‘Education or training?’: a case study of undergraduate business curriculum in a new university business school

This is a single case study of undergraduate business curriculum design and pedagogic practice in a post-1992 university business school (UBS). The central aim of the research was to investigate the factors that combined to influence the design and enactment of the BA Business Studies and BA Entrepreneurship and Innovation programmes. Data were collected using semi-structured interviews with academics from the department of Systems and Management and a documentary review of programme texts. The data were analysed within an analytical framework which brings together Bhaskar's critical realism, Fairclough's critical discourse analysis and Bernstein's theory of the pedagogic device. This thesis contends that the undergraduate curriculum in UBS has become recontextualised as a business project which frames knowledge as a commodity for the purposes of income generation, pedagogy as a rational, 'quality-assured' system for its 'delivery' and academics as the 'deliverers'. The pedagogic codes which underpin this model legitimise knowledge as narrow projections of business practices and confine didactics to behaviourist, sometimes incoherent, approaches to knowledge generation predicated on 'employability' and 'transferable skills'.

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

edd

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Greenwich

Year dc:date.issued

2013

Author dc:creator

• Brady, Norman

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Ainley, Patrick
• Jameson, Jill

• LB Theory and practice of education

Language dc:language

en