Eine Frage des Stils?

Abstract

In the next years digital technologies change business professions. Activities within accounting and office work decrease whereas complex, uncertain strategical decisions and marketing activities increase. This development demands traders to create innovative solutions and to acquire the necessary knowledge autonomously. They way traders construct their knowledge depends on their beliefs about knowledge and knowing and on their thinking styles. Epistemic beliefs determine the criteria for selecting, evaluating, and accepting information as knowledge whereas thinking styles characterize the preferred way in engaging problems and dealing with tasks. The aim of this paper is to explore how epistemic beliefs and thinking styles can be combined into individual procedures of constructing knowledge. The study investigates how these individual procedures influence learning success, and how these procedures prepare apprentices for dealing with future demands. 236 prospective wholesalers and 295 retailers participated in the study. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis identified four thinking styles for marketing and accounting: innovation, tradition, conformity, and teamwork. These styles explain about 7 % of the variance in the grades for accounting. Based on these four styles and the epistemic beliefs latent profile analysis reveals three groups of apprentices: the flexible, the average, and the discussant. These groups explain about 4 % of the variance for the grades in marketing and accounting. The paper concludes that trading apprentices have several resources for dealing with future demands. Recommendations for supporting learning within the three groups are outlined.