Published Online:https://doi.org/10.5465/amle.2013.0106

In recent years, many scholars have argued that business schools have jeopardized their legitimacy and identity. However, business schools have also been praised as a success story of higher education. To understand the legitimacy-related contradictions faced by business schools, we examine the historical development of the business school as an academic and professional institution. Specifically, we argue that certain transitions in the ethos and practices of business schools that were aimed at strengthening their legitimacy have subsequently produced challenges and threats to that legitimacy. We then discuss three sequential but interrelated periods, namely, the scientification, politicization, and corporatization of business schools, which have created legitimacy paradoxes and challenges for their management. We conclude by discussing how the legitimacy paradoxes contribute to our understanding regarding the challenges of managing business schools.

REFERENCES

  • Adler N. J., Harzing A. 2009. When knowledge wins: Transcending the sense and nonsense of academic rankings. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 8: 72–95.LinkGoogle Scholar
  • Akins J. E. 1973. The oil crisis: This time the wolf is here. Foreign Affairs, 51: 462–490. Google Scholar
  • Alajoutsijärvi K., Juusola K., Lamberg J. 2013. Institutional logic of business bubbles: Lessons from the Dubai business school mania. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 13: 5–25.10.5465/amle.2012.0036. Google Scholar
  • Alajoutsijärvi K., Juusola K., Siltaoja M. 2013. Academic capitalism hits the fan: The birth of acamanic capitalism. Dialogues in Critical Management Studies, 2: 91–121. Google Scholar
  • Alajoutsijärvi K., Kettunen K., Tikkanen H. 2012. Institutional evolution of business schools in Finland 1909-2009. Management & Organizational History, 7: 337–367. Google Scholar
  • Aldrich H. E., Fiol C. M. 1994. Fools rush in? The institutional context of industry creation. Academy of Management Review, 19: 645–670.LinkGoogle Scholar
  • Altbach P. G., Knight J. 2007. The internationalization of higher education: Motivations and realities. Journal of Studies in International Education, 11: 290–305. Google Scholar
  • Alvesson M. 2013. The triumph of emptiness. Consumption, higher education and work organization. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar
  • Anderson R. 2006. British universities past and present. London: Continuum International Publishing Group. Google Scholar
  • Archibald R. B., Feldman D. H. 2010. Why does college cost so much? Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar
  • Ashforth B. E., Gibbs B. W. 1990. The double-edge of organizational legitimation. Organization Science, 1: 177–194. Google Scholar
  • Augier M., March J. 2011. The roots, rituals, and rhetorics of change: North American business schools after the Second World War. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Google Scholar
  • Baily M. N., Chakrabarti A. K. 1988. Innovation and the productivity crisis. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Google Scholar
  • Baum J. A. C., Oliver C. 1991. Institutional linkages and organizational mortality. Administrative Science Quarterly, 36: 187–218. Google Scholar
  • Bennis W. G., O’Toole J. 2005. How business schools lost their way. Harvard Business Review, 83: 96–104. Google Scholar
  • Birnbaum R. 2000. Management fads in higher education: Where they come from, what they do, why they fail. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Google Scholar
  • Bitektine A. 2011. Toward a theory of social judgments of organizations: The case of legitimacy, reputation, and status. Academy of Management Review, 36: 151–179.LinkGoogle Scholar
  • Bousquet M., Nelson C. 2008. How the university works: Higher education and the low-wage nation. New York: New York University Press. Google Scholar
  • Boyle M. 2004. Walking our talk: Business schools, legitimacy, and citizenship. Business & Society, 43: 37–68. Google Scholar
  • Brandon C. 2010. The five-year party: How colleges have given up on educating your child and what you can do about it. Dallas: BenBella Books. Google Scholar
  • Chancellor E. 2000. Devil take the hindmost: A history of financial speculation. New York: Penguin Group. Google Scholar
  • Cornuel E. 2005. The role of business schools in society. Journal of Management Development, 24: 819–829. Google Scholar
  • Crowther D., Carter C. 2002. Legitimating irrelevance: Management education in higher education institutions. International Journal of Educational Management, 16: 268–278. Google Scholar
  • DiMaggio P. J., Powell W. W. 1983. The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields. American Sociological Review, 48: 147–160. Google Scholar
  • Ebenstein A. O. 2007. Milton Friedman: A biography. NY: Macmillan. Google Scholar
  • Elsbach K. D. 1994. Managing organizational legitimacy in the California cattle industry: The construction and effectiveness of verbal accounts. Administrative Science Quarterly, 39: 57–88. Google Scholar
  • Elsbach K. D., Sutton R. I. 1992. Acquiring organizational legitimacy through illegitimate actions: A marriage of institutional and impression management theories. Academy of Management Journal, 35: 699–738.LinkGoogle Scholar
  • Engwall L. 2007. The anatomy of management education. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 23: 4–35. Google Scholar
  • Engwall L. 2008. The university: A multinational corporation? In Engwall L.Weaire D. (Eds.), The university in the market: 9–21. London, UK: Portland Press. Google Scholar
  • Engwall L. 2009. Mercury meets Minerva: Business studies and higher education: The Swedish case. Stockholm, Sweden: Economic Research Institute, Stockholm School of Economics. Google Scholar
  • Ferraro F., Pfeffer J., Sutton R. I. 2005. Economics language and assumptions: How theories can become self-fulfilling. Academy of Management Review, 30: 8–24.LinkGoogle Scholar
  • Fragueiro F., Thomas H. 2011. Strategic leadership in the business school: Keeping one step ahead. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar
  • Ghoshal S. 2005. Bad management theories are destroying good management practices. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 4: 75–91.LinkGoogle Scholar
  • Ginsberg B. 2011. The fall of the faculty: The rise of the all-administrative university and why it matters. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar
  • Giroux H. A. 2002. Neoliberalism, corporate culture, and the promise of higher education: The university as a democratic public sphere. Harvard Educational Review, 72: 425–464. Google Scholar
  • Gordon R. A., Howell J. E. 1959. Higher education for business. The Journal of Business Education, 35: 115–117. Google Scholar
  • Grubb W. N., Lazerson M. 2005. The education gospel and the role of vocationalism in American education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Google Scholar
  • Hambrick D. C. 1994. What if the Academy actually mattered? Academy of Management Review, 19: 11–16.LinkGoogle Scholar
  • Henisz W. J. 2011. Leveraging the financial crisis to fulfill the promise of progressive management. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 10: 298–321.LinkGoogle Scholar
  • Ho K. 2009. Liquidated: An ethnography of Wall Street. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Google Scholar
  • Jackson K. T. 2010. Scandal beneath the financial crisis: Getting a view from a moral-cultural mental model. Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, 33: 735–766. Google Scholar
  • Jonsson S., Greve H. R., Fujiwara-Greve T. 2009. Undeserved loss: The spread of legitimacy loss to innocent organizations in response to reported corporate deviance. Administrative Science Quarterly, 54: 195–228. Google Scholar
  • Juusola K. 2015. Mercury beats Minerva? Essays on the accelerating impact of market logic permeating higher education. PhD thesis. Jyvaskyla: Jyvaskyla University Printing House. Google Scholar
  • Keen S. 2011. Debunking economics: The naked emperor dethroned? (Revised, Expanded, & Integrated Edition). London, UK: Zed Books. Google Scholar
  • Khurana R., Penrice D. 2011. Business education: The American trajectory. In Morsing M.Rovira A. S. (Eds.), Business schools and their contribution to society: 3–15. London: Sage Publications. Google Scholar
  • Khurana R. 2007. From higher aims to hired hands: The social transformation of American business schools and the unfulfilled promise of management as a profession. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Google Scholar
  • Khurana R., Nohria N. 2008. It's time to make management a true profession. Harvard Business Review, 86: 70–77. Google Scholar
  • Khurana R., Spender J. 2012. Herbert A. Simon on what ails business schools: More than ‘a problem in organizational design’. Journal of Management Studies, 49: 619–639. Google Scholar
  • Kieser A. 2004. The Americanization of academic management education in Germany. Journal of Management Inquiry, 13: 90–97. Google Scholar
  • Krugman P. 2008. The return of depression economics and the crisis of 2008. London, UK: Penguin Books. Google Scholar
  • Lewis M. A., Dehler G. E. 2000. Learning through paradox: A pedagogical strategy for exploring contradictions and complexity. Journal of Management Education, 24: 708–725. Google Scholar
  • Locke R. R., Spender J. 2011. Confronting managerialism: How the business elite and their schools threw our lives out of balance. London, New York: Zed Books. Google Scholar
  • Lorange P. 2002. New vision for management education: Leadership challenges. Oxford, UK: Elsevier. Google Scholar
  • Macfarlane B. 1995. Business and management studies in higher education: The challenge of academic legitimacy. International Journal of Educational Management, 9: 4–9. Google Scholar
  • Marglin S. A. 2008. The dismal science: How thinking like an economist undermines community. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Google Scholar
  • McKee M. C., Mills A. J., Weatherbee T. 2005. Institutional field of dreams: Exploring the AACSB and the new legitimacy of Canadian business schools. Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences/Revue Canadienne Des Sciences. Revista ADM, 22: 288–301. Google Scholar
  • Meyer J. W., Rowan B. 1977. Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony. American Journal of Sociology, 83: 340–363. Google Scholar
  • Mintzberg H. 2004. Managers, not MBAs: A hard look at the soft practice of managing and management development. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Google Scholar
  • Moldoveanu M. C., Martin R. L. 2008. The Future of the MBA: Designing the thinker of the future. New York: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar
  • Oliver C. 1991. Strategic responses to institutional processes. Academy of Management Review, 16: 145–179.LinkGoogle Scholar
  • Paradeise C., Thoenig J. 2013. Academic institutions in search of quality: Local orders and global standards. Organization Studies, 34: 189–218. Google Scholar
  • Pearce J. L., Huang L. 2012. The decreasing value of our research to management education. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 11: 247–262.LinkGoogle Scholar
  • Peters M. A. 2007. Knowledge economy, development and the future of higher education. Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Google Scholar
  • Pfeffer J. 1997. New directions for organization theory: Problems and prospects. New York: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar
  • Pfeffer J., Fong C. T. 2002. The end of business schools? Less success than meets the eye. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 1: 78–95.LinkGoogle Scholar
  • Pfeffer J., Fong C. T. 2004. The business school ‘business’: Some lessons from the U.S. experience. Journal of Management Studies, 41: 1501–1520. Google Scholar
  • Pierson F. C. 1959. The education of American businessmen. The Journal of Business Education, 35: 114–117. Google Scholar
  • Porter L. W., McKibbin L. E. 1988. Management education and development: Drift or thrust into the 21st century? New York: McGraw-Hill. Google Scholar
  • Porter T. M. 1995. Trust in numbers: The pursuit of objectivity in science and public life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Google Scholar
  • Rivera L. A. 2011. Ivies, extracurriculars, and exclusion: Elite employers’ use of educational credentials. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 29: 71–90. Google Scholar
  • Robinson J. 1972. The second crisis of economic theory. The American Economic Review, 62: 1–10. Google Scholar
  • Rynes S. L., Brown K. G. 2011. Where are we in the “long march to legitimacy?” Assessing scholarship in management learning and education. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 10: 561–582.LinkGoogle Scholar
  • Rynes S. L., Trank C. Q., Lawson A. M., Ilies R. 2003. Behavioral coursework in business education: Growing evidence of a legitimacy crisis. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 2: 269–283.AbstractGoogle Scholar
  • Sachs J. 2011. The price of civilization: Economics and ethics after the fall. New York: Random House. Google Scholar
  • Scherer A. G., Palazzo G., Seidl D. 2013. Managing legitimacy in complex and heterogeneous environments: Sustainable development in a globalized world. Journal of Management Studies, 50: 259–284. Google Scholar
  • Schuetze H. G. 2012. Universities and their communities—Engagement and service as primary mission. In McIlrath L.Lyons A.Munck R. (Eds.), Higher education and civic engagement—Comparative perspectives: 61–77. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar
  • Schultz M. 2010. Reconciling pragmatism and scientific rigor. Journal of Management Inquiry, 19: 274–277. Google Scholar
  • Shareff R. 2007. Want better business theories? Maybe Karl Popper has the answer. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 6: 272–280.AbstractGoogle Scholar
  • Simon H. A. 1967. The business school a problem in organizational design. Journal of Management Studies, 4: 1–16. Google Scholar
  • Slaughter S., Rhoades G. 2011. Markets in higher education: Trends in academic capitalism. In Altbach P. G.Gumport P. J.Berdahl R. O. (Eds.), American higher education in the twenty-first century: 433–463. Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press. Google Scholar
  • Slaughter S., Leslie L. L. 1997. Academic capitalism: Politics, policies, and the entrepreneurial university. Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press. Google Scholar
  • Smith W. K., Lewis M. W. 2011. Toward a theory of paradox: A dynamic equilibrium model of organizing. Academy of Management Review, 36: 381–403.LinkGoogle Scholar
  • Smith Y. 2010. Econned: How unenlightened self-interest undermined democracy and corrupted capitalism. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Google Scholar
  • Sonpar K., Pazzaglia F., Kornijenko J. 2010. The paradox and constraints of legitimacy. Journal of Business Ethics, 95: 1–21. Google Scholar
  • Spender J. 2007. Management as a regulated profession. An essay. Journal of Management Inquiry, 16: 32–42. Google Scholar
  • Starkey K., Hatchuel A., Tempest S. 2004. Rethinking the business school. Journal of Management Studies, 41: 1521–1531. Google Scholar
  • Starkey K., Tiratsoo N. 2007. The business school and the bottom line. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar
  • Staw B. M., Epstein L. D. 2000. What bandwagons bring: Effects of popular management techniques on corporate performance, reputation, and CEO pay. Administrative Science Quarterly, 45: 523–556. Google Scholar
  • Steck H. 2003. Corporatization of the university: Seeking conceptual clarity. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 585: 66–83. Google Scholar
  • Suchman M. C. 1995. Managing legitimacy: Strategic and institutional approaches. Academy of Management Review, 20: 571–610.LinkGoogle Scholar
  • Taylor M. C. 2010. Crisis on campus: A bold plan for reforming our colleges and universities. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Google Scholar
  • Thelin J. R. 2011. A history of American higher education, (2nd ed.). Baltimore,MD: The John Hopkins University Press. Google Scholar
  • Thomas H., Cornuel E. 2011. Business school futures: Evaluation and perspectives. Journal of Management Development, 30: 444–450. Google Scholar
  • Thomas H., Wilson A. D. 2011. ‘Physics envy,’ cognitive legitimacy or practical relevance: Dilemmas in the evolution of management research in the UK. British Journal of Management, 22: 443–456. Google Scholar
  • Trank C. Q., Rynes S. L. 2003. Who moved our cheese? Reclaiming professionalism in business education. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 2: 189–205.LinkGoogle Scholar
  • Tuchman G. 2011. Wannabe U: Inside the corporate university. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Google Scholar
  • Vaara E., Faÿ E. 2011. How can a Bourdieusian perspective aid analysis of MBA education? Academy of Management Learning & Education, 10: 27–39.LinkGoogle Scholar
  • Varoufakis Y., Halevi J., Theocarakis N. 2011. Modern political economics: Making sense of the post-2008 world. New York: Routledge. Google Scholar
  • Washburn J. 2005. University, inc.: The corporate corruption of higher education. New York: Basic Books. Google Scholar
  • Wedlin L. 2011. Going global: Rankings as rhetorical devices to construct an international field of management education. Management Learning, 42: 199–218. Google Scholar
  • Whitley R. 1984. The social and intellectual organization of the sciences. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar
  • Whitley R. 1986. The transformation of business finance into financial economics: The roles of academic expansion and changes in US capital markets. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 11: 171–192. Google Scholar
  • Whitley R. 1988. The management sciences and managerial skills. Organization Studies, 9: 47–68. Google Scholar
  • Williams A. P. 2010. The history of UK business and management education. Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing. Google Scholar
  • Willmott H. 1995. Managing the academics: Commodification and control in the development of university education in the UK. Human Relations, 48: 993–1027. Google Scholar
  • Wilson D. C., Thomas H. 2012. The legitimacy of the business of business schools: What's the future? Journal of Management Development, 31: 368–376. Google Scholar
  • Wilson D., McKiernan P. 2011. Global mimicry: Putting strategic choice back on the business school agenda. British Journal of Management, 22: 457–469. Google Scholar
  • Zemsky R. 2009. Making reform work: The case for transforming American higher education. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Google Scholar
Academy of Management
  Academy of Management
  100 Summit Lake Drive, Suite 110
  Valhalla, NY 10595, USA
  Phone: +1 (914) 326-1800
  Fax: +1 (914) 326-1900