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The final chapter of this volume brings together the key debates from this book and situates them within an ever-developing policy landscape. It argues that the themes this volume raises around the two competing uses of ‘business’, both figurative and literal, continue to drive developments in widening participation (WP). It draws together threads around the figurative usage of business to consider the ways in which the ideology of marketisation has impacted the sector to date and continues to shape policies in this area. Considering the more literal ways in which WP has become the ‘business’ of the sector, this chapter draws together threads from across the second part of this book, which examined how higher education providers (HEPs), further education colleges, new providers and third sector WP organisations all enact WP as part of their ‘business as usual’. This chapter concludes with a summary of changes to the market structure introduced since the Higher Education Research Act (HERA, 2017), such as the levelling up White Paper (Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, 2022), the Department for Education (DfE, 2022a) higher education policy statement and Office for Students (OfS) regulatory consultations (OfS, 2022b), and questions whether these represent minor tweaks to a recently embedded policy environment or indeed render much of the 2017 settlement redundant. Whether these are considered as continuity or change, in the final analysis, they suggest that there remain tensions among those responsible for the executive/ideological policy direction, with corresponding knock-on effects elsewhere on the enactment staircase. What remains clear, however, is that the contradictions inherent in the dual imperative – the human capital needs of the country juxtaposed against a desire for a more socially just society – remain unresolved while a ‘level playing field’ market order is layered over such a steep institutional hierarchy.

Over the last few decades, there have been many approaches aimed at developing a manager's wide range of capabilities and skills. In a recent article, Abrahams discusses the range of management development theories and justly states:

Presents the results of an interview survey carried out in an out‐of‐town store, compares these with the impact of the store as predicted by the Lakschmanan‐Harsen real potential model. Suggests that the model is an effective way of assessing the impact of out‐of‐town stores.

Education is, or should be, a gateway to a better life, a better understanding of ourselves in a complex and hierarchical social world. As a political scientist from a working-class mature-student background I have been fortunate enough to build a career that not only celebrates and embodies the possibilities provided by educational access but also aims to highlight the staggering lengths the socially advantaged go to in their denial of educational opportunity for the vast majority of people from my background. Like all autoethnographies, I guess this contribution may seem an idiosyncratic take on working-class life and academia; it is at once a primal scream against ingrained classism we have to confront every day, but also a recognition of the intellectual pluralism and tolerance of academia that allows and rewards even members of the ‘awkward squad’ like me if we stick it out long enough. It is a rage against the machine, but hopefully, also a small step towards changing the definition of academia.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

There is a growing interest among writers, academics and professionals in Europe and America about the integration of training with organisational development (OD). As will be seen later, the basis for this is the need to develop training as an integral part of organisational life, so that its contribution to organisational performance can be enhanced. Training is being seen more as an OD tool than the traditional role of providing courses for improvement in individuals' job performance.

The architects of institutional policy are rarely those tasked with operationalising it. This can create gaps between what is set out in policy and what happens on the ground. This is an under-researched area and one this chapter will shed a light on. This chapter examines the role that widening participation (WP) practitioners play in operationalising policy. Focusing upon the implementational level of the policy enactment staircase, it examines the roles of individuals working at the coalface in enacting WP policy. Drawing upon research conducted by the author in 2016–2017 with higher education providers (HEPs) in England (Rainford, 2019), it supplements this with data from a sector-wide survey conducted by the editors of this book in 2021. In drawing together these two data sets, it offers a rich picture of who works in WP within HEPs in England. It examines the multitude of roles undertaken by these practitioners and how this varies across the sector both in HEPs and collaborative Uni Connect partnerships. This chapter also highlights how practitioners can shift the focus of how policy is operationalised. In doing so, it examines some of the challenges faced by practitioners and the extent to which they are given the tools to carry out this essential work. While this chapter argues that practitioners have a level of agency in the work they do, this can be constrained by both national and institutional policies. It argues that these constraints are often shaped by competing imperatives of both social justice and economic drivers.

Widening participation (WP) has increasingly become part of the normal ‘business’ of English higher education (HE) providers during the last 25 years. WP entered the policy mainstream for the entire HE sector following the Dearing Review (NCIHE, 1997) and the election of a new Labour government wedded to notions of social justice but also concerned with ‘lifelong learning’ in the name of human capital growth. This book employs a dual usage of the term ‘business’ in relation to WP policy, practice and culture in the context of the marketised English HE system. The first, figurative, usage explores the ways in which WP has been drawn into institutional positionality as HE providers are encouraged to differentiate themselves in the market. The second, literal, usage explores the ways in which the business of WP has become ‘business as normal’ for the sector and institutions, increasingly intertwined with other activities and which play out variously, often in response to regulatory demands of the state. This introductory chapter first contextualises these developments with a brief overview of the evolution of the HE sector in England before proposing a multilevel model – the HE policy enactment staircase – as a way of thinking about how policy is made, enacted and implemented within the sector. This chapter then draws upon this model to acts as a structure for this book. It does this by moving from a macro-level exploration of ideological levels of policymaking, through National/Sectoral level right down to the issues at an institutional and operational levels. In doing so, this chapter creates a framework from which to understand how the various elements and levels of the business of WP play out within the English HE sector.

The English sector is characterised by an expanding and increasingly differentiated set of higher education providers (HEPs) and an ever-more diverse student body. As a consequence, HEPs are as differentiated in their widening participation (WP) approaches as they are in every other aspect of the business of HE, and this has led to tensions between why and how they should go about the business of WP. Are HEPs driven by the desire to enhance social justice or merely responding to regulatory pressure? This chapter discusses how changing market regulatory regimes have interreacted with, and often conflicted with, institutional missions as they try to respond to the dual policy imperatives discussed in earlier chapters: the economic, human capital expansionary dynamic and the desire to enhance social justice through access to the HE system.