Britannia and her Business Schools
| Date | 01 September 2011 |
| Author | Lars Engwall,Rickard Danell |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8551.2011.00761.x |
| Published date | 01 September 2011 |
Britannia and her Business Schools
Lars Engwall and Rickard Danell
Department of Business Studies, Uppsala University, Sweden, and Department of Sociology,
Umea
˚University, Sweden
Corresponding author email: Lars.Engwall@fek.uu.se
Business education constitutes a significant part of offerings at modern universities. It
started to emerge on both sides of the Atlantic around 1900, despite considerable
resistance from professors of established disciplines. In Europe, it was mainly
established outside universities, as at Handelshochschulen in Germany, e
´coles de
commerce in France and handelsho
¨gskolor in Scandinavia. The UK in contrast was
much slower to take up business education. With the exception of the London School of
Economics and Political Science, which turned more into an institution preparing
graduates for civil service, and accounting education in Birmingham and Manchester, it
was not until the mid-1960s that academic business education took off in the UK. This
paper elaborates on the reasons for this development and shows how earlier traditions
were challenged after the Robbins and Frank reports. As a result, five groups of top
institutions for business education have been identified and labelled: (1) Front-runners,
(2) Engineers, (3) Frankies, (4) Followers, and (5) Latecomers. The paper also
demonstrates that the relatively late diffusion of business education has implied that UK
business schools have been relatively less prominent in publishing in relation to US
business schools. However, a comparison between two periods (1981–1992 and 2005–
2009) of publishing in 15 top journals indicates that UK business scholars are gaining
ground. At the same time most top references in the published UK papers have US
authors.
Introduction
Classical universities were organized on the idea
that students prepared themselves for profes-
sional studies through studies in the Faculty of
Philosophy. After this they could move on to
professional studies in the Faculties of Law,
Medicine or Theology. This structure is still
visible in modern European universities, while
US universities are more organized in terms of
different professional schools. However, on both
sides of the Atlantic, academic studies have come
to include other specialties than the original ones,
primarily engineering and management. Of these
particularly management education and research
has become an increasingly significant part of
academic systems all over the world.
Although there are some earlier examples of
academic management education and research,
the starting point for the establishment of
business schools can be said to have occurred in
the later part of the 19th century and early 20th
century. Among the early institutions two are
often mentioned as front-runners: l’Ecole des
Hautes Etudes Commerciales in Paris and the
Wharton School of Finance and Commerce at
the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia,
both founded in 1881 (Engwall, 2009/1992, p. 6).
They were followed by a number of other
institutions in Europe and in the USA.
Early foundations in France of e
´coles des
commerce occurred in Lille (1892), Rouen
(1895), Nancy (1896), Montpellier (1897), Dijon
(1900) and Toulouse (1905) (Engwall and
Zamagni, 1998, p. 5). These were founded on
the initiative of local chambers of commerce.
Similarly German business interests were behind
the foundations of Handelshochschulen: Aachen
and Leipzig (1898), Cologne and Frankfurt
(1901), Berlin (1906) and Mannheim (1908)
British Journal of Management, Vol. 22, 432–442 (2011)
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2011.00761.x
r2011 The Author(s)
British Journal of Management r2011 British Academy of Management. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA, 02148, USA.
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