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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.

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.

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.

THE ANCIENT and royal burgh of Stirling, at one time the capital of Scotland, was at the turn of the century the county town of Stirlingshire and the centre of a thriving agricultural community. With the exception of a carpet and woollen mill and some neighbouring coal mines, there was little industry in the town. This was reflected in its social structure. There was growing up in the village of Raploch, beneath the castle rock, a sizeable Irish community of labourers and artisans, but of a population of around 20,000 in 1900, middle class businessmen and shopkeepers predominated. The town's structure in turn was reflected in the nature of the Town Council, which, although not always conservative in politics, was generally conservative when faced with innovation, be it a swimming pool or a modern town centre. This might explain why in Stirling the public library movement was late in starting, nearly 25 years after the Public Libraries (Scotland) Act of 1870 authorising the use for library purposes of 1 d. in the £ from the rates. It might also explain why there was some opposition from the Town Council to providing for the upkeep of the library after its foundation.