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6 - Is the business school a professional service firm? Lessons learned

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 July 2013

Howard Thomas ,
Peter Lorange  and
Jagdish Sheth
Howard Thomas
Affiliation:
Singapore Management University
Peter Lorange
Affiliation:
Lorange Institute of Business
Jagdish Sheth
Affiliation:
Emory University, Atlanta
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Summary

This chapter examines the proposition that business schools have simpler characteristics than professional service firms (PSFs). There are two useful reasons for doing so. First, the process of analysing business schools through a professional services lens sheds new light on the management and leadership challenges for business school deans. Second, the process broadens the range of studies of PSFs that exist outside of the ‘core professions’ (law, accountancy, medicine and so on; Lowendahl, 1997), enabling closer scrutiny of the characteristics of PSFs.

Business schools, like most higher education institutions and PSFs, are ‘loosely coupled’ organisations that exhibit a set of distinctive traits and characteristics which lead to a unique organisational form and setting. This presents particular challenges for business school deans since leading a business school is not the same as leading a corporation. In a growing literature that examines business schools and their various constituents, there is only limited coverage of the practice and role of deans (Davies and Thomas, 2009).

Type
Chapter
Information
The Business School in the Twenty-First Century
Emergent Challenges and New Business Models
 , pp. 197 - 239
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2013

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