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From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession. Rakesh Khurana. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. 542 pages, $35.00 hardcover.
Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at the Harvard Business School. Philip Delves Broughton. New York: The Penguin Press, 2008. 304 pages. $25.95 hardcover.
At a time when market models have transformed thinking in virtually all our major social institutions, we are fortunate to have two new books that take us back to business school, where these models have been most fully developed and whence they have been most widely spread. Indeed, as Rakesh Khurana points out in his award-winning book, From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession, the growing importance of markets in higher education has enhanced the position of graduate schools of business within their own universities. With swelling enrollments, access to corporate donors, and expertise in matters of marketing and finance, business schools seem to be the most promising children of the entrepreneurial university. But might these schools—and perhaps the universities they inhabit and influence—possibly have lost their way? Philip Delves Broughton’s lively memoir on his MBA experience, Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School, gives qualified support to Khurana’s answer to this question: Yes, to some degree.
It isn’t often that books by a professor (Khurana) and a student (Delves Broughton) at—and more or less about—the same institution (Harvard Business School) get published at around the same time. Their scope and style are far apart—the first is a sociological study of the American business school’s transformation over the past hundred-plus years and the second a popular account of one student’s experience at a single business school over a scant two years. Yet the two books dovetail in interesting ways. While Khurana himself makes a brief appearance in Delves Broughton’s memoir, there is no indication that the student knew of the professor’s project or vice versa. It is remarkable, therefore, how these two very different perspectives converge on the same vanishing point: the diminishment, if not loss, of social purpose from the preparation students receive for business careers today. As Delves Broughton colorfully puts it, “Too much cost-benefit analysis; too little humanity” (p.212).
From Higher Aims to Hired Hands is a title that tells a tale. Examining the intertwined histories of corporate management and university-based business schools, Khurana argues that the social and moral “imperatives of professionalism” with which education for the business elite began a century or so ago have been replaced by “market imperatives” as the center of gravity for the field. It is a story of loss and self-betrayal, in which business schools themselves bear some responsibility for the gradual eclipse of old ideals. Today’s emphasis on increasing shareholder value as management’s main responsibility, a position advanced through the research and scholarship that business school faculty publish and teach, gives short shrift to the roles that managers once played as mediators between corporations and society and as stewards of corporate resources. Toward the end of the book, Khurana expresses some hope that business schools may be ready to reinvent a socially responsible model of management. Until they do, however, he questions their right to be designated “professional” schools at all.
Mary Taylor Huber is a senior scholar at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, where she directs the Integrative Learning Project and works closely with the Carnegie Academy on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. She has written extensively about changing faculty cultures in U.S. higher education and is coauthor, with Pat Hutchings, of The Advancement of Learning: Building the Teaching Commons (2005).
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