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Roundtable on Business Education

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2011

John F. Wilson ,
Robert R. Locke ,
Rolv Petter Amdam ,
Nuria Puig  and
Tamotsu Nishizawa
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Extract

A consideration of Rakesh Khurana's From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession (Princeton, 2007).

Khurana's book is an examination of the development of the university-based business school in the United States from the nineteenth century to today. He asserts that while the original goal of these schools was to train a professional class of managers in the mold of doctors or lawyers, university business schools no longer strive for this ideal. Instead, Khurana believes that business schools have become purveyors of a product –the MBA–sold to student-consumers. People should therefore not be surprised at corporate misconduct when managers are considered responsible only to shareholders. Khurana calls for a renewal of the professional ideal in the business school, in which future business leaders are trained to take their place as moral leaders in society. We asked each of the following authors to comment on the book and see if business education underwent a similar transition in other countries.

Type
Meeting Report
Information
Business History Review , Volume 82 , Issue 2: A Special Issue on Alfred D. Chandler Jr. , Summer 2008 , pp. 329 - 358
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2008

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References

1 See, for instance, Aaronson, Susan, “Dinosaurs in the Global Economy? American Graduate Business Schools in the 1980s and 1990s,” in Management Education and Competitiveness: Europe, Japan, and the United States, ed. Amdam, Rolv Petter (London, 1996), 215.Google Scholar

2 See, for instance, Locke's, The Collapse of the American Management Mystique (Oxford, 1996).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Khurana touches only briefly on the ideas offered by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Christina Fong on the links between theory and practice in “The End of Business Schools? Less Success than Meets the Eye,” Academy of Management: Learning and Education (Washington, D.C., 2002).

4 Wilson, John F. and Thomson, Andrew, The Making of Modern Management: British Management in Historical Perspective (Oxford, 2006).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 See Grey, Chris, A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Studying Organisations (London, 2005), 120–21.Google Scholar

6 See Enteman, Willard F., Managerialism: The Emergence of a New Ideology (Madison, Wise, 1993).Google Scholar

7 I exclude the French écoles supérieures de commerce, which were basically secondary schools.

8 Norwegian Research Center in Management and Organizations, “Management Education and Selection of Top Managers in Europe and the United States” (University of Bergen, 2001), 90.

9 I describe the institutionalization of these schools and their intellectual achievement in The End of the Practical Man: Entrepreneurship and Higher Education in Germany, France, and Great Britain, 1880–1940 (Greenwich, Conn., 1984, 2006).

10 See Shenhav, Yehouda, Manufacturing Rationality (New York, 1999).Google Scholar

11 As Khurana emphasizes in his chapter, “A Very Ill-defined Institution,” 137–92.

12 See “The New Paradigm,” in my book, Management and Higher Education since 1940 (Cambridge, U.K., 1989).

13 Locke, , Management and Higher Education since 1940: The Influence of America and Japan on West Germany, Great Britain, and France (New York, 1989).Google Scholar

14 Locke, , The Collapse of the American Management Mystique (Oxford, U.K., 1996).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 Business Week, June 1, 2007.

16 Journal of Christian Ethics (Feb. 2000): 6.

17 Chronicle of Higher Education (Jan. 24, 2003): 20.

18 Locke, Robert and Schöne, Katja, The Entrepreneurial Shift: Americanization in European High-Technology Management Education (New York, 2004), 2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 A process that has been described by the contributors to Missionaries and Managers: American Influence on European Management Education edited by Gourvish, Terry and Tiratsoo, Nick (Manchester, U.K., 1998)Google Scholar, and by Locke, , in Management Education and Higher Education since 1940: The Influence of America and Japan on West Germany, Great Britain, and France (Cambridge, U.K., 1989).Google Scholar

20 See their new book The Business School and the Bottom Line (New York, 2007).

21 See his HEC 100:1881–1981: Histoire d'une grande école (Jouy en Josas, 1981).

22 See Chandler, Alfred D., Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).Google Scholar

23 See his The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power (Stanford, Calif., 1996).

24 Engwall, Lars, Mercury Meets Minerva: Business Studies and Higher Education: The Swedish Case (New York, 1992).Google Scholar

25 See my “Educating Spanish Managers: The United States, Modernizing Networks, and Business Schools in Spain, 1950–1975,” in Inside the Business Schools: The Content of European Business Education, eds. Amdam, Rolv Petter, Kvalshaugen, Ragnhild, and Larsen, Eirinn (Oslo, 2003), 58–86.Google Scholar

26 Guillén, Mauro F., Models of Management: Work, Authority, and Organization in a Comparative Perspective (Chicago, 1994), 152–204.Google Scholar

27 See their La enseñanza de directión de empresas en España: Management education in Spain (Madrid, 1969).

28 Guillén, Mauro F., The Rise of Spanish Multinationals: European Business in the Global Economy (New York, 2005).Google Scholar

29 North American Review (1903): 31.

30 Economic Journal (1908).

31 Quoted in Hitotsubashi University, 1875–2000 (2000), 107.

32 Journal of National Political Economy (1921).