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Ruth Simpson is a leading scholar in management education. This paper aims to provide a succinct summary of her voluminous work on management education, with a particular focus on her work on the relevance and benefit of the Master in Business Administration (MBA) degree, which is generally considered the flagship of business and management education.

The approach taken is a review that introduces the central themes underpinning the work of Ruth Simpson on the MBA.

The paper elevates the understanding of the skills development and related outcomes from the MBA.

The works reviewed have implications on how to align the MBA curriculum to meet contemporary business requirements in a fast-changing world.

This paper highlights the key findings of Ruth Simpson’s research on the MBA and her scholarly contribution in this area. The paper also generates insights that are anticipated to stimulate management educators to further extend the field and carry it forward in the coming years.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of organisational culture (OC) on leadership styles in Nigerian universities. The study utilises the cultural dimensions theory (Hofstede’s insights) and the social exchange concept as theoretical lenses to examine the phenomena.

Using an exploratory qualitative approach, 40 interviews were conducted with senior academics and non-teaching staff working in Nigerian universities.

The findings reveal hierarchical, patriarchal, servile, and interdependent values as the underlying characteristics of organisation culture, shaping the choice of leadership styles in the management of Nigerian universities. As a result, it emerged from the study that positional, formalised exchanges, paternalism, relational approach and gendered reactions to leadership were typically adopted in university administration in this context.

The study relies on a small qualitative sample size, which makes the generalisation of findings difficult. However, the study provides a good understanding of cultural hegemony, framing leadership styles different from those of western cultures.

The findings of this study help to bridge the research gap concerning the implications of OC, and its influence on leadership behaviours in the Sub-Saharan African context. Research within this subfield in Africa is rare. Specifically, the study also enriches our understanding of cultural dimensions, informing the leadership methods adopted in higher education institutions.

This paper aims to stimulate scholarly interest in career dynamics in the African continent and to highlight a useful analytical framework for studying career dynamics within the continent. It is a step towards countering the hegemony of the Anglo‐Saxon conception of careers.

The approach taken is a literature review that introduces the topic and provides some background and discussion of the key analytical frameworks in cross‐national studies.

A review of the extant literature on careers revealed a dearth of knowledge on career dynamics in Africa. The paper contributes to the literature by providing a concise discussion of the two most dominant theoretical approaches (the culturalist and the institutionalist) which are often invoked in studying career dynamics within and across national contexts.

The effect of national culture on career dynamics should not be overstated. There is a need for career scholars to move beyond cultural explanations of career dynamics and embrace a more institutionalist approach in the study of career dynamics in the African context.

Career studies from an African perspective is currently underdeveloped. This paper represents the first major attempt to stimulate scholarly interest in this area. It generates insights that are expected to aid the development of more research on career dynamics in Africa, a relatively neglected, though important, empirical site.

Drawing on institutional theory, this study sets out to explore the career anchors that exist among information technology (IT) workers in Nigeria and also to establish the strongest anchors in this context.

This research adopted a two‐pronged methodological approach, which involved the use of 30 semi‐structured interviews and a 336‐question survey.

Results suggest the continued significance of traditional orientations to careers in Nigeria as well as orientations associated with new career theory.

The extent to which the findings of this research can be generalised is constrained by the selected context of the research.

Human resources managers in Nigeria should be cautious of adopting career management models developed in the West. They should provide a reward system, which minimises financial uncertainty and risk.

This paper provides valuable insights on the career anchors of IT workers in a relatively neglected region in the literature. It also extends Schein's original career anchor theory.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the mediating role of perceived employability in the relationship between core self-evaluations (CSEs) and job search behaviour (preparatory and active job search).

A cross-sectional survey data were obtained among a sample of 254 employed and unemployed graduate students from a university in Southeast Nigeria.

Results of the hierarchical multiple regression show that CSEs was significantly and positively associated with only preparatory job search behaviour but not active job search behaviour. CSEs was positively associated with perceived employability. Perceived employability was positively associated with the preparatory job search but not active job search. Perceived employability also mediated the relationship between CSEs and preparatory job search but failed to mediate the relationship between CSEs and active job search.

The study makes important contribution to the literature on job search by augmenting our understanding on the mechanism that govern core self-evaluation and job search behaviour relationship.

Human resources practitioners can use the insights of the present study in understanding aspects of jobseekers’ personality and perception that may be relevant in job search behaviour. The study has also implications for career development practice especially in the areas of counselling of job seekers in environments where there is high level of unemployment.

There has been rarely any previous attempt at investigating the possibility that the relationship between CSEs and job search behaviour is mediated by perceived employability.

This paper seeks to explore claims about the changing nature of careers by focusing on how information technology (IT) workers enact careers in the context of Nigeria. The theoretical framework guiding this research is that societal context (social structure and institutions) has an influence on the career patterns exhibited by individuals.

This study adopted a qualitative research approach, which involved semi‐structured interviews with 30 IT workers.

Analysis of the findings indicates that the career trajectory of these workers conforms in part with the traditional view of hierarchical and progressive careers and partly with recent models of the boundaryless career. In order to capture a more contextual understanding, and based on findings from this research which highlight both the dynamic and the reactive nature of the careers of IT workers in Nigeria, the concept of the chameleon career isi ntroduced.

This research contributes the Nigerian context and perspective to the wider discourse on changing nature of careers.

The Igbos are renowned for their success in business. This chapter traced the pre-colonial and post-colonial innovations among the Igbos to highlight salient factors that could be responsible for their outstanding success in recent times. In the pre-colonial era, the Igbos made their livelihood through vocations such as blacksmithing, traditional medicine, farming, pot moulding, hunting, food preservation, and textiles, especially in cloth weaving. The post-colonial period which witnessed the Nigerian civil war, led to a disruption of their entire business structure. However, through the principles of apprenticeship and hard work, ingredients of success in the pre-colonial years, the Igbos were able to rebuild their business structure and became renowned for their success. They retained some of their pre-colonial crafts such as cloth weaving of which the Akwete fabric is a good example and has gained both national and international prominence in recent times. The chapter presented the case of the Akwete Weaving Centre of Alex Ekwueme Federal University Ndufu-Alike Ikwo (AE-FUNAI), established to promote cultural heritage and enhance the entrepreneurial skills of students in the craft through modern apprenticeship. The chapter made recommendations on ways to enhance the Akwete Weaving industry and effectively harness its potentials.

This paper sets out to explore the gendered nature of the MBA and the benefits men and women gain from the course. In so doing it aims to highlight a relationship between the masculinity of the MBA and the “un‐development” of men.

The paper draws on secondary data and critiques the masculinity of the MBA pedagogy.

Examining outcomes from the MBA, evidence suggests that while men may achieve greater progress in terms of career development and pay, it is women who are more likely to undergo “transformational” change.

Drawing on work from critical management education (CME) and on models of learning, this paper argues for the need to “feminise” the MBA, where feminisation is used in a critical context to include a challenge to rather than rejection of dominant discourses. This goes some way to address the charge that, while CME has highlighted some of the programme's moral and political foundations, it has failed to recognise the gendered implications of the MBA.