Following the steps of Pfeffer, Mintzberg and others, Profs. Bennis and O'Toole just joined the ranks of insider critics bashing the management education establishment (see their piece "How business schools lost their way" at HBR, May 2005). Management education may not be perfect, but the fatal flaws attributed by these authors may not only be unfair, they may provide support to current trends that threat to weaken what I consider one of the most important professional disciplines of our times. Here's a summary of some counterarguments by my colleague Prof. David Bowen and myself in an upcoming article discussing the professionalization of management education.Download jmecabrera_bowen.pdf
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Bennis and O’Toole are right to advocate stronger ties between management education and practice. But they make an unfair assessment of the achievements of business education and research in the last decades. Even worse, if left unchecked, their recommendations may contribute to a “de-professionalization” of management, quite the contrary to what they claim to pursue.
Bennis and O’Toole erroneously circumscribe the scientific method to what they call basic “academic disciplines” and exclude it from “professional disciplines” like medicine, law or management. Yet, medical practice draws not just from scientific advances in the basic disciplines, but from research in the very practice of the medical profession. This is not very different from what management scholars do when they test the effectiveness of a management practice across firms in a given industry.
Professional practice is not incompatible with the scientific method. Good science helps us build and adjust a powerful toolset to the service of the practicing professional. To reduce management to a question of personal judgment not susceptible of scientific inquiry does not only ignore the accumulation of relevant and informative research that is available to date, it is also a disservice to the future quality of management as a profession. Bennis and O’Toole do make the disclaimer that not all science is to be ruled out, but their straw man analysis of current management research risks being utilized to justify and legitimize vocational versions of management education that will not contribute to improving the service of business to society. Management research is relatively new and immature compared with medical research. But this means that we need more and better research, not less.
The world’s leading accrediting body, AACSB now grants schools significant flexibility to interpret research standards and instructor qualifications. EFMD, its European counterpart, has long recognized alternative ways to interpret “research”, perhaps to accommodate the relatively low research productivity of the average European school rather than to defend a still unclear alternative model of knowledge creation and validation. Both these moves may be weakening management as a profession, rather than strengthening it.
Management educators will surely benefit by engaging with professional managers. At Thunderbird (as in many other leading business schools around the world) faculty members are encouraged (and rewarded) to engage with corporations through executive education, advising and case writing, in addition to their own academic (and unashamedly scientific) research. The more connected instructors are with real practice, the more relevant and useful their instruction will be. But just like there is absolutely no systemic incompatibility between rigor and relevance in management research, there is no incompatibility either between solid research and engagement in management practice. We need more of both, not one at the expense of the other.
For management to grow as a true profession it needs, first of all, a solid knowledge base that is both scientifically sound and instrumental for practice, and this can and should be done through a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods, multidisciplinary frameworks, grounded theory, case research, validity generalization studies, etc.. Second, the management industry needs to protect some minimum requirements for those interested in practicing it, by among other things strengthening instruction and instructor accreditation standards for business schools. And finally, the management community (schools, accrediting bodies, scientific communities and professional associations) needs to explicitly accept its overarching social purpose and articulate a set of core values and principles. Management more than ever needs to build and adopt its own “Hippocratic Oath” that will set its moral foundations of a true professional discipline.
