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From Higher Aims to Hired Hands : The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession / Rakesh Khurana.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [2010]Copyright date: ©2007Edition: Course BookDescription: 1 online resource (568 p.) : 7 line illus. 15 tablesContent type:
Media type:
Carrier type:
ISBN:
  • 9780691145877
  • 9781400830862
Subject(s): Other classification:
  • online - DeGruyter
Online resources: Available additional physical forms:
  • Issued also in print.
Contents:
Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction. Business Education and the Social Transformation of American Management -- I. The Professionalization Project in American Business Education, 1881-1941 -- 1. An Occupation in Search of Legitimacy -- 2. Ideas of Order: Science, the Professions, and the University in Late Nineteenthand Early Twentieth-Century America -- 3. The Invention of the University-Based Business School -- 4. "A Very Ill-Defined Institution": The Business School as Aspiring Professional School -- II. The Institutionalization of Business Schools, 1941-1970 -- 5. The Changing Institutional Field in the Postwar Era -- 6. Disciplining the Business School Faculty: The Impact of the Foundations -- III. The Triumph of the Market and the Abandonment of the Professionalization Project, 1970-the Present -- 7. Unintended Consequences: The Post-Ford Business School and the Fall of Managerialism -- 8. Business Schools in the Marketplace -- Epilogue. Ideas of Order Revisited: Markets, Hierarchies, and Communities -- Acknowledgments -- Bibliographic and Methods Note -- Notes -- Selected Bibliography -- Index
Summary: Is management a profession? Should it be? Can it be? This major work of social and intellectual history reveals how such questions have driven business education and shaped American management and society for more than a century. The book is also a call for reform. Rakesh Khurana shows that university-based business schools were founded to train a professional class of managers in the mold of doctors and lawyers but have effectively retreated from that goal, leaving a gaping moral hole at the center of business education and perhaps in management itself. Khurana begins in the late nineteenth century, when members of an emerging managerial elite, seeking social status to match the wealth and power they had accrued, began working with major universities to establish graduate business education programs paralleling those for medicine and law. Constituting business as a profession, however, required codifying the knowledge relevant for practitioners and developing enforceable standards of conduct. Khurana, drawing on a rich set of archival material from business schools, foundations, and academic associations, traces how business educators confronted these challenges with varying strategies during the Progressive era and the Depression, the postwar boom years, and recent decades of freewheeling capitalism. Today, Khurana argues, business schools have largely capitulated in the battle for professionalism and have become merely purveyors of a product, the MBA, with students treated as consumers. Professional and moral ideals that once animated and inspired business schools have been conquered by a perspective that managers are merely agents of shareholders, beholden only to the cause of share profits. According to Khurana, we should not thus be surprised at the rise of corporate malfeasance. The time has come, he concludes, to rejuvenate intellectually and morally the training of our future business leaders.
Holdings
Item type Current library Call number URL Status Notes Barcode
eBook eBook Biblioteca "Angelicum" Pont. Univ. S.Tommaso d'Aquino Nuvola online online - DeGruyter (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Online access Not for loan (Accesso limitato) Accesso per gli utenti autorizzati / Access for authorized users (dgr)9781400830862

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction. Business Education and the Social Transformation of American Management -- I. The Professionalization Project in American Business Education, 1881-1941 -- 1. An Occupation in Search of Legitimacy -- 2. Ideas of Order: Science, the Professions, and the University in Late Nineteenthand Early Twentieth-Century America -- 3. The Invention of the University-Based Business School -- 4. "A Very Ill-Defined Institution": The Business School as Aspiring Professional School -- II. The Institutionalization of Business Schools, 1941-1970 -- 5. The Changing Institutional Field in the Postwar Era -- 6. Disciplining the Business School Faculty: The Impact of the Foundations -- III. The Triumph of the Market and the Abandonment of the Professionalization Project, 1970-the Present -- 7. Unintended Consequences: The Post-Ford Business School and the Fall of Managerialism -- 8. Business Schools in the Marketplace -- Epilogue. Ideas of Order Revisited: Markets, Hierarchies, and Communities -- Acknowledgments -- Bibliographic and Methods Note -- Notes -- Selected Bibliography -- Index

restricted access online access with authorization star

http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec

Is management a profession? Should it be? Can it be? This major work of social and intellectual history reveals how such questions have driven business education and shaped American management and society for more than a century. The book is also a call for reform. Rakesh Khurana shows that university-based business schools were founded to train a professional class of managers in the mold of doctors and lawyers but have effectively retreated from that goal, leaving a gaping moral hole at the center of business education and perhaps in management itself. Khurana begins in the late nineteenth century, when members of an emerging managerial elite, seeking social status to match the wealth and power they had accrued, began working with major universities to establish graduate business education programs paralleling those for medicine and law. Constituting business as a profession, however, required codifying the knowledge relevant for practitioners and developing enforceable standards of conduct. Khurana, drawing on a rich set of archival material from business schools, foundations, and academic associations, traces how business educators confronted these challenges with varying strategies during the Progressive era and the Depression, the postwar boom years, and recent decades of freewheeling capitalism. Today, Khurana argues, business schools have largely capitulated in the battle for professionalism and have become merely purveyors of a product, the MBA, with students treated as consumers. Professional and moral ideals that once animated and inspired business schools have been conquered by a perspective that managers are merely agents of shareholders, beholden only to the cause of share profits. According to Khurana, we should not thus be surprised at the rise of corporate malfeasance. The time has come, he concludes, to rejuvenate intellectually and morally the training of our future business leaders.

Issued also in print.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 30. Aug 2021)