Stabile on Khurana, _From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession_

[eh.net-review at eh.net]

Published by EH.NET (November 2007)

Rakesh Khurana, _From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social 
Transformation of Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of 
Management as a Profession_. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University 
Press, 2007. viii + 531 pp. $35 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-691-12020-1.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Donald R. Stabile, Department of Economics, 
St. Mary's College of Maryland.


Is management a profession? Are collegiate schools of business 
legitimate professional schools? The answers Rakesh Khurana's book 
provides to both questions are "not yet" and "maybe never." In 
reaching these answers, Khurana, associate professor of 
organizational behavior at Harvard Business School, provides a wealth 
of information about the history of collegiate business schools. His 
aim, however, is not to write a history of those schools. Rather, he 
is concerned with the process of legitimation. To him, the growth of 
big business in the U.S. created the new occupation of management, 
but managers did not attain the social authority of other 
professional occupations such as medicine and law. By providing 
university training in business on par with programs at law and 
medical schools, promoters of business schools intended at the outset 
to give managers the legitimacy of a profession. On Khurana's account 
they have failed and managers have never been able to act from the 
"higher aims" of the book's title instead performing more as "hired 
hands."

To make his case, Khurana divides the book into three parts. Part one 
details the early years of business schools, 1881 to 1941, when they 
engaged in what he calls their "professionalization project." The 
Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, an undergraduate 
program founded in 1881, was the first university business program. 
In 1901, Dartmouth established the Tuck School of Business as a 
five-year program that culminated in a master's degree. Harvard 
followed in 1906 with its strictly graduate school of business and 
the MBA. Other universities joined the trend and by the 1920s the 
school of business became an established, if controversial, feature 
of many university campuses.

To attain their own legitimacy as professional schools, the business 
schools presented management as a science by following the pioneering 
work of Frederick W. Taylor, although Khurana questions whether those 
schools ever developed a science of management. Deans of those 
business schools recognized that the definition of professionalism 
went beyond science to include research, ethics and social 
responsibility -- the "higher aims." To promote their definition of 
professionalism, those deans formed the American Association of 
Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) in 1916. It was to serve as 
both a professional association and an accrediting body to ensure 
that business programs had high standards consistent with a 
professional education. The AACSB promoted the "professionalization 
project" for the next half century and Khurana's use of the AACSB 
archives to tell its story is a notable scholarly achievement.

Part two describes a period of institutional acceptance of business 
schools, 1941-1970, when they began adopting a standardized 
curriculum. During World War II, academics contributed a range of 
technical innovations such as linear programming and statistical 
quality control to help the government plan and coordinate its 
wartime activities. After the war, the federal government used the GI 
Bill to send a large cohort of returning soldiers to college. These 
soldiers provided an expansion in higher education, especially in 
business schools. Consequently many business schools reduced their 
standards in terms of the academic credentials of their students and 
the quality of their courses. The AACSB tried to uphold its standards 
but, on Khurana's account, it went into decline. The large national 
foundations such as Carnegie, Rockefeller and Ford replaced the AACSB 
as the main influence on business schools. These foundations used 
their money to promote a business school curriculum that stressed 
quantitative methods at the cost of ethics and social responsibility.

This approach removed business faculty from concern with the actual 
operation of a business but left them vulnerable to market forces, 
the concern of part three of the book. Here Khurana finds the main 
influence to have been in the discipline of economics, particularly 
the neoclassical school that had a project to transform economics 
into a methodology of high theory that abstracted from the events of 
the real world and focused on how pure markets worked. The school 
dominated economics in the 1980s and their view that markets remained 
the best way to organize economic activities began to take over 
social discourse in the U.S. Khurana construes this market 
orientation as leading to the view that managers are free agents who 
should continually seek their highest incomes with no loyalty to 
their employers and no social responsibility. At the same time, in 
the late 1980s _Business Week_ began a trend in ranking MBA programs 
using ratings from students and their employers, that is, a market 
standard. Business schools responded to those ranking by changing 
their programs to offer what the market wanted rather than what a 
"profession" of management should have. Khurana leaves it an open 
question whether business schools can regain their spirit of the 
"professionalization project," although he offers some suggestions as 
to what they might do to regain it.

Khurana presents his argument in rich detail and the book is worth 
reading by anyone interested in the current trends in the 
commercialization of academia. At the same time, he is raising an 
issue that is as old as higher education. The beginnings of higher 
education in ancient Greece saw a debate over its nature between the 
classic philosophers and the sophists. The sophists earned their 
living by teaching practical subjects as determined by the 
marketplace, while Plato and Aristotle, with the advantage of 
personal wealth, opened schools that aimed at the discovery of 
virtue. The problem then and now is defining virtue or what Khurana 
refers to the "higher aims." In the secular and culturally diverse 
world of U.S. universities many disciplines have tried to claim the 
privilege of defining virtue but none have succeeded. The discipline 
of business has not yet sought this privileged place in academia. 
Still, the market system has given business a privileged place in 
society. The future may well see business schools attaining the 
"professionalization project" not to confer legitimacy on managers 
but from the legitimacy of managers. That is how the older 
professions conferred legitimacy on their professional schools, as 
Khurana clearly understands.


Donald R. Stabile is Professor of the College at St. Mary's College 
of Maryland. His latest book is _Economics, Competition and Academia: 
An Intellectual History of Sophism versus Virtue_ (Edward Elgar, 
2007).

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