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Corporate Strategy (CS) has traditionally played a pivotal role in the undergraduate business curriculum and is normally a required final year course. While the managerial experience of students at postgraduate level provides a clear justification for requiring students to study CS, the decline of work experience and the massification of UK higher education raises question marks regarding the relevance of CS in undergraduate business education. CS may also be criticised as being overly concerned with simplified and abstract theories inappropriate in a rapidly changing post‐Fordist economy. In response to these challenges there needs to be a re‐conceptualisation of CS as a preparation for empowered and informed employees rather than as a preparation for potential senior managers. The teaching of CS also needs to take greater account of changes in the economic environment such as the growth of smaller businesses and the importance of ethics.

The chapter reflects on the strengths and limitations of David Carpenter’s proposal to support the work of research ethics committees through consideration of the virtues required by their members. Carpenter’s approach has many strengths, responsibilising researchers and ethics committees, and increasing the scope for robust and active theoretical engagement with ethical issues. I bring two alternative perspectives on research ethics to bear on this discussion. First, I discuss work in care ethics and relational ethics, approaches to ethics that have some similarities with virtue ethics but also distinct differences. Bruce Macfarlane’s text, on which Carpenter draws, notes care ethics briefly. I offer a more detailed consideration of what this perspective can offer, both for research ethics and for the virtuous research ethics committee. This helps to identify the relationships that are missing from a virtue ethics focus. Further, a context sensitive relational approach suggests ways in which we can strengthen Carpenter’s proposals to help research ethics committees select between competing principles or virtues. Second, my research ethics expertise is in undergraduate teaching for a multidisciplinary course, and an enquiry-based learning programme, which allows students in mixed discipline groups to plan, conduct, report and present their own original social research. The research skills training provided includes an interactive introduction to research ethics, what they are for and why they matter. Since we aim to offer practical guidance to research ethics committees when they consider what they should do and how this should be done, such a first principles approach may be useful.

Discusses the problems associated with the successful organization of business start‐up projects at undergraduate level, including teamwork, the involvement of mentors and assessment methods. Student business projects also involve the development of a highly demanding set of skills. The weaknesses of student projects are identified principally with respect to financial projections and marketing strategy. Concludes that these projects are a valuable means of reinforcing theoretical business studies principles and foster more realistic and mature expectations of enterprise.

Over recent years there has been a considerable growth in the provision of client‐based postgraduate and post‐experience management education. Client‐based programmes delivered on company premises raise serious concerns connected with the educational quality of student experience and wider issues of academic freedom within higher education. Discusses the values of higher education, the learning environment, teaching style, politicization of knowledge and research tensions.

Acknowledging the claims of stakeholders is part of the new lexicon of higher education management. Institutions, through mission statements, now explicitly recognise their obligation to meet the needs of a range of stakeholders such as students, employers, professional associations, the government, the academic community, and wider society. However, while it is easy to list stakeholders, and promise to safeguard their various interests at the institutional level, significant conflicts can arise in managing their competing claims. Previously, stakeholder mapping has focused attention at the institutional level although the practical responsibility for managing these relationships often occurs at the micro or programme level. Drawing on interviews with programme leaders and lecturers involved in single company management education programmes, this paper explores lecturer understandings of stakeholder interests and relates these findings to different conceptions of quality. It is argued that such programmes face particular challenges in managing multiple, and often conflicting, stakeholder interests and expectations.

Points out that competence‐based education has been endorsed by Government and employers alike as a means of raising standards of management practice in the UK, though the highly prescriptive nature of the competence curriculum poses dangers to organizations seeking to release the human potential of managers. Contends that the over‐control of the management curriculum through competences encourages conformity and fails to challenge the received wisdom of current practice.

Describes the marginal accommodation of courses in business ethics within the business studies first degree curriculum. Focusing principally on the role of law and economics, argues that introductory subject study within business studies degrees plays a significant role in underpinning free‐market principles and undermining ethical concerns. As a result students are encouraged to regard business activity as legitimately distinct from society. Concludes that courses in business ethics are under pressure to conform to a vocational rationale demonstrating the market benefits of ethical behaviour rather than encouraging students to examine fundamentally the assumptions and effects of business practice. Also suggests that, as a final‐year option, discrete courses in business ethics do little to disturb the market orthodoxy of business studies students.

The academic sphere has in recent years become almost saturated in leadership-related processes, structures and positions. This is often explained through recourse to arguments concerning the pathologies of managerialism and the decline of academic autonomy. And yet one area where leadership-related thinking and development structures have not generally permeated is in relation to core research activities. As a result, thinking about research leadership, especially in relation to self-leadership and the governance of large inter-disciplinary ‘team science’ projects, is emerging as an important debate within academe. This chapter seeks to develop this debate by exploring what research leadership is and why it matters.

Critics argue that the core values of higher education, including academic freedom and intellectual detachment, conflict with the more prosaic aims and ethos of business and management education. Analyses the isolation of business and management studies within this culture by reference to its epistemological, academic, institutional, doctrinal and professional identity. Argues that the ethos of business and management departments closely resembles an academic culture despite perceptions to the contrary in the wider academic community. However, acceptance of business and management in the academy as a legitimate social profession dictates the need for a broader curriculum which treats humanistic values as a central, rather than peripheral, concern.

While the university as an institution is a great success story, one hears the constant chatter of the crises in higher education usually associated with the organizational transformation of universities. Regardless of one’s normative assessment of these observations, the institutional success of the university has been accompanied by the emergence of universities as organizational actors. I reflect on how these changes could alter the university as an institution, using the Australian higher education sector as an example. In doing so, I explore how universities as organizational actors, in responding to the demands of their external environment, set in motion a series of changes that redefine highly institutionalized categories, and, in doing so, radically remake the university as an institution.