Problem-based learning is an effective approach for integrating skills and knowledge in business education, yet the motivational processes it activates remain underexplored. In a semester-long problem-based learning project, we combined problem-based learning with a real-life, real-time business challenge and a competitive learning environment to examine how student motivation evolves over time. Using inductive analysis, we trace how social-contextual conditions embedded in the problem-based learning design shape students’ motivational responses across successive phases of the learning process. Our findings distinguish between early and late-phase motivational responses, showing a shift from externally guided, task-oriented engagement toward internalization and more autonomous, goal-oriented forms of motivation. The study contributes to problem-based learning research by conceptualizing motivation as a dynamic and relational process shaped by evolving social-contextual conditions throughout the problem-based learning experience.
Professional service firms have long operated through a traditional, hierarchical “up-or-out” career track that reinforces learning and professional identity formation. While new roles and alternative career paths have been introduced to better meet the needs of the younger generations, who strive for work–life balance, the desire to achieve partner status and follow the hierarchal structure is still the norm. However, this is now being challenged by rapid digital transformation, where new roles and competencies are being introduced to meet the need of understanding new digital technology, including artificial intelligence and automation, as well as data-driven advisory. Drawing on an in-depth case study of an elite professional service firm, this study investigates the tensions that arise between entrenched professional norms and the demands of new types of professionals. We draw on institutional and organizational learning theory and organizational learning to illustrate how the traditional “career ladder” is being challenged, arguing that the concept of a “career lattice” better explains the emerging career patterns that arise with digital transformation. The article contributes to research on career development in professional service firms, including the institutional theory and organizational learning, by conceptualizing the shift from ladder to lattice as a means for entangling conflicting logics.
Work placements are widely promoted by universities as essential for enhancing graduate employability. However, this discourse often assumes students are free agents, equally positioned to pursue such opportunities. Drawing on Archer’s theory of reflexivity, this study challenges static, individualised accounts of agency by conceptualising universities as structured reflexive spaces that shape, channel and sometimes constrain student deliberation and career-related decision-making. Using qualitative data from focus groups and interviews with 88 business students at a post-1992 1 UK university, we examine how students’ reflexive orientations mediate their engagement with placement schemes. Our findings demonstrate that agency is not a stable trait but a dynamic, relational and emotionally demanding process shaped by institutional narratives, structural inequality and cycles of pressure. We make two key theoretical contributions to Archer’s framework. First, we offer a more dynamic and context-sensitive view of reflexive modes by foregrounding their temporal and relational emergence. Second, we introduce adaptive reflexivity to theorise a strategic yet ambivalent form of agency in which students adjust aspirations under constraint, often misread as disengagement. This study contributes to management learning and education by reframing employability as a structurally mediated process and advocating for more inclusive placement models that support diverse student agency.
Finding meaningful careers within the neoliberal academy can be a challenge. When we – a group of nine academics – reflected on our careers, we struggled to comprehend meaningful alternatives in academia. We found ourselves caught within a web defined by competition, performance metrics, and notions of the enterprising academic, as well as by neoliberal logics that shaped our career paths and ideas of success. Still, we were determined to reimagine otherwise. This article explores how we collectively learn to reimagine meaningful academic careers within the neoliberal academy, focusing on how temporality, place, and values shape this meaning. Drawing on yarning, an Indigenous conversational practice of communal and explorational learning from Australia, alongside collaborative autoethnography, we carved a window for “epistemic rupture” – a term we use to describe our efforts to (temporarily) disentangle from dominant neoliberal ways of knowing. Through this process, we created space to critically reflect on how neoliberal career logics constrain and compel us, while opening up possibilities for alternative academic careers. In doing so, we reconceptualise meaningful academic careers as relational, situated, and values-based, challenging individualised and performative career logics.
