| Popis: |
Business schools provide an interesting context for studies from cultural perspectives. Both outsiders and insiders to these universities maintain distinctive stereotypes that are supposed to describe business students’ and teachers’ orientations and values. This chapter looks back and reflects on a narrative study on businessschool culture (Leppala and Paivio 2001). In the end, the study in question became an intervention into the local culture of a business school. My account of the project will present an example of how university studying, and more particularly, business studying, can be approached both culturally and in the spirit of participative research. There are no generally accepted criteria for what can be considered a cultural approach to higher education or university studying (Valimaa 1995; see also Mantyla 2007). In this project, cultural approach has meant mainly two things. Firstly, we proceeded from the studies of disciplinary cultures, and conceptualized business education itself as a process in which the students become socialized into different disciplinary and work cultures (e.g., Becher 1989; Clark 1987; Ylijoki 1998). We focused not only on how this process actually becomes realized in business education, but also on what kind of cultures and communities are actually meaningful in the everyday life of the business students. Secondly, in this project cultural approach meant that we were studying our own university, that is, we were doing research “from within”. We have participated in this study first as students, and later on as teachers at this university. As we were |
