Browsing by Author "Gordon, David"

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    Challenging the mechanisms of business
    (Cross Productions Ltd, 2023-07-14) Stokes, Peter; Gordon, David; Smith, Kerry
    The Doctor of Business Administration (DBA) programme is aimed at middle and senior managers who want to elevate their careers, senior professionals wanting to add a leading edge to their business, entrepreneurs who aren’t afraid to question how society operates, and those who want to transform businesses by moving into consultancy or non-executive directorship.
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    Managing post-Brexit/post-Covid extremes in SME businesses – A novel role for curriculum co-creation between SMEs and business schools
    (Cairn, 2023-08-08) Gordon, David; Stokes, Peter; Beckinsale, Martin
    Abstract Extremes have become increasingly prevalent in the 21st Century. Recent exemplars of such events have been the Covid pandemic and the exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union (colloquially termed Brexit). The repeated occurrence of such extreme events is having major impacts on businesses and causing many to rethink their business models. Importantly, as is commonly the case in many developed economies, a majority of employment takes place through Small-to-Medium-Sized (SME) scale businesses rather than larger corporate entities. This makes SMEs an important engine room for the economy. Equally, graduates – with changing generational social values – appear to be increasingly attracted to SMEs rather more corporate graduate recruitment programmes as they often find that the SME community responds better to their contemporary value systems and approaches. University business schools are responsible for educating these students and future employees. However, in recent years, there have been serious question marks regarding the relevance and usefulness of business school curricula. While much of extant curricula are focused on corporate global operations and issues, much less considers the SME context. This is particularly of paramount importance if continuing extreme events such as Covid and Brexit are to be appropriately approached by new graduate employees and SMEs. Therefore, this paper looks at scoping the potential to co-construct a curriculum between SMEs and a business school. The approach engages stakeholder and experiential theories in conjunction with authentic assessment theory in order to develop a response. The field methodology involved interviews with SME firms, former students/graduates and enterprise orientated academics in order to identify the issues and the possible process that might be required. The paper develops a conceptual model of what is likely to be required to build a co-constructed curriculum and discusses the issues involved and managerial implications. Overall, the paper proposes that initiatives such as curriculum co-construction are likely to be key in providing a response to the Covid and Brexit types of extremes which are characterising current business climates. Key words: Covid; Brexit; Extremes; SMEs; Curriculum; Co-construction; Graduate, Business Schools.