This article explores how the International Labour Organization (ILO) introduced management development programs in Argentina as a pilot project in developing countries in the late 1950s. By studying how the ILO worked together with actors at the national level, the article reveals how the ILO’s original idea to focus on top management development was reshaped through a dialogue with local actors within the context of tripartite cooperation between the government, business organizations, and unions. While the initiative was successful during the project period, it collapsed when Argentina’s government closed down the national productivity center with which the ILO was cooperating. While the tripartite principle was valuable for the first achievements, it was extremely vulnerable without the support of all partners.

Executive education programs offered by business schools became a global phenomenon for developing top managers in the 1960s. These programs were established in more than 40 countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America in less than two decades. This article explores the phenomenon in three different Latin American contexts: Central America, Peru, and Colombia. In all these cases, initiatives led to successful executive programs, which contributed to the growth of business schools that gradually achieved high international reputation. By studying the way that various U.S. actors interacted differently with local actors in the three cases, the article contributes to three discussions within business history: the history of Americanization, management education, and the alternative business history of emerging markets.

There have been calls in recent literature for researchers to open up the “black box” of business schools to explore their dynamics and behaviors in-depth for a context-sensitive understanding of their evolution. Drawing on the case of ESCP, a leading business school in France, this article shows how European business schools’ curricula have evolved since the late 1960s in response to a combination of powerful actors’ demands and the emergence of new processes in the educational domain. This article finds that while European business schools’ curricula reflect the influence of internal and external forces, they do not converge to a common type, because of the different markets and political and cultural contexts in which they operate. It also finds that business schools in Europe purposefully do not imitate those in United States.

Leader development has traditionally focused on adults. However, evidence suggests that these efforts are limited to developing and refining skills, encouraging some reflection, and helping the learners plan for the future. The underlying problem is that these are people whose brains are fully developed and relatively set. Hence, adult leader development works with what is already there. In this controversial essay, we argue that leader development activities should instead be directed towards children. Their brains are forming and leader development work will create and shape the leaders of tomorrow. We draw the important caveat that relatively little is known about influencing leadership in young brains making this a fertile and exciting, if challenging, area for leader development research.

The market for agribusiness extension activities and programming is diverse, intensely competitive, and national or international in scope. It is a market that agricultural economists cannot serve alone. Despite these complexities, a strong agribusiness extension effort is critical to the success of agribusiness research and teaching programs. Agribusiness extension opportunities include extending traditional agricultural economics research, small business management programs, economic/technical education programs, and management education. Keys for conducting successful agribusiness extension programs include understanding client needs, locating and employing the best instructional talent available, and flawless execution of the activity. Stimulating faculty interest in agribusiness extension is a major challenge. Most schools will have the opportunity to focus their traditional extension education efforts on the non-traditional agribusiness audience. A few schools will be successful in developing a new extension program emphasis in agribusiness management education. Both types of contributions are important for the long-run viability of the profession.

Management research has been challenged by the altering realities of organization life, job roles, and individual motivations that have long guided traditional theoretical thinking. The classical frameworks regarding managerial performance requirements have been largely based upon organizationally driven underpinnings. We propose a cognitive shift suggesting that individually driven roles and desires are impacting the relevancy of conventional job requirements. Our study analyzes the utilization of managerial skills, mindsets, and roles as perceived by 259 executives representing nine industries and ~200 organizations. The results reveal that the interpretation and application of managerial roles are primarily influenced by the individual’s intentions rather than adherence to the current organizationally based theoretical taxonomy as taught by many business schools. These findings illuminate the gap between the vast amount of effort researchers and educators have expended on taxonomic precision and its questionable relationship to organizational and individual learning and effectiveness. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed along with recommendations to extend the current research.

Given the need to provide increased opportunities for busy managers to learn, but their reduced availability to attend formal on-campus classes, management students and corporate employers have turned to Distance Education (DE) provision as an alternative to face-to-face (FtF) programmes.

Providing flexible delivery, however, does not guarantee that the learning requirements of management students will be met, and needs to be considered in terms of the limits and enhancements to learning that different flexible methodologies support. DE comes in many forms and pedagogics, uses a variety of media, and tends to be designed with the individual learner in mind, whereas the demand for work-relevant management skills requires Management Education (ME) programmes to include collaborative as well as individual modes of learning.

Managers require integrative knowledge, emotional intelligence, and complex social and perceptual skills and attitudes that increasingly reflect ethical and values-oriented behaviour. At issue in the shift from FtF to DE is the need to provide opportunities for the ongoing social and interpersonal skills development that would normally occur within the classroom. For DE to add value to management learners it needs to offer flexibility that supports quality work-relevant education.

In this paper the author explores whether print-based DE combined with Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) technologies provides a solution. CMC is a networked electronic medium; used in conjunction with print-based DE it can provide opportunities for group interactivity and collaborative learning. Since the skills required for effective CMC participation are also synergistic with the socio-cultural and technical skills required of today's ‘networked manager’, the author suggests that there are further advantages to including CMC as part of the ME curriculum. From a review of the literature, the author concludes that there is much benefit in combining the two methodologies provided that:

• appropriate pedagogy is designed into the combined media

• the flexibility and educational needs of management learners are met

• educators and learners learn how to learn by the new media.

The concept of ‘emotional labour’ is concerned with occasions when feelings are managed to create publically observable emotions in organizational settings in ways that involve them being ‘sold for a wage’ and therefore taking on an ‘exchange value’ (Hochschild (1983: 7). Drawing on an in-depth literature review, this paper explore grounds for arguing that business academics in Australia are experiencing emotional labor. The authors consider the application of findings concerned with emotional labor in a variety of occupations in relation to the context of university business schools. More specifically, they discuss how two decades of increasing marketisation, commercialisation and service orientated university practices may have contributed to emotional labor in Australian university business schools. The paper draws two conclusions. Firstly, educational managers need to be better informed about the positive and negative implications of emotional labor so that they can develop appropriate strategies, guidelines and workplace environments at the organizational level. Secondly, that a review of the literature suggests that empirical research is warranted in order to address the question posed in the title of the paper.

This paper argues that management education needs to consider a trend in learning design which advances creative learning through an alliance with art-based pedagogical processes. A shift is required from skills training to facilitating transformational learning through experiences that expand human potential, facilitated by artistic processes.

This creative learning focus stems from a qualitative and quantitative analysis of an arts-based intervention for management development, called Management Jazz, conducted over three years at a large Australian University.

The paper reviews some of the salient literature in the field, including an ‘Artful Learning Wave Trajectory’ Model. The Model considers four stages of the learning process: capacity, artful event, increased capability, and application/action to produce product. Methodology for the field-based research analysis of the intervention outcomes is presented. Three illustrative examples of arts-based learning are provided from the Management Jazz program. Finally, research findings indicate that artful learning opportunities enhance capacity for awareness of creativity in one's self and in others, leading, through a transformative process, to enhanced leaders and managers. The authors conclude that arts-based management education can enhance creative capacity and develop managers and leaders for the 21st century business environment.

In recent years the Business Council of Australia (BCA) has drawn attention to the importance of the availability of a well-trained supply of employees for the Australian workplace. Specifically the BCA highlighted the benefits of a quality education imparting skills in the areas of collaboration, teamwork and leadership all of which greatly assist the effective practice of creativity, innovation and strategy. This paper makes a useful contribution to teaching practice in several ways. The paper links comments from the BCA to a significant and ongoing debate in the strategy literature on the best approaches to teaching the practice of strategy. The paper then demonstrates, with case studies from the RMIT University MBA and the Central Queensland University MBA programs, different approaches to how this can be done. This is followed by a critical discussion of the literature and case studies. Suggestions are made for future research and teaching practice.

The issues of business ethics, corporate social responsibility and sustainability have come to attract increasing attention in management education in recent years, at least from the perspective of potential employers, accrediting bodies and business school alumni. This paper examines the extent of penetration of these three subjects in to global MBA curricula through an examination of course content and structure pertaining to the Financial Times Global MBA Rankings top 100, the Australian Financial Review BOSS top 17 ranked Australian MBAs, and the seven MBA programmes currently offered by universities in New Zealand. The findings reveal that: a variety of delivery modes are utilised; while the teaching of ethics has achieved considerable penetration, only about fifty percent of MBA programmes include it as a required subject (and even then it may only constitute part of a larger subject); and that the teaching of sustainability has achieved much lower penetration, with only six percent of MBA programmes examined incorporating the topic into their core curriculum. Implications for the design of MBA programmes and future research directions are then discussed within the context of a business environment in which increasing prominence is being given to these subject areasx.

Traditional approaches to leadership assert that leadership is a definite quality of leaders. In contrast, the social constructionist approach conceptualises leadership as a quality of observers. The goal of this paper is to show how this philosophical base can be used to create a teaching strategy for leadership. In this strategy, there are three learning objectives: understanding the philosophical approach; revealing students’ lay theories of leadership; and, skill development. The lessons revolve around understanding how leadership perceptions form so that students appreciate how they are influenced and, in turn, how they might influence other people's perceptions of themselves.

Feedback to students is an important feature of assessment in higher education. Constructive and timely feedback guides students to improve on a continuous basis in the process of their tertiary education. This paper outlines an exploratory study based on survey research, which was conducted on a large sample of undergraduate students on management courses in a New Zealand university. Following a review of the relevant literature a conceptual model was developed using systems thinking principles. A questionnaire was designed consisting of 20 closed Likert questions and two open questions designed to explore students’ perceptions of the feedback given to them on their formative assessments. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were undertaken of the data collected from over 600 valid responses. The quantitative analysis consisted of descriptive statistics, an exploratory factor analysis and Pearson's correlation analysis. The four main factors to emerge were: improvement of work quality, improvement of results, need for feedback and quality of feedback. The qualitative analysis was based on these themes. The results of these analyses are discussed in this paper. This paper attempts to contribute to the ongoing discussion regarding the better understanding of the complex relationships between feedback and student learning in tertiary level management education.