archetypes: Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, The Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy and Rebirth. It is not difficult to relate some of these to the seven archetypal characters identified in folk tales by Propp (1928[1968]): the villain, the provider, the helper, the princess and her father, the dispatcher, the hero, the false hero. There are also story archetypes in management learning and organisational literature (Hopfl, 2002; Kets De Vries, 1993; Kostera, 2012). However, as Kirkpatrick and Ackroyd (2003a; 2003b) warn, using archetypes may perpetuate a kind of functionalism that risks obscuring agency, a noteworthy point since I was interested in the agency of the MBA in the lives of the students.

The most productive archetypes could still be derived from the general idea of bildungsroman, but there were aspects of growing and coming into something that seemed to include more specific ideas of overcoming, change agent, quest, rebirth and various forms of heroism. It was apparent that a useful coding would have to be quite specific and take into account that few stories are thematically singular and most can sustain different interpretations; the quest is often a voyage, deus ex machina can be a kind of rebirth. There were always mixed motives and overdetermined rationales. I reanalysed the essays following an inductive approach, synthesised the findings and reorganised the themes into a web of stories which are presented below as a ‘constructed understanding’ of the possible roles of the MBA in the lives of students.

The stories

The ‘web’ I have constructed comprises the following stories: The Show Goes On, The Quest, Born Again, Deus ex Machina, The Voyage, The Servant and The Big Apple.

I have included quite long quotes to provide some sense of the tone and complexity of the essays. I have done this also because, as explained above, I cannot link quotes to the identity or personal circumstances of specific students. I have elected to let the web of stories speak and reserved commentary for subsequent discussion and conclusions. To some extent, the stories segue from one into the next, but this linking is of course debatable. I do, however, occasionally point out instances of where stories may be linked.

It seems sensible to start with the expected, the prosaic, the ordinary.

The Show Goes On

In The Show Goes On, the focus is continuity, the expected next step. The emphasis is on natural progression, an explicit career development or self-development in the normal course of a life. Even in this context, there is depth and nuance. For this student, it was linked to growing up:

I can identify within my life’s internal environment (childhood memories, family, personal and career experiences) two major influences on my education … the huge family encouragement and support from my parents in my attaining an undergraduate degree … my long history as a professional business advisor, and my involvement in the business environment has given me the motivation to undertake this MBA educational challenge.

Sometimes the MBA is presented as the not unsurprising response to a problem, a touch of the deus ex machina without the sense of desperation or threat but still a sense of pressure:

what to do with my career was a strategic problem I faced at the end of my BBS degree in 2007 … So at the age of 37, I had a decision to make and I had to work out where my career was going to head …

Another student seeks to resolve what she or he has constructed as a choice: ‘… keep progressing in the company via in-house courses and self-development OR complete my MBA and create the opportunity to potentially make a difference in the world’.

Sometimes the MBA is a strategic move with a broad focus, ‘an opportunity to broaden component skills and leadership practice’; sometimes it is more specific, such as the desire to be ‘more able to assist my business clients adapt to the rapidly changing environments’. Sometimes The Show Goes On is entwined with two other storylines or archetypes. For the following student, it is part of a quest that has involved immigration, as well as part of a voyage to acquire new skills:

my partner and I arrived in [city] in April 2008 and have enjoyed settling into our new lives. After a period of reflection, and through a process I can’t fully explain, I decided on a new five year plan. My ambition over the next 5 to 10 years is to grow my sphere of influence and fulfil a senior management position or launch a start-up company. I recognized there were several challenges to face before achieving this. Two of the most immediate being my level of commercial acumen and my personal credibility with the local business community. I believed then, as I still do now, that an MBA would assist in both of these areas.

There is a sense of a curriculum vitae here that may have entailed large shifts with consequences that may not have been predictable but were not exactly surprising. There is certainly development, but there is not the explicit quest that we see in the theme so named.

The Quest

The Quest is the most ‘storied’ of the stories and the most substantial. The emphasis here is on an active seeking of meaning and self-exploration. It is related to, but not as explicit or defined as, career development or self-development and quite distinct from straightforward skills acquisition. Along with the straightforward statements such as ‘my own personal quest for increased knowledge and understanding’, there are more elaborate statements:

my own cognitive shift from the need to master expertise in one discipline, to being a mechanism for greater self-examination and the opening of new ways of thinking … I decided on an MBA as it had strong integration between theory and practice and gave me the opportunity to move out of my ‘comfort zone’ and take on a very different type of educational challenge.

There are statements that could almost stand as theoretical assertions about the MBA story, such as ‘I am furthering my education to gain the knowledge to apply a framework and credibility to my experience to date’, endorsing what Warhurst (2011), Kelan and Dunkley Jones (2009) and Vidaillet and Vignon (2010) have theorised about the value of frameworks for self-understanding. Another student considers ‘that the MBA education is the start of a transformation process’ and hopes that

at the end of my MBA education I will be able to think with broad clarity, and plan keeping in mind that every action has a cost, and make strategic changes based upon this knowledge, both as a valued business leader and member of the community.

For this questor, the MBA is a sense-making tool.

For other students, the quest is linked to a more personal journey tied to internal awareness. The quest for such knowledge can be presented as part of a life-long journey that is not necessarily planned. In this story, the MBA is more than part of a show that goes on:

throughout my life I aspired to numerous deliberate strategies of insight, some I achieved and some I did not. My decision to embark on the MBA programme, although not well planned, nevertheless was a deliberate strategy that was finally realised. I understand that I do not have the ability to control many events that occur in life, however I do have the ability to control my thinking, forming and implementation of how I manage these events.

The MBA can also be seen as the instigator of such a journey, potentially offering the opportunity to become wiser. The theme is best presented as a personal story:

having left both my homeland and chosen career behind I now feel more confident to answer what the purpose of my life is. I’m a husband, a father, a son, a brother and the core of my existence is my family. I’m here at this particular place and time to nurture, educate and protect my children. I’m here to serve my community and friends … Completing an MBA is a personal challenge with tangible benefits for my workplace and staff … There are also significant personal benefits gained just by undertaking study and stepping outside my comfort zone. I chose this particular course believing that it will extend and open my mind to new ways of thinking and ideas I would not have entertained ten years ago … Having finally re-established my real persona, and aligned my actions and career with my beliefs, studying for an MBA will challenge me to embrace the unknown, to question myself and my assumptions, and develop a better understanding of me, as a man and as a leader.

Once again, one may see how intertwined the themes can be. This quest stands somewhere between The Show Goes On – it is not quite in the ordinary course of events – but it is not quite as dramatic as Born Again. Although the student writes ‘finally re-established my real persona’, this is not directly entwined with the MBA.

An understanding of the learning process itself became a fundamental part of the self-development:

I am seeking a better understanding of the learning process. I want to learn how to analyse my own response to given situations with a view to continuous learning and self-development. This learning supported by peer group learning and a breadth of subject matter will support my progress through a generative reasoning process.

Certainly, the MBA can be a means to an end, but an end that is not extrinsic and material. Many students were quite eloquent and insightful about this kind of quest:

this MBA journey is for me part of the continuing process of broadening my awareness of myself, and the environment in which I am living. To enable me to see situations from a wider range of perspectives … MBA education is more than just learning a set of business skills and strategies. That in order for me to be a leader, I must be aware of bigger universal issues … I am also looking for a greater internal awareness of myself, my own beliefs, abilities and capabilities through this MBA journey. I am conscious that my world view obscures as much as it illuminates.

Entering into such a journey can be seen as a leap of faith since an aspect of the quest is the unknown, not knowing what one will learn or where it might take you. The story of The Quest at this level can be related to the story of Born Again.

Born Again

The emphasis in Born Again is on comprehensive rapid change, a substantial transition over a short period of time. Something like an epiphany, it is almost the opposite of The Show Goes On. Whether unexpected or sought or accidental, there is a new perspective, often related to a new career and new life in a new country. Sometimes the MBA is an immediate result of the rebirth, sometimes it provokes it. When students went through this process, they transformed themselves:

… coming to [country] was the first emergent moment of my life, as I embraced opportunism and flexibility and gave up everything to be near my future husband. That precise moment of emergence created a personal revolution. Everything had to turn upside down, and yet I landed right side up or maybe slightly sideways.

It can be part of developing a new personal or professional identity. With the following student, an interesting move takes place. The rebirth may have been underway prior to embarking on the MBA, but the analysis is couched in strategic terms learnt on the MBA:

I began to feel hopeless, unchallenged, and a wasted resource … I underwent a strategic diagnosis activity to try and comprehend the critical issue and its underlying cause. I conducted an internal assessment to discover what it was that would make me happy in [country]. What I found was that I needed to regain my professional identity in a way which challenged me, allowed me to be the impetus for change, gave validation to my voice for insights in the medical field and offered respect …. I generated a few options and then selected the option of applying to [university] for my MBA.

Transformation can occur on a smaller scale, where people recreate themselves using the MBA as a vehicle to access a different form of employment. One student, from a science background, ‘realised I needed entrepreneurship education which is beyond my scientific training [and] therefore decided to embark on the journey to pursue an MBA’.

It is sometimes clear that the MBA has been the agent provocateur in a rebirth:

Taking largely for granted the peaceful, successful and harmonious personal and business environments I have lived and worked throughout my 54 years of life, I had never seriously considered the importance of measuring the success of education against its effects on environment and people. However in this critical examination of myself, the business world, and Orr’s claims … in just three short months my thoughts have changed … this will modernise my thinking … make me a better generalist leader … the environment was never really considered, would not have been if not for this MBA.

In this instance, Orr’s influence on a shift in thinking is clear. Another form of a shift in thinking can be unexpectedly rethinking their current career path, with a move away from simply pursuing seniority and wealth to servant leadership and the wellbeing of communities. Through the MBA, the following student felt a need to ‘redefine the framework of the purpose of my life. I would now rather … become an admirable leader, who not just does good things for the society around, but also leaves good things behind him that society can redeem’.

Deus ex Machina

In Deus ex Machina, the tone is ‘get me out of here!’ with the MBA being a provider or helper that solves a current problem perhaps by enabling progress to another place or acting as a safety net. Unlike Born Again in which the MBA is part of an internal epiphany, with Deus ex Machina there is a way in which the MBA is an exit strategy, an intended agent of change as it helps to solve a problem:

[The] threats are: the possibility that the company hires a new person to take my position increases in line with my increasing salary; the potential of selling of the company becomes greater because of the rapid growth of the company in the past 5 years. The nature of these threats challenges my marketability in the high end labour market and puts me in the situation where I need to make strategy to overcome these problems … if I have to leave, start my own business.

It is not always a threat, and although more sharply defined than a quest, and not quite as dramatic as a rebirth:

I completed the self-analysis and reflection on my purpose and goals in life … A strong theme evolved – I didn’t really enjoy my job, or the organisation – so the question was what I am going to do to change this situation … I read an advertisement for [university’s] MBA program; suddenly higher education was spotlighted as an alternative course of action which might give me the job movement and achievement that I wanted.

The MBA as Deus ex Machina can also be construed as a resolution to a dilemma: ‘I needed broader knowledge to make informed decisions within my professional career context as a solution to the dilemma of career development’.

The Voyage

Like the quest, The Voyage or journey is an archetypal story, and it is also often an explicit metaphor in introducing students to ‘your MBA journey’; students are invited to ‘embark’ upon the degree. As such, it merges into other stories presented here such as The Quest. However, unlike The Quest, in The Voyage the destination is known. It is a specific journey undertaken to go, to get and bring back. Although it involves the acquisition of skill, it is more distinct than the accumulation detectable in The Show Goes On because of a more precise shift. There may be various aspects, such as taking ‘stuff’ back home, which is often related to community, especially indigenous community: ‘… the influences on my decision in choosing to do the MBA programme, to give me better skills to proactively work through the issues we as [the community] face over the next 30 years’.

Sometimes it was tied to a student’s desire to return to their ‘home’ community, as this account reflects:

I will need to learn to associate and develop relationships with other candidates who have different backgrounds and influences. The resultant synergy will broaden my horizon and enable me to achieve desired goals and objectives, one of which is promotion to a middle-management role. In addition, having a desire to return to my home country, I will need to keep myself informed on the incremental changes taking place in different economies.

An aspect of increasing knowledge can be broadening one’s horizons due to the global economy and seeking to gain a better understanding of other cultures. Here, the sense of voyage is implied:

due to the increasingly global nature of business, to me it is critical to understand the diversity of cultures that I am working with, either within my team or as other stakeholders.

However, undertaking a voyage is not necessarily without its tensions. For the following student, these were expressed in managing their time between work, finances, studying and family commitments. Preparing for the journey was an important element:

using the cognitive maps I have developed over my lifetime, I analysed the implications of committing to an MBA on my family, my work, my spare time and my finances. I also considered what the benefits in these areas would be after I graduated.

One student, through several complex metaphors, linked The Voyage with The Servant. She felt the MBA presented ‘a wonderful opportunity to “infect” myself and my cohort’ – New Zealand’s future business leaders – with the sustainability bug. This is an example of how motivations are complex, overdetermined and linked. There are concurrent stories here.

The Servant

The Servant theme refers to a purpose bigger than oneself, often related to community, indigenous background and sometimes to a transcendent faith. Sometimes the intent is rather vague as in ‘my thinking has certainly been changed since commencing the MBA program in that my goal is not to selfishly improve my career, but to attach value to the career by giving to the community and the environment’. The Servant can be more tersely stated than The Quest as ‘make a difference in the world’ or ‘studying for an MBA as part of my professional development should also prepare me for a future role as an agent for social change’.

The idea of serving becomes interesting when there is a hint of tension between service and self-interest:

although I signed up to do an MBA for the ‘mythical’ reasons of achieving success, I have always wanted to make a difference in the community in which I live, in my life, and in the lives of people I come into contact with … success can be achieved either way; but at what cost?

The tension between service and self-interest is linked to making a difference and responsibility and role: ‘it is the current generation of leaders that have both the opportunity and responsibility to reform industry and ensure a secure, sustainable global community for our descendants. This is the leader that my MBA will aide me in being’.

As in The Quest, The Servant story was often extended and eloquent. One student writes about the common immigration experience of coming to New Zealand and remembering ‘the sacrifices that my parents made for the whole family’. The student is the first-born and carries his traditional responsibilities of leader of the extended family seriously. This is linked to him noting that ‘for the past 30 years of my working life, I have been involved and gone through many changes and restructuring companies and I have learned that I need to seek new opportunities in life’. One suspects that the experience of redundancy has played into the weight of responsibility. The role of the MBA for this student then takes on a surprising multipurpose:

my long-term goal is to return to [country], and as a leader of my extended family I feel that I have an obligation and a duty to fulfil, by supporting them and work[ing] with the communities. This will be another chapter of my life, a different challenge and I also believe the MBA will help me with some of the decisions [family feuds over land and business].

For one student, a sense of steward leadership extended to wanting to help a developing country:

my goal is to use my MBA for the betterment of my family, my work colleagues, the community I live in and perhaps my country. I would like the opportunity in the future to use the skills in a country in the developing world.

A strong orientation towards community was often reflected in students’ stories when they belonged to an indigenous community, either in New Zealand or overseas:

as [student’s tribe] moves from grievance (reactive) mode to development mode (proactive) a new set of strategies are required. So the aforementioned reasons are the influences on my decision in choosing to do the MBA programme, to give me better skills to proactively work through the issues we as [name of group] face over the next 30 years.

The notion of serving can also be tied to a transcendent faith, where the purpose is bigger than oneself: ‘for me the issue is deeper than that of the environment. If we understand what truth is, who God is and what our eternal purpose is, we will be good guardians of our environment, with less self-centred goals’.

The Big Apple

This last theme refers to the rags to riches story and dreams of becoming the big boss, with big money, fame and fortune. The pursuit is from a self-interested point of view:

the recognition in society, bank balance, and lifestyle are the main reasons behind my decision to do an MBA. My entire life so far has been geared towards having the ideal education, job, house, car, and everything else which society associates with the success of a man.

It has been traditionally assumed that the MBA student is focused on advancing self-interest, and although business schools pay more attention to ethics and sustainability, the increase in salary that one may expect on acquiring an MBA remains a substantial part of the marketing of the degree. The tension of private versus public interest exists in students as well as business schools. One may discern the stereotype in these essays, but it is peppered with qualification and readily linked to other themes, such as the voyage and the servant.

Mostly, the lure of The Big Apple is centred on status linked to owning a business or achieving career success. This generality is not surprising given that this MBA, like many others, is typically linked with the development of skills for students to become generalist senior managers. This generalist aspect does not imply a lack of focus and can be strongly linked to a sense of self:

it has always been my aim to learn as much as possible on the different aspects of running a business. I am extremely curious by nature … I am also quite independent and ambitious. I have therefore always envisioned creating and sustaining my own business. [The MBA provides] the means (financial and networking) and knowledge to do so.

But there are tensions:

to what extent should I exploit the resources around me and at what cost? As I utilise resources like labour and capital and maximise on my bottom line other undesirable negative effects can impact on the communities like job losses … As an entrepreneur I will have a kind heart of love and give back to the communities as much as I get from it.

Sometimes there appear to be trade-offs but I can only speculate on the presence of tensions:

my husband and I had decided not to have children and I wanted to focus on my career. On reflection, I recognised that I wanted more out of my career, as I am an ambitious person. A move into executive level management felt like the right career change for me.

The pursuit of The Big Apple in many of these essays is apparent, but it is also obvious that this pursuit is by no means clear-cut and singular. How, for example, could we finally categorise the following intention?

… I decided that I would create an Indigenous Business Development consultancy and that I would enrol in an MBA that was consistent with my company’s holistic vision and was academically accredited … I did not realise at the time that I was starting a journey through a revolution paradox that was focussed on self-mastery.

It would appear that when it comes to the MBA, there are, as in life, few straight paths and clear boundaries, but many interesting stories to be told.

Discussion

The acquisition of any major qualification would probably have substantial consequences in a person’s life story. The MBA, however, occupies a rather singular place. It is not a natural progression from an undergraduate degree, and it is usually pursued by older experienced workers and sometimes by people who do not have undergraduate qualifications. Although offered by universities, it is a degree that is very much market-oriented, hence the often awkward relationship between MBA programmes and the colleges or faculties of business that host them. For example, the MBA programme at my University was at one stage presented off campus in the city which is not unusual. MBA teaching is sometimes outside the standard teaching load of faculty, and the MBA programme is often used as a cash cow for the school or college in which it is financially embedded. This awkwardness reflects deeper tensions between education perceived as a private or a public good, and education as personal exploration or as gaining credentials. In the light of the stories analysed here, the historical readiness to align the MBA with private benefit and merely gaining credentials can be questioned.

It may be that the rationale for the MBA will continue to be framed largely as an instrument for personal capital gain. However, considering the MBA as a ritual, a rite, or as a character in a complex story invites alternative framings. Under the provocation of what the actual or real reasons for pursuing an MBA might be, considering alternative framings has been enlightening and the view of the MBA as an element in a larger story has been vindicated. Phrases such as ‘learning as an act of conscientious transformation’, ‘a process I can’t fully explain’, ‘an element in an emergent process, a journey into self-knowledge’ and references to ‘a personal revolution’ all attest to the function of the MBA as a sense-making tool. This view suggests that agency and a larger sense of purpose than instrumental gain is an important part of understanding the MBA.

The MBA is usually sold by business schools as a way of furthering career goals and achieving benefits for organisations. As such, it is embedded in a story with the student as protagonist actively achieving goals. This is The Big Apple described in this study. But as we have seen, there are many ways in which the MBA can be embedded in the story of a student’s life. It is apparent that the decision to pursue an MBA and the process of getting one are part of identity construction and take place in the context of protean careers and boundaryless lives. The student is the agent, but we can be more nuanced than this.

Agency takes different forms in the various stories. In The Quest and Born Again scenarios, the MBA helps the student to discover specific goals in the long term (The Quest) or in the short term (Born Again). The student also exercises strong agency in some stories, for example, The Big Apple, but by contrast, in Deus ex Machina and The Show Goes On, the agency of the student is relatively weak, with the student driven either by the immediate circumstances at her organisation (short- or mid-term problems that the MBA is expected to fix as Deus ex Machina) or by mimicking common patterns (The Show Goes On). Finally, in The Servant scenario, the student’s goal is broader than her specific career or organisation, the goal may develop over time, the agency is strong and the time-scale of the story in which the MBA is embedded is very long term, even possibly extending beyond the protagonist’s own lifespan. In this way, agency is linked to tensions in the MBA degree and related to the way it has been marketed.

Although the MBA is generally marketed in instrumental terms, business schools often claim a range of purposes that include the wider social good. For example, The University of Exeter Business School’s One Planet MBA is marketed as ‘for change – for good’. Of course, some would argue that this is simply good niche marketing. In Exeter’s case, there is an appeal to a holistic frame of reference and the sustainability debate. Many of the stories illustrate this ambiguity around agency, purpose and benefit. In some stories, the MBA is an agent, in others, the student is an agent; sometimes the MBA is a tool of the student, in other ways the MBA is a tool for social transformation.

It would be a brave or foolhardy business school that did not consider the expectations of students. However, these stories show that a smart business school could go much further and provide experiences that influence goal-seeking and goal-development. After all, we do not know to what extent marketing the MBA in terms of personal financial gain repels potential students. The MBA could have a much wider ambit and broader appeal than it currently does. Business schools should consider ways to influence the students’ stories and how they may support the agency of students beyond an immediate return on investment. Engaging with students’ stories offers the MBA a role over the long term. Perhaps if students were invited at the outset to fundamentally reappraise what their MBA was for, this information from the beginning of their courses could be used to shape the curriculum in response.

This relates to the societal function of the MBA. The MBA, in the face of changing organisational forms and the contested nature of management, is itself being transformed and various kinds of MBAs proliferate. The very nature of the qualification is being challenged (Pink, 2004). There is an opportunity for the MBA to function in the business world today like a Bachelor of Arts used to function in society 40 years ago – a space apart for all kinds of learning. The MBA could be a space for personal reflection, but it could also become a social space for collective reflection.

Conclusion

These essays indicate that the pervasive view of the MBA as a tool for self-interested ambition is not warranted (Hay and Hodgkinson, 2008; Vigoda-Gadot and Grimland, 2008; Warhurst, 2011). The stories offer nuance and insights that surveys do not usually capture. They show that the reasons why students embark on an MBA are complex, dynamic and overdetermined (Muja and Appelbaum, 2014). Understanding the MBA degree from the point of view of a life story and the formation of identity presents a student with an opportunity for fundamentally reappraising the role of the qualification in his or her life. This perspective also challenges business schools offering the qualification to fundamentally reappraise their reasons for doing so.

The stories confirm other findings in the literature. They confirm the importance of identity construction relative to the MBA (Warhurst, 2011). They illustrate the importance of the stage of life of the student that embarks upon an MBA (Kelan and Dunkley Jones, 2009). It is clear from these stories that getting an MBA is sometimes more than an individual pursuit. They make it clear that the benefits of an MBA vary enormously and that there can be a difference between an initial espoused motivation and a benefit realised quite early in the pursuit of one. The fact that these stories were collected at the beginning of these students’ MBA journey begs the question of what they might think at the end of it as well as some years after graduation. Exploring how the stories told in this research may have developed is a tantalising prospect.

Accessing the actual and the real through stories is about both the MBA and method. The attempt in this article to explore the pursuit of an MBA in broad open-ended terms and in the context of a life story, although productive, was limited. Ethics precluded linking the essays with personal circumstance and risking identification. This limited the details that could be presented in the analysis and of course I could not seek clarification from students. Such limits need not apply to further research. Participants would be invited to identify themselves and explore how their stories have developed since their graduation.

It might be useful to offer the story themes outlined here to students as a tool for them to inquire into their own reasons for embarking on the MBA, but that might pre-empt alternative stories. It might be more useful to continue asking the original open-ended question, posed as baldly as possible to allow for maximum interpretation.

On the other hand, it could be just as useful to frame the question in terms of the need for reflection in management education, given management as a relational activity (Cunliffe, 2002; Petriglieri et al., 2011; Segon et al., 2010; Smith, 2011). This framing could include the state of the world and mastery of the self (Orr, 1991) and management education as part of an identity construction process (Andersson, 2010; Warhurst, 2011) and the challenge to question beliefs and consider alternative possibilities (Gagnon, 2008; Hay and Hodgkinson, 2008; Sturdy et al., 2006; Vidaillet and Vignon, 2010).

These stories show that the choice to do an MBA may be the result of a nascent transformation or quest with the MBA merely influencing this existing process. The extent to which the MBA can be a provocateur that transforms this process deserves further consideration. There is a need for caution for while schools may wish to accommodate students’ development, they must be clear on what they are promising and deliver it. And of course, business school should continue to be challenged on what they promise and why they promise it.

The most pervasive theme in the web of stories presented has been transformation which begs the question of agency; who/what is transforming whom/what in whose interests? For whom and to what extent is acquiring an MBA a transformative experience? Is it appropriate for business schools to take responsibility for providing a transformative experience? In whose interests and how should business schools be transforming their MBA offerings? Should management educators accept market demand as the frame for their purpose? Whence their warrant, if they choose to claim one, for challenging students about what they want?

Using stories invites a creative, open-ended approach to these questions. It is clear that what the MBA is for remains a contestable unfinished story.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I thank the reviewers for their constructive criticisms that helped develop this paper. I also thank my colleagues Phil Ramsay and Alexei Tretiakov for their discussions, and Ralph Bathurst and Lorraine Warren for their comments. Most of all I would like to thank those MBA students who were prepared to think differently and engage in a challenging task.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

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