The article deals with the modern problems and development trends of business education oriented to building students' and trainees' social competencies. It covers the principal approaches and methods used to improve students' social responsibility level in the course of professional trainings for managers. The article also explores the issues related to academic activities organization, teaching socially significant disciplines, and improving the general level of students' and trainees' managerial culture.
In the modern world, the understanding of entrepreneurship and its main functions and goals is changing considerably: it turns from the narrow idea of business as activities aimed at gaining profits by means of producing goods and services to the idea of business as the source of growth for the public welfare to be achieved through production of goods and services. This clearly shows the idea of business as a socially significant value in contrast to that narrow idea of it as a source of individual enrichment. This makes it more vital to ensure comprehensive interaction between business and society and adds new tones to the issue of social responsibility of entrepreneurship.
Socially oriented development of the Russian economy implies new socially important goals for the higher professional education sphere. Training socially responsible staff is the primary task of the Russian educational system, which is provided in the National Doctrine for Education and the Federal Law "On Education" [2]. This is especially topical for business education as this is exactly the area that forms specialists in management who play the key roles in the social and economical development of the country.
The social aspect proves to be among the key ones for the professional competence of a manager as his activities are assessed through the efficiency of his interaction with the owners, staff, partners, and the state. This interaction is to some extent characterized as a subject-subject one [3, P. 28].
A manager's interaction with other subjects or persons must be at least socially acceptable. There must be a compromise between the manager's personal goals and those of the big number of the social life subjects. U. Pfingsten and R. Hintsch define social competence as a working knowledge of "cognitive, emotional and motor ways of behaviour that, in some certain social situations, lead to long-term and favourable ratio of positive and negative consequences" [3, P. 29].
A manager's social competence represents a composite characteristic including his social knowledge, motivational and regulatory qualities, and communicational skills. The social competence of a manager depends on the person and situation. It is impractical to solely identify it through socially oriented actions, through readiness to help or render managerial assistance. Social competence is characterized through connection to the individual goals of the subjects in a professional activity. A manager's socially competent behaviour must be based on the assessment of the professional activity efficiency; it must be rational from the point of view of the objective assigned.
U. Pfingsten, H. Herschgen and R. Hintsch refer to situational specificity, objective orientation and practical rationality of the behaviour as the most significant characteristics of a manager's social competence. As a matter of fact, it means that social competence is based on the manager's ability to attain objects and realize plans in certain situations, taking account of the situational specificities as well as the needs and opinions of different professional activity subjects involved in professional and social interactions. [5, P. 344].
We will understand a manager's social competence as the integrated characteristic of his professional activities, which reflects his skills in building interactions with various social subjects, depending on the situation and according to the standards and norms accepted in the society and organization (company) at the time.
In practice, the management efficiency depends upon the manager's level of social competence, which means that the manager's behaviour is socially competent only when he possesses some certain minimum of the skills that can be observable or not. Depending on the social and professional situation, as well as on the professional interaction subjects and their objectives and views on the problem, the manager's flexibility in role-playing and communication or other kinds of social skills can be of major importance. And the level of importance of various social skills as the indicators of the manager's social competence depends on certain situations.
Managers of various levels are made-up personalities possessing certain life and professional experience and stable value systems; they are parts of the professional business sphere and work in the dynamic conditions of the market economy. Trainees of this category make specific demands on the educational process management, on the level of the educational programs and the trainers' qualifications. It is advisable to build the training process on the basis of the andragogic principles. Andragogy is a section of educational theory, which reveals specific laws applying to the ways adult learners perceive trainings and master new skills and knowledge, as well as the methods to be used by professional trainers in order to manage those activities. The term andragogy was originally introduced in scientific practice by A. Kapp, a German educator specializing in history of pedagogy. The andragogic principles for training managers must be based on transition of the training from a strictly regulated and formalized educational process to its humanization, so that it could be aimed at development of the students' (trainees') personalities, at support and correction to be rendered by the educator to the personal activities in the course of the training, and at building conditions for development of the cognitive abilities [3, P. 31].
The international experience in business education proves that one of the main conditions for satisfying the society's demand for highly skilled and socially oriented specialists in management is establishment of a business school (university) as a learning organization, by means of the competence approach. This approach was established by P. Senge in 1992 and consolidated by A. Mayo and E. Lank in 1994. The competence approach is based on decomposition of the responsibility for the training results between the trainer and the trainees, which ensures efficient formation of the system of integrated motivation for the trainees in the course of the training, as well as high-quality formation of the key professional and social competencies. Throughout the process, the trainer ensures both personality-based and group-based approaches when working with the trainees during classes. So, there comes the issue of selecting proper technologies to combine those approaches.
According to the Russian specialists in business education (A. Fidanov, L. Titarev, D. Titarev), the learning organization should be considered an advanced technology for implementation of the competence approach [4]. However, in this case, the process of knowledge formation, enrichment and preserving does not take account of the specificities of the comparison procedures applied to the achievements and training methods of every student (trainee), both as a result of group training and outside of it. Therefore, the educator should have the ways determined to correct the processes of learning and analyzing the positive experience by the students as the instrument to develop their key professional and social competencies.
The author analyzes peculiarities of the competence approach, on the one hand, from the positions of revealing the competencies of the educational organization in the business education market and, on the other hand, from those of ensuring formation of the key social competencies of a specialist in the context of the educational process.
A learning organization is examined from the point of view of building a system ensuring:
To build socially responsible world outlook of the students and trainees of business education institutions, teachers should pay special attention to the value-orientation approach as well as to the informational one. The main objective of the process of educating the necessary personal qualities is orienting the students to self-improvement and realization of their own potentials. Attaining that objective requires involving students in various kinds of activities being the condition for personal self-actualization and the educational instrument.
When building socially responsible world outlook and social competencies, one should follow the principles of scientific character, nature and culture conformity, non-violence, tolerance, connection between education and life, openness, activities variability, and aesthetization of the students' lives.
Educating students on the basis of the abovementioned principles takes place in the process of teaching the humanities and social, general scientific, general professional, and special disciplines.
The objective of the education must be formation of the manager's personality characterized through humanistic awareness and an active civil stand, orientation towards professional success, creative aspiration, intellectual and cultural refinement, social activity and communicability.
Within institutions, building socially responsible world outlook must be carried out through efforts of special structures (business schools), using a system of corresponding measures. Those structures ensure integrity, consistency and continuity of the content and organizational forms of education, taking account of the specific features of different departments and years of study, their traditions, staff potentials, and social demands. Throughout the process, the coordinating sources for all the activities are the university and department administrations that promote humanization of the relations within the university and departments, and the collective character of the professional and working activities performed by the teachers and students. The administering bodies examine the issues of teaching quality and ethics at the meetings of the academic councils of the university (business school) and departments, so they organize and monitor the quality of the educational process.
Today, building socially responsible world outlook can and must be considered not as one-time communication of knowledge and value judgements by educators, but as interaction and collaboration between teachers and students (trainees).
The crucial role in coordinating the efforts of all divisions is played by thorough planning and well-considered realization of all kinds of measures. When it is done comprehensively, it will allow coordination of the efforts made by all divisions, by teaching staff, public organizations and students; it will also contribute to more reasonable usage of their resources and abilities, as well as more active application of various forms and methods of socially responsible education.
Considering how complicated it could be and what an important role the corporate social responsibility plays in the stable development of an organization, a lot of business education providers include special courses of corporate social responsibility in their training programs for managers.
The concepts of MBA studying plans must be based on application of the technologies used in the humanitarian fields of science for training top-level managers. Those concepts must as well include disciplines that allow building the culture of decision making, behaviour and interrelations management, both within an organization and outside of it, basing on the principles of corporate social responsibility. It is advisable to teach such socially significant disciplines as Management Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, and Fundraising in Social Sphere. A part of the class hours allotted to those disciplines must be dedicated to discussions on topical theoretical issues including corporate social responsibility. The rest of the studying time is used for development and analysis of cases and group projects.
Oriented to gaining profits with all of his activities, a manager should now be searching for the optimal ratio between the profits and the loads and damages caused to the environment. Hence, ecological competency makes an important constituent part of the manager's social competence. We will consider ecological competency as the specialist's skill to orientate himself within his organization's activities, basing on the reciprocal influence with the natural environment, and to plan those activities aimed at gaining profits in conformity with the organization's strategic objectives (i. e. the long-range development goals for gaining long-term profits rather than short-term ones). If we want a manager to possess that kind of competence right after graduation, we have to ensure that the studying process includes the following:
learning the essential terms, ideas and definitions related to the environment (e. g. biosphere, ecology, ecosystem homeostasis, etc.) and environment protection (e. g. active and passive methods for minimization of the negative impact produced by the industries upon the nature);
Today, there are a series of disciplines that should serve to develop the abovementioned constituents of a manager's ecological competence. The main ones are: Ecology, Ecological Systems of Nature Management, Social Ecology, Engineering Ecology, etc. In a number of respects, certain personal qualities of a specialist also contribute to building the knowledge of other disciplines bound to ecology with interdisciplinary relations. For example, learning a topic like Global Problems of the Modern Times within the courses of Philosophy or Concepts of the Modern Natural Science would include analysis of the ecological problem as one of the global problems of the modern world. Thus, when building ecological competence, its constituents should be integrated in the programs of those disciplines.
We should introduce the term ecology managing competency that we will understand not just as the skill to manage the activities of an organization with the reciprocal influence on the natural environment taken into account, but also as the ability to transform the organization's objectives to ecologically significant solutions made in partnership with other subjects of the ecology managing activity.
In the situation emerging, one of the main tasks of business education is building the understanding of corporate culture by means of developing the students' (trainees') social competence.
The modern corporate culture is studied by students of a lot of disciplines pertaining to the humanities: social management sciences, culturology, psychology, and others.
Corporate culture is a system of material and intellectual values interacting in the ways characteristic for a certain organization. Its "individual" character can be observed from the viewpoint of self-perception and perception of others in the social sphere, in the behaviour style, and in the peculiarities of the interaction with the surrounding world.
Some valuable analytical material on this subject was introduced by the researcher A. Averin who considers corporate culture as a complicated and many-sided social and cultural phenomenon based on the values of the common destiny, professional competence, self-actualization, creative work, and joint participation of the personality in the activities of a modern organization and the society. This phenomenon determines the sense and the idea of the corporation's existence and its attitude to the employees and the society [1].
Hence, the content of the disciplines taught in business education institutions must be oriented to building the basics of corporate culture, which is necessary to enable the graduates to work in a big company as well as in a small one where the corporate culture is already built or only being built.
To build students' socially responsible world outlook, it is reasonable to use the universal technology for achieving the desired results, which is based on integrative planning. The integrativeness consists in uniting into a single plan all the various aspects of the things (or phenomena) studied for various disciplines, which allow identification of them as a single whole. The integrative planning technology includes task definition, objective statement, search for efficient methods of learning and professional activities, application of informational and material resources, assessment of the students' cognitive abilities by the students themselves, as well as analysis of the results and presentation of the final result.
In the context of the integrative planning technology, the content of the disciplines making the curriculum for a specialization gets integrated: horizontally – between the disciplines and years of a separate education period; vertically – between the disciplines and years of different education periods. When implementing the integrative planning technology at a higher educational institution (business school), it is required to focus students' attention on application of the system of creative tasks, projects, and business plans developed for each of the years of study, as they represent an efficient way to master the methodology of socially responsible professional activities.
It is recommended to teach the basics of the theory at lectures. However, one should remember that competence building process consists of three levels including not only mechanical memorizing of the material but also development of activeness and creative abilities. That is exactly why students must be recommended to perform independent researches, apart from just studying the material given at lectures. Such research work is supposed to serve for development of the skills of a manager that has his social competence built and is able to make socially significant decisions in partnership with other subjects of the managerial activities.
The reproductive level shows weak cognitive activities. Students (trainees) demonstrate positive attitude to the tasks that they are offered to fulfill, sometimes overcoming their unwillingness. But absence of initiative and inclination for obtaining new knowledge as well as stereotyped approach to the work become well observed. The students have basic knowledge of socially significant disciplines corresponding to the lower level of learning; the knowledge lies within the limits of general notions and ideas about the subject studied. The students show unstable knowledge of the simplest cognitive activities. The reconstructive level is characterized through the presence of cognitive activeness requiring external incentives and through some initiative when selecting the ways to act, and when doing so, the students only use the simplest transfer of their knowledge, basing on the cognitive experience that they have. This level is characterized through the presence of basic knowledge that the students can reproduce with the help of leading questions. The characteristic qualities of the reconstructive level are: responsibility, conscientiousness, vitality, initiative when selecting the ways to act, and the simplest transfer and interpretation of the knowledge. The creative level of social competence is characterized through a high level of independence, initiative, interest in social knowledge and problems, and original ways of actions. The knowledge that the students possess allow them to operate with the facts revealed by means of logical reasoning and to use the obtained information for finding solutions to the tasks and receiving subjectively new information. The students also can, with no help from outside, find and implement some new approach to solving the tasks. The characteristic qualities of this level are: initiative, cognitive interest, independence in statement of the tasks and objectives of cognition as well as in determination of the ways to realize that independence, interest, innovative character of the activities, and their optimization (minimization of actions and operations, time costs and efforts).
So, we have discussed the key areas of building socially responsible world outlook and social competencies for students and trainees attending business education programs. The integration of a modern business education provider with the social and cultural space of a city, region, and the world as well, and the permanently growing requirements for the graduates of business education programs present radically new demands for determination of the activities aimed at building socially responsible world outlook. In the context of consolidation of the positions of liberal education, we encounter new objectives related to planning the new educational sphere as a multidimensional space that should be adequate to the present-day needs of the graduates and employers, and to the corresponding development trends of the modern culture, economy, production, and technologies. Therefore, we should provide flexible combination of the social construction ideas of the reality and the environmental approach to education oriented to development of socially constructive interaction, creative atmosphere, and humanistic communication within the educational systems.
References
[1] A. Averin. Corporate culture of the modern society: Thesis ... Doctor of Philosophy. Stavropol, 2006.
[2] Federal Law of Russia dd. 10.07.1992 No. 3266-1 (Edition of 29.12.2010) "On Education" [electronic resource] / Consultant Plus Legal Information System. – Electronic data. – Moscow, 12.01.2011. Mode of access: http://base.consultant.ru, free. – Title taken from screen.
[3] T. Kalugina, N. Tereschuk. Development of manager's social competence in the complementary professional education system / Bulletin of Chelyabinks State University. 2007. – No. 19. – Pages 27-32.
[4] N. Karkulenko. Implementation technology for competence approach in the business education system: Thesis. ... PhD in pedagogics. Tambov, 2004.
[5] H. Herschgen. Marketing: basics of professional success: manual for higher educational schools / H. Herschgen. Moscow: INFRA-M, 2000. Page 344.
[6] Pfingsten, U. Groppentraining Sozialer Kompetenzen / U. Pfingsten, R. Hintsch. Weinheim: Psychologie. Verlag Union, 1991. Page 3.
Contact: Vyacheslav Gordeyev, slava@gordeyev.com
Author: Vyacheslav Gordeyev
Language: English
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