What the Faculty of Business and Management will be like

The HSE has concluded a process of expanding its faculties. What opportunities has this process opened up for students? How are BA and MA programmes now managed? Will this help ensure decision-making centers are closer to student audiences and scientific laboratories? Here we take the 'big' Business and Management Faculty, which now unites specialists in management, logistics, and business informatics as an example in exploring these issues.

Why did we need to create a joint faculty?

The new faculty brings together three schools that had previously been separate faculties: The School of Business and Business Administration (formerly the Faculty of Management), The School of Logistics and the School of Business Informatics. This combination has been carefully thought out. Today, a solid understanding of the latest IT is needed to achieve management, logistics, and marketing goals.

Those who are involved with IT can collaborate with, for example, their colleagues from HR Management Department.

What opportunities does this expansion open up?

This integration makes it possible to expand the variety of courses offered to students at the 'big' faculty, and to attract specialists who are used to a more narrow audience to teaching and research positions. The three schools will enjoy lively interaction within the 'big' faculty – in courses, teaching staff, experts, business contacts and ideas.

From repertory to non-repertory theater

The Faculty will retain its previous (three) BA programmes and (12) MA programmes. But HSE has adopted a new approach to overseeing its educational programmes. They will now be overseen by academic councils and academic supervisors who create the basis of the programme, the study plans, and select the teaching staff. Only then are these documents endorsed by the HSE's Education and Teaching Methods Council and Academic Council.

Nikolay Filinov, Dean of the Business and Management Faculty, describes the difference between the old system and the current approach as being something akin to the difference between repertory and non-repertory theater.

Departments or schools are roughly equivalent to repertory theater, with their troupe and repertoire formed based on the available talent.

There are advantages to a department – it is an environment in which new talent, i.e. young researchers and teachers, enjoy the space needed to grow and develop. That is why the departmental structure will be retained within the Faculty's schools. However, these departments will no longer have an administrative function — their focus will be solely on education and teaching methods. They will discuss graduate students' dissertations, teaching plans and course programmes. One teacher will, based on their research interests, be able to be part of several different departments simultaneously.

Why 'continuing' education should not be separate

The Faculty also includes offers associate member status (i.e. they retain their management autonomy) to sections involved in the provision of Additional Professional Education. These include the Higher School of Business Informatics, the Institute of Innovation Management, and the International Center of Training in Logistics,  

In this instance the term 'additional professional education' is not the best one to use here, as it seems to invoke a degree of repetition or obligation. Professor Filinov feels that it is neither 'additional' nor 'ancillary' — but is part of management education and to an extent business informatics programmes.

'If you look at global best practice, you see that the most successful business schools combine what we would call fundamental educational programmes and what we would call additional educational programmes,' Professor Filonov says. 'Further, MBA programmes are leading business schools' flagship offerings — the best teachers teach them and the latest research results are used.'

Research at the Faculty

The Faculty retains and expands opportunities for carrying out fundamental and applied research, and consulting work. All the academic sections (The Center for Study of Social Organization of a Firm, Laboratory of Network Organizational Forms) will continue to operate. The expanded Faculties will stimulate the development of interdisciplinary research projects.

The Faculty is set to become a broad forum for joint discussion and research, and a recruiting ground for the best teachers from business.