'Epistemic Chaos': The Recontextualisation of Undergraduate Curriculum Design and Pedagogic Practice in a New University Business School

This paper is based on a qualitative case study of undergraduate curriculum design and pedagogic practice in the new University Business School (UBS). Data were collected using semi-structured interviews with 24 academics from across a range of business sub-disciplines together with an extensive documentary review of materials relating to two undergraduate degree programmes. The case study found that the UBS curriculum had become recontextualised as a "business project" in which programmes were constructed as "products" for the higher education market. The associated pedagogy was largely confined to behaviourist problem--solution routines based on narrow projections of the "real world" of business. This paper contends that UBS undergraduate programmes were designed in a generic mode in response to the material and discursive influences of marketisation. As a consequence, "epistemic chaos" had arisen in which knowledge and pedagogy had become fragmented and amorphous.