The Social Transformation of American Business Schools

12 November 2007 at 11:07 am Peter G. Klein Leave a comment

| Peter Klein |

Is management a profession? Are collegiate schools of business legitimate professional schools? The answers Rakesh Khurana’s book provides to both questions are “not yet” and “maybe never.”

Thus opens Donald Stabile’s EH.Net review of Rakesh Khurana’s From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession (Princeton, 2007). Business schools, argues Khurana, emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to provide “legitimacy” to management, giving it the same professional status as medicine or law. In Khurana’s account, this project failed largely because business schools, under the influence of powerful foundations such as Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford, promoted a curriculum focused on quantitative methods rather than the softer elements of ethics and social responsibility. (The main culprit: economics, or at least a 1970s-era Chicago school caricature of economics, as we’ve seen many times before.)

For additional commentary and discussion see Jim Heskett’s HBS Working Knowledge piece and this article from Business Week.