Integrating business and liberal arts: A competency map for understanding the blend
Dr. Mary Grace Neville

FEATURES FOR THIS SITE
Liberal Arts and Business website establishes space for teacher-scholars to explore innovative approaches to teaching business using liberal arts thinking. Colleagues and I welcome and invite relevant stories to feature --- stories about your curricular innovations and curiosities, your campus community, and your perspectives integrating liberal arts and business education. Just send copy to info@liberalartsandbusiness.com.
Here, I’ll explain a ‘competency map’ that Southwestern University colleagues Dr. Don Parks, Andy Ross and I developed during several years of reflection following our 2006 national symposium (see Neville et. al., 2007 for a full discussion of the symposium’s content and findings; see Godwin & Neville, 2008 for a full discussion of the whole-systems approach used to convene the symposium).
This resulting capacity map needs more work! Are you interested in picking it up? Do you have a research center or doctoral students who might be interested? We’d love to see this draft model flourish.
I’ll provide context about Southwestern’s program, then outline the ‘map’, and finally sketch limitations to it that we already know about. I hope you find some inspiration in what’s here. Go to this site’s blog page to comment.

SU’s BUSINESS PROGRAM
Southwestern University (SU) is a small liberal arts college in central Texas, near Austin. We enroll approximately 1300 students, all at the undergraduate level. SU faculty follow a “teacher-scholar” model in which we dedicate ourselves to co-created learning that occurs as we attend to students and to our core areas of research. While my primary research focuses on alternative business models that blend social and capital good, my attentiveness to students as the next generation of innovative business leaders led me to ask strategic questions about our small program’s purpose. Those questions have now engaged me for more than 5 years.
SU’s business program vacillates between being the first and second most popular major on campus. Ironically, we have only 3 full time tenured faculty. Therefore, colleagues and I have been forced to become quite innovative in delivery.
Our program is embedded in a blended department called “Economics and Business” comprising 5 economists, 2 accountants, 3 business faculty, and a mix of lecturers who cover specialized courses (such as business law and tax accounting). Business students must take introductory accounting and economics before beginning the business core sequence, as much for content as for demand management. Then, students take our blended introductory business course called “Foundations of Business”, a 2 course sequence introducing students to marketing, management, operations, finance, and human resource concepts. Students are introduced to business by reading a paper back book about Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream (a brilliant move on the part of my colleague Don Parks who recognized the value in meeting students where they are) and by working through siloed chapters in a general business textbook. From there students enroll in “money and banking” and “finance”, both taught through the economics program and both serving as gateway courses to upper level business electives and a capstone.

COMPETENCY MAP
Rather than concentrate on the functional areas traditional to business, colleagues and I have oriented our courses towards knowledge, skills and abilities that people need in order to be critical and innovative thinkers in a rapidly changing and highly complex global world. Therefore, Dr. Don Parks and Andy Ross and I built a map of the skills and abilities we deemed crucial based on our experience and our 2006 symposium findings. The map serves as a conceptual framework of content representing broad disciplines and multiple levels of aggregation. We invite you to use and build on this skeleton which we constructed over many ideation sessions together.
The map explicates spheres of development students face. The spheres are not intended to be discrete (though power point and our industry’s proclivity for rubrics renders these spheres as if they are mutually exclusive). The nautilus image at the center represents the learning nature of iterations: each sphere contributes to the others, and by cultivating a basic literacy in each sphere one can more fluidly develop an advanced competency in any sphere. I also imagine that the map provides direction to young alums, seeking to orient themselves about which aspects of a job or an industry interests them and why.


First, view the map from hemispheres – the northern hemisphere loosely represents intrapsychic and individual cognitive development; the southern hemisphere loosely represents the individual in relationship with others. I describe this to students as what they learn and know “in here”, within themselves; and how they engage the outside world, the “out there.”
Second, look at the four quadrants of the map. The upper right quadrant, “Thinking & Analysis” begins with traditional skills students expect from education including literacy, logic and reasoning. The upper left quadrant, “Introspective & Intellectual Capabilities” addresses students’ need not only to absorb content, but also their ability to foster and develop critical and integrative thinking. For example, can students grasp the distance between a textbook’s paradigm and one they most want to see in the world? Can students see, articulate and leverage the value of philosophy or history or economics on how they conceptualize and evaluate a business situation? Notice that “Introspective & Intellectual Capabilities” includes both critical thinking and a sphere called “personal capacity” – here colleagues and I sought to distinguish the cognitive knowing from the students’ genuine capacity to foster knowledge creation through insights and curiosity (see Neville, 2008 for a pedagogical approach to cultivating these abilities).
The southern hemisphere introduces levels of system in the “Humans & Organizations” quadrant. The “Individual and Interpersonal” sphere seeks to name the role of multiple levels of psychology in business phenomena. The “Systems and Society” sphere extends to organizations, industries, and the global world through fields like sociology and economics. These domains seek to heighten students’ awareness to their relationships with people and the natural world, as well as the inherent embeddedness of business in society.
Finally, the lower right quadrant of the southern hemisphere allows space for the reality that most students and parents want job-readiness to be an integral part of their college experience. During the 2006 symposium, colleagues and I noticed that the educators wanted to develop students for long term success while students and parents wanted educators to ensure that graduates would be job-ready. We began to be explicit about this tension, especially in an integrated business/liberal arts program. Therefore, we include “Building My Future” on the map, and yet designate the quadrant as a student’s responsibility. Students are responsible for who they will become. The “Whole Person/Strategic” sphere acknowledges the power of extracurricular activities, especially if students mindfully explore relationships between the extracurriculars and their long term wants and needs. The “Career Skills/Tactical” sphere encourages students to find internships during college, to actively apply business and classroom concepts to jobs they have, to learn how to establish and cultivate a network, and even how to take initiative to look ahead towards desired futures and anticipate backwards to choose courses and activities that position the student for that desired future. Colleagues and I often shade in this fourth quadrant, explicitly showing students that this area remains squarely in their responsibility outside of the classroom.

LIMITATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS
The map offers a conceptual view of liberal arts education in a way that equips business students and teachers to consider where and how traditionally siloed content is subordinate to a student’s broader capacity development. The map needs rigorous definitions and clear examples in order to be of most value. For example, Wick and Philips, 2008 offer a more detailed scorecard model than ours, yet theirs breaks out cognitive, skill and affective domains as separate components rather than explicitly integrating elements of whole person development. Clearly more good thinking, reflecting, dialogue, and development are needed. I share our map in its elementary form in hopes that someone else has support for developing it further.
Here are some of the questions still needing research, dialogue and reflection:
 What can education literature offer to refine these spheres (in meaning, dimensions and inter-relationships)? How might the ideas be diagrammed differently to better convey the intentions?
 In what proportions should these spheres be emphasized?
 How can non-western thinking be intentionally integrated into the map?
 What value might business faculty glean by using the map to design our courses and/or to design our course offerings and curricula?
 How might traditional liberal arts disciplines fluidly blend with business programs if faculty university-wide were to approach curricular dialogue from a shared perspective?
 Is there a version of this map that students could use to track their development across college, regardless of what courses they choose?
 How might this thinking inform curricular design at the MBA and executive education levels?

MY HOPE FOR THE FUTURE
I share this model here in hopes that someone will find kernels of ideas that might flourish, either by expanding, refining, or simply catalyzing related research. I hope that you will write about your insights, your program, and your philosophy of education and offer it to this like-minded community. Together, we have potential for shifting tomorrow’s world as we expand the capacity of collegiates who then go out into the business sector, one deeply enmeshed today in our increasingly complex and highly interdependent global social world.
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Mary Grace Neville is an Associate Professor of Business at Southwestern University studying, teaching and coaching ways to expand positive change leadership in business. The capacity model represents collaborative work between her and two colleagues, Dr. Don Parks and Andy Ross.

References:
Godwin, L. and Neville, M.G. (2008). “Learning from a Whole-System, Strength-Based Approach: A Case of Collaborative Curriculum Development,” in American Society for Quality, The Journal for Quality and Participation, Spring, 11-14.
Neville, M.G., Parks, D., Senchack A.J., & Godwin, L. (2007) “Re-Envisioning Business Programs in Liberal Arts Worlds: 2006 Summit Proceedings and Outcomes.” Southwestern University. Catalogued with ERIC database.
Neville, M.G. (2008). “Using Appreciative Inquiry and Experiential Learning to Explore the Dominant Paradigm.” Journal of Management Education, 32, 1, 100-117. DOI: 10.1177/1052562907305558.
Wick, M. R. and Phillips, A. T. (2008). “A Liberal Education Scorecard.” Liberal Education, Winter 2008, 22-29.

One of the core purposes of this site is to inform and inspire those who wish to join us in our attempt to better integrate the liberal arts into the business classroom.

As a part of that goal, we would like to highlight business programs or people that are asking and/or answering provocative questions in this area.

Please let us know if this describes you or your institution or if you know of a program that is achieving this goal. We would love to hear what you are doing.