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

What an invaluable book! As a part-time MBA student who has been in my program for a year now, I wanted a book to read to help build my "MBA mindset". Well I did not really get what I bargained for with this particular book. What started off as a nice summer read caused me to seriously look into the methods that are in place at my own business school as well as what exactly it is that an MBA stands for in the marketplace.Professor Khurana approaches the subject more as a academic than an common industry critic. This book reads very much like an academic journal. A lot of the text is consumed by a historical analysis of the beginnings and development of the MBA degree; which I found fascinating, but others may grow a bit weary of reading so much detail about MBA reformers in the 1960s. Overall I was surprised by his candor regarding the AACSB and the "elite" MBA programs (especially since he is employed by Harvard). He highlighted these two entities as part of the problem; settling for modified standards that have helped move the MBA away from its original designation of a professional degree; and leaving the door wide open for the degree to have no formal defined standards and/or purpose.Surprisingly though, I did not find this book to be an outright onslaught on the MBA degree and its growing irrelevancy. True, I may be biased, but if anything, I found this book to be an assessment. Khurana does not share any specific initiatives about what needs to be done about the current state of graduate education programs, but just rather concludes that a transformation is needed. I saw this book as a simple evaluation tool; a gift to me as a consumer of an MBA degree basically. A consumer that is far more knowledgeable about the product (the MBA) than I was before reading this book. Kudos, and thank you!

I came to this book with a prejudice - I thought business school professors mostly published inane statistical analyses of executive compensation and such other frivolous nonsense. This book definitely contradicts that stereotype and is a fine example of high-quality scholarship on an interesting and important subject.Khurana's main thesis is that the management profession in general, and the education it receives in business schools in particular, has lost its way in the last 30 years or so. Here, Khurana uses the word 'profession' in its precise sociological sense, not in the loose, colloquial sense in which every specialist is a professional. The sociological literature on 'professions' is too massive to summarize easily in this review; the book does offer a good introduction and many good bibliographical references. For our purposes, a 'profession' differs from a mere 'occupation' in possessing a service ideal i.e. professions claim to serve some kind of a higher purpose in society than just earning a living. Thus, for e.g. a doctor is a professional, but a carpenter is not. Historically, in the West, only 3 groups have enjoyed universal prestige and recognition as professions: medicine, law and clergy. (In case you are wondering, no, the world's oldest profession is not one..)Khurana develops in great detail the idea that the original founders of business schools, first at Wharton in Pennsylvania and later at Harvard, Yale etc, envisioned management as a profession; its purpose would be to efficiently organize production in the large industrial corporation that was emerging as the dominant organizational form, and do so to the benefit of all of a corporations constituencies ('stakeholders') i.e. employees, customers, owners, the state and the community at large. But starting the 70's, this ideal has degenerated into a monomaniacal obsession with profit maximization with the result that business school graduates are now mere hired hands without any higher purpose even in theory. The recent attempts at creating a Hyppocratic Oath for MBAs is a direct and interesting reaction to Khurana's book:[...]Khurana's analysis is considerably more sophisticated than the doctrinaire narrative that passes for scholarship on this subject. Khurana mentions Alfred Chandler's "The Visible hand" as an exemplar of this genre. Nevertheless, I do not really agree with his thesisoverall. For one thing his nostalgia for a golden age of idealistic management pioneers seems like a distorted reading of history. And, for all his merits, Khurana apparently is still too much of a prisoner to his institutional affiliations to ask two rather basic questions:1. Are managers so powerful because our world is dominated by large corporations which require talented men to control and run them? Or is our world dominated by large corporations because managers are so powerful? This may look like a chicken-and-egg dilemma, but it is not. The historical evidence to answer this question is out there forsomeone to dig it out. Alas, that someone is not Khurana, at least not in this book.2. The central conceit of the management profession is that its skills are more-or-less portable. A good manager can lead a automobile manufacturer one year and then move on to a software company the next and still be productive and successful. Khurana completely fails to challenge or critically examine this claim.Overall, this is still a book very well worth reading especially for anyone interested in getting an MBA.

I quite love the opening few chapters of this book and how they track the early development of the idea that business could be an area for professional study. Yet as the book progresses I was frustrated by a few things.Most importantly, it was published before broad and general realization was reached that shareholder value theory has damaged US business a great deal. As a result, it closes suggesting that the shift was important — a shift that ended up wreaking great destruction.And through the middle, the author seems to endorse a misguided sense of business research as science — the mythology business schools like Harvard want to put forth but which is misguided. For example, savvy psychologists now know how much damage has been done from psychology's adherence to a theory of "psychology as traditional, reduction based science." Similar shift is desperately needed in business.And while the author dismisses anecdotal research, there is a tremendous amount to be gained from thorough anecdotal investigation of company success or failure. Success is, after all, unable to be comprehended by managerial theory or investor based theory. It is an individual reality of a specific company acting within its own specific circumstances with its own specific market, technology, customers, and society.I recommend the book — but with caveats.

I am a professor in a school of government/public policy, which also seeks to establish a profession of public leadership and management. I have been reflecting on what has made the establishment of these schools so difficult, and had my own theories. Reading Khuran's account of the struggles of Business Schools helped me enormously in understanding both the goals of professional schools, and what they are so hard to create in the research universities which are their preferred home.

Great book

A must read for any university president or business school dean

This book provides a concise understanding the evolution of management education and business schools. This is highly recommended for any educator or researcher examining the future of management education and business schools.

Un testo che dovrebbero leggere tutti i docenti e gli studenti di economia. Consigliato per capire meglio cosa ha generato la crisi