The Paradox of Work-Placement Identity:Exploring the Challenges of Role Transition from Students to Interns in the Workplace

In this paper, we argue that identities often become destabilised and disrupted during macro-level transitions across organisational boundaries i.e. university to the placement organisation. This can lead to conflicts between the role of students, who remain enrolled with their university programme, and interns, who see themselves as student-practitioners. We aim to untangle the complex relationship between work and placement identities, often intertwined and taken-for-granted in work-based learning (WBL) arrangements (e.g. internships or placement programmes)

Who is responsible for responsible business education? Insights into the dialectical inter-relations of dimensions of responsibility

One criticism of the globalisation of Business Schools is the propagation of an instrumentalist, functionalist and market-based approach to education. While programmes such as the United Nations Principles of Responsible Management Education initiative have attempted to promote more socially responsible practice and pedagogy within Business Schools, there is little evidence of significant change. Although the extant literature explores the response of educators to such initiatives, little is known about how management educators interpret and make sense of their and others’ responsibilities, particularly in the Global South. In this article, we critically explore the ways in which lecturers in a private Malaysian Business School locate social responsibility within their understanding of responsible business education. We identify dynamics of responsibilisation and elaborate the dialectical inter-relations of four dimensions of responsibility – individual, interactional, group and collective. Our findings reveal the limited impact of the disruptive potential of responsible business education in this instance. However, we argue that alternative theories of responsibility and responsibilisation, indicated in the dynamic inter-relations between the dimensions of responsibility, remain a potent source of inspiration for changes within business education. We offer suggestions to inform efforts towards transformatively oriented and socially responsible business education

A phenomenographic study of lecturers’ conceptions of using learning technology in a Pakistani context

While there are many studies exploring the phenomenon of lecturers’ use of learning technology within teaching practices in western higher education contexts, currently we know little about this phenomenon within less developed countries. In the paper, we discuss the findings from a phenomenographic study of lecturers’ conceptions of using learning technology in a Pakistani university context. We describe how lecturers’ use of learning technology is underpinned by their pedagogical understanding. Furthermore, we show that prevailing contextual socio-economic and technological limitations affect lecturers’ daily pedagogical practices and use of learning technology. The results of the study demonstrate the importance and influence of lecturers’ pedagogical understandings and of contextual limitations within daily teaching practices on their experiences of using learning technology. The findings have wider implications for our understanding of the variation in ways learning technology is understood and used within pedagogical practice in other developing and more developed contexts

Socio-digital disadvantage within management education : a study of MBA students’ experiences of digital technologies

Assumptions regarding digital technologies in business schools have become part of the hidden curriculum. It is generally assumed that students have the same levels of access and prior exposure to digital technologies as well as information and digital literacies (IDL) skills. Little attention has been given to the issues of social-digital inequalities and the impact of this hidden curriculum on students from disadvantaged backgrounds. In this study, using a phenomenographic approach, we examine how students from rural, socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds in Pakistan, experienced digital technologies in the context of a full-time, in-person MBA program. The findings reveal the students initially had an alienating experience of digital technologies which for most transitions to either an engaged or instrumental experience. While the students exercised agency in transitioning from an alienation experience this was as a result of their own effort, time and labor. We conclude that without additional support offered to students from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds, the hidden curriculum associated with digital technologies potentially perpetuates, or maintains socio-digital inequalities within management education

Beyond traditional audits: the implications of information technology on auditing

This paper examines the manner in which audits would be conducted in the future and how technology has transformed and impacted the business processes of public, private sector entities and various organisations and the guidelines which need to be followed to ensure compliance with applicable laws and regulations. The tranperancy of financial statements is of paramount interest to shareholders and other significant stakeholders. This necessities that the financial statements are audited to acquire a certain level of confidence over the integrity of numbers and the validity of business rationale which thereby arises a need for auditor to be well equipped with all the tools and system essentials in carrying out an effective and efficient audit. Information Technology can act as an impediment or stimulant towards the achievement of the above discussed objective. Various organizations use automation tools and ERP applications which have become a vital cog in their internel control environment. Understanding by auditor of these automated controls is necessary to ensure that the they are well equipped with the requisite skills and have knowledge of all technological tweaks that would be required in the audit process of a complex structured entity. The primary function which can be performed by generalized audit software include customizing data in numrous ways to serve the distinct purpose. The audit teams obtain insights into latest developments and plan their procedures accordingly keeping in view the applicable professional standards

Understanding the variation in MBA students' experiences of using Learning Technology in Pakistan

Today, technology is increasingly being viewed as a key resource for enabling innovation within teaching and learning approaches. Social media platforms and applications such as Facebook and Twitter, WhatsApp, Skype and Viber have emerged as one of the most popular mechanisms for developing the social perspective in learning. Some recent studies even refer to this phenomenon as the development of a ‘parallel infrastructure’ to institutional offerings such as Moodle. However, when any artefact (such as technology), is introduced into a learning environment, there is a possibility that it will be responded to and utilised in different ways. This paper presents the initial analysis from MBA students’ experiences of using learning technology within their studies in a Pakistani business school, to see if technology has any impact on the learning approaches, in terms of the way and the purpose for which it is being used. Phenomenographic analysis revealed some initial categories of description, which include ‘access to learning materials and other information sources’, ‘organisation of course-related activities’, ‘improved communication and connectivity’, ‘developing cooperation and collaboration’ and ‘means of overcoming socio-cultural barriers’. The degree of variation within these categories can be related to the established concepts of deep and surface level approach. For example, there were students who preferred to use technology ‘as and when required’ by their teachers, and within the same environment there were others, who appeared to take a 'deep level' approach that involved some critical thinking about the use of technology and its subsequent influence on learning approaches. Our analysis highlights that students in relatively less developed regions are also making efforts to change themselves from ‘passive recipients’ of knowledge to active participants, who can support the learning activities of each other, using diverse forms of technology. We argue that while students may be developing an ‘alternative or parallel infrastructure to their institutional offerings’, there is no disconnect between them. It is this blend in using different forms of technology, which is encouraging the students to develop ‘informal networks’ among themselves – in an environment, which is majorly instructor-led. However, for addressing a possible 'dis(connect)' in students' use of various forms of technology, there is still a need for educators to ‘temper’ the enthusiasm of students, to develop a better understanding of how they should interact with technology, as this may provide some new insights for networked learning

Are undergraduate internships worth the effort?:Time to reconceptualize work-based learning for building protean meta-competencies

Internships are widely recognized within higher education as a useful work-based learning (WBL) approach to enhance student employability. However there remains a need to understand whether internships provide a developmental experience that includes higher-level (soft) skills such as self-responsibility, flexibility and innovation. Our study inductively analyses 154 undergraduate student-interns’ reflective diaries over a three-year period to explore the relationship between internship experience and development of higher-level skills, or protean ‘meta-competencies’. In the research, we find the interns’ developed three meta-competencies that can broadly be categorized as: self-regulation, self-awareness and self-direction. Our findings also highlight the role of socio-political dynamics of internship work in shaping students' experiences as an indicator of the changing world of work. The study has implications for higher education institutions (HEIs) and host organisations in adopting a WBL approach that supports interns with reflexive engagement with situated organizational practices and accessing (in)formal learning opportunities in the workplace. Our research therefore offers insights into a learner-centred WBL approach that contributes towards a more holistic internship/WBL experience that facilitates student-interns in developing protean meta-competencies and graduate employability

Video-FocalNets: Spatio-Temporal Focal Modulation for Video Action Recognition

Recent video recognition models utilize Transformer models for long-range spatio-temporal context modeling. Video transformer designs are based on self-attention that can model global context at a high computational cost. In comparison, convolutional designs for videos offer an efficient alternative but lack long-range dependency modeling. Towards achieving the best of both designs, this work proposes Video-FocalNet, an effective and efficient architecture for video recognition that models both local and global contexts. Video-FocalNet is based on a spatio-temporal focal modulation architecture that reverses the interaction and aggregation steps of self-attention for better efficiency. Further, the aggregation step and the interaction step are both implemented using efficient convolution and element-wise multiplication operations that are computationally less expensive than their self-attention counterparts on video representations. We extensively explore the design space of focal modulation-based spatio-temporal context modeling and demonstrate our parallel spatial and temporal encoding design to be the optimal choice. Video-FocalNets perform favorably well against the state-of-the-art transformer-based models for video recognition on five large-scale datasets (Kinetics-400, Kinetics-600, SS-v2, Diving-48, and ActivityNet-1.3) at a lower computational cost. Our code/models are released at https://github.com/TalalWasim/Video-FocalNets.Comment: Accepted to ICCV-2023. Camera-Ready version. Project page: https://TalalWasim.github.io/Video-FocalNets