Faculty and Students of the Future

Following on from Chapter 9, this chapter considers some of the arguments and implications related to the changing nature of students and the increasing demands for different skills and perspectives in terms of faculty members. These entail factors that are potentially important at the individual level of universities and business schools. For example, demands related to research, teaching, administration and the impact of online technology, and increasing influences from global competition and non-traditional providers of management education. In addition, there is the influence of an increasingly consumer/stakeholder-orientated approach that is being demanded by students in the current university and business-school environment. All of these elements arguably require increasing flexibility and a wider range of skills than are currently used by existing faculty; there is an increased need for faculties to cross traditional inter-organizational boundaries and to engage more effectively with the external business community and other sectors, for example, the non-profit sector (Muff et al., 2013; Gibb & Haskins, 2014). On top of these influences there are those that come from changing environmental factors, such as PESTE- related factors that have been explored to some extent in the earlier chapters of this book.