One of the more practical things I learnt in school was how to write a cheque. It wasn’t one of the most academically challenging lessons I remember, but it was one of the more useful in my later life!
This lesson was part of a CSE in Commerce. I recall that it was my second favourite subject (maths being the first), not least because it was taught by the larger than life Mr Brown, a gruff, surly, overweight and scruffy individual who had the habit of chucking board rubbers at students who were not paying attention (usually me). I liked Mr Brown. He wasn’t everyone’s favourite, however. I remember the graffiti scrawled on the sports hall wall which said ‘Mr Brown is a fat bald man’ – factually correct, if unkind to point it out so publicly.
When I scraped the grades I needed to study A Levels at college (I wasn’t welcome in the Sixth Form at my school – that was made abundantly clear), the more sexy sounding Business Studies was an obvious choice. And it was for kids like me: ones who couldn’t handle proper subjects.
35 years later, here I am still teaching the subject. In many ways, little has changed, certainly not the syllabus which includes some hopelessly dated content.
Back then, Business Studies interested me in a way most other subjects did not. It was about the real world! It seemed like the sort of thing I could actually use to do something useful in life. It helped me understand what all those people (like my dad) did when they dressed up in suits and caught the train into work every morning. Most importantly, though, it was a subject I could do well at. I think the euphemism is ‘accessible’.
Over the years, I fell out of love with the subject. I found my academic mojo in my 30s and started to see that Business Studies was… well, a bit of a mess from a disciplinary point of view. My head was turned by the more conceptually abstract Economics which seemed to have everything Business Studies didn’t: rigour, academic grounding, a conceptual framework, serious theorists, credibility, depth.
In short, I became a bit of a snob about business education. You’ll find plenty of teachers out there with a similar attitude. They are usually in a Business and Economics department somewhere doing all they can to fill their timetables with A Level Economics classes and steering lower attaining students towards the ‘more accessible’ business course.
And yet, Business and Management degrees are the most popular in the UK and USA, and MBAs are increasingly sought after (and expensive), enabling graduates to command high salaries and prestigious jobs.
Furthermore, the subject is quite popular post-16 and, in my experience, is still one of those subjects that students often rank as one of their favourites, for many of the same reasons that drew me to it many years ago.
So, what is problematic about Business Studies as a school subject? And what might make me fall back in love with it?
Identity
As a school subject, Business is a strange mish-mash of disciplinary and professional knowledge domains. It borrows from academic disciplines such as economics, psychology and sociology, and from professional fields such as accountancy, marketing and manufacturing. In this sense, it suffers from the same identity problem as Geography, except at least Geography has two clear domains: human and physical geography.
The first problem the subject therefore has is it derives neither from a single academic discipline (like physics or, psychology does) or a professional discipline (like nursing or law). One could claim it be a modern academic discipline I suppose as Business and Management is a field of study in academia, but it is a loose and ill-defined one. What exactly are the traditions by which knowledge builds in the ‘discipline’? We have a fairly good conception of what it means to be an historian, for example, but not even a word for people who knowledge-build in business education. And if you want to claim it is a professional discipline then what profession, I ask, are we preparing for? I’m not sure ‘business person’ is an occupation!
But this looseness is also the subject’s strength. At school level, it offers a toe in the water for a variety of disciplines and professions.
The second problem is the subject’s conceptual fragmentation.
For those unfamiliar with the subject, Business syllabi are usually structured by ‘functional areas’ of business (e.g. marketing, production, Human Resources) – ‘inside’ the business – then build to consider the business in its environment (e.g. markets, international trade, societal influences). Structuring the knowledge in this way leads to a pragmatic ‘how businesses work’ emphasis. Consequently, Business teachers tend to follow a topic-based approach when teaching, perhaps teaching a unit on marketing followed by a unit on business finance. The ‘links’ between topics are made to various degrees of effectiveness according to how well developed the teacher’s subject knowledge is.
This structure is potentially, in my view, academically limiting. I’ll come back to why in a short while.
The third problem for the subject is it’s reputation for being ‘applied’ and academically light-weight. This results in lower attaining students often being steered towards the subject and a lower status for the subject than ‘theoretical’ subjects like economics, psychology or the sciences.
Business education is indeed rooted in the ‘real world’ and where theory is taught it often begins with examples and works gently up towards generalisations (using the tool of case studies, which appear in many a Business Studies lesson). This is almost the exact opposite of its sister subject Economics, which floats high in abstraction and rarely deigns to dip into reality to illustrate a point (at least at school level). It is this fundamental difference that causes business and economics teachers to recoil in horror when it is suggested that the subjects are ‘very similar’.
We don’t teach students how to write cheques, like we did in the subject’s predecessor, but we do teach practical techniques and through the use of many real-world examples. We tell stories. It is this slant to the subject that gives it a reputation for being academically light weight. And yet, history begins with stories before making its generalisations, but is never branded as being for the ‘less able’.
But the grounding of the subject in the real world is also a strength. It feels fresh for students tired of being asked to constantly think in the abstract. It feels more relevant to many.
The final problem – and this is a problem with how the subject is interpreted by exam boards, not intrinsic to the subject itself – is it’s failure to move on. If I were to tell you that the most recent motivational theory mentioned in many syllabuses is from the 1960s, you may understand what I mean. I’m all for teaching classical theory and the chronological progression of theorising in the subject, but the world has moved on!
We can see that Business Studies has an identity problem. It cannot decide what it is. It is seen by others as low status. It is conceptually fragmented. It is held back by its utilitarian and capitalist associations.
And yet! It helps young people see the world differently. It speaks to them as they grow up in a consumerist society. It leads somewhere. It is diverse, multi-faceted and could even be dynamic.
Reconceptualising the subject
A starting point might be to create a more unified conceptual framework for the subject. Doing so may help us be clearer about what the subject is (and is not), promote insight and depth of understanding, and move away from the topic-based approach which segments the subject into silos of knowledge.
I have recently read Sarah Cottingham’s excellent Ausubel’s Meaningful Learning in Action in which she outlines the idea of subsumers: high level concepts under which the detailed knowledge of a subject can be organised (or ‘subsumed’). The point of identifying and using subsumers in teaching, Cottingham argues, is to provide a conceptual framework so that students have an organising structure to subsume new knowledge into.
This idea struck a chord with me as I find the topic based approach to teaching Business Studies can lead to the impression that subject content ‘belongs’ within the topic rather than to a broader conceptual framework. This is problematic as students do not see the conceptual links between ideas in different topics.
Perhaps an example would help. I have recently been teaching productivity to my year 12 class. The concept is taught within a unit which covers the ‘production’ functional area within a business (with a particular emphasis on manufacturing rather than service provision). Students therefore conclude that ‘productivity’ is a concept within ‘production’, specifically to do with manufacturing. When I teach them about how to improve productivity, something funny happens (at least it is funny to them). Two of the ‘ways’ of increasing productivity are through training and motivating workers. Yet, training and motivation are topics covered within the unit on Human Resources.
For the last 30 years, I would pause at this point and highlight the ‘link’ between the two units. But this is only necessary because the knowledge has been structured in this particular way. Furthermore, the link is portrayed as horizontal i.e. between two topics at the same level conceptually.
If we apply Ausubel’s subsumer idea, we might think of these concepts in a different, more hierarchical, way. Productivity is in fact quite a high level concept which is not limited to the functional area of production. If we move up the conceptual hierarchy, we see that productivity is subordinate to the higher level concept of ‘the efficient allocation of resources’, and beyond that to the basic economic problem which is commonly stated as ‘scarce resources, infinite wants’.
An idea I taught immediately before productivity – capacity utilisation – which I taught as a ‘related concept’ is in fact a subordinate concept to productivity as, conceptually, it is a particular form of productivity to do with the total productive capacity of a business.
What we have here are Russian Dolls of concepts, each one subsumed by another. By failing to define a conceptual framework, we risk limiting students’ ability to think holistically and deeply about the subject. We create fragmented islands of knowledge which we later try to unite, a flat rather than hierarchical structure.
What might the high level subsumers for the subject of Business Studies be? My initial attempts have generated the following ‘top level’ concepts: meeting consumer needs profitably; goals and motives; the impact of business; analysis and forecasting; decision making and implementation; specialisation and the division of labour; managing change and growth; constraints on business activity; market mechanisms.
I have been through the syllabus we use and am confident that the content is subsumed in its entirety by the above, and could be organised hierarchically to give depth of understanding to these overarching ideas. Importantly, these subsumers cut across the functional areas of business and ‘external environment’ content such that they may be revisited and built on frequently in a well-sequenced curriculum. For example, goals and motives arises in considering what drives entrepreneurs to start businesses, the objectives of public and private sector organisations, the motives of stakeholders, and the role business plays in the economy and society.
A conceptual framework such as the one described (but it needs a lot more work!) might help us sequence teaching better and help students assimilate the subject content more effectively, gradually building a depth of knowledge. It might also help us address the image problem Business Studies has of being lightweight and fragmented through clarifying the ‘big questions’ the subject is attempting to address.
We might also examine the ways different disciplines and professions have attempted to answer these big questions, making the study of knowledge-building in the subject an object of study. Rather than worry that the field is not united by one approach to knowledge-building, we can celebrate the fact that the subject builds through insights from multiple disciplines and professions. The academic discipline of psychology provides insights into the motives and goals of workers and how businesses might improve human productivity (two of the subsumer concepts). Whereas the professional discipline of accountancy overlays the productivity question with a monetary layer, thereby casting the question in terms of efficiency. The subject’s multiplicity becomes a strength, refusing to be limited by one disciplinary perspective and seeking insight where it can be found.
New knowledge is being generated all of the time, across disciplines, into business organisations and the role they play in a modern economy. The subject should provide a grounding in the classical theory and the cutting edge work going on, whether that be seeding entrepreneurship in developing economies or applying the young field of behavioural economics, a discipline at the intersection of psychology and economics.
This – we should be telling our students – is a dynamic subject that enables you to see the world in new ways. It is shamelessly interdisciplinary. It is a smorgasbord from which you can sample your future academic and professional pursuits. It seeks to answer big questions and provides a conceptual framework which promotes flexibility and depth of knowledge. It should be a subject you feel in love with, not just because it is relevant and accessible, but because it challenges intellectually and leads you down intellectual rabbit holes.
But to make these claims, we need to think afresh about the subject. In an era where identity is everything, we should ask what exactly is Business Studies? I need to know what it is I am falling (back) in love with.
Matthew Evans 