From ivory tower to battlefield: investigating the philisophies of curriculum change and development

As our world shifts to the "post" - i.e., from capitalism to post-capitalism, from industrialism to postindustrialism, from modernism to post-modernism, and alike, we are also experiencing a sense of newness that pushes us to respond. Porter & McKibbin (1988) suggest that in the field of business education there are now multiple and conflicted interpretations of what and how material ought to be taught. Now, even more than ever, as the world intertwines through global commerce and instantaneous communication, that the business community, university administrators, faculty, and, indeed students, all have a keen stake in business education. However, faculty still fulfils a primary role through their responsibility in the designing and delivering of the curriculum and in determining what and how business students learn in school. Given this current mix of diverse stakeholders, pulling in many different and often opposite directions, faculty must come to grips with how they want to proceed. Our purpose in this paper is to review a number of current models and philosophical approaches used to develop curriculum, and then follow the development of a post-graduate curriculum in Management Studies in order to grasp the impact of model and philosophy selection on educational direction.