Enterprise and entrepreneurship (EE) education is integral to higher education, yet the professional realities of those delivering it remain underexplored. Existing research focuses on pedagogy and student outcomes, offering limited insight into how EE educators negotiate identity and recognition within increasingly hybrid roles. This article addresses this gap by examining EE educators’ work through communities of practice theory and its extension into landscapes of practice, conceptualising their activity as distributed across curricular, learner-facing, and strategic domains. Drawing on two UK-wide surveys (2020, 2023), the study uses Enterprise Educators UK’s Academic, Practitioner, and Influencer pathways as ideal-typical regimes of competence to analyse patterns of alignment and prioritisation. Findings reveal growing hybridity, with educators consistently valuing learner motivation, relationship-building, and stakeholder engagement over curriculum delivery alone. While pathways remain coherent as professional reference points, practice is increasingly configured across multiple domains, challenging traditional notions of distinct role categories. The article contributes to management education by examining how a professional competence framework structures learning, recognition, and role alignment, demonstrating how recognition infrastructures shape hybrid academic work within practice-based education.
For nearly half a century, management educators have utilized Kolb’s (1984) learning style theory to inform their teaching and learning practices. However, certain elements have been misapplied, including the matching hypothesis (e.g., meshing), the belief that teaching should be tailored to align with learners’ learning styles, and the predictive hypothesis, the belief that learning styles predict academic performance. We argue that when Kolb’s original theory is applied as intended, it offers substantial pedagogical value. Kolb describes learning styles as preferences across the learning cycle. He characterizes learning styles as mental categories, emphasizes within-person variance in learning, and treats them as developmental tools that promote reflection, flexibility, and self-awareness. Learning styles remain an effective instructional tool because they can support multimethod instruction, frame lessons across the learning cycle, and foster situational interest by helping learners connect course material to their experience.
Management education in Nigerian public universities is often approached by students as an instrumental means to economic mobility. While this is a rational response to persistent graduate unemployment, underemployment, and wider socio-economic precarity, it poses pedagogical challenges for management educators. This essay proposes that students are grappling with what we conceptualise as a meta threshold concept at the programme level; namely, that management education is an initiation into a professional and societal role . We argue that crossing this threshold requires students to integrate several interrelated concepts – capability, career, interdependence, and collective outcomes – which together reframe management education beyond individual advancement towards social contribution and continued learning. Drawing on our experiences as management educators in a Nigerian public university, we illustrate how educators can use threshold-crossing practices to coax students to grasp this troublesome yet transformative meta threshold concept. The essay offers deeper and more contextualised insights into trends toward increasing student instrumentality in and beyond Nigeria, and advances threshold concept theory by offering an African perspective on a pedagogical approach that has predominantly been examined in Western contexts.
Entrepreneurial passion is a key driver of entrepreneurial behavior, yet its structural and cultural antecedents remain underexplored in entrepreneurship education. This study examines how childhood socioeconomic status and the perceived impact of entrepreneurship education shape harmonious and obsessive passion, and subsequently entrepreneurial intention, through the mediating role of the desire to gain face—a culturally embedded motive salient in collectivist emerging economies. Drawing on Social Class Theory, Face Theory, and Self-Determination Theory, we test a conceptual model using two-wave survey data from 273 entrepreneurship students in Vietnam. Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling is used to assess the measurement and structural models. Results show that childhood socioeconomic status exerts competing direct and indirect effects on harmonious passion, yielding a non-significant total effect and no significant association with obsessive passion. The perceived impact of entrepreneurship education positively influences both forms of passion. The desire to gain face mediates its relationship with harmonious passion but not obsessive passion. Both harmonious and obsessive passion are positively associated with entrepreneurial intention. These findings highlight the importance of socio-cultural background and motivational internalization processes in entrepreneurship education design.
Tragic events like mass shootings exemplify chaotic or turbulent environments as survivors face uncertainty and seek to reconstruct their understanding of the world. One aspect of helping those affected by tragedy is through social support. Classrooms offer unique opportunities for social support as they consist of many individuals affected by tragedy in various ways. The unique context of classrooms also allow management educators to discuss such events to help prepare students for how to handle uncertainty when they are managers. Yet, as management educators, we are sometimes hesitant to discuss such events because they fall outside our area of expertise, we need to contend with other course constraints, or we are trying to deal with our own uncertainty following tragedy. Using an autoethnographic approach, the current research provides an account of my thought process going into the first class I held following the Route 91 shooting in Las Vegas, NV, as well as a recap of the conversation in that class. The hope is that this research helps instructors in the future with their decision-making about how to handle post-tragedy classroom discussions. Implications of these conversations in preparing future managers for their careers and for organizations more generally are discussed.
This paper details an innovative pedagogical approach integrating custom AI-powered chatbots into case studies to develop future leaders capable of tackling grand challenges. Traditional case studies, while building analytical skills, often lack the systemic complexity and dynamic information-seeking essential for real-world leadership. Our chatbot-assisted case study, focused on an automotive logistics challenge, overcomes this by requiring students to engage in interactive dialogue with the AI. This process simulates the ambiguity and negotiation inherent in professional practice, directly cultivating adaptive leadership and systems thinking skills. We present a theoretically-grounded conceptual framework that informs this design, linking pedagogical theory to the development of these specific competencies. Qualitative and quantitative data demonstrate enhanced student engagement and the acquisition of the targeted adaptive and systemic skills. The findings underscore the transformative potential of AI to modernize management education, bridging theory with the practical skill development required to address complex, real-world problems.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report highlights the importance of innovative problem-solving skills. Paradox literature suggests that managing tensions between competing exploration and exploitation demands, or ambidexterity, is essential in innovation contexts such as these. Yet little is known about how to design learning experiences that cultivate an ambidextrous mindset and behaviors. This mixed-methods study developed and evaluated a paradox pedagogy designed to build ambidexterity competence and capabilities in management education, delivered through a workshop for business students. Competence was assessed through changes in awareness and self-efficacy, and capabilities through the originality and usefulness of the solutions produced. Results showed that the pedagogical model enhanced competence and capabilities, supported by four key pedagogical features: experience, exposure, engagement and extension. Emergent findings also revealed two developmental processes that explain how ambidexterity develops and is enacted: reflexive agility (mindset) and adaptive integration (behavior). These processes operated through interconnected preparation and action phases, forming a recursive feedback loop that illuminates the microfoundations of ambidexterity. The study contributes to management education by offering an evidence-based, sequenced paradox pedagogy for developing innovative problem-solving. It also extends our understanding of how paradox theory can be applied in management education by clarifying how ambidextrous mindset and behavior co-evolve.
Water conservation has become one of the major ecological challenges of the 21st century. Education is therefore critical to fostering awareness of water-related issues among future managers and policymakers. In this regard, this study examines the XL Blue Walk, an experiential learning program implemented in France. Thirteen business school students (undergraduate and graduate levels) participated in the initiative. The program combined a walking journey with site visits and meetings with water management experts. Drawing on a three-stage data collection process and thematic content analysis, the research highlights the nuanced effectiveness of the experiential learning program for knowledge acquisition and assimilation. While the program's flexible structure and diverse interactions facilitated knowledge transmission, students tended to retain lived experiences more strongly than the theoretical knowledge conveyed during the XL Blue Walk. However, their perception of water evolved toward a heightened awareness of the need to preserve this resource. Several participants even reported initial behavioral changes, adopting more sober and conservation-oriented practices following their participation in the program. Thus, this study contributes to theoretical knowledge on the effectiveness of experiential learning and on raising students' awareness of water-related issues. By proposing adaptable formats, the study presents the XL Blue Walk as a transferable model for management education.
The increase in online instruction makes business schools vulnerable to a surge in cheating behavior and in need of a framework to assess the potential effectiveness of exam proctoring conditions. A social facilitation theory framework was developed to assess how four prototypical proctoring conditions (1. web recording, 2. video summarization, 3. live online, 4. in-person) should be associated with decreasing levels of cheating. The framework was investigated with three studies. Study 1 assessed students' (n = 395) perceptions of being watched and monitored and instructors' (n = 113) perceptions of being able to control and monitor the testing environment. Study 2 showed students (n = 397) had weaker intentions to cheat for proctoring conditions posited as more actively watched and monitored. Consistent with social facilitation theory, evaluation apprehension and self-awareness were motivational deterrents to cheating. Study 3 replicated and extended prior findings of higher student scores for unproctored versus proctored exams with a field study (n = 224) of actual exam results for the same four proctoring conditions. Results were mostly consistent with the framework, with interesting asymmetries in how students and instructors perceived live online versus in-person proctoring conditions. This framework can help researchers classify proctoring effectiveness and help instructors align proctoring approaches with their assessment goals.
The Future17 Program provides universities with an educational approach and mode of delivery that develops leaders for work in organizations that address the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals as "grand challenges." We develop a conceptual framework to structure our reflection based on three attributes of "grand challenges": interdisciplinary approaches, organizational complexity, and multicultural skills. Using a case study method, we reflect on the experiences of five key academic staff, including one within the team responsible for the global implementation of Future17, the academic lead for one of the consortium university members, and three academic mentors from the same university. We offer a conceptual model for addressing "grand challenges" in the context of the Future17 program, practical guidance for universities to implement Future17, and insights for project scoping and deliverables on a timeline, while also discussing the limitations of our study and directions for future research.
Business schools increasingly proclaim commitments to ethics, sustainability, and responsible leadership, yet these often operate as ethical simulations-performative displays that secure legitimacy while preserving the managerial and market logics driving inequality and ecological harm. This theory-led essay draws on debates in JME and related literatures to identify four interlocking mechanisms-ethical simulation, epistemic refusal, pedagogical inauthenticity, and planetary harm reproduction-through which responsibility is converted into reputational capital. We introduce ideological grooming to describe how students are trained to recognise and disavow harm simultaneously. We then advance three normative commitments for reimagining business education: epistemic completeness, pedagogical honesty, and planetary responsibility. The article outlines implications for curriculum, pedagogy, governance, and student formation, concluding by urging educators to confront the contradiction of teaching care within systems complicit in planetary destruction.
In this essay, we consider the development challenges and opportunities for education-focused management educators who specialize in teaching and learning. We provide support to address the challenges and stimulate debate on how opportunities can be maximized and recognized. The heart of our contribution is constructing a three-step framework that addresses the challenges and opportunities by outlining practices for discerning an educator's vocation, activities for individual self-development, and approaches to community building. These elements provide a reflexive framework for career development, which can be used as a "textual partner" by those who lack sufficient opportunities for guidance and exploration, often due to limited resources. Adaptively working with the steps in our framework will provide practical options to help education-focused management educators craft their career paths in ways that best support their sense of vocation.
Student-led consultancy is widely used in management education to connect theory with real organizational practice, yet the identity transitions students undergo in these contexts remain underexplored. This article introduces identity shock to describe the disorientation that arises when learners are expected to perform a professional identity they have not yet internalized. Drawing on possible selves theory, role theory, and an autoethnographically informed reflective teaching practice, we conceptualize identity shock as a form of identity dissonance that becomes particularly salient in externally facing consultancy work. We position the construct in relation to reality shock, identity crisis and impostor syndrome, to clarify its developmental significance. The article outlines five pedagogical strategies that can help students navigate the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral tensions of adopting both student and consultant roles: role framing, mentoring and modeling, structured reflection, peer-supported identity work, and identity-aligned supervision and assessment. We argue that consultancy modules, and other practice-based curricula, should be designed as learning ecosystems that scaffold identity development alongside skills acquisition, enabling students to engage more confidently with emerging professional selves.
Amidst the ethical challenges facing the corporate world, there is an urgent demand for enhanced ethics education in business schools. This article introduces SpaceJam, an innovative pedagogical strategy designed to nurture empathy-an indispensable capacity for guiding ethical decision-making and behavior within organizational settings. Grounded in a pragmatist and humanistic approach to ethics education, SpaceJam offers a holistic strategy that targets the affective, cognitive, and motivational dimensions of empathy as well as ethical reflection. By diversifying learning spaces-encompassing the classroom, home, and community-and employing experiential and art-based methods, this strategy fosters multiple immersive learning experiences and opportunities in diverse contexts. The core of its integrative nature is manifested through the creation of an artistic portfolio, serving as a fourth learning space for students to express, comprehend, and reflect upon their learning journey through creative work. Implemented on three cohorts of students enrolled in a Bachelor of Business Administration program, the strategy was found effective in cultivating empathy and ethical reflection among future business leaders, offering a promising pathway for business schools to meet the imperative need for ethical education.
