Personal and professional development for business students
- Submitting institution
-
Bath Spa University
- Unit of assessment
- 17 - Business and Management Studies
- Output identifier
- 1582
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Sage
- ISBN
- 9781446282205
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- March
- Year of publication
- 2015
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- 23 - Education
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- As a researcher, Dowson operates at the interface between management education and the humanities. This stems from his conviction that professional development must supplement ‘how to’ practice-based approaches with posing ‘why’ questions in the search for meaning. Consequently, Dowson set out to create a book designed to support teacher and student learning in terms of its content and pedagogy; but also to bring something new to professional development studies through a distinctive identity-development focus. These two elements contribute to knowledge in how universities might deliver professional development (PD) at undergraduate and Masters levels, where the work operates as a textbook.
Adopting a reflective and philosophically rooted approach, the book grapples with the challenges of, as one reviewer put it, ‘how to become an employable person in the protean world of postmodernity’. Dowson utilised action research and multiple cycles of curriculum development; module delivery and learning; and further pedagogic research, including the thinking of Erik Erikson. The book breaks new ground by integrating professional development with Corporate Responsibility; and it brings existentialist views together with development theory through its view of integrity as focused in the development of narrative and dialogue.
This research output, therefore, by integrating these instrumental and ontological modes of practice and thinking, and through the action-reflection cycle applied to professional development pedagogy, has produced new knowledge. Many of the book’s core themes - including professional identity development, gaining contextual intelligence, and achieving developmental adaptation - are central to professional development in the contemporary late-modern context.
The book was published in 2015 and, since then, it has helped to shape student and teacher learning and practice. Work-based learners have used the textbook to understand the centrality of PD in their MBA studies.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
