Where Have All the Business Schools Gone?
| Author | Thomas Durand,Stéphanie Dameron |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8551.2011.00775.x |
| Published date | 01 September 2011 |
| Date | 01 September 2011 |
Viewpoint
WhereHaveAlltheBusiness
Schools Gone?
Thomas Durand and Ste
´phanie Dameron
1
CNAM, Paris, France, and
1
University Paris Dauphine, France
Email: thomas.durand@cnam.fr; Stephanie.Dameron@dauphine.fr
Management education and research crystallizes
some of the successes, failures and contradictions
of our modern societies. On the one hand, the
demand for training in management keeps grow-
ing and so do the expectations from stakeholders
within and around organizations to better under-
stand how businesses emerge, grow, evolve and
disappear and how these businesses may be run
in various contexts. Enrolment at business
schools is increasing throughout the world, and
more research is conducted and published every
year – with in fact an explosion of the literature
that makes it extremely difficult for both aca-
demics and practitioners to follow everything
that goes on in the field. And this is taking place
in a world economy that keeps growing despite
some ups and downs, with international trade
bound to develop further despite the limitations
of the resources of our planet, and with entire
regions of the globe reaching income per capita
that they had been dreaming of, hoping for a
better life with access to mass consumption,
better housing, health, education, travel etc. In
this sense, management education and research at
business schools may be viewed as both benefit-
ing from and fueling the world economy. Busi-
ness schools aim at providing (a) educated
individuals trained to deal with the complexity
of the task of leading ‘organized collective action’
and (b) new insights to improve the practice of
management for a variety of forms of organiza-
tion in a variety of contexts.
On the other hand, the success of business
schools raises many disturbing questions. How
could the community of researchers in finance
not see the subprime nonsense that their sophis-
ticated models made possible? To what extent is
the knowledge produced by management
researchers at western business schools fitted to
the socio-cultural-political context of, say, a
small family business in Tunisia or a co-op in
northeast Brazil? What happens to scholarly
inquiry if most of the management researchers
seem to take it for granted that the main issue in
business is performance of the focal organization
itself, e.g. treating social or environmental con-
cerns at best as constraints, if not as mere
externalities? What could have been done to
better train the faulty and greedy top managers
who led their companies into dishonesty, scandal
and ruin? How could we better combine the
principles of private entrepreneurship and
democracy in the governance of the firms? There
are many other such questions. Note that we do
not question here the role of management per se.
This is altogether a quite different debate and we
firmly believe that organized collective action
needs to be managed. Instead, our main point
here is to suggest that the development and
success of the business of business schools may be
questioned despite all the good they may bring to
our societies and economies.
We argue that the institutional setting and the
dynamics of the rules of the game that regulate
the world of management education and research
created a ‘business school bubble’ and may in fact
contribute to weakening our current business
school system from within. More specifically, we
argue that business schools have lost their way
while competing at the game of rankings. We
further argue that the UK – and other EU
business schools – make a mistake in blindly
British Journal of Management, Vol. 22, 559–563 (2011)
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2011.00775.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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