Exploring Hidden Curriculum in Responsible Management Education : A Narrative Inquiry of Students’ Lived Experience in Management and Leadership Training Programmes.

Abstract

The implicit dimensions of learning environment referred to here as Hidden Curriculum (HC) remains embedded in the governance of a business school faculty producing future managers and leaders in the Global South, and this is the motivation for this article. Using the Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME) as our point of departure, we draw on the tools of narrative analysis to tease out aspects of HC. For this purpose, we compare narratives by master’s students in a business and management education faculty in the North of Uganda with the PRME document and two formal curricula. We apply critical discourse and genre analysis of the PRME genre, and we predict high intertextuality and frequency of specific lexical items covering ethical, sustainable and responsible management. However, while both curricula have themes such as responsibility, ethical value(s) and sustainability, themes such as management, leadership, and business are found to be more prominent, while examples of intertextuality involving the concepts of responsibility, ethics, and sustainability are few. Our study further shows a weak intertextual relationship between the students’ narratives and the PRME and a strong intertextual relationship between the PRME and the MBA and MPA curricula.