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1 - The business school: history, evolution and the search for legitimacy

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

INTRODUCTION

Since the 1960s, young, ambitious managers have regarded attending a programme at a high-quality business school as almost a prerequisite for business success and eventual promotion to the executive suite.

More recently, despite business schools being one of the acknowledged success stories of higher education over the past forty years, there has been a wide range of comment and criticism and a growing sense of concern about the value, purpose, role and academic stature of business schools.

There is, for example, criticism about them being too market-driven (Bennis and O’Toole, 2005), about the impact and relevance of business school research (Pfeffer and Fong, 2002) and some doubt about whether attendance at a business school actually makes anyone a better manager (Grey, 2005: 106; Mintzberg, 2004). It is argued that management is an art and not a science (Mintzberg, 2004) and that it is not even a profession since it has no widely accepted body of knowledge, unlike accounting, medicine or law (Spender, 2007).

This chapter, therefore, poses the following questions:

  1. (1) What is a business school? How did it become a commonly accepted model? What is its espoused role and purpose?

  2. (2) How did the business school concept develop?

  3. (3) How has the business school evolved from an historical perspective?

  4. (4) What is the evidence of both success and failure of the business school?

  5. (5) What is its current positioning and strengths/weaknesses?

Type
Chapter
Information
The Business School in the Twenty-First Century
Emergent Challenges and New Business Models
 , pp. 1 - 51
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2013

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