With the advent of the Further and Higher Education Act of 1992 (Her Majesty’s Government HMG, 1992), former polytechnics and other central institutions in the UK were mandated to apply, if they wished, to attain university status. This marked the start of a significant phase in the expansion of the remit, number and differentiation of higher education institutions (HEIs) in the UK. In the year following the Dearing Report on ‘Higher Education in the Learning Society’ (Dearing, 1997), the 1998 Teaching and Higher Education Act (HMG, 1992) introduced annual tuition fees of £1000 for England. By 2017/18, fees had risen to a maximum of £9250, with all the implications that this entails for university funding, student access and potential indebtedness.
This has resulted in greater attention being paid to the annual publication of ‘league tables’. These rankings relate to the nature and quality of ‘the student experience’, and reflect the widespread use of a neo-liberal language typically associated with the world of business, such as the prominence of words like competition, marketing, entrepreneurship and customer, and the application of value-for-money impact criteria throughout the HE sector (see Segers, Chap. 12, this book). Indeed, the decades following the Dearing Report (Dearing, 1997) have been characterised by intensifying scrutiny according to such commodifying criteria, in the form of National Student Surveys (Office for Students, 2023), which were introduced in 2005, and in other institutional performance reviews such as the Teaching Excellence Frameworks (TEFs), which were introduced in 2016 (Office for Students, 2020), and Research Excellence Frameworks (REFs), which replaced the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) approach in 2014 (Higher Education Funding Council for England HEFCE, 2014). This period has also seen concerted efforts to recruit greater numbers of students from both at home and abroad, and there are expectations for universities to contribute to a political drive towards what has more recently been labelled a ‘levelling up agenda’ within society. Various iterations of the digital revolution (Clarke, 2012) and more recently the rapid applications of and developments in artificial intelligence are profoundly affecting relationships, research and pedagogy within HEIs in ways that are not yet fully understood. Such pressures and developments have combined to impact on ways that different stakeholders within the field of higher education (HE) are experiencing, interpreting and practising their roles, with an emphasis on ‘performativity’ and other scrutiny pressures induced by ‘the panopticon’ (Foucault, 1980). The 2013 Witty Review (Witty, 2013) urged universities to play a stronger specific role, especially in more local innovation, entrepreneurship and economic development, and this expectation is seen as particularly pertinent to the role of business schools (see Cooper, Chap. 2, this book). The concept of ‘The Civic University’—a network of whose members ‘supports universities across the UK to develop and embed civic aspirations at an institutional level’—has also gained greater traction (Civic University Network – Maximising the civic impact of universities in their place, n.d.).
Given these strands, within a period of acute financial and political turbulence and uncertainty, combined with complex international relations and a general push for institutional growth and expansion, the proposition that ‘small is beautiful’ (Schumacher, 1973), which underpins the premise of this book, is open to challenge. Moreover, polarised ideas co-exist about the role, purpose and value of universities and their constituent business schools, and are hotly debated. Writing on behalf of the Humanistic Management Network in their book Business Schools Under Fire, Amann et al. (2011) make the case for a humanistic management education to save business schools from the charge of being ‘silent partners in corporate crime’ in times of instability when ‘trust in managers is low’. As stated in the rationale of the Humanism in Business book series, to which our book is a contribution, humanistic business education and practice is based on three principles: ‘the unconditional respect for the dignity of life, the integration of ethical reflection in managerial decision making, and the active and ongoing engagement with stakeholders’ (von Kimakowitz, 2019).
With this contested context in mind, we next discuss the relationship between HEIs in general and their various communities.