Education for ManagementNew Directions and New Challenges

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Education for Management: New Directions and New ChallengesAuthor(s): Dalton E. Mc FarlandSource: The Journal of the Academy of Management, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Apr., 1959), pp. 39-46Published by: Academy of ManagementStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/254555Accessed: 28/08/2010 07:37

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EDUCATION FOR MANAGEMENT: NEW DIRECTIONSAND NEW CHALLENGES

DALTON E. MC FARLAND

MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY

Management education today stands at a significant crossroad, for ele-mental forces are rapidly reshaping its character. Failure to comprehendthe impact of these forces and their effects on the teaching of management in

collegiate schools of business will entail the risk of decadence. However, the

process of attaining understanding and of reacting constructively to thesetrends will be arduous, for the clash of competing academic disciplines hovers

menacingly in the background.

The purposes of this paper are to describe these developments and to

interpret their impact on the teaching of management at the university level.

NEW DEVELOPMENTS AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS

Three related trends are exerting far-reaching influence on educationin business administration and, consequently, on programs of managementeducation at the college level: (1) the decline of the traditional concept of func-tional specialization in schools of business administration, (2) stresses andstrains produced by growth and attending conflicts among the sciences under-

lying business activity, and (3) the evolution of new patterns of administrationwithin collegiate schools of business administration.

Decline of the Functional Concept

Between 1908, the year of its founding, and 1915 Harvard experimentedwith courses organized along the lines of specialized business fields. Thiswas in accordance with Harvard's original concept of a professional school.Thus, with an eye on the market for placing its graduates, it developed coursesin banking, railroad operations, actuarial practice, fire insurance engineering,business practice in printing, work and methods of trade associations, as well ascourses in lumbering, water transportation, and public utilities operation.By 1915 changes in course titles began to reflect changes in the aims of itscourses. For example, in 1914-1915 Harvard added a course called The Tay-lor System of Management and changed a course called Industrial Organiza-tion to Factory Management. This appears to be one of the earliest uses ofthe term management in course designations in this country. Gradually Har-vard shifted its emphasis away from having training in industries and tradesinto the functional fields and into courses in general management and admin-istration. I


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For over fifty years the functional pattern of organization has dominated

collegiate schools of business administration. This pattern, emerging earlyat

Harvard,also flourished at the

Universityof

Chicagounder Leon C. Mar-

shall, widely influencing business administration edu'cation throughout theUnited States. 2 Under this format universities established academic depart-ments paralleling the major functions of a business--marketing, finance, ac-

counting, personnel management, and production or industrial management.To handle courses that did not fit this departmentation they created depart-ments of business organization, business operations, or general business.

Establishment of these administrative patterns profoundly affected theentire spectrum of academic affairs. Professors assigned to an area exploredit intensely, becoming specialists. They recruited students who, althoughmatriculating in business administration, focused their studies on particular

functional areas as preparation for entering the business world. Organizationsto further the professional practice of business specialties sprang up amongstudents and professors alike. Business enterprises responded favorably,abetting these movements through support from their parallel functional de-

partments. Corporations developed their recruiting procedures around theareas of specialization, and national professional groups together with theirstudent chapters functioned as auxiliary job market centers. College place-ment bureaus, too, were caught up in this pattern, reflecting prevailing ur-gencies from the world of business.

Thus there emerged the bureaucratic mechanisms that made businesseducation at the college level an operative and practical reality. The declineof this pattern of organization is due not so much to its structural or logicaldefects as to changes in the world of business administration itself and to con-

sequent changes in the academic disciplines making up business administrationsubject matter. The growth in size and complexity of business enterpriseshas led to demands for generalists rather than specialists and the recognitionthat specialists trained in traditional methods do not automatically becomegood generalists when they reach the top of a business organization. These

changes in business requirements have caused schools of business to considerwhat they want their graduates to be like twenty years after their graduation. 3

The need for generalists in management and administration has led to

a preference by some businessmen for graduates of liberal arts curricula.WVhen concepts of executive behavior changed from emphasis on technical per-formance of particular skills to an emphasis on conceptual and integrativeskills, these businessmen sensed that traditional preparation of students forcareers in business no longer matched their rapidly changing needs. Seeingthe need for articulate, literate executives possessing the skills of reading,writing, understanding, and pulling together seemingly disparate variables,numbers of businessmen began turning to liberal arts graduates with the prom-ise that "we'll tell them what we want them to know about business. " Rightlyor wrongly business schools were thought by these businessmen to be clearlyunable to provide the kind of education required in business.


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As disciplines of business administration the individual functionalareas might have survived this liberal-arts derailment; they were secure and

adequate as long as they had vocational significance and as long as the co-ordi-nation of the functions in a business enterprise was on a scale that could be

managed by one hard-working executive. However, with the growth of large-scale business units and the growing tendency to look twenty years ahead whenhiring each college graduate, the goals and methods of schools of business ad-ministration are changing rapidly.

Note that we have pointed to the decline of the importance of the func-tional areas within business administration, and not to their demise. This isa conservative view compared to the statement by R, A. Gordon that, withinbusiness administration, "the most desirable policy would probably be to haveno fields of specialization within the business school, but the student might be

permitted one or two business electives in senior courses . . . where a par-ticular faculty member might wish to offer advanced work. "4 Gordon, who isdirecting a major Ford Foundation analysis of business education at the uni-versity level, further recommends that "considerable flexibility should be al-lowed in the way the functional fields are handled, " and he would allow a totalof "three to five semester courses to cover the functional fields. "5

The traditional disciplines of marketing, finance, production, and thelike will doubtless continue, with changes that are rapid but evolutionaryrather than revolutionary. To survive, however, they will have to becomeresponsive to the forces and influences seeking to reshape their character.The relationships of the functional fields to management and administrationwill change; all are undergoing a searching realignment of aims, interest,and methodologies. Managerial and administrative components of the func-tional fields will receive increasing attention from the functional specialistsas well as from specialists in the management process as such. A possibledifficulty is that the functional disciplines, in developing more fully the mana-gerial, administrative, and organizational aspects of their subject matter,may commit professional suicide by veering too far away from the inner con-tent of the discipline itself. A difficulty facing teachers of management is thatthey may unduly resent the burgeoning managerial interests of functional spe-cialists, treating them as intruders and thus overlooking possible sources ofenrichment and enlightenment for managerial theory and practice.

Growth in Scientific Disciplines

For centuries human knowledge has been compartmentalized into dis-ciplines, or fields of thought and experience. Expanding knowledge has led toan increased number of separate disciplines as scholars splintered off sectionshere and there and built them into disciplines in their own right. This birthprocess among the disciplines is not without its labor-pains. The changingpatterns have often seemed revolutionary rather than evolutionary and, there-fore, we find increasing jealousy and competition among scientists and disci-plines. For example, Riesman has pointed out that in the social sciences we


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Drucker, among other writers. He points out that there has been no basictheoretical delineation of the knowledge of business administration. 12 Thereis as yet no universally accepted scholarly journal devoted to the reporting.ofresearch, although the Journal of Business of the University of Chicago andthe Administrative Science Quarterly are making an impressive effort to fillthis void.13 Criticism has also been made that research in schools of busi-ness administration is not only limited in quantity, but geared to the descrip-tion of the best business practices and to applications that are regarded as"practical" and "marketable. "14

Changes may be expected, and indeed are going forward, in curriculum-building. Among these changes are: (1) a lessened tendency to allow the pro-liferation of descriptive courses in fundamental subject matter areas, (2) agreater freedom from the restriction of treating business -administration merelyas applied economics, 15 and (3) recognition of the greater role to be played bybehavioral sciences and certain elements of mathematical and physical sciencesas the underlying disciplines of business administration. 16 The administrativeproblem is how to develop both a faculty and a curriculum, at the graduate andundergraduate levels, that will most effectively accomplish this new orienta-tion in the behavioral and mathematical sciences. Work on such problems can-not hefp but lead to consideration of numerous innovations such as those ad-vanced by Thomas Carroll, who has suggested consideration, at least by someinstitutions, of a three-two plan borrowed from engineering schools. In thisplan the student would do three years of work in liberal arts and take an addi-tional two years of business subjects broadly oriented towards the fundamentalsof communication, human relations, and administration. This five years ofwork would lead to a master's degree. 17

Impact on the Field of Management

The changes we have described will profoundly reshape the characterand activities of traditional management or industrial administration depart-ments in collegiate schools of business.

Under the functional schema, management departments were impor-tant, but no more so than any of the other functional departments. These de-partments were a convenient location for subject matter spurred by FrederickTaylor's concepts of scientific management and by the growing popularity ofpersonnel administration. They also became a dumping ground for subjectsthat didn't seem to fit anywhere else, as well as a place for locating the inte-grating course in business

policyat the

senior level.The new look in schools of business administration promises to in-crease the relative importance of management departments, provided theyare willing to assume the responsibilities that accompany this increase ininfluence. As the functional fields decline in relative importance, it is possi-ble that the field of management--expanded to include concepts of organization,administration, and human relations--will no longer be merely one among sev-eral, but one which supersedes and overarches all the rest as the parent orbasic discipline within the school of business administration. Managementand administration could thus become the basic integrating disciplines withinbusiness administration.


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This seemingly happy result will not come about automatically, how-ever. Without serious attention by management scholars, the field of manage-ment could fail to sustain itself as a viable and noteworthy discipline. This

disintegration has indeed been suggested. In one view at least, the behavioralsciences, rather than merely modifying personnel administration subject mat-ter, may actually replace it. Mathematical programming applications mayalso replace the area we now know as production management. 18 Whereasthe other functional fields will find in behavioral sciences and mathematical

programming a healthy addition to their activities, the field of managementcould be affected adversely if its faculties do not succeed in understandingand directing the forces inherent in the changes we have described.

There can be little doubt that collegiate schools of business are destinedto become a central meeting ground for scholars from many disciplines. Theircommon bond will be an

abidinginterest in the

functioningof the business en-

terprise and in the applications of the theoretical knowledge of the supportingdisciplines to the evolving theory of business enterprise. But this meltingpot of interdisciplinary scholarly effort will pose advantages and administra-tive problems that are as yet not clearly perceived.

One advantage as well as a problem is the great likelihood that schoolsof business administration will attract the "mavericks" of the supporting dis-

ciplines. As Leavitt puts the situation:

One of the brightest sources of hope for further interaction andmutual influence among them [behavioral scientists] . . . is, in

my judgment, the collegiate school of business. This low castemember of the academic community is a perfect meeting placefor odd-balls who have been driven or escaped from industry,sociology, economics, mathematics, and psychology. At ...more and more universities . . . the school of business is be-coming a place of serious mutual influence among many disci-plines and across many levels of activity. The school of busi-ness (correction: a small group of schools of business) is theonly academic place I know where all the motley kinds of peo-ple interested in industry are being forced to try not only tounderstand one another, but to call upon one another's help.I expect it will be the place where mavericks oi all kinds fromseveral disciplines will mate, procreate, and deliver up a cu-rious and perhaps useful new kind of progeny. 19

In recent years, scholars in contributing disciplines have become moreaware of business organizations as satisfactory and even interesting placesin which to do research. These scholars have experienced the thrill of dis-

covering that the world of business is not only full of money but that business-men will to an increasing extent underwrite the expenses of scholarly scru-

tiny and experimentation.

Business schools have recruited many faculty members from these


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outside disciplines. True, they usually try to get men with "experience inbusiness," at least through research channels if not as actual employees. Thismovement has not been entirely voluntary, for there has been a scarcity of

trained faculty members emanating from our schools of business administra-tion. Faculty members for schools of business are no longer drawn only from

leading business schools, nor even from economics departments, but are com-

ing frequently from sociology, political science, and psychology departmentsas well. To fill faculty positions at all, schools of business have had to turnto the basic underlying disciplines. This has turned out all right for theseother disciplines, who were not having an easy time placing their graduatesin teaching, government, or business positions calling for the practice of thebasic skills of the disciplines themselves.

Just as schools of business administration are the focal point of thismovement of scholars from behavioral and mathematical disciplines, depart-

ments of management will become the logical focal point around which the in-terests of these scholars will center. The historical orientation of our man-agement departments in personnel administration, production administration,and general management will lend support to this development.

CONCLUSION

Management departments, it would appear, and their faculties arefaced with the choice of (a) finding that their.traditional bodies of subject mat-ter have been superseded by the expansion of other business administrationdisciplines or by the substitution of general administration and organizationtheory for personnel and production administration, or (b) making a concertedeffort to understand this growing movement and to establish the managementdepartment firmly within the business school as the chief center for integratingand co-ordinating the core subject matter of a science of business administration.

Which choice will be made is not yet apparent. It depends largely onhow readily and how clearly the influential teachers and researchers of our dayperceive the problem and on how they will act and react in the evolving circum-stances. As yet, there is little evidence of a decisive movement toward thesecond of the two alternatives.

FOOTNOTES

1. The fascinating story of these developments is recounted in detail in Mel-vin T. Copeland, And Mark an Era, (Boston, Little Brown and Company), 1958.See especially pp. 40-46, and pp. 147-178.

2. Marshall's views may be examined in Leon C. Marshall and Rachel Mar-shall Goetz, Curriculum-Making in the Social Studies, (New York, CharlesScribner.'s Sons), 1936, and more specifically in his book Business Adminis-tration, (Chicago, University of Chicago Press), 1921. This latter work is oneof the earliest books of the type now used in courses in Introduction to Business.

3. See G. L. Bach, "Some Observations on the Business School of Tomorrow,"Management Science, Vol. 4, No. 4, July, 1958, pp. 351-364.


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4. R. A. Gordon, "Some Current Issues in Business Education," a talk pre-sented at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Collegiate Schools

of Business, May 2, 1958.

5. Ibid.

6. David Riesman, Constraint and Variety in American Education, (GardenCity, Doubleday Anchor Books), 1956, Chapter II.

7. Peter F. Drucker, Landmarks of Tomorrow, (New York, Harper andBrothers), 1958, pp. 12-13.

8. See, for example, Eugene J. Kelley, and William Lazer, Managerial Mar-keting: Perspectives and Viewpoints, (Homewood, Illinois, Richard D. Irwin,L-c.), 1958. This is a new book of readings dealing with behavioral scienceapplications to marketing.

9. James H. S. Bossard and J. Frederic Dewhurst, University Education forBusiness, (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press), 1931.

10. R, A. Gordon, in a paper presented at the University of Denver, April24, 1958.

11. Ibid.

12. Peter F. Drucker, "Business Objectives and Survival Needs: Notes on a

Discipline of Business Enterprise," Journal of Business, Vol. XXXI, No. 2,April, 1958.

13. For an interesting analysis of the Administrative Science Quarterly andsimilar efforts of other journals, see Kenneth E. Boulding, "Evidences foran Administrative Science," Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 1,June, 1958.

14. Thomas H. Carroll, Business Education for Competence and Responsibility,a monograph published by the American Association of Collegiate Schools ofBusiness, 1956, p. 11. See also G.L. Bach, op. cit., pp. 363-364.

15. See Thomas Carroll, op. cit.,pp.

9-10, andp.

20.

16. Ibid., pp. 9-12 and 19-24. See also, G.L. Bach, op. cit. , pp. 354-356.

17. Carroll, op. cit., pp. 12-14.

18. Harold J. Leavitt and Thomas L. Whisler, "Management in the 1980's."Harvard Business Review, Vol. 36, No. 6, pp. 41-48.

19. Harold J. Leavitt, "The Influence of Human Relations Research on Psy-chclogy: In Praise of Mavericks, " a paper delivered before the Annual Meetingof the Industrial Relations Research Association, Chicago, Illinois, December,1958.

Education for ManagementNew Directions and New Challenges

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