Centre for Scholarship and Innovation in Management Education

Erasmus+ project led by Karen Verduijn (PI), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Professor Sarah Jack, Department of Entrepreneurship and Strategy, Co-Investigator

The TrEE project is about creating the resilience that is needed to deal with the major crises of our times, and the growing complexities of the societal challenges that come with them, both ecologically as well as socially. Entrepreneurship has the potential to contribute to solving as well as worsening some of such contemporary societal challenges.

In this project, we propose to decouple EE from the creation of (high-growth) businesses, and instead put its (creative) potential to work to help enact more just futures, for 'people' as well as 'planet'. This entails shifting towards innovating without exhausting planetary resources, addressing social inequalities, and becoming more inclusive. In short, this entails a justice for all life; human and more-than-human. This means making changes in the way we currently enact EE, finding new pedagogical premises, and developing new course formats, materials, and assignments and also thinking through how things play out in the places in which they happen.

The project is designed to host a number of workshops titled Growing Roots, Green Shoots, First Fruits, New Buds, Early Blossoms, and Branching Out. Further information about these events can be found at: https://www.transformingee.eu/events

Publication:

Transforming enterprise education: sustainable pedagogies of hope and social justice

Building on Alistair Anderson’s work, this paper proposes transforming enterprise education to deeply address questions of sustainability, social justice and hope in our time of multiple and complex crises. New pedagogies, practices, vocabularies and connections help us to enact crises in entrepreneurial, ethical and creative ways, enabling us to remain hopeful in the face of unknown horizons.

LUMS funded project

Dr Marian Iszatt-White, Department of Entrepreneurship and Strategy, Principal Investigator

In the 20 years since its launch in 2004, the ESG movement has grown into a global phenomenon representing more than US$30 trillion in assets under management, as well as being a widely recognized umbrella term for a range of ethical/responsible business practices. Building on LUMS' commitment to PRME (Principles for Responsible Management Education), this interdisciplinary project aims to leverage existing innovative management education interventions within LUMS as a platform for reshaping the School’s wider curriculum towards a broad ESG focus. The core output will be a proposal for a radical redesign of our management education curriculum, grounded in a core focus on ESG. The proposal will be based on innovative, impactful, research-led teaching and learning interventions, that better prepares our students to become the next generation of responsible leaders, managers and entrepreneurs. We will also develop impact case studies, and disseminate our findings at conferences and in leading management journals.

The research will engage with our management education students and alumni, with a particular focus on the core strategic themes of:

1. sustainability in business;
2. social justice at work, in organizations and in society; and
3. innovation in place.

Participants will be drawn from School programmes such as the full-time MBA and the Good Growth programme, as well as drawing insights from programmes and colleagues situated in Educational Research.

The qualitative research design will explore

1. how our existing ESG-focused modules raise awareness or change perceptions;
2. any disconnects between the themes of these modules and others on the same programme;
3. how the modules influence future career choices or result in changes to personal/organizational practice and
4. how participants deal with any disconnects they face when applying their learning in the workplace

Publication:

Forthcoming in the October issue of Fifty Four Degrees: Do we need a new umbrella? The rise (and fall?) of ESG standards as a working umbrella term for ‘good’ business, by Marian Iszatt-White

LUMS funded project

Professor Radka Newton, Department of Entrepreneurship and Strategy, Principal Investigator

The Good Place Innovators team is working on developing an innovative, engaged and digitally enhanced dissertation framework for Postgraduate (PG) dissertations. The project addresses the need for greater authenticity and relevance of PG dissertations and demonstrates a direct commitment to LUMS’ Innovation in Place and responsible management education agenda. At the University level, we contribute directly to the University Civic Charter and the government’s Levelling Up agenda and address local policymakers' concerns over the graduate talent retention shortage in Lancashire.

The team has a reputation for collaborative engagement with external stakeholders, which forms the foundation for co-creating curricula focused on place-based challenges. Our external partner, Groundswell Innovation, commits to fostering engaged and impactful knowledge exchange and facilitates meaningful links to local communities and dissemination of our practice. It is envisaged students will work on local community innovation challenges identified by Groundswell Innovation that are aligned with relevant UN SDGs that impact the regional ecosystem. Civic engagement ensures the dissertation themes are co-created with the local community, ​delivering true impact and enhancing the campus connection with the city and the region.

We aim to provide an authentic assessment that is relevant to students’ future aspirations as responsible leaders advocating the career development and University employability agenda. The engaged dissertation embraces creative research methods, such as ethnography, non-participatory observation, and videography, essential for students’ development of systems thinking and empathy. Digital enhancement is a core opportunity to enable accessibility, inclusivity, independent learning and advancing the innovative integration with LinkedIn learning.

Funded by Henley Business School

Emma Watton, Lancaster University Co-Investigator

Principal Investigator - Dr Elizabeth Houldsworth, Associate Professor of Leadership, Organisations and Behaviour at Henley Business School

This is a collaborative project between Henley Business School and Lancaster University Management School reviewing the personal development (PD) modules used on the Senior Leader Apprenticeship programmes. Workshops and focus groups have been held at both institutions to hear reports from learners on the impact of the PD module on their development as reflective practitioners. An exploratory empirical study was designed using Henley students to consider the relative degree of reflective thinking displayed by learners in their PD assignments and whether there was a correlation between the level of reflective learning and the overall academic achievement of learners. The initial pilot phase with Henley students has been completed, and we are now looking to expand the study to review a wider number of participants at both Henley and Lancaster.

The approach was informed by SoTL frameworks by Boyer and Kern et al. and in particular, the need to ‘go public’ about the study. The collaborators reflected that the study had an unexpected positive impact on their own personal development as reflective practitioners. As researchers, we have engaged in a reflective process ourselves using a letter-writing methodology to capture our experience of applying SoTL and the research project itself.

Conference papers:

Houldsworth, L. and Watton, E. (2023). ‘We know what we are, but know not what we may be’- William Shakespeare: Taking a SoTL approach to self-reflection and reflexivity. British Academy of Management Conference, Brighton.

Houldsworth, L. and Watton, E. (2023). The ‘challenge’ of SoTL: what does it take to go public? Advance HE conference, Keele.

Houldsworth, L. and Watton, E. (2023). To what extent do levels of learning exhibited on personal development assignments translate into learning and attainment outcomes for senior leaders on management education programmes? Research in Management Learning and Education Conference, Banff.

Houldsworth, L. and Watton, E. (2022). A SoTL based study of Senior Leader Apprenticeships: time well served in developing reflexive practitioners? British Academy of Management Conference, Manchester.

Krista Court and Jo Greenwood, Centre for Executive Training and Development (CeTAD), LUMS

CeTAD has delivered the SLMDA since September 2018, underpinned by the pedagogical principles of work-based learning, action research and critical reflection to develop the knowledge, skills and behaviours (KSBs) of leaders from our partner organisations. Ofsted’s requirement to measure ‘impact’ dovetails with our own desire and quality assurance demands to do the same; however, defining ‘impact’ beyond the attainment of KSBs remains elusive. Collecting quality data from busy professionals operating in a VUCA environment is also a challenge and has required a more creative, collaborative approach to research. This action research project with a local authority partner sought to explore meanings and dimensions of impact from the apprentices’ and organisations’ perspectives in order to help ensure impact is sustained beyond the programme and to enhance our executive education provision.

Using Co-operative Inquiry, six graduates from one partner organisation worked with us to develop an understanding of what impact might mean and what it looks likes to them. The inquiry group engaged in dialogue around capstone action research projects, the apprenticeship standards and current practice/outcomes, negotiating knowledge and understanding through cycles of inquiry, action and reflection. This research study offers an account of the inquiry group’s journey, highlighting key themes as identified by the group, including the power of capstone action research projects to engender engagement and wider organisational learning; the cyclical nature of impact; the importance of taking ownership of one’s own leadership practice; and the wider influence of VUCA/pandemic-related factors on practice.

Presented at the CABS Learning, Teaching and Student Experience Conference May 2023 and currently being written up for publication.

Neil Ralph, Department of Organisation, Work and Technology, LUMS and Dr Marian Iszatt-White,
Department of Entrepreneurship and Strategy, LUMS

This research recognises Gallos’ (2008) portrayal of leaders as ‘toxic emotion handlers’, Heifetz (1994) view of leaders as creating holding environments for their followers, and Obholzer’s (1994) work on how whole institutions can act as containers in times of organizational change. It asks the question: while managers are acting as ‘containers’ for their staff, how – and from whom – can they receive similar support for themselves?
We argue that leaders would benefit from the establishment of ongoing support networks that replicate the functions of coaching supervision (Proctor, 1986) - namely normative, formative and restorative - in helping leaders to process and learn from the difficult emotions and experienced anxieties associated with their role. Such functions/interventions could usefully be incorporated into leadership development programmes. In addition, we suggest that such interventions have the potential to support practicing leaders in developing their ongoing capability and capacity in this area by raising their self-awareness as to when they need further ‘supervision-like’ interventions and for increasing their resources for seeking/creating it.
In exploring this topic, we are working with ‘True North’-style peer support groups, taking place as part of the Core Capabilities module within the LU full time MBA programme and comprising practicing leaders and managers, to understand what psychological and emotional support senior leaders seek, and how leadership learning interventions can help participants develop ongoing personal resources in dealing with the emotional and psychological challenges they will face as practicing leaders.