guest editor
Business
schools:
equilibrists on an
unravelling rope
Guest editor Professor Rik Maes discusses how business schools can regain relevance for
management practice.
orporate scandals in the US and in Europe caused
C major business schools to redraw on the spur of
the moment their favourite teaching toys, ie the
case studies in question. This hasn’t prevented even
leading management gurus (Mintzberg, Ghoshal, Bennis
and O’Toole, and many others) to assail the same
business schools more fundamentally and more decisively.
They are not only accused of educating future managers
in an amoral (and even immoral) way, but equally of being
irrelevant and detrimental for real management
education at large: management practices simply don’t
work according to the mathematical formulas published
in Management Science and other so-called top
management journals.
My basic concern with business schools as they
operate today is that they are unable to solve (or even to
address) the very fundamental problems organisations
(and not only companies) all over the world are facing
today. Societal, organisational and individual dynamics
are confronting organisations with their own identity and
raison d’être, yet business schools continue to operate
as if the career of their faculty based on esoteric
publication rankings is their main concern. “Instead of
measuring themselves in terms of the competence of their
graduates, or by how well their faculties understand
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convergence
important drivers of business performance, they measure
themselves almost solely by the rigour of their scientific
research (…) (They) exist primarily to support the
scholar’s interests.” (Bennis and O’Toole, 2005). There
is as big a difference between teaching customer-
orientation and being customer-orientated as there is
between reading about bulls and being in the ring,
according to an old Spanish proverb.
Forewarned is forearmed: weren’t there any warnings
against the growing separation between management
theory and management practice? Or, still more germane,
weren’t there any models for a better-balanced and hence
more relevant business school? I bet there were! In 1990,
Ernest Boyer published his landmark vision on
scholarship. In this highly acclaimed, yet just as
disregarded manifesto, he stands up for the reassessment
of forgotten values in academic life: “Surely, scholarship
means engaging in original research. But the work of the
scholar also means stepping back from one’s
investigation, looking for connections, building bridges
between theory and practice, and communicating one’s
knowledge effectively to students. Specifically, we
conclude that the work of the professoriate might be
thought of as having four separate, yet overlapping
functions. These are: the scholarship of discovery; the
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scholarship of integration; the scholarship of application;
and the scholarship of teaching” (Boyer, 1990: 16)
Elaborating on this model, Boyer asserts that
discovery should not only contribute to human
knowledge, but also to the intellectual climate of a
university and of society. The scholarship of integration,
for its part, is dealing with the interpretation and
meaning of discoveries and their contexts; therefore, it is
inherently inter-disciplinary. The scholarship of
application deals with the responsible application of the
scholar’s knowledge in the outside world; Boyer explicitly
notes that application not necessarily follows knowledge,
yet that “new intellectual understandings can arise out of
the very act of application (…)Theory and practice vitally
interact and one renews the other” (ibid., 23). Through
the scholarship of teaching, professors not only transmit
knowledge, but transform and extend it as well through
the interaction with challenging students.
For a number of years, the Department of Information
Management at the University of Amsterdam has been
engaged in an analogous endeavour, although we were at
the outset not aware of Boyer’s ideas. All of its
educational programmes, ranging from undergraduate
programmes in business studies and business
information systems to a post-graduate executive
programme in information management and an
accompanying continuing education programme, as well
as its research programme, are organised according to
the “learning-by-sharing” approach (Maes, 2003;
Huizing, Maes and Thijssen, 2005). In this approach,
four roles comparable with the scholarship typology of
Boyer are discerned: researcher, student, practitioner
and teacher.
What makes learning-by-sharing unique is that
gradually, through the succeeding programmes, these roles
are deliberately spread over the different participants:
whereas bachelor students are still very much in their
student role and their teachers in the teaching role,
participants in the continuing education programme,
students/practitioners and teachers/researchers alike, are
members of a community of reflective co-learners playing
interchangeable roles according to the problem under
consideration. Through learning-by-sharing, integral
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convergence
guest editor
scholarship becomes a common quality of academics and
non-academics alike.
The advantages of this approach, related to the above-
mentioned lack of relevance of business schools, are
straightforward. Just to mention some with respect to
research, as this materialises to be the sitting target in
the discussion on business schools: (1) academic
researchers are continuously invited to leave their ivory
tower and to deal with fundamental business problems of
topical interest; (2) practitioners are stimulated to
Business schools are unable to address the
very fundamental problems organisations
all over the world are facing today
engage in research, often in collaboration with academic
researchers, and hence to reflect deeply on their
practical experiences; (3) sterile retrospective,
quantitative research is naturally replaced by
generative research aimed at giving direction to the
fundamental transitions organisations are faced with;
(4) mixed learning communities are both the breeding
ground and the test ground for joint action research;
and (5) through learning-by-sharing and integral
scholarship, universities and business start recognising
each other again as the interesting and interested
partners they always ought to be.
Business schools are invited to leave the unravelling
rope and to jump in the space of fundamental relevance.
But I doubt they will ever have the guts to prefer
jumping above falling, paralysed as they are!
References:
Bennis, WG and O’Toole, J (2005). “How Business Schools Lost Their Way”,
Harvard Business Review, 83(5): 96-104.
Boyer, EL (1990). Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate.
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
Ghoshal, S (2005). Bad Management Theories are Destroying Good
Management Practices. Academy of Management Learning and Education,
4(1): 75-91.
Huizing, A, Maes, R and Thijssen, JPT (2005). “Educating Professionals:
Leveraging Diversity in a Globalising Education”, to appear in Educational
Innovation in Economics and Business XI, Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
Maes, R (2003). “On the Alliance of Executive Education and Research in
Information Management at the University of Amsterdam”, International
Journal of Information Management, 23(3): 249-257.
Mintzberg, H (2004). Managers, Not MBAs: A Hard Look at the Soft Practice of
Managing and Management Development. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.
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