The Leicester MBA – Challenging the management status quo
July 31-2013
The Leicester MBA – Challenging the management status quo
Your decision to join an MBA programme will be one of the most important decisions you will ever make. If you demand first rate academic standards and are ready for the hard work involved you will find studying an MBA programme to be a rewarding and enriching experience.The University of Leicester School of Management is known for the ‘Leicester model’ of management studies.
As a business management school, we take a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of management and organisations drawing from across the social sciences, and unlike most mainstream western business schools, our concern is as much with challenging the status quo rather than perpetuating it.
A Leicester Professor recently made the headlines by challenging Alan Sugar and the popular BBC reality programme, The Apprentice to explain how the “sociopathic” behaviour shown by candidates appearing in the series is useful in business. Martin Parker, professor of organisation and culture, says “The Apprentice presents the idea that you have to be sociopathic in your relations with others in order to succeed in business.”
Professor Parker argues that the portrayal of the business world, the values presented and the behaviours shown in the programme are sending out a message that is the polar opposite to what the School of Management wishes to communicate to its students. “The business education offered by the University of Leicester School of Management is about ethics, diversity and responsibility – not bullying, one-upmanship and backstabbing.”
The School of Management looks for MBA students who are willing to look at management in a different light and have some of their basic managerial assumptions challenged. Our aim is to create space to debate management and encourage students to critically analyse and evaluate management problems and issues. We want to challenge common assumptions about the techniques and goals of organising, managing, accounting, finance and marketing in a globalising world and help students to work through the implications of these perspectives for their management practice.
Whatever your chosen discipline for an MBA degree, our goal is to equip you with a range of relevant theories, techniques and concepts. However, whereas most business schools stop there, we go further: we guide you as you unpick these concepts, challenge them and question their relevance to contemporary society for we believe that management is too important not to debate.