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Medical education is an evidence-driven professional field that operates in an increasingly regulated environment as compared to other fields within universities. The purpose of this paper is to establish the extent to which Porter’s five competitive forces framework (Porter, 2008) can drive the management of medical schools in Australia.

Drawing on data from semi-structured interviews with over 20 staff from 6 case study Australian medical schools, this paper explores Australian medical education, by looking at the current policy context, structure and interactions between organizations within the system.

The findings provide evidence that environmental forces affect the nature of competition in medical education, and that competitive advantage can be gained by medical schools from a sustained analysis of the industry in which they operate in. Consequently, it is possible to apply a pre-dominantly profit-oriented framework to higher education.

As an industry facing increasing pressure toward marketization and competition, the findings provide sufficient evidence that an analysis of higher education as an industry is possible.

The findings provide evidence that strategic leadership and management in higher education should encompass greater levels of delegation and decision making at all levels. Effective leadership should focus on creating an inspiring vision of the future through a sustained analysis of the industry in which they operate.

The study has made a key contribution through an industry analysis of Australian medical education, which provide important implications for leadership and management in higher education. The study is of significant value to researchers as well as senior management in higher education.

Universities are investing billions of dollars in building infrastructure, with the design of learning spaces driven by technological developments and long-standing changes in pedagogical theory and practice. The aim of the study is to investigate the alignment between pedagogy and space by responding to a single research question: What is the relationship between the purpose, process, place and product of student learning in higher education?

Drawing on Beckers et al.’s (2015) purpose–process–place framework, the study uses an online survey and photo elicitation method to gather perspectives from educators and students in one Australian university about their learning spaces. A hybrid approach consisting of inductive and deductive coding to thematic analysis was used to find repeated patterns of meaning.

A total of 24 images of learning spaces were received from 8 educators and 16 students. Thematic analysis of the images and responses by participants highlights the importance of the pedagogical affordances of the learning environment and the product of learning, which are aligned to the purpose–process–place of learning.

This study provided a robust approach grounded in data to understand the alignment between space and pedagogy. Articulating students learning as an output of the alignment between space and pedagogy has important implications for the design of learning spaces and pedagogical practices in higher education. One limitation to the study, however, is noteworthy. The surveys had limited responses. Whilst the small response rates may not necessarily lead to biased results, it is acknowledged that a larger sample is likely to give more reliable results to enable the theory to be generalised.

The study’s findings extend the purpose–process–place framework to include pedagogical affordances and the product of learning. The purpose, process, place, pedagogical affordance and product framework posits that pedagogical affordances within a place must be deployed in such a way so that teaching and learning processes can contribute to enhancing educational goals or purpose to improve student learning outcomes, i.e. product. This framework provides a context for understanding the relationships between pedagogy and space in higher education.