A Hay

Reflecting on reflection: scale extension and a comparison of undergraduate business students in the United States and the United Kingdom

In the Peltier, Hay, and Drago (2005) article titled “The Reflective Learning Continuum: Reflecting on Reflection,” a reflective learning continuum was conceptualized and tested. This is a follow-up article based on three extensions: (1) determining whether the continuum could be expanded, (2) further validating the continuum using additional schools, and (3) determining whether the continuum could also be applied to undergraduate business education. The findings from a study of U.S. and U.K. students show that the revised scale is valid and reliable and that U.S. students in the sample universities rated their educational experience higher and were more likely to use reflective thinking practices.

Exploring MBA career success

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the meaning of career success in relation to the attainment of an MBA degree, for a group of experienced managers. In so doing, the paper aims to consider the adequacy of MBA career success, defined solely in terms of external criteria.Design/methodology/approach – A total of 36 in‐depth interviews were undertaken with MBA alumni which sought to capture the individuals own account of their career success in relation to their MBA. The study utilised an inductive data analysis approach.Findings – The findings revealed a diversity of meanings given to MBA career success, with success generally being expressed in much broader terms than conventional notions of fast track career advancement. The salience of internal criteria for judging MBA career success is thus highlighted. The findings may be seen to further dispel the myth that MBA students are concerned exclusively with status and salary.Research limitations/implications – The study focuses on the experie...

‘I don’t know what I am doing!’: Surfacing struggles of managerial identity work

Recent work contends that management education provides an important space for managers’ identity work. However, it is also recognised that much of what is currently offered constrains rather than enables managers’ identity work. Against this background, I present material which provides important practical possibilities to managers for more realistic and helpful forms of identity work, and theoretically, also add to the development of a more nuanced understanding of managerial identity work processes. Drawing on interviews with a range of managers, I offer rare empirical evidence, which illustrates the ordinarily suppressed emotional struggles of the mismatch between social identities of manager and self-identities. In this way, I contribute to current theoretical offerings to demonstrate the centrality of emotions to processes of becoming. In turn, I propose that exploration of these emotions offers management educators important possibilities for facilitating managers’ identity work.

Dispelling the Myths of Online Education: Learning via the Information Superhighway

There continues to be a perception that online education is inferior to traditional education. In the U.S. online learning is more developed than in the U.K. This paper provides insights into a U.S. provision and takes a close look at what are per ceived as weak nesses of on line learn ing and ar gues that these are not necessarily inherent weaknesses of this form of educational delivery. Then, results of two major studies, undertaken in the U.S. are provided comparing the effectiveness of online education to traditional education as perceived by current MBA students and past graduates. Results of these studies suggest that students of MBA modules and MBA graduates perceive the quality and effectiveness of online education to be similar to, if not higher than, the quality and effectiveness of traditional modules and programmes.

Desperately seeking fixedness: Practitioners’ accounts of ‘becoming doctoral researchers’

We draw upon the concept of liminality to explore the experiences of practitioners enrolled on a UK Doctor of Business Administration (DBA) programme. We analyse 20 practitioners’ reflective journals to detail how the Doctor of Business Administration liminal space was negotiated. More specifically, we describe how practitioners deal with their struggles of identity incoherence or ‘monsters of doubt’ which are amplified in the Doctor of Business Administration context owing to the complex nature of the separation phase of liminality. We identify three broad methods deployed in this endeavour – ‘scaffolding’, ‘putting the past to work’ and ‘bracketing’ – which evidence practitioners ‘desperately seeking fixedness’. We make three contributions. First, we provide empirical insights into the experiences of the increasingly significant, but still under-researched, Doctor of Business Administration student. Second, we develop our understandings of monsters of doubt through illustrating how these are negotiated for learning to progress. Finally, we contribute to wider discussions of ‘becoming’ to demonstrate the simultaneous and paradoxical importance of movement and fixedness in order to learn and become.