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  • 2007
  • Book

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

By: Rakesh Khurana
  • Format:Print
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Abstract

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.

Keywords

Business Education; Moral Sensibility; Profit; Social History; Leadership; Managerial Roles; United States

Citation

Khurana, Rakesh. From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. (Winner of Association of American Publishers Best Professional/Scholarly Publishing Book in Business, Finance and Management. Winner of Max Weber Award for Distinguished Scholarship for the book which makes an outstanding contribution to scholarship on organizations, occupations, and/or work presented by American Sociological Association.)
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About The Author

Rakesh Khurana

Organizational Behavior
→More Publications

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More from the Author
  • Philanthropic Conditions for Diffusion: Theoretically Mediating the Diffusion of Economics and How it Superseded the Rise of Executive Education in Business Schools By: Kenneth C. Kimura, Rakesh Khurana and Marion Fourcade
  • How Foundations Think: The Ford Foundation as a Dominating Institution in the Field of American Business Schools By: Rakesh Khurana, Kenneth C. Kimura and Marion Fourcade
  • Still Leading Series—Issues in Transitioning to New Forms of Service Later in Life By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Rakesh Khurana, James Honan and Ai-Ling Jamila Malone
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