Taking action: new forms of student and manager involvement in business education

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the usefulness of situated learning in business education. Design/methodology/approach – Illustrative case study. Findings – The increasingly popular situated learning approach holds some possible solutions to the emerging crisis of business schools' educational models. The key challenge in our view is to develop an area where action‐oriented learning can take place – and take place in a form that resembles the key idea of situated learning – that learners must become involved in a knowledge‐production process. Research limitations/implications – Situated approaches to learning, such as communities of practice (CoP), are not directly transferable to business schools' curricular teaching without considering the power relations and structural characteristics of the actors potentially constituting the CoP in which learning is to unfold. Originality/value – This paper addresses the issue of power relations and structural characteristics and shows through an illustrative case study, how situated learning principles may be practiced in order to become part of the pedagogical models in business schools. In doing so, the links between lecturers, students, and managers can be strengthened.