INTERDISCIPLINARITY IN MANAGEMENT COURSES: THE OPINIONS OF UNDERGRADUATE PROGRAM SPECIALISTS AND COORDINATORS

Abstract

Undergraduate management courses find themselves in turbulent contexts and facing difficulties in generating resources and competencies of different natures. One of the biggest problems is the capacity to refine students’ education in line with the challenges that arise in the management profession. Symptoms such as the disassociation between theory and practice, the lack of a logical sequence of content, an excess of lectures and the inability to develop students’ skills in market demand are always mentioned as criticisms. Interdisciplinarity, however, treated as the controlled promotion of relationships between different disciplinary contents and currently considered more as a process than a product (fazenda, 1991; 2006), aims to develop a complex thinking able to understand the systemic reality and relating elements found in different areas. Using interdisciplinary practices, teaching in management could overcome, or at least reduce, the issues present in its courses. Thus, the objective of this paper is to present the point of view of specialists, interdisciplinarity research group members and management course administrators through personal interviews and the Delphi method that employed an online questionnaire. The findings show that specialists do not distinguish between interdisciplinarity applied in management teaching to that in different contexts, while course administrators are supportive of the idea, but face structural and organizational difficulties to put it into practice. Management teaching is seen by both these groups to lack greater interdisciplinarity, but in order to change this a reform is needed in curricular structures, as well as an effort by professors with a stronger focus on post-graduate degree, to the detriment of graduate degree courses. In addition, an inversion is required in the didactic methods used in the classroom, making them more student-centric than teacher-focused and thus eliminating the excess of lecture classes. Initiatives that provide systematic thinking, whether in their extent or in case studies, can also strengthen interdisciplinarity in management teaching.