Burke, D D et al --- "The twenty-first century and legal studies in business: preparing students to perform in a globally competitive environment" [2010] LegEdDig 20; (2010) 18(2) Legal Education Digest 13

• The twenty-first century and legal studies in business: preparing students to perform in a globally competitive environment

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The twenty-first century and legal studies in business: preparing students to perform in a globally competitive environment

D D Burke, R A Johnson and D J Kemp

27(1) Journal of Legal Studies Education, 2010, pp1-33

This article first examines the dynamic role business education must play in a flat world economy. Second, the article explains how legal courses in the business curricula already equip students with portable twenty-first-century skills and relevant academic content.

The article then advocates the acceptance of the Boyer Model of Scholarship, which defines scholarly pursuits in terms of activities involving teaching and learning, engagement with the relevant community, and basic research pursuits designed to expand discipline-based knowledge, as a means of enhancing the discipline’s already valuable role in business education. It explains the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), and provides resources for embarking on such scholarly pursuits, as well as examples. It then explores the Scholarship of Engagement and explains the importance of applied research in partnerships between universities and their communities from the perspective of economic competitiveness. Finally, it analyses an emerging trend that measures the significance of basic research in terms of its impact.

Passion, curiosity quotients, and initiative translate into the intellectual vitality demanded for success in the new millennium. Success has less to do with where individuals are educated and more to do with their level of practical and emotional intelligence and their willingness to put in the time required to achieve mastery in their field. The United States will be at a competitive disadvantage if its educational system fails to produce postsecondary school graduates who have a passion for learning and a solid work ethic.

Today, ideas for new products and services must evolve rapidly to a market-ready stage, necessitating the employment of cross-functional teams of employees who understand how the functions are connected. Business schools must graduate students who can contribute from day one because they have a holistic perspective. As a result, business educators must move beyond a focus on basic competency in core subjects and discipline-specific knowledge to promoting the development of the behavioural skills and tools required to be effective and productive in the workplace over a career that spans from managing projects to managing people to managing policies.

While twenty-first-century talent continues to need basic fundamental skills in order to be adaptable and synthesisers of information, it is the ability to create and innovate that will define career success in the future. What is referred to as left-brain work (i.e., computer programming, medicine, accounting) can be done cheaper by the rest of the world, so workers in the United States must do right-brain work better in the new Conceptual Age, which succeeds the Information Age. Jobs which will not be outsourced or automated in the new economy require creativity and innovation in conjunction with interdisciplinary combinations, such as design and technology or mathematics and art. To compete globally, education in the United States must emphasise the ability to work in teams and with people from different cultures and also must achieve the right balance between core knowledge and what educators call portable skills, such as critical thinking, making connections between ideas and knowing how to keep on learning. Market-valued assets in this context, as advanced by the American Association of Colleges and Schools of Business (AACSB), include learning experiences that develop communication skills, analytical abilities, and relevant knowledge.

For future business leaders, the ability to manage decision-making processes will be of crucial importance as well. Making a sound judgement involves an interpretive, flexible process that examines rules in context so as to produce a valid situational decision. Students must strengthen their ability to form judgements in an effective, efficient, and ethical fashion, especially because issues tend to be intractable at the senior management level.

A business education must add value by providing students with a unique portfolio of effective learning experiences, including research skills and engagement services and opportunities. It must leverage students’ leadership potential and management skills through career-focused academic studies. Additionally, business education programs must focus on preparing well-rounded graduates who are motivated by their own high level of intellectual vitality; have a strong respect for global diversity; sustainability, and the world at large; feel empowered to be active participants in their own learning journey; and seek to be members in good standing in their communities and knowledgeable and productive world citizens.

Undergraduate studies in business law contribute greatly to this complex educational mission required of twenty-first-century business schools. A legal education, which examines how courts interpret the Constitution, statutes, and regulations in the context of policy goals and objectives, is extremely useful for preparing students to make sound judgements in a business context. Business leaders must display finely honed critical thinking skills in the decision-making process as well, and law courses play a key role in providing a fertile multi-issue framework to develop such skills in students. The law curricula in business schools emphasise problem solving in a legal environment and generate intellectual curiosity through instruction in legal analysis and critical thinking.

While it is true that many business school courses are designed to develop critical thinking skills, legal analysis is a structured form of thinking that addresses the higher-ordered thinking skills of Bloom’s taxonomy – principally analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Legal analysis consists of five distinct phases: (1) legal research and analysis; (2) issue identification; (3) application of rules to facts; (4) synthesis of information; and (5) evaluation of the result.

Legal Studies in Business curricula uniquely are able to prepare students for this global economic environment that is characterised by continuous and rapid change. International Law courses further the appreciation of diverse cultures and legal systems and should be a part of business education in a global economy.

Just as law school prepares the next generation of leaders in the legal profession, legal undergraduate education in business prepares business students to lead with a moral compass.

Finally, an understanding of law is essential to competent leadership in that it allows a business manager to understand the consequences of strategic and tactical actions (or lack of actions) on personnel and business relationships. A survey of corporate executives concludes that law courses assist business persons to recognise and to manage legal problems. Another survey reveals that 88 per cent of graduates concluded that the law courses they took were helpful in making business decisions, with contracts and risk management topics being very useful in decision making. Legal studies in business courses empower students to know what steps to take to prevent disputes from arising and to make educated choices about resolving conflict.

Global developments suggest that it will be increasingly important to ensure that graduates of business schools are prepared to compete in an environment in which their knowledge of core content areas is supplemented by an ability to create, innovate, adapt, collaborate, and lead, while being self-directed, diligent, and ethical in their work.

Boyer supported the abandonment of the traditional teaching vs. research model in favour of a much broader definition of scholarship that encompasses the application of knowledge, the engagement of scholars with the broader world, and an examination of the teaching and learning process. Boyer advocated discarding the traditional three-legged stool, which comprises teaching, research, and service, in favour of scholarship in a broader context so that America’s colleges and universities could remain vital.

His new paradigm of scholarship recognises four separate, yet overlapping, functions of scholarship: The Scholarship of Discovery, which is designed to push back the frontiers of human knowledge; the Scholarship of Integration, which is designed to encourage interdisciplinary conversations; the Scholarship of Application, which is designed to move theory into practice; and the Scholarship of Teaching, or sharing knowledge to recognise the importance of fostering learning.

In essence, Boyer promoted a ‘more inclusive view of what it means to be a scholar – a recognition that knowledge is acquired through research, through synthesis, through practice, and through teaching ... these four categories – the scholarship of discovery, of integration, of application, and of teaching – divide intellectual functions that are tied inseparably to each other’. Recognising the value of faculty activities related to the Scholarships of Teaching, Integration, and Application, in addition to the traditional view of scholarship, that is, the Scholarship of Discovery, will strengthen the competitive edge of colleges and schools of business in the twenty-first century as previously described.

A good teacher understands how students achieve the types of learning found in Bloom’s taxonomy. ‘Whereas some professors might see their job as teaching the facts, concepts, and procedures of their subject, the [best] teachers ... emphasised the pursuit of answers to important questions and often encouraged students to use the methodologies, assumptions, and concepts from a variety of fields to solve complex problems’.

Scholarly teaching, or good teaching, however, is not the same concept as SoTL. In fact, conducting SoTL research can be a paradigm shift regarding how one thinks about teaching because it is aimed at testing and validating teaching methods. As a systematic and deliberate study of teaching and learning, it can be an amalgamation of all the Boyer forms of scholarship.

SoTL is a methodical inquiry and investigation that is characterised by a public account of some aspect of teaching, which is subject to critical peer review and subsequently used by others in building a body of community knowledge. As such, ‘teachers have an exceptional opportunity to engage actively in the scholarship of teaching by using their classrooms as laboratories for the study of teaching and learning’.

It is axiomatic that scholarly research designed to enhance the educational experience of future practitioners of business and management will be crucial, particularly in the competitive global economy.

Moreover, a cumulative increase in faculty doing SoTL research improves its credibility as well as the knowledge base.

Comparable to the effective execution of other scholarly research projects, executing a SoTL project consist of several steps: visualise, design, implement, analyse, and publicise. To conceptualise a SoTL project the following factors should be considered: (1) State a teaching and/or learning issue or problem concerning students, a course, an assignment, or a pedagogical strategy as a question; (2) What types of information are needed (and from what sources) to answer this question?; (3) What research strategies could be used to obtain this information and answer this question? (eg, self- reflective portfolio or other product, interviews, focus groups, analysis of existing data, content analysis, questionnaires, quasi-experiment, multi-methods); (4) Are there any practical problems in conducting this study?; (5) What resources are needed and how may they be obtained?; (6) What ethical issues must be considered in doing this study?; and (7) In what ways or in what outlets could the results of the project be shared?

SoTL studies may be either quantitative or qualitative. Qualitative research involves asking students open-ended questions for subsequent content analysis. Interviews and focus groups may serve as the data collection points for a qualitative study as well. Other examples of student-generated sources of information that may be analysed for a SoTL research question include test scores and answers, completed assignments, reflection papers, essays, projects, one-minute papers, portfolios, and presentations. Likewise, the data may be analysed quantitatively using descriptive or inferential statistics. Conducting studies using such methodology, which often is employed in non-legal discipline-specific research in business schools, could facilitate more interdisciplinary research projects among business faculty and also bridge any perceived credibility gap for legal scholars.

In sum, SoTL research recognises classroom experiments in learning as being a legitimate form of academic research and a way to inform the professoriate about learning. Professors do informal classroom research intuitively by assessing their courses each semester and by modifying them in response to those informal results, but they have not published their findings, nor conducted a background review of literature in support of a more methodical analysis.

Certainly factors such as effort and motivation can affect student performance, as can factors that interfere with their effort or motivation. The project found no significant correlation between performance and study time, suggesting that other factors, such as aptitude, may play a greater role. It also found that work and family commitments, rather than a lack of interest in the material or a dislike for the text, were viewed as being the primary barriers to their ability to prepare for class.

The Scholarship of Engagement is more than the Scholarship of Application because it incites faculty to go beyond applied research, which is coupled with outreach or service, to genuine collaboration in community-based endeavours that transcends disciplines and institutional sectors. It can incorporate the Scholarship of Integration through interdisciplinary studies as well as SoTL when students are involved and the effect of their experiences is examined from a teaching and learning perspective. In all its forms, the scholarship of engagement ‘means connecting the rich resources of the university to our pressing social, civic, and ethical problems, to our children, to our schools, to our teachers, and to our cities ... [it] also means creating a special climate in which the academic and civic cultures communicates more continuously and more creatively with each other. ...’.

The American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) recognises the importance of public engagement by institutions of higher education, describing it as being place related, interactive, mutually beneficial, and integrated. AASCU encourages public universities to be stewards of place and to adopt engagement as a core value so that their regional community partners will be equipped to serve as catalysts for regional development.

While the advantages of better town-gown relations include the potential for shared facilities, stronger communities, and increased opportunities for development, an equally important outcome is that students may participate in projects and have an opportunity for experiential, engaged learning, which can be transformational. Authentic learning focuses on learning that occurs in the context of activities related to real-world problems. Service learning activities, which involve collaboration between students, faculty, and community partners to address such problems, potentially can provide examples of both engaged learning and engaged scholarship.

Examples of the Scholarship of Engagement might include consulting projects performed for stakeholders, as well as studies conducted for governmental agencies or funnelled to the institution through small business development associations in order to solve community issues.

Yet in order for engagement activities to be considered the Scholarship of Engagement under Boyer’s model, certain standards must be met, not the least of which is that the work must be vetted to determine its value. Because the Boyer Model of Scholarship recognises scholarship that may not lend itself to traditional forms of evaluation (scholarly publications), an alternative peer review process that permits evaluation by external disciplinary experts or practitioners who attest to its scholarliness should be employed. In response to the growing need for peer review of Scholarship of Engagement projects, the National Review Board for the Scholarship of Engagement was established and subsequently developed criteria for evaluation, including the demonstration of (1) iable goals and objectives; (2) best practices in the context of theory and literature; (3) appropriate research methodology contextually; (4) results that make a discernable contribution or impact; (5) suitable dissemination of findings to the intended audience; and (6) reflective critique for guiding future efforts.

Universities desiring to change to the Boyer model must align the institution’s mission and reward system for the recognition of multiple forms of scholarship in order to encourage faculty members to contribute to the fulfilment of the institutional goals, as well as to fulfil their own disciplinary aspirations, particularly because such encouragement ‘in policy and practice benefits individual faculty, institutions and society’.

While the SoTL and the Scholarship of Engagement potentially represent new directions for business law faculty members in the twenty-first-century academy, they certainly can continue to be viable contributors to the knowledge base of the discipline as well. Legal research coupled with that of other business disciplines provides a more realistic and holistic environment for risk analysis in the decision-making process. Boyer’s model, at its core, values the impact of scholarship on not only the advancement of the discipline, but also on the community and the educational experience of the students.

If measurable impact becomes the new top tier, then even traditional legal research should fare well for two reasons. First, legal research is characterised by its indexing and the extensive use of citations as the relevant body of knowledge matures. Therefore, the use of one’s scholarship by others in advancing knowledge is well documented and capable of measurement. Second, legal scholarship can quickly drive policy decisions. Law review articles are frequently cited by courts in support of their decisions, or to explain the result.

Business law faculty can contribute greatly to the expansion of the scholarly mission of the academy by engaging in high-impact scholarship not only with respect to discipline-based scholarship, but also in the SoTL and the Scholarship of Engagement.