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This paper aims to use the origin story of Dalhousie’s Faculty of Management as a foil for unpacking the tensions between deep disciplinary specialization and liberal education in business schools in Canada and the USA. Ultimately, the paper reveals that those tensions are not irreconcilable, and that through the fortunes of historical contingencies and deliberate decision-taking, a faculty can embrace the benefits of both breadth and depth.

The paper proposes a critical organizational history of management education through a case study. By drawing on secondary literature and archival sources, the authors focus on moments in business education, such as the founding of the Wharton School of Business, the release of the Carnegie and Ford Reports and the trend towards increased specialization to situate a case study of Dalhousie University’s Faculty of Management.

The authors find that the evolution of business education in North America from its broad, liberal origins towards narrow, specialization has come at a cost to some of the benefits of business and management education. An alternative approach, one reflected in the design of Dalhousie’s Faculty of Management, its programme offerings and its interconnection with other disciplines, enables the advantages of deep disciplinarity to co-exist (and cross-inform) with the advantages of liberal approach to knowledges.

The Dalhousie model offers business schools an example of a faculty that balances the rich insights of liberal interdisciplinarity with the need for sophisticated approaches to more granular, often disciplinary, topics. In addition, the paper offers the story of a multidisciplinary management faculty, some explanation for how that faculty was maintained despite pressures towards specialization; and in doing so, contributes to the limited historical research of management education, particularly in Canada, post-2000.

This paper aims to identify the changes in management education students in business schools prefer since the spread of gig work.

The empirical data is based on focus groups with 30 management educators working in five public business schools in Egypt. Thematic analysis was subsequently used to determine the main ideas in the transcripts from the interviews.

The author finds that both curricular changes (indifference to traditional management theories, student calls for more practical case studies, student passion for entrepreneurship-related courses) and structural changes (concentration on student-centred teaching, student preference for short flexible lectures and increasing student doubts regarding the competence of their teachers) are the two main forms of change in management education students prefer since the spread of gig work.

This paper is a pioneering study that specifically investigates how the spread of gig work triggers change in management education in response to calls from students. No previous studies (to the author’s knowledge) have theorized and empirically analysed this specific topic, especially in the under-researched settings of developing countries in North Africa.