5th Nordic Geographers Meeting, in Reykjavík

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Tomorrow I am going to take part to the 5th Nordic Geographers Meeting, in Reykjavík. I am going to present a paper written with Stewart Clegg, on how Business Schools are responding to the Global Financial Crisis and on the new “creative” take on Business Education. Below the abstract – the paper is currently under review for Management and Learning.

“The Global Financial Crisis and the New Architecture of Business Education”

After the recent financial crisis many Business Schools around the world have felt the necessity to revise their teaching and learning programs, as well as their overall approach to business education and research. They – as “local” entities – are answering to a supposedly “global” threat. New organizational patterns have been created and change has become, in a way, the mantra to incant. The paper investigates what these Business Schools are doing, identifying three main areas of change that represent their “new” model of business education. First, change is reified in the construction of new facilities, manly designed by “star-architects”, whose material architecture makes claims to shaping practices differently from the conventional broadcast mode of large-scale lecture theatres. Second, change take place in the designing of new teaching curricula, characterized by “critical thinking”, “creativity and innovative thinking”, and “experiential learning”. Third, among the set of practices involved in this new ethos (which has already been adopted, to varying degrees, by Business Schools such as Chicago, Harvard, Stanford and Yale), the integration between creative/design approaches and management have had a particular specificity. The paper takes as main (ethnographic) case-study UTS Business School in Sydney, Australia, which is currently undergoing a profound revision that include both a new building designed by Frank Gehry and a new teaching curriculum. On the basis of this case study, the paper offers two contributions. First, it traces how the global changes in Business Education are increasingly becoming inscribed in urban landscapes and teaching activities. Second, it confronts Business Schools with their responsibilities in producing a “new” model of Business education, the consequences of which are still largely unknown and under-investigated.

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