Developing a Public Interest School of Management
| Published date | 01 March 2010 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8551.2009.00681.x |
| Date | 01 March 2010 |
Developing a Public Interest School of
Management
Ewan Ferlie, Gerry McGivern and Ailson De Moraes
1
Department of Management, King’s College London, 150 Stanford Street, London SE1, and
1
School of
Management, Royal Holloway University of London, Egham, Surrey TW20 OEX, UK
Corresponding author email: ewan.ferlie@kcl.ac.uk
This ‘think piece’ paper contributes to the recent ‘business school business’ debate by
examining whether an alternative form of the business school – specifically, the public
interest model – can be created. Current criticisms of conventional business schools are
reviewed and alternative models explored. We take some examples from our own field
of health management research. We define the public interest school model in more
detail than in previous accounts and compare and contrast it with other models of the
reformed business school. We identify certain conditions in which this form is more
likely to succeed and suggest a future empirical research agenda.
Introduction: Crisis in the business
school?
Can business schools go beyond what their many
critics see as their current function of educating
and training managerial cadres in managerial
techniques and supplying advice to maximize
short-term shareholder value? The educational,
intellectual and even moral collapse of the
conventional business school has been heralded
(Khurana, 2007). Various models have recently
been advocated (Bennis and O’Toole, 2005; Grey,
2004; Pfeffer and Fong, 2002, 2005; Starkey and
Tiratsoo, 2007) in response to this perceived
crisis.
Is this reformative project doomed as all
business schools are essentially the same? We
argue that there is some diversity in the business
school field so that further reform may be feasible
as well as desirable. For example, some existing
schools term themselves ‘schools of management’
and others ‘business schools’, and this choice of
language may be thought to be significant in sig-
nalling a distinct identity and ideology. Schools
of management, for instance, might intuitively be
thought to be more inclined than business schools
to adopt the public interest form (although we
need empirical evidence to test this intuition, as
argued in the conclusion) and to work with
public and not for profit organizations as well as
private firms. In this paper we examine the poten-
tial for creating and sustaining a ‘public interest’
business school, perhaps better labelled as a
school of management, within the UK context.
Why are these questions important? First,
business schools now represent a major force in
the production of management knowledge. The
website of the UK Association of Business Schools
(ABS) (http://www.the-abs.org.uk) lists 108 mem-
bers, even though the first two UK business
schools (London and Manchester) were founded
as recently as 1965. Business schools now account
for about a seventh of all students in UK higher
education (223,041 full-time equivalent in 2005–
2006). The rise of the business school is a notable
feature of the UK higher education landscape.
Nearly all UK business schools are institution-
ally located within host universities largely
funded through the public purse. There are no
Thanks are due to anonymous referees for their
comments and also to participants at a seminar at the
University of Warwick for their helpful comments on an
earlier draft.
British Journal of Management, Vol. 21, S60–S70 (2010)
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2009.00681.x
r2010 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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