WHOSE business knowledge?

WHOSE perspective are we adopting in the IB Business & Management course? An organisation has many stakeholders, so why do we insist on studying it from mainly the perspective of managers and shareholders? What about the knowledge of organisations required by customers, pressure groups, employees, unions, the great invisible public? Consider Union Carbide and Bhopal.

As a member of the first curriculum review committee which began reviewing the previous IB syllabus back in 1996, I was glad to see that the current syllabus has many encouraging features which were anticipated then. But one of my proposals then was that the IB should move away from presenting just one perspective, and should also provide opportunities (as it does analogously in the Group 4 project) to bring other disciplines such as history, sociology and anthropology to bear on the study of organisations (rather than insist that all issues be framed within a decision-making framework - who is making the decisions?). Unsurprisingly, my proposal fell on unreceptive ears at the time (and no criticism of my colleagues is implied), so I made it again in 2000 so that some discussion can be generated before the next review is due. Again, I was ignored.

I am aware that this would make the course into something other than a Business Management course and that teachers would resist the idea because of lack of material in the form of a convenient textbook (most of which adopt a management perspective, being designed for management courses), as well as lack of training. But consider this: who was trained to teach courses like ITGS or Environmental Systems? Where are the "textbooks" in these subjects? Shouldn't we as teachers strive to go beyond our training if we are teaching "for the 21st century"?

Why am I proposing this breach of tradition? Because organisations nowadays affect many more people in diverse ways, not all of them benign, and therefore should be open to the scrutiny of a well-informed public, not just of managers and investors. The absence of such scrutiny tends to turn them into "unaccountable tyrannies". Of course, many business courses now include discussions of ethics and social responsibilities, but these are usually peripheral to the main thrust and direction of the courses.

More broadly, if if we are educating for more democratic societies, then the PARTs of democracy we should be should be emphasizing are Participation, Accountability, Responsiveness and Transparency. Our courses should provide for a plurality of views and perspectives that encourage these aspects. I don't think the IBOshould consciously associate itself with any one perspective in a course which is as deeply ideological as a business and management course.

Comments

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I agree with the offered proposal in this entry and want to share some similar ideas by writing a comment.

I believe that the method of considering all the major and minor facts within an area of knowledge should be applied in all IB courses (plus the Turkish Educational System courses: being a bit too optimistic here). This learning method is not only more realistic than the basic single-concentration method on subjects (which we nowadays use in the Turkish Educational system), but also a method which develops reasoning skills and broadens the perspectives of a student, since it encourages the learners to think about the "bigger picture", and consequently to figure out all the points in a certain area of knowledge.

I think that, whatever the subject a student concentrates on, (geography, sociology, literature, business or etc.) s/he has to form his/her knowledge as a composition of all the areas of knowledge s/he learns, and try to analyze that subject from this inter-disciplinary method. This will enable him/her to grasp the bigger pictures within the studies they come across with.

As a member of Koç School's IB students, I am glad to study by this learning method. First of all, Theory of Knowledge is the leader course which encourages us to collaborate all areas of knowledge. This inter-disciplinary method is used in social studies department; for analyzing a history case, we apply our knowledge in sociology, geography and psychology and then try to form the cause-relationship in our minds. In English and Turkish courses, we discuss some historical background information before reading the literary works, which enables us to put the knowledge in a context and to better understand the authors' ideas.

In your IB B&M class I believe that we are successful in putting your proposal into practice. For instance, we consider the NGOs, NPOs as well as the managers and shareholders while discussing the applicability of PAST analysis on Human Resource Management. We always use frameworks which consider the every aspect of the subject.

I find this method very useful and I can say that it helps me a lot in forming a vision of the world. I hope that this methodology will one day start up in the Turkish Educational System and allow students have broader and more realistic perspectives in life.