This is a study about the student experience of undergraduates at Newcastle University Business School, and the implications for the design and delivery of undergraduate Business education. I find that while the term “student experience” is used widely in practice, it is remarkably under-developed as a construct in the academic literature. By identifying themes within the literature, I develop a conceptual framework for the student experience, which is then tested and refined during the pilot project and main data collection and analysis phases. My research approach is based around the use of semi-structured focus groups of students. A questionnaire is used to give structure, but participants were encouraged to develop their own ideas in open discussion, thereby generating a rich set of data which has allowed me to explore the themes and nuances of what defines the student experience. In the concluding chapter, I propose a conceptual framework where the student experience is defined as a broad, multi-faceted, psycho-social construct and where the student develops and matures as a result of meaningful interactions with seven key microsystems, which represent the most significant influences on student life. I also propose that in order to have a satisfying student experience, an undergraduate needs to engage in meaningful interactions with these microsystems, the extent of those interactions being linked to the level of individual personal development. Accordingly, the implications for practice are that a broader conception of undergraduate Business education is required, stretching beyond the degree programme, to facilitate interaction with these key microsystems. It is proposed that the most appropriate perspective is that of the student as an active fee-paying member of an academic community rather than as a passive consumer. Such a perspective balances the rights of students to expect academic staff to show accountability to them with students own responsibilities to realise their own potential.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine how business professionals involved in experiential online learning can effectively promote business students’ practical management skills development. Another objective is to help business educators to introduce practical relevance in business learning, teaching and assessment through experiential online learning at institutional level. The study adopts a constructivist perspective: new knowledge is constructed from the perspective of an internal researcher, which interacts with the institutional environment and is interrelated with its stakeholders. This study’s research participants are business educators, students, practitioners as well as administrators. The research is conducted within an embedded single-case design while data is collected through various methods and within the researcher’s own institutional context. The research findings section outlines the quantitative outcomes followed by the integrative qualitative discussion, where central categories and their properties and characteristics are presented. The integrative process with the objective to draw theoretical conclusions focusses on three major aspects: namely, practitioners’ effective forms of engagement, business students’ practical management skills development, as well as experiential online learning as the objects of research. In order to address the full scope of the practical aspects, interrelations with the institutional environment are involved. In order to involve practitioners effectively and to institutionalise practitioner-involvement successfully in formally-assessed higher business education, this study suggests a pedagogic framework that defines objectives in terms of practitioners’ instructional orientation and that also adapts their instructional self-conception within an overarching role model. This study further proposes that such a pedagogic framework needs to be harmonised with the intended competence level of learning outcomes and activities, and aligned with educators’ instructional activities and students’ learning in and around the traditional classroom. In addition, this research suggests that the learning context and environment promotes the self-regulated and active engagement of all participants and defines institutional standards and careful integration measures in relation to practitioners’ roles in educational core processes. The thesis concludes by suggesting practical development methods and further research agendas for business educators.

Analysing the role of rankings in the business education field, this study aims to understand how and why rankings build reputation in business schools and how they shape the business education field and field boundaries in the developed and developing countries. Taking a field perspective, the researcher argues that categorisation systems, such as rankings, are used for constructing boundaries of the developed and developing business education fields. Adopting a purposive sampling method, ten highly-rated business schools per country are selected for the United Kingdom (UK) and Pakistan case-studies. Empirical evidence is gathered from 43 interviews with academic experts, business school marketing managers and industry experts, supplemented by internal student surveys and other relevant secondary sources of data for the qualitative analysis adopted in this study. Through categorisation systems, the current study showed boundary-work at different levels such as boundary-work for reputation, international and domestic fields, and new categories. The researcher argues that rankings become a contest that redefine, evaluate, and change the perception of reputation in the field. Categorisation systems also play an active role in field and field boundary formation, and become a contest for authority. Rankings construct the international business education field and set boundaries for new categories, which include defining and determining the authority in the field. Rankings in developing countries are shown to be a contest for authority, which challenges the existing authorities to counter the Western model of rankings and to construct the perception of the domestic field and positions within it. The current study may be useful for policy-makers in developing countries seeking to upgrade their ranking systems by providing them with an understanding of the significance of different transparency instruments.

This thesis explores the experiences of international business studies students in the UK. Their experiences offer vital insights into important, contemporary socio-political processes, which crisscross international student mobility and the changing nature of global higher education. Such political transformations are driven and shaped by both neoliberal post-Fordist social organization, as well as an intensification of control over mobility. More specifically, this thesis suggests that the production and the policing of international students’ experiences in the UK are shaped by the creation of diversified points of control, such as UK Visas and Immigration, international student recruitment agencies, the UK police, universities’ international offices. Inspired by and drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987), Jacques Rancière (1999) and Frigga Haug (1987) this thesis seeks to surface and analyse minor processes of experiencing which evade the regulatory practices of these institutions. I have experimented with two different methodologies – interviews with international business studies students and a memory work collective with international students undertaking PhD research in business studies. The ten in-depth interviews which I conducted with students from diverse ethnic backgrounds gave me multiple insights into the complexity of the international student experience. However, the methodology of memory work has a more prominent role in this thesis, as it provided the possibility to collectively explore and re-work the collective’s experiences. In doing that it uncovered moments of oppression as well as of resistance which usually remain hidden in clichéd accounts of experience. The main themes that emerged from the responses of my participants were: a) the intensification of border controls: student visa restrictions, the threat of deportation and their anxieties around answering the meticulous questions posed by migration agents; and b) the discourse of employability: lifelong learning, the need for self-regulation and self-valorisation, as well as the problematic links between business studies and business in the ‘real world’ under the current precarious times. At the same time, the numerous tactics these students deploy in order to manoeuvre around and beyond these enclosures emerged during the very process of research as well as during the analysis of the empirical data. Some of these tactics are as follows: non-participation in prescribed tuition (seminars especially); creating informal support networks; avoiding responding to or ‘manipulating’ migration agents; using business studies in unpredictable ways. Through my research I seek to participate in the development of new readings of the international student experience, in order to start envisioning our experiences more broadly as active participators in the socio-political conditions which shape our everyday lives. Such new readings of the international student experience can enact new points of entry in both migration as well as labour studies.

This thesis explores the contexts that make possible contested articulations of critically-oriented business and management schools in the UK. Drawing on British cultural studies, the theoretical framework builds on the concept of articulation understood as an overdetermined, non-necessary correspondence between elements of the social totality. Any articulation is an inherently unstable unity that, in a radical contextualist approach, acquires its temporary local meanings in mutual contradistinction to various contexts. Based on my empirical research, I provide an example of how the meaning of criticality gets contextually negotiated at a particular school through the performative re-iteration of boundaries that organize the local contexts. The 14-month ethnographic fieldwork underpinning this research at a school of business and management in the UK included participant observation, interviews with full-time staff members, university managers and third-year undergraduate students, and analysis of relevant documents. This was complemented by interviews done with staff members at further two schools. The analysis is underpinned by a deconstructive approach to disentangle how contexts come together in the institution of critically-oriented schools. The research shows that the conditions of possibility for criticality emerge through the antagonistic local institutional history of the main site and its mother university but this discourse of criticality is continually challenged inside the school. With regard to the context of the scholarly field of critical management studies, the research finds that repeated calls for engagement actually reinforce the idea of critique as a largely academic exercise and a similar separation is found with regard to educational content and pedagogic method. The thesis concludes by suggesting possible rearticulations, new routes of political engagement, along the lines of embodied resistance and performative education.

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The aim of this doctoral study is to explore the cultural complexities of organizing action learning at three Pakistani business schools with the intention of investigating whether reflective practice can be established as a self-sustaining feature of MBA education. The study informs about the cultural conditions shaping the reflective practice of Pakistani MBA students in action learning by challenging their taken-for-granted assumptions and encouraging habits of critical thinking. However, with a lack of literature that documents the use of action learning in non-western cultures, the empirical insights generated by this study shed light on the difficulties surrounding the potential realization of reflective practice in the Pakistani MBA. This qualitative study is pivotal in filling this gap by providing academics, facilitators and practitioners with a cultural understanding about the organization of reflection in action learning and its situated perspective in a non-western context. This study argues that gaining an understanding of the embodied dispositions of action learners is a significant factor in fostering pedagogies of action within a given cultural context. The data obtained through set observations and interviews with 31 Pakistani MBA students over a 16-week period is indicative of the friction between predisposed, embodied, dispositions (e.g. gender, power, emotions, identity) and action learning’s reflexive character. An explanatory framework, drawing upon Bourdieu’s theory of practice (i.e. habitus, field and capital) helps reveal: cultural dispositions embodied by participants that structure reflective practices, the politics and emotions mobilized during reflection that legitimize power-relations, and the embodied practices shaping group dynamics in the action learning space. The study contributes to action learning practice in the Pakistani MBA and similar contexts, and in particular cautions practitioners to consider culturally sensitive ways of developing a collective space conducive to reflective dialogue. In conclusion, this study emphasises the need to recognize culture and its relation to reflection – i.e. to acknowledge the challenges of embodied dispositions to action learning, the psychological and political implications they have for organizing reflective practice in sets, and the complex interaction between action learning and the embodied and situated culture of Pakistani MBA students.

This thesis provides an account of an empirical study into the institutionalisation of the United Nations Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) in UK university business schools. 29 academics in 22 schools were engaged in dialogic interviews to address three questions: (1) What are the reported practices and strategies deployed by PRME advocates (institutional entrepreneurs) in their work to institutionalise PRME in their business schools (2) What are the dimensions of institutional logics within business school settings that hinder or promote the work of PRME institutional entrepreneurs and (3) How do PRME’s field level characteristics affect PRME outcomes at organisational level? A context for PRME is presented, including recent critiques of alleged ethical failings in business education. Core constructs in neo-institutional and relevant other theoretical domains are outlined. The social constructionist, interpretivist basis of the research design and related methodologies are explained. Findings are presented in a way consistent with institutional theory; at individual entrepreneur, organisational and field levels. Conclusions include the proposition that PRME as currently enacted lacks the capacity to disrupt dominant institutional logics and enable sustained institutional change. Despite strategic, adept and emotionally demanding institutional work by PRME advocates, the power of current logics and weaknesses in PRME’s framing appear to mean that implementation is often partial or easily derailed. Closing reflections include an evaluation of the research design and process. Contributions to future practice as well as to theory, particularly in relation to institutional logic complexity and an understanding of the affective dimensions of institutional work, are suggested.

The study explores the experiences of Access to Business students on a course located in an inner-city setting that is characterised as diverse in terms of age, ethnicity and nationality. Research questions asked how students from diverse backgrounds experience learning and questions the extent to which the Access discourse of widening participation matches reality. The main findings of my research reveal the way the Access course has, to an extent, been colonised by those who have social resources that normalise participation in higher education. I also revealed the impact that sources of identity have in structuring participation in diverse settings.

Within the context of a wide and structural transformation of the educational system within the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the issue of privatization remains a relatively new phenomenon. As it stands, the vast majority of higher education institutions continue to be run by the state. However, this situation has led to an increasing number of debates about the ability of the current higher education system to meet modern educational standards, and produce graduates that are able to compete and succeed in the present labour market. The quality output of higher education is a particularly pressing issue for the country, given that Saudi Arabia currently faces an ever-increasing problem of integrating a large youth segment of the population into the requirements of the modern labour market. Critics contend that, both in terms of their management and their governance, higher education in the Kingdom is outdated. Excessive government control is seen as a key factor that is inhibiting the current higher education institutions from having the autonomy and flexibility required in order for them to succeed. This thesis set out to examine and gain a better understanding of the management practices used within the University of Business and Technology (UBT) in Saudi Arabia. In order to do this, it focused on three core areas: approaches to management by senior management at UBT, the view and experience of the academic staff in how such approaches are applied, and UBT‟s relationship with the government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the broader social environment that exists in the country.