New JC Spender Essay

15 March 2007 at 1:10 am Nicolai Foss Leave a comment

| Nicolai Foss |

JC Spender is one of my favorite management thinkers. I may disagree with him, but he is usually challenging and very often profound (in contrast to some other management thinkers who have been discussed here at O&M). And he writes extremely well. JC has a new essay coming out in Journal of Management Inquiry, “Management as a Regulated Profession.” (It can also be downloaded from JC’s site). Much of the content of the paper is a discussion and diagnosis of the theory-practice gap, including pointing out that this discussion has been going for a very long time: “Redlich (1957) tells of the 19th-century German steel town that, its business failing, pressed the local business school principal to take charge. The business failed anyway, and he was put in jail — where he died — to ponder the gap between rigor and relevance. Deans beware!”

Here is the abstract:

The history of management education shows the rigor and relevancegap has been around for centuries, well before its appearancein the United States. Nor is it peculiar to management. It isneither germane to our discipline’s present difficulties noran appropriate focus for our critics. Rather, history suggestswe finally parted company with managers after the 1959 Fordand Carnegie reports, as we presumed rationality alone was thesufficient basis for understanding them and their doings. Thesereports helped us turn management education into a professioneven as management itself has yet to become one. To return closerto managers, the author suggests rationality captures one dimensionof their practice, whereas the notion of business as an artform might capture its complement. Reformed art education, coveringart’s history, aesthetics, criticism, and production, providesa framework for studying the managerial art, and leads us toa rich, dynamic theory of the firm.