‘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.